text stringlengths 14 5.77M | meta dict | __index_level_0__ int64 0 9.97k ⌀ |
|---|---|---|
© 2014 by Julie Klassen
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2014
Ebook corrections 10.05.2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6482-4
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations identified GNV are from the Geneva Bible, 1599 Edition. Published by Tolle Lege Press. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover photography by Mike Habermann Photography, LLC
Cover design by Jennifer Parker
Author represented by Books & Such Literary Agency
With love
to my brothers,
Bud & Dan
# Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Epilogue
Author's Note
Discussion Questions
About the Author
Books by Julie Klassen
Back Ads
Back Cover
For nothing is secret,
that shall not be evident:
neither anything hid,
that shall not be known,
and come to light.
—Luke 8:17 GNV
# Prologue
LONDON, ENGLAND
MAY 1817
I sat across the table from the man I most admired, feeling self-conscious. How I wished I'd taken more time with my appearance. But my meeting with the housekeeper had run long, allowing me barely enough time to wash my face and repin my hair in a simple coil. I had planned to wear a new evening dress—golden satin with red roses embroidered throughout the bodice—but instead I'd slipped into the plain ivory gown I usually wore. It had far fewer fastenings.
I glanced over at my beautiful younger sister, her hair curled and styled by Mamma's lady's maid. Louisa wore the emerald necklace I had planned to wear, declaring it looked so well with her new dress. She'd said, "You know you don't care a fig about fashion, Abigail, so don't fuss. You can wear my coral. It will look fine with the gown you always wear."
I reminded myself it didn't really matter how well I looked. Gilbert Scott and I had known each other since we were children. He knew what I looked like without a hint of powder, skin clear or with eruptions, with hair up or down or in need of a good brushing. We grew up as friends and neighbors through the awkward stages of adolescence and into adulthood. The time for first impressions had long passed.
Even so, this was his going-away party. The last time I would see him for a year. And I'd wanted his final memory of me to be a good one. For I cherished a secret hope. Perhaps when Gilbert returned from studying abroad he would finally ask me to marry him.
For more than an hour, our two families enjoyed a lovely meal of several courses in the Scotts' dining room. Warm and friendly conversation flowed easily around the table. But I barely noticed what I ate.
I turned to Gilbert's sister and asked, "How goes the magazine?"
"Very well, I think." Susan smiled, then looked at her brother. "Bertie, you ought to write an account of your travels while you're away."
"Capital notion, my love," Susan's husband said, adding his approval. "Send us a few sketches to accompany the piece and we'll publish it."
Gilbert shook his head. "I shall have my hands full with my studies, Edward, but thank you just the same. Susan's the writer in the family, not I."
Gilbert's father spoke up from the head of the table. "But you will write to us, my boy, won't you? You know I . . . your Mamma will worry otherwise."
Humor shone in Mrs. Scott's eyes. "That's right, my dear. I shall worry. But not you?"
"Well, perhaps a bit. . . ." He gestured for the butler to refill his wine. Again.
Over my glass, I met Gilbert's gaze, and we shared a private smile.
Mr. Scott addressed my father. "I say, Foster, did you not invest in that bank mentioned in the newspaper today—the one having some sort of trouble?"
"We . . . did, yes. My brother-in-law is one of the partners. But he assures us it's only a minor setback. All will be well."
Father sent me a guarded look, and I forced a reassuring smile. This wasn't the time or place to discuss finances. Nor did I wish to cast a pall over Gilbert's send-off.
When the meal concluded, the men remained behind to smoke and sip port, while the ladies retired to the drawing room.
Gilbert, however, did not remain with the other gentlemen. Instead, he asked me to join him in the library.
I did so, my heart tripping a little faster with each step.
Alone with Gilbert inside the candlelit room, I reminded myself to breathe normally. We stood very near each other at the high library table, necks bent to study the measured drawing of a church façade in classical style. Gilbert had won the Royal Academy's silver medal for the drawing. And a gold medal for his design of a guildhall. For his achievements, Gilbert had received a traveling scholarship from the academy to study architecture in Italy. I was so proud of him.
"In the end, I altered the design to create a grander façade," Gilbert explained. "With a Corinthian portico six columns wide, based on the Pantheon in Rome. And notice the steeple here? I designed its top stage to resemble a miniature temple. . . ."
He spoke with enthusiasm, but for once I wasn't really listening. My interest had strayed from the drawing to the man himself. With his eyes on his prize-winning design, I felt at liberty to study his profile, to linger on his features—his jaw more defined than I had noticed before, his cheekbone framed by long, stylish side-whiskers, his lips thin but expressive as he spoke. I thought I might try to sketch him, though doubted my ability to do him justice. And he smelled good too. Bay rum cologne, I thought. And mint.
As he reached over to point to some detail of the drawing, his broad shoulder, elegant in evening wear, pressed against mine. I felt the warmth of it through my thin muslin and closed my eyes to savor the sensation.
"What do you think?"
"Hmm?" I opened my eyes, chagrined to be caught not listening.
"About the steeple?"
Personally I thought it a bit much but held my tongue. In the past, I had often offered my opinion or a suggestion, but as the design had already won a medal from the Royal Academy, who was I to disagree?
"Lovely," I murmured. It was an innocuous, uninformed, feminine remark. Something Louisa might have said. But in his flush of triumph, he did not seem to notice.
I glanced over my shoulder. Through the open library door, I could see into the Scotts' drawing room. There Susan slipped her arm through her husband's as they stood talking to my mother. My parents lived very separate lives—Father occupied with his club and investments. Mother with her social calls, charities, and husband hunting for Louisa. No, I didn't want a marriage like my parents'. But a life like Susan's, working side by side with the one you loved . . . Yes, that seemed ideal.
With that hope, I glanced up at Gilbert. He had followed my gaze toward his newly married sister. He briefly met my eyes, then looked down, his Adam's apple convulsing, his fingers distractedly rolling the corner of his plan.
Noticing his nervous hesitation, my heart beat hard. Had the moment come? Was he about to propose?
He began, "You know you mean a great deal to me, Abby. And I realize you might be expecting . . ."
His words trailed away, and he swallowed. Had he guessed my presumptuous thoughts?
"No, no. I am not expecting anything," I reassured him, adding to myself, Not yet.
He nodded but did not meet my eyes. "We have been friends a long time, you and I, but you need to know that I . . . That with all the chances involved in the coming year away, I don't think either of us should shackle ourselves with promises."
"Oh." I blinked, stomach plummeting. Perhaps he was merely trying to protect me, I told myself. He no doubt had my best interests at heart. I forced a smile. "Yes, you are perfectly right, Gilbert. Very practical."
Gilbert's mother stepped into the room. "Thought I would find the two of you in here," she said. "Come through. We're serving coffee, and your father needs a great deal of it." Mrs. Scott patted her son's arm. "He's terribly proud . . . but so sorry to see you go."
Me too, I thought.
Later, when the evening began winding down and my parents were thanking Mr. and Mrs. Scott for dinner, I went in search of Gilbert, hoping to say my good-byes to him in private. Instead I found Gilbert and my sister ensconced in the vestibule, alone.
With sinking heart, I saw Louisa hand something to Gilbert. She said, "To remember me by."
He slipped it into his pocketbook and tucked it away, his gaze lingering on her lovely face all the while. Then he smiled and squeezed Louisa's hand.
Feeling light-headed, I turned away, not waiting to hear his reply.
What had Louisa given him? A miniature? A lover's eye? A lock of hair set in a ring? I had not seen Gilbert place anything on his finger, only in his pocketbook. Surely it had been nothing of such import—nothing that indicated a courtship or engagement. Even if Louisa had developed a schoolgirl affection for our neighbor, that did not mean Gilbert returned her feelings. He was likely too polite to refuse her gift, whatever it was.
Even so, it was all I could do to smile and feign normalcy a short while later, when everyone gathered at the door to say farewell and wish Gilbert success and safe travels.
Gilbert took my hand, the old brotherly tenderness coming back into his expression. "Abby. You won't forget me, I know. And I shall never forget you. Your father has given me permission to correspond with you and your sister. Will you write to me?"
"If you like."
He pressed my hand warmly and then turned to shake Father's hand and made Mother blush by kissing her cheek. He hesitated when he came to Louisa, her head demurely bowed. He made do with a bow and a murmured, "Miss Louisa."
She looked up at him from beneath long lashes, and I saw the telltale sparkle in her eye even if no one else did.
When did things change between them? I wondered. Louisa had always been the pesky little sister, someone to tease or avoid. Someone with a plait of hair to be tugged—not presented as a lover's gift.
I had wanted Gilbert's year away to fly quickly past. Now I wasn't so sure.
I had looked forward to life after his return—a life in which he played a significant role.
Suddenly the future seemed far less certain.
# Chapter 1
10 MONTHS LATER
MARCH 1818
The jewel case lay open on the desk between them, the evergreen emeralds glittering against the black velvet lining. The necklace and matching bracelet had been passed down through the Foster side of the family. Her mother's family had no precious gems to pass down. And soon neither side would.
Her father snapped the case shut, and Abigail winced as though she'd been slapped.
"Say good-bye to the family jewels," he said. "I suppose I shall have to sell these along with the house."
Standing before her father's desk, Abigail gripped her hands. "No, Papa, not the jewels. There must be another way. . . ."
Nearly a year had passed since Gilbert left England, and with it Abigail's twenty-third birthday. When she had predicted an uncertain future on the eve of his departure, she'd been more accurate than she would have guessed.
What had she been thinking? Just because she could run a large home and staff did not mean she knew anything about investments. She was the type of person who usually considered things carefully, investigated thoroughly before acting—whether it was selecting a new dressmaker or hiring a new housemaid. Abigail was the practical, behind-the-scenes daughter and had long prided herself on making sound, rational decisions. That was why her mother left much of the household management to her. Even her father had come to depend on her opinion.
Now they were facing financial ruin—and it was her fault. Little more than a year ago, she had encouraged her father to invest in Uncle Vincent's new bank. Her mother's brother was her only uncle, and Abigail had always been fond of him. He was charming, enthusiastic, and eternally optimistic. He and his partners, Mr. Austen and Mr. Gray, owned two country banks and had wished to open a third. Uncle Vincent had asked her father to post a large bond of guarantee, and under Abigail's influence, he agreed.
The banks were at first successful. However, the partners made excessive, unwise loans, sometimes lending to each other. They sold one bank but struggled to keep the others afloat. The new bank had stopped business in November, and a week ago the original bank failed and the partners declared bankruptcy.
Abigail could still hardly believe it. Her uncle had been so sure the banks would thrive and had made Abigail believe it as well.
Seated at his desk, her father set aside the jewelry case and ran his finger down the accounts ledger.
Abigail awaited his verdict, palms damp, heart beating dully.
"How bad is it?" she asked, twisting her hands.
"Bad. We are not destitute, and you and Louisa still have your dowries. But the lion's share of my capital is gone and with it the interest."
Abigail's stomach cramped. "Again, I am sorry, Papa. Truly," she said. "I honestly thought Uncle Vincent and his partners would be successful."
He ran a weary hand over his thin, handsome face. "I should not have allowed myself to be swayed by the two of you. I have seen his other ventures fail in the past. But you have always had a good head on your shoulders, Abigail. I thought I could trust your judgment. No, now, I don't say this is entirely your fault. I blame myself as well. And Vincent, of course."
Seeing her father so deeply disappointed and disillusioned—with her and with life—left her feeling sick with guilt and regret. Uncle Vincent blamed his partners and their risky loans. But in the end, regardless of who was to blame, the fact was that Charles Foster had agreed to act as guarantor. He was not the only person who lost money when the banks failed, but he lost the most.
Her father shook his head, a bitter twist to his lips. "I don't know how I shall break it to Louisa that she is not to have her season after all. She and her mother have their hearts set on it."
Abigail nodded in silent agreement. The London season was well-known hunting grounds for wealthy husbands. She hoped Louisa's eagerness to participate meant she was not waiting for Gilbert Scott. If Louisa and Gilbert did have an understanding, Louisa had clearly kept it a secret from her mother, who was determined to give her youngest a spectacular season. At nineteen Louisa was at the peak of her beauty—or so their mother declared, insisting it was the perfect time to find her an advantageous match.
Her father leaned back in his chair with a defeated sigh. "If only we could avoid selling the house, but as much as we all love it, it is too large and too expensive. The price of being fashionable, I suppose."
Not to mention the cost of maintaining a Grosvenor Square–style of living—behaving like nobility, though in reality they were only genteel, with no title or land. As a gentleman, her father had never in his life had to work. The family had lived on the interest from his inheritance. Money he had invested wisely—until now.
Once again, Gilbert's suggestion that they not "shackle ourselves with promises" echoed through Abigail's mind, and she straightened her shoulders in resolve. "Yes, Papa. We shall have to sell the house, but not the family jewels. Not while there is another option. . . ."
A short while later, Father asked Mamma and Louisa to join them in the study, and attempted to explain the situation. He did not assign any blame to her, Abigail noticed, but knowing he held her partially responsible for their predicament was enough to make her miserable.
When he had finished, Anne Foster protested, "Sell our house?"
"You know, Mamma, that might not be so bad," Louisa said. "Grosvenor Square isn't as fashionable as it once was. I saw some lovely houses in Curzon Street that would do us very well."
"Curzon Street?" Father echoed. "That will not be possible, my dear."
"I think it would be wisest to retrench elsewhere," Abigail said. "In a smaller city or even in the country, where the pressure to have an army of servants, large dinners, and the latest gowns would be far less."
"The country?" Louisa's pretty face puckered as though she'd found a mouse in her soup. "Unless you are talking about a great country estate, with house parties, and fox hunting, and hedge mazes . . ."
"No, Louisa, I am afraid not. Something smaller."
"Oh, why did this have to happen?" Mamma moaned. "What about Louisa's season? Her dowry? Is it all gone? Is our youngest daughter not to have her chance, after all?"
"I didn't say that. No. Louisa is to have her season." Father sent an uneasy glance toward Abigail, then quickly looked away. "We will muster enough for Louisa's gowns and things. I trust your aunt Bess will allow us to stay with her for a few months?"
"Of course she will. But . . . I don't understand. I thought you said there would not be enough money."
With another glance at Abigail, Father began, "Abigail has kindly—"
But she interrupted him. "I have helped Papa find a few ways to economize. Some funds we had set aside for a . . . rainy day. And a few things we can sell—"
"Not your father's emeralds!"
Abigail shook her head. "No, not the emeralds."
Her mother firmly nodded. "Good. Louisa must have her chance to wear them, as you did."
Abigail noticed with relief that her mother refrained from adding, "for as much good as it did you," or something of that sort.
Abigail forced a smile. "We shall scrape together enough to give Louisa a wonderful season. The season she deserves."
For a moment her mother stared at her as if she spoke a foreign language. Abigail feared she would probe further into the source of the money—perhaps even suggest Abigail's dowry could be used for additional funds, since she no longer needed one. It was one thing to offer it up quietly, willingly—as Abigail had done privately to her father—but quite a different, humiliating thing to be told a dowry was wasted on her.
Mollified, her mother only nodded. "As it should be." She pressed Louisa's hand. "You see, my dear, you are to have your season after all. What did I tell you? You shall meet the most handsome, best connected, and wealthiest young man this year. I just know it!"
And so, while Mrs. Foster and Louisa attended dress fittings, Abigail began helping her disillusioned and disappointed father find a more affordable place to live.
Abigail contacted a property agent and made inquiries for a suitable dwelling. But she heard of no situation that answered her mother's notions of spacious comfort and suited Abigail's prudence. She had rejected several houses as too large for their income.
One afternoon, among the correspondence about properties, Abigail received a letter from Gilbert Scott, postmarked Roma. Her heart gave a little foolish leap, as it always did when seeing her name in his neat hand. Over the preceding months, Gilbert had sent letters to both her and Louisa. Abigail always read his descriptions of his studies and the architecture of Italy—sometimes with sketches in the margins—with absorption and dutifully wrote back. She did not know what sort of letters Gilbert wrote to Louisa. Abigail feared they might be of a more romantic nature than those she received but hoped she was wrong.
She retreated to her bedchamber to read Gilbert's letter in private.
My dear Abby,
Hello, old friend. How is life in London? I imagine you are bored without me there to tease you and drag you about the city to see St. Paul's, or the construction at Bethlehem Hospital, or to hear some lecture or other. Italy is amazing, and you would love it. But I shan't overwhelm you with details in this letter, for fear of making you jealous and risk your not writing back.
You have been very good about answering my letters, Abby. I appreciate it more than you know. As much as I enjoy Italy and my studies, I don't mind confessing to you—since you know me so well—that I do feel lonely now and again. How I would love to walk with you along the Piazza Venezia and show you the Roman Forum!
I have not heard from Louisa in some time. Like you, she was prompt in writing back when I first began my travels. But her letters have trickled off of late. I hope she is in good health—as well as you and your parents, of course. Perhaps I have done something to vex her. If I have, it was unintentional. Please tell her I said so. If only all women were as easygoing and forgiving as you, Abby.
You asked in your last letter which building I most admired here. I seem to find a new favorite every day. Which reminds me, I had better sign off for now. We're soon to leave to visit the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Perhaps I shall find a new favorite.
Fondly,
Gilbert
Abigail folded the letter and for a moment held it to her chest, imagining Gilbert's handsome, earnest face as he wrote it, the ink on his fingers, and the tip of his tongue protruding as it always did when he concentrated on a task. Then she imagined walking arm in arm with him through Rome. . . .
"What has you smiling?" Louisa asked, pausing in her bedchamber doorway.
"Only a letter from Gilbert."
"And what has he to say this time? More lengthy descriptions of columns and cupolas, I suppose?"
"You may read it if you like," Abigail held it forth to show she had nothing to hide, hoping Louisa might return the favor. Not that Louisa ever exhibited any sign of being jealous of her older sister.
Louisa waved away the offer. "Maybe later."
"He asks why you have not written to him lately," Abigail said. "He's afraid he has vexed you."
Louisa lifted a delicate shrug. "Oh, nothing of that sort. I've just been so busy answering invitations and attending fittings and the like. And now that Easter is over and the season has begun . . . Well, you remember how it is. Up late every night, sleeping in every morning, and every afternoon given to calls. . . ."
Abigail had never told Louisa that she had witnessed her private tête-à-tête with Gilbert, nor asked what she had given him as a parting gift. Perhaps it was time she did.
"Louisa, I know you gave Gilbert something before he left. Is it a secret, or . . . ?"
Louisa blinked at her in surprise. "Did Gilbert tell you that, in his letter? I . . . gave him a lock of my hair. You don't mind, do you? For you've always insisted you and Gilbert were just friends."
Had she? Abigail swallowed. "Well, yes. Good friends."
Had Gilbert asked for a lock of Louisa's hair? Did he even now wear it in a ring? Her stomach cramped at the thought, and she couldn't bring herself to ask. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.
Instead, she made do with a sisterly "It's impolite not to answer letters promptly, Louisa. Surely you might manage a few lines at least? To assure him all is well and you are still . . . friends?"
Louisa flopped into an armchair, her usual concern for posture and poise neglected in only her sister's presence. "Oh, very well." Then she grinned sweetly at Abigail, a teasing light in her fair eyes. "Or might you not tell him so for me when you write back? For I know your reply shall be in tomorrow's post."
Soon they began receiving offers on their house—the best price contingent on keeping the majority of furnishings in place. They were relieved to receive such a good offer, but even so, once her father finished paying off the bond, there would be little left to spend on new lodgings. Although tireless in her efforts, Abigail began to despair of ever finding a house that would suit them all.
Early in April, while Abigail met with the housekeeper about more modest menus and other economizing measures, a footman came to find her.
"Your father asks that you join him in the study, miss," he said.
"Oh? I thought he had a caller."
"Indeed he does." The servant bowed and backed away without further explanation.
Abigail thanked the housekeeper, made her way to the study, and let herself in.
Her father sat at his desk. A man in black stood to one side, framed by one of the windows.
With an uncertain glance at the man, Abigail began, "You asked for me, Father?"
"Actually, this gentleman requested you join us." Mr. Foster gestured to the visitor—a man of about sixty years, she guessed. Not tall, but a distinguished figure in his black frock coat and charcoal-grey waistcoat. His high white shirt collar framed an arresting face—deep hooded eyes under heavy arched eyebrows as black as a bat's wings. Deep grooves ran from either side of a straight nose to the corners of his mouth. He wore a small mustache and beard trimmed in the Van Dyke style—his cheeks cleanly shaven. His hair and beard were black edged with silver. But it was his eyes that drew her back. Keen and calculating. Knowing and judging.
She was quite certain she had never seen him before. She would surely have remembered him. Why then had he requested her presence?
"Have we met before, sir?" she asked.
"No, miss. I have not had that pleasure," he replied, displaying no pleasure in meeting her even now.
Her father made belated introductions. "My elder daughter, Miss Abigail Foster. Abigail, this is Mr. Arbeau. A solicitor."
Abigail's stomach tightened. Was her father in more trouble because of Uncle Vincent's failed bank? Was he there to announce they were responsible for yet more money? Abigail fisted her hand. They had lost too much already.
Mr. Arbeau cut a crisp bow, then straightened, folding his arms behind his back. He was an intimidating presence with all his dour elegance.
He looked somewhere over her father's head, then began, "Mr. Foster, I gather that you are facing a financial crisis, and the offer of a commodious abode at a low rate would not be unwelcome at this time?"
Her father's face darkened. "I do not appreciate my private affairs being bandied about by strangers, Mr. Arbeau."
"Then I advise you not read the papers, sir." The man waved a graceful hand, and Abigail noticed the gold ring on his little finger. "Yes, yes. You are a proud man, I understand. But not too proud, I hope, to at least consider the offer I am prepared to make."
Her father's eyes narrowed. "What offer? I suppose you have a commodious abode to let?"
"Not I, no. But a client of mine possesses an old manor house, and has instructed me to offer it to you on very easy terms."
"And who is your client?" Father asked.
The man pursed his lips. "A distant relation of yours, from a family of consequence and property in western Berkshire. That is all I am at liberty to say."
"If he is a relative, why the secrecy?"
The man held his gaze but offered no reply.
Her father looked up in thought. "I do have antecedents in Berkshire, now that I think of it. May I know the name or location of this property?"
"Pembrooke Park. Spelt with two o's."
"Ah." Father's eyes lit. "My maternal grandmother was a Pembrooke."
The man continued to regard him evenly but neither confirmed nor denied the connection.
Instead Mr. Arbeau said, "Please understand that you are not inheriting said property, as closer heirs still live and the will is held up in probate over some question of ownership. However, the current executor of the estate lives elsewhere and wishes the property to be inhabited—and by deserving relatives if at all possible."
"I see . . ." Her father tented his fingers, and Abigail saw his mind working, considering whether to be flattered or further insulted to be considered a deserving relation.
Mr. Arbeau went on, "The house has two main levels and five bedchambers. As well as attic servants' quarters, and kitchens and workrooms belowstairs. Church, stables, and outbuildings. Nine acres of parkland, ponds, orchards, and gardens, though uncultivated for years."
"But an estate so large," Abigail interjected. "I am afraid it would be beyond our . . . needs."
The man withdrew a card from an inner pocket upon which was written a figure. He handed it to Mr. Foster, who in turn handed it to Abigail. Glancing at it, Abigail felt her brows rise in astonishment. Curious, she flipped it over. The other side was a simple calling card printed with only Henri Arbeau, Solicitor.
"That is an uncommonly reasonable and indeed generous offer," Abigail conceded. "But I'm afraid the staff and expense to manage such a place would be beyond our means."
The solicitor eyed her shrewdly and addressed his reply to her. "My client was right, I see, in wishing you present during this meeting, Miss Foster." He pulled a second slip of paper from his pocket. "I am authorized to engage and pay basic staff, though my commission does not extend to French chefs or a tribe of liveried footmen." He glanced at the list on the paper. "You are to be provided with a cook-housekeeper, kitchen maid, manservant, and two housemaids. Personal servants—valet, lady's maid, and the like—must be provided by yourselves. If that is agreeable."
Abigail opened her mouth to utter some incredulous comment, but before she could fashion one, Mr. Arbeau held up his palm.
"Now, before you credit me or my client with an overly 'generous' offer, I must ask you to moderate your expectations and your gratitude. The house has been boarded up for eighteen years."
Abigail gaped. She dragged her gaze away from the stranger to her father to gauge his reaction. Did his heart sink as hers did? Why would anyone abandon a house for nearly two decades? What condition would it be in?
Her father said, "May I ask why it has been allowed to sit empty for so long?"
"It is not my place to judge my client's past decision in this regard. Suffice it to say, neither my client nor anyone else in that family has been able or willing to live there."
"And it has not been let before?"
"No." Mr. Arbeau drew an impatient breath. "See here. My client apprehends that your family is in need of a dwelling and wishes to fill that need. Be assured that everything shall be done to render it habitable. I will escort you there myself, and you and your daughter may judge for yourselves whether Pembrooke Park might, by any alteration, be made suitable. And if you are willing to inhabit the place for at least a twelvemonth to make the investment worthwhile, my client will bear the expense of repairs, cleaning, and a staff of five to keep you reasonably comfortable."
Abigail stared blindly as her mind struggled to tally the sizeable expense his client was willing to bear, compared to the modest rent requested. She blinked at the disparity. A pinch of disquiet, of suspicion, unsettled her stomach. Had the business with Uncle Vincent not taught her that anything that sounded too good to be true usually was? But they could ill afford to pass up such an opportunity.
Her father seemed less aware of the astounding nature of the offer, or simply took it as his due. He said, "I assume the servants will prepare the place ahead of our arrival?"
"You assume wrong," Mr. Arbeau replied crisply. "My client is most insistent on that point. You and Miss Foster are to be present with me when the house is unlocked and opened for the first time since 1800."
It was her father's turn to gape. "But . . . why?"
"Because that is my client's wish and stipulation." His tone did not invite further inquiry.
Her father ducked his head to consider the matter, his furrowed brow indicating bewilderment.
The mantel clock ticked.
Mr. Arbeau consulted his list again, then refolded it. "There is an inn not terribly distant from the manor. If we discover that the house is uninhabitable as is, you are welcome to sleep at said inn for a period of up to a fortnight—as long as you return to the house each day to oversee the servants' preparations."
He returned the list to his pocket and said in a patronizing, nearly mocking, tone, "If that meets with your approval?"
Abigail stole a glance at her father and found his face growing florid. Fearing he might send the man away with a sharp setdown, she quickly spoke up. "Again, that is very generous, Mr. Arbeau. I can find no objection to at least visiting Pembrooke Park. Can you, Papa?"
He hesitated, taking in her pleading expression. "I suppose not."
Abigail ventured, "Is the place furnished, or would we bring our own things?" She remembered the highest offer on their own house, contingent on leaving the furnishings behind.
"Fully furnished, yes," Mr. Arbeau said. "I have never been inside, but my client assures me you will find Pembrooke Park already fitted up when you take it. Beneath the inevitable dust, that is." His eyes glittered wryly.
Might this be her chance to help improve her family's circumstances and regain her father's trust?
Abigail prayed she wasn't leading her father astray once again. She squared her shoulders and forced a smile. "Well, we are not afraid of a little dust, are we, Papa?"
When they had agreed on a date to visit Pembrooke Park, Mr. Arbeau took his leave. It was a relief when the officious man and his astounding offer departed.
# Chapter 2
Abigail and her father rode with the somber solicitor in a well-sprung post chaise hired for the occasion. They traveled for most of the day, on turnpikes and through toll gates, stopping to change horses and postilion riders at regular intervals, or to take a hurried meal at a coaching inn.
Finally, they reached western Berkshire, its rolling hills and woodlands giving way to farms and chalk downs near its border with Wiltshire. They passed through the village of Caldwell, with a fine church, cloth mill, and the Black Swan, which Mr. Arbeau pointed out as the nearest inn where they might sleep until they deemed the manor house habitable. A few minutes later, they reached Easton—a small cluster of shops and thatched cottages—near Pembrooke Park.
Abigail felt her pulse quicken. Please, God, don't let the manor be an utter ruin. . . . Not when I advised Father to come. I cannot stand to disappoint him again.
Leaving the hamlet behind, they turned down a narrow, tree-lined lane. Bumping down the long drive, the coach came to a jarring halt.
Mr. Arbeau's black eyes flashed. "What the devil . . . ?"
Abigail lifted her chin, trying to see out the window.
The groom opened the door. "Way's blocked, sir. This is as far as we can go in this big ol' girl."
"What do you mean, the way is blocked?"
"Come and see, sir."
Taking his tall beaver hat with him, Mr. Arbeau alighted, the carriage lurching under his weight. Abigail took the groom's offered hand and stepped down as well. Her father followed.
Abigail was instantly surrounded by the lush smell of pines and rich earth. Ahead a stone bridge crossed a narrow river. But the bridge was blocked by stout barrels heaped with rocks. The barrels were placed at intervals, allowing pedestrians or single horses to pass but not carriages.
Mr. Arbeau muttered over the barricade and began discussing the situation with the groom and postilion rider. But Abigail's gaze was drawn beyond the bridge to the manor on its other side—a large house constructed of rubble stone in warm hues of buff gold and grey, with a tile roof and steeply pitched gables. It faced a central courtyard, with stables on one side and a small church on the other, the whole surrounded by a low stone wall and approached through a gate beyond the bridge.
Beside her, her father said, "That's it, ey? Pembrooke Park?"
"Yes."
She glanced at him to gauge his reaction, but it was difficult to tell what he was thinking.
Mr. Arbeau stepped nearer, addressing them both. "My client did not mention any such barricade. It must have been erected in recent years without my client's knowledge." Mr. Arbeau tugged on his cuffs. "Come. We shall walk from here."
He employed a gold-headed walking stick as he strode off. Abigail and her father exchanged uncertain looks but followed the solicitor through the barrels and across the bridge.
On the other side, they passed through the gate in the stone wall and crossed the courtyard, their shoes crunching over the pea-gravel drive, where patches of weeds had grown up here and there from disuse.
Nearer now, Abigail noticed the manor's windows were of different styles and eras. Some were arched, others square casement, and there were even two lovely projecting oriel bays. The front door was recessed under an arched porch. To Abigail it looked like a gaped mouth, and the windows above like frightened eyes. She blinked away the fanciful image.
A chain and padlock bound the double doors closed. Abigail and her father paused as Mr. Arbeau fished an old key on a black ribbon from his pocket. He lifted the padlock and inserted the key.
Suddenly a dog barked viciously and bounded across the drive toward them. Abigail stiffened and looked about for a weapon, ready to grab Mr. Arbeau's walking stick if he didn't think to use it. The muscular, square-headed mastiff lurched to a halt a few yards away, body coiled, teeth bared as its warning barks lowered to ominous growls.
Crack! A shot rang out, making Abigail jump and whirl around with a cry.
Her father stretched out an arm as though to shield her, the act touching if futile. Mr. Arbeau slowly turned in the direction of the shot.
There at the corner of the house some twenty yards away, a man held a smoking double-barrel flintlock, pointed up in the air. He was a tall, lean man of perhaps fifty years with faded red hair and trimmed beard, his legs spread in confident stance.
He lowered the gun, leveling it at them. "Next time I'll na' aim over yer heads."
Her father raised his hands.
Mr. Arbeau regarded the man, hooded eyes revealing neither fear nor noticeable surprise.
A second, younger man ran onto the scene. "Pa!" His voice rose on a warning note. "Pa, don't." The man was in his midtwenties, with red hair as well.
He flicked a glance in their direction. "Put the gun down, Pa. And call off Brutus. These good people mean no harm, I'm sure. They don't look like thieves to me."
For a moment the older man remained poised as he was, sharp eyes darting from Mr. Arbeau, to her father, and at last to her.
The younger man reached out and lowered the barrel of the gun. "There now. That's better."
The older man kept his eyes locked on them and demanded, "Who are ye, and what's yer business here?" His low voice betrayed a faint Scottish lilt. His long, thin nose and high, defined cheekbones gave him the look of an ascetic or aristocrat, though his clothes were less refined than his features.
Mr. Arbeau stepped down from the porch, reaching into his pocket as he did so.
The gun snapped up again in response.
"My card," the solicitor explained, his hands wide in supplication. "The name is Arbeau. And we have every right to be here, I assure you."
"I'll be the judge of that."
Mr. Arbeau offered his card. "I represent the executor of the estate."
Tucking the gun under his arm, the man snatched the card and glowered down at it.
Mr. Arbeau's hooded eyes roved the taller man's face with calculating interest. "You, I take it, are Mac Chapman."
The man's head snapped up, eyes flashing. "And how is it ye know my name, when I have'na laid eyes on ye in my life?"
The younger man gave them an apologetic look, an ironic smile tugging his mouth. "No doubt your reputation precedes you, Papa. Or certainly will, after this."
The humor was lost on the elder Mr. Chapman. He lifted his red-bearded chin toward Abigail and her father. "Who are these people? And why do they trespass here?"
Mr. Arbeau sent them a sidelong glance, likely considering how best to disarm the man—quite literally. "Miss Foster and her father have come all the way from London to see Pembrooke Park."
Her father stepped forward, arms still raised but flagging to waist level. "I am Charles Foster. My maternal grandmother was Mary Catharine Pembrooke, daughter of Alexander Pembrooke."
Abigail felt a flush of embarrassment on her father's behalf. She had never heard him speak those names before. He must have been studying the family tree since the solicitor's first call. His pride in his distant relationship to an old family they barely knew left her uneasy.
Mr. Chapman seemed to consider her father's words with sincere interest, his eyes lifting to the sky as he searched his memory. "Mary Catharine Pembrooke . . ." he echoed. "Oh, aye. She would have been Robert Pembrooke's great-aunt."
"I . . ." Her father hesitated. Like her, he probably had no idea who Robert Pembrooke was.
The man continued to search his memory. "She married a Mr. Fox, I believe."
Father's head reared back in surprise. "That's right. My grandfather. But how did you know?"
The younger man clapped his father's shoulder. "My father served as Pembrooke Park's steward for many years. He took great pride in his work, and the family he represented."
"Apparently, he still does." Mr. Arbeau drew back his shoulders. "Well, if we are finished with our genealogy lesson, I think it is time we went in." He turned toward the door.
Mac Chapman stiffened and scowled. "Go in? Whatever for?"
"Why, to show Mr. and Miss Foster around the house. My client has offered to let the place to them for a twelvemonth, if it meets with their approval."
Abigail did not miss the stunned look father and son exchanged. They were certainly not happy to learn people might be moving into the abandoned house.
Mr. Arbeau returned his attention to the padlock, struggling to unlock the rusted old thing. But Mr. Chapman handed his son the gun and strode forward, pulling a tangle of keys from his coat pocket.
"Allow me," Chapman said. "That key ye have is for the door itself."
Mr. Arbeau stepped aside, offense sparking in his dark eyes. "By all means." Noticing a rusty orange-brown smear on his silky black palm, he wiped his gloved hands on a handkerchief.
Mr. Chapman employed one of his keys, and the padlock gave way. He unhooked it from the heavy chain and pulled the links from between the door handles.
The son offered, "My father has kept the roof and exterior in good repair over the years, as I believe you will see."
Mr. Arbeau surveyed man, dog, and gun. "And taken it upon himself to padlock the place and act as self-appointed guard?" he suggested, black eyebrows raised high.
"What of it?" Chapman said, setting the chain aside.
"I suppose it is you we have to thank for the barricade on the bridge?"
"There have been attempted break-ins in the past."
Her father said, "Youthful dares and vandals, I'd guess?"
"No, sir. Ye guess wrong. Treasure hunters. Thieves."
"Treasure hunters?" Abigail asked sharply.
Mac Chapman looked at her directly, and at such close range, she was struck by his intense green eyes. "Aye, miss. Brought on by old rumors of treasure hidden in the house. In a secret room." His eyes glinted. "Stuff and nonsense, of course."
"Of course," she echoed faintly. Treasure? Abigail wondered. Could it be?
He inserted a second key into the door lock. "Stuck eighteen years ago, and I doubt disuse has helped matters." He butted his shoulder against the wood while pressing the latch. The door released with a shudder, then creaked open.
"Well, Mr. Chapman," the solicitor said, "would you like to do the honors of giving us the tour?"
"It's just Mac, if ye please. And no thank ye."
His son said, "I wouldn't mind seeing it, Pa. I haven't been inside since I was a boy."
Mac gave him a pointed look. "I am sure ye have important duties to attend to."
He met his father's steely gaze. "Ah. Yes, I suppose I do."
Movement caught Abigail's eye. She looked over her shoulder and saw a young woman step through the gate, accompanied by a girl of eleven or twelve. They crossed the courtyard, then stopped in their tracks at the sight of the visitors.
Mac Chapman tensed. "Will," he said under his breath, "take Leah home, please. Kitty too."
The young man looked up sharply at something in his father's tone. "Very well." He gave a general bow in their direction, then turned and strode quickly away in a long-legged stride. He put an arm around the pretty woman and took the girl's hand.
His wife and child, perhaps? Whoever they were, the young man gently turned them, leading them past the stable and out of view.
"Are you sure you won't accompany us, Mac?" Mr. Arbeau asked again, adding dryly, "Make sure we don't steal anything?"
Mac looked through the open door and into the hall beyond with an expression riddled with . . . what? Longing? Memories? Regrets? Abigail wasn't sure.
"No. I'll wait here and lock up after ye leave."
The stale, musty odor of dampness met them inside a soaring hall. Some small creature skittered out of sight as they entered, and Abigail shivered. Cobwebs crisscrossed the balustrades of a grand staircase and draped the corners of portraits on the walls. Dust had settled into the folds of draperies covering the windows and into the seams of the faded sofa beside the door. A long-case clock stood like a silent sentry across the room.
Mr. Arbeau pulled a note from his pocket and read from it. "Here on the main floor are the hall, morning room, dining room, drawing room, salon, and library. Shall we begin?"
Their tentative steps across the hall left footprints on the dust-covered floor. They walked into the first room they came to—it appeared to be the morning room. Through it, they entered the dining room, with a long table and candle chandelier strung with crystals and cobwebs. The table held the remnants of a centerpiece—flowers and willow tails and perhaps . . . a pineapple? The arrangement had dried to a brittle brown cluster of twisted twigs and husks.
Next came the drawing room, and Abigail stared in surprise.
It appeared as though the occupants had just been called away. A tea set sat on the round table, cups encrusted with dry tea. A book lay open over the arm of the sofa. A needlework project, nearly finished, lay trapped under an overturned chair.
What had happened here? Why had the family left so abruptly, and why had the rooms been entombed for almost two decades?
Her father righted the chair. Abigail lifted the upturned needlework basket, only to discover a scattering of seedlike mouse droppings beneath. She wrinkled her nose.
Her father posed her unasked question. "Why did the former occupants leave so suddenly?"
Arms behind his back, Mr. Arbeau continued his survey of the room. "I could not say, sir."
Could not, or would not? Abigail wondered, but she kept silent.
They looked briefly in the shuttered salon and dim library, its floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with abandoned books. Then they slowly mounted the grand stairway and rounded the gallery rail. They looked into the bedchambers, one by one. In the largest two they found carefully made beds, tied-back bed-curtains, moth-eaten clothes lying listless in wardrobes, and bonnets and hats on their pegs. In the other rooms, they found beds left unmade, bedclothes in disarray and bed-curtains hastily thrown back. In one of these rooms, a chess set waited for someone to take the next turn, as though abandoned midgame. In another room stood a dolls' house, miniature pieces neatly arranged; clearly a cherished possession. Abigail's gaze was arrested by a small blue frock hanging lifeless and limp from a peg on the wall.
Again, she shivered. Where was the girl who once wore it now, eighteen years later?
She asked, "What became of them—the family who lived here?"
"I am not at liberty to say," Mr. Arbeau replied.
She and her father exchanged a raised-brow look at that but did not press him. They made their way back downstairs to the hall.
"Well?" Mr. Arbeau asked, with an impatient look at his pocket watch.
The house, beneath its layers of cobwebs and mystery, was beautiful. Once cleaned, it would be a privilege to live in such a place. She looked at her father as he surveyed the hall once more with a pinched expression.
"It will require a great deal of work . . ." he said.
"Yes," Mr. Arbeau allowed. "But work you will not personally be required to perform. I shall ask Mac Chapman to recommend qualified staff to ready the house, if that meets with your approval?" Again that condescending glint.
But staring up at the formal portraits of his distant ancestors, her father didn't reply. In his stead, Abigail answered, "If Mac is willing, yes. I think that an excellent idea."
"So you will take the place for a twelvemonth, at least? And sign an agreement to that effect?"
Abigail looked at her father. Would he accept her advice after she had failed him before? She wasn't sure but gently urged, "I think we should, Papa. If you agree."
Charles Foster nodded as though toward a painted gentleman in Tudor attire. "I think we must."
They spoke with Mac Chapman before they left, and he assented to engage a trustworthy cook-housekeeper, manservant, kitchen maid, and two housemaids, as requested.
"Give me a few days to interview folks and investigate their characters," he said, looking uneasily at the dim, blind windows of the upper story as he said the words. "Can't hire just anyone, you know—not to work here."
Abigail and her father thanked the man and said they would see him soon.
As they took their leave of him, Mac cautioned Abigail, "Now you've taken the place, yer sure to hear gossip. Pay it no mind."
"Gossip?" she asked. "About the supposed treasure, you mean?"
"Aye." His green eyes glinted. "And other rumors far worse."
# Chapter 3
They returned home, told Mamma and Louisa all about their new lodgings, and accepted the highest offer on their London house. The buyer, having recently returned from the West Indies, desired to take possession immediately, so Abigail launched herself into preparations to vacate the premises.
Some of the art was to be sold separately, and a few special pieces of china and linen taken with them, but the rest would remain with the house. Abigail oversaw the packing of trunks but left the negotiations with the art dealer to her father.
She felt nostalgic as she packed things from the bedchamber she had occupied for most of her life. How strange to leave the furniture and bedclothes for someone new to sleep in. She hoped he or she would appreciate them. She packed away her own clothes, sorting between those she would take in her valise for immediate use and those she would pack away in her trunk to be sent down later. She packed her favorite books—books of house plans, landscaping essays by Capability Brown, and a few novels.
Because the new owner was willing to retain the household staff, the Fosters decided they would take only the lady's maid, Marcel, though she would remain behind in London with Mamma and Louisa for the time being. Her father's valet refused to leave London and requested a character reference to use in seeking another situation.
The horses were sold, as well as the town coach. They would hire a post chaise for travel.
A fortnight later, everything was settled, allowing Abigail and her father to return to Pembrooke Park. Meanwhile, Mrs. Foster and Louisa removed to Aunt Bess's home, planning to join them in Berkshire after the season.
The night before they left, Abigail finished packing her remaining personal belongings, checking to be sure she had everything she would need for a week or so in her hand luggage—nightclothes, a clean shift, toiletries, the novel she was currently reading. She went through her desk drawer, looking for a drawing pad and pencils to take along. She spied a tube of paper and unrolled it, her heart aching as she recognized the house plans she and Gilbert had drawn up long ago. After much discussion and many revisions, here was their ideal house.
Perhaps it had only been a game to him. An exercise. But for her it had been very real. She had imagined living in those rooms. Filling those bedchambers with their children. Eating their meals together in that dining room with its bow window overlooking a landscaped garden through which she and Gilbert would stroll arm in arm. . . .
She blinked away the foolish images and the tears that accompanied them. They had been adolescents. He probably didn't even remember drawing these plans with her and would likely be chagrined to know she had kept them. She was tempted to tear them up, or burn them, but in the end, she couldn't bear to do so. Although it was not very practical to go to the trouble of transporting them to their new home, she rolled the plans carefully and laid them in her trunk—keeping alive a dream probably better relinquished once and for all.
On the appointed day, Abigail and her father traveled by post chaise back to Pembrooke Park. A line of newly hired servants stood shoulder to shoulder at the entrance awaiting their arrival.
Mac Chapman was there to greet them. "Good morning, Miss Foster. Mr. Foster. May I introduce Mrs. Walsh, your new cook-housekeeper."
The thick-waisted, kind-looking woman bowed her head respectfully. "Sir. Miss."
"Her kitchen maid, Jemima."
A thin girl of no more than fifteen giggled shyly, then bobbed a curtsy.
"And these are Polly and Molly. Sisters, as you may have guessed. They will be your housemaids."
The two dipped curtsies and smiled warmly. The pair of pretty girls were perhaps eighteen and nineteen, one with dark blond hair and the other a light brown.
Abigail smiled in return.
Mac turned to the lone male among the new hires. "And this is Duncan. He's to be your manservant, odd job man, haul and carry—whatever you need."
The man with sandy brown hair was in his late twenties with broad shoulders and brawny arms. He certainly looked as if he could haul and carry.
He bowed perfunctorily but offered no smile as the others had done.
Her father said to the former steward, "Thank you, Mr. Chap—"
"Mac," he reminded them.
"Mac. Well . . . Welcome, everyone."
Abigail added, "We are glad you are here. Shall we get started?"
After consulting with Mac and Mrs. Walsh, they decided they would begin with the kitchen, scullery, servants' hall, and sleeping quarters—so the staff could eat and sleep in the manor—and then move on to preparing bedchambers for the Fosters. Mrs. Walsh would occupy the housekeeper's parlor and Duncan the former butler's room belowstairs, while the young maids would sleep in bedchambers in the attic.
For several days, while her father primarily remained at the Black Swan, Abigail oversaw the servants' work each day, returning to the inn at night. She answered the servants' questions as they cleaned and aired the house room by room.
Abigail's father insisted she pick whichever bedchamber she wanted for herself—her small reward for coming early and preparing the house. It was kind of him, the first kind words he'd spoken to her since the disastrous bank failure, and she treasured them—though her practical, skeptical mind told her he'd only said it to assuage his guilt for leaving her to oversee the work alone.
Whatever his reasons, Abigail did not choose either of the largest rooms—the master's and mistress's bedchambers in the past, she guessed. Nor did she pick the newest—the one in the later addition over the drawing room with its big sunny windows and lofty half tester bed.
Instead, she picked the modest-sized room with the dolls' house. She was drawn to the little window seat overlooking a walled garden and pond with the river beyond. She was drawn to the cherished dolls' house and the small blue frock hanging on its peg. She was drawn to the secrets she sensed in this room and wanted them for herself.
She personally helped clean the chamber, assisting the maids in taking down the draperies and bed-curtains to wash, and removing the carpets for cleaning. Polly scrubbed down the walls, mopped the floors, and washed the windows. But Abigail herself dusted the books and toys and every tiny piece of furniture in the dolls' house, returning each precisely where she'd found it. She didn't know why, exactly. It would be far more practical to box up all the playthings, far easier to clean without them than around them. Mr. Arbeau had asked them not to dispose of anything, but she could have asked Duncan to haul it up to the attic storeroom. She did not.
The dolls' house—or "baby house," as she'd sometimes heard them called—was impressive indeed. The structure stood atop a cabinet to raise it from the floor. The exterior of the house had been built as a scale model of Pembrooke Park itself, with paned-glass windows and tiny shingles. The three-story interior, with a central staircase hall complete with oak rails and balustrades, had been somewhat simplified, she realized, so that all of the major rooms were accessible from its open back.
The rooms themselves were fashioned with intricate details, like moulded cornices, paneled doors, and real wallpaper. Bedchambers were furnished with mantelpieces, four-poster beds, and washstands with basins and pitchers no bigger than thimbles. In the dining room, a crystal chandelier hung over a table set with farthing-size porcelain plates and tiny glass goblets. The drawing room held small woven baskets, a silver tea set, and miniature books with real pages. The kitchen—shown on the same level as the dining room, though in reality belowstairs—contained a miniature meat jack, a hearth with spit, tiny copper kettles, and jelly moulds.
To buy all these miniatures or have them created by craftsmen would have made for an extremely expensive hobby. Abigail guessed this dolls' house had at first been some wealthy woman's pastime, before it had become a child's plaything.
Abigail pulled out the drawer of the cabinet and found a family of dolls with porcelain faces and soft bodies dressed in costumes of decades past: mother, father, and two sons. At least she assumed they were boys from their attire, though one body was missing its head. She wondered where the daughters were.
While dusting the small dining room, she admired the miniature silver serving platter on the table, complete with a domed lid. Curious, she reached in and lifted the lid. There on the platter was the severed head of the second boy doll, with dark embroidery-floss hair and stuffing stringing out from its neck.
Abigail shivered. The work of some nasty little boy, she told herself. How he must have vexed his sister, whoever she was, with his destructive mischief. Abigail put the head in the drawer with its body, determined to repair it someday when she had time. But at the moment, it was time to get back to work.
# Chapter 4
On her third day working in the manor, Abigail helped herself to a cup of tea and stepped out onto the small front porch for a respite. It was a fine spring morning, and she drew in a deep breath of fresh air. She looked forward to exploring the gardens and grounds soon, but the house came first. The work was going well, she judged. Mrs. Walsh was an even-tempered, no-nonsense leader who ruled with a gentle hand and an encouraging reprimand. "Now, girls, I know ya can do better than that. . . ."
She cheerfully met with Abigail regularly in her parlor to discuss progress, plans, and purchases. She had made it clear early on, however, that the kitchen was her domain and she would not appreciate the lady of the house interrupting her work there. So Abigail did not often see the kitchen maid, Jemima.
She saw a great deal, however, of Polly and Molly. Especially Polly, the elder sister, who had volunteered to serve as Abigail's personal maid—helping her dress and so on—along with her other duties as upper housemaid. Both were pleasant, hardworking girls, daughters of a local farmer, who found even heavy housework far lighter than the chores they were accustomed to on their father's farm.
Duncan worked hard those first few days as well, even offering to help the maids carry cans of water and other heavy loads. Now and again Abigail saw him glance at Polly to see if she noticed his efforts. Abigail hoped she would not have a staff romance on her hands—though Polly, nearly ten years younger than Duncan, did not exhibit anything but friendly politeness in return, so perhaps all would be well.
Abigail had quickly discovered, despite the friendliness of the staff, that all were tight-lipped about the past and the former residents. When she'd asked Mrs. Walsh about the Pembrookes, the woman shook her head, eyes wary. "No, miss. We're not to talk about that."
"Why not?"
"No good can come of it, Mac says. It's too dangerous."
"Dangerous? How?"
But she only shook her head once more, lips cinched as tight as a drawstring reticule.
When Abigail asked Polly what she knew about the former residents, the young woman had shrugged. "Not a thing, miss. I was only a babe when they left, wasn't I?"
"But surely you've heard rumors."
"Aye, miss. But rumors is all it is. I don't want to lose my place for gossipin', do I?"
Clearly Mac had laid down the law when he'd hired the servants.
So Abigail set aside her questions for the time being and lost herself in sorting, cleaning, and organizing, as well as writing up lists of needed repairs and orders for the larder and supply cupboards.
Standing there now on the front stoop, sipping her tea, Abigail found her gaze drawn across the courtyard to the church within the estate's walled grounds.
Mac passed by in a long Carrick coat, leather breeches, and knee-high boots, his dog at his heels. He wore a greenish-brown Harris-tweed cap in honor, she'd heard, of his Scottish mother. The strap of a game bag crossed his chest, and he carried a veterinary case in one hand and a fowling piece in the other.
She had learned Mac Chapman was not only the former steward and protector of Pembrooke Park. He also served as land agent for Hunts Hall, an estate owned by a family of gentry on the other side of Easton.
Seeing her standing in the doorway, he tipped his hat to her. "Miss."
"Good morning, Mac. What are you about today?"
"Oh, off to try a new remedy on an ailing cow, and to check a new drainage ditch while I'm out there."
"And the gun?"
"In case my doctorin' fails."
She looked up in alarm.
"Only teasing you, lass," he said. "Often carry a gun when I walk about on my duties. Never know when a wild dog or mangy badger might decide to harass me or the livestock."
"Or a trespasser?" she suggested wryly.
He frowned. "That's no joking matter, lass. As you may discover for yourself."
She changed the subject. "May I ask about the church, Mac? Has it been locked up like the house?"
He paused to follow the direction of her gaze. "Not at all. It's the parish church, along with the church in Caldwell, and the chapel of ease in Ham Green. Services every Sunday and on feast days."
"May I peek inside?"
"Aye. It's always open. The parson's a good man, if I do say so myself." His mouth quirked in a grin. How different he appeared now compared to the fierce stranger who'd given them such an inhospitable welcome not long ago.
Later, while the servants ate a light midday meal, Abigail walked across the gravel drive toward the churchyard. Stepping onto the spongy grass verge, she passed through the opening in the low wall. She glanced around the well-kept graveyard and then looked up at the narrow church itself. The front door was sheltered by a hooded porch—a later addition to the original building, she guessed. Above was an arched window, and a square bell cote topped by a crocketed spire. She stepped into the porch, pushed open the old wooden door, and entered the cool interior.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the light—dim compared to the sunny day, yet surprisingly well lit from a large window on either end. Her mind quickly identified a fifteenth-century stone screen dividing chapel and long narrow nave. Paneled walls and wagon roof. Box pews, communion rail, and canopied pulpit—all of oak. Even Gilbert would have approved.
In the central aisle, a ladder stood empty beneath a high brass chandelier. She wondered where the workman was.
She stepped nearer the back wall to study a series of old paintings.
As she stood there in the shadows, a man entered from the vestry in plain waistcoat and rolled up shirtsleeves, a box under his arm. He climbed the ladder and began removing the spent tapers. Humming to himself while he worked, he'd obviously not noticed her there.
Not wishing to startle him, she cleared her throat and softly greeted, "Good afternoon."
He looked in her direction. "Oh! Sorry. Didn't see you there."
It was the younger man she'd seen with Mac—his grown son, she assumed, though they'd not been introduced.
She walked slowly up the aisle. "If you are ever looking for more work," she said, "we've no end of it at Pembrooke Park."
He chuckled and readjusted the box under his arm. "I imagine so, but as you can see, I have my hands full here."
She nodded. "Keeping the church in good repair the way your father does the house?"
"In a matter of speaking."
"I am surprised your father did not hire you officially."
He grinned and said fondly, "He is accustomed to assigning me chores without having to pay me. Family privilege and all that." He pulled out another stub and tossed it in the box.
Watching him struggle to balance ladder, box, and tapers, she said, "That high chandelier doesn't strike me as terribly practical."
He glanced down at her, then returned his focus to his task. "I suppose it isn't. Wall sconces would be easier to refill and maintain. But I like this impractical thing. I think it's beautiful. An endowment from the lady of the manor long ago."
He descended the ladder and nodded toward the paintings she'd been studying. "That's Catherine of Alexandria, the Martyr. Many paintings of saints were destroyed after the Reformation. But the artwork in our little church here was spared."
He set down the box and wiped his hands on a handkerchief. "We haven't been formally introduced. If you will allow the liberty, I shall introduce myself." He tucked away the cloth and bowed before her. "William Chapman. And you, I believe, are Miss Foster."
"Yes. How do you do," she said, and dipped the barest curtsy, not sure whether a land agent's son would expect such a courtesy or think it out of place.
At the sound of footsteps, Abigail turned. A woman entered the church behind them, head bowed over a box in her arms. "I've found more tapers," she called, glancing up. She drew up short at the sight of Abigail.
It was the woman Abigail had seen with the young girl the day she and her father first arrived. Seeing her more closely now, Abigail guessed the woman was in her mid to late twenties. Her pretty brown eyes and golden-brown hair well compensated for her plain day dress and unadorned bonnet. Was this the man's wife?
"It's all right, Leah," William Chapman said. "This is our new neighbor. She and her family come from London. Distant relations to the Pembrooke family. Very distant."
"Yes, Papa told me. Miss Foster, I believe?"
"Forgive me," Mr. Chapman said, turning to her. "Miss Foster, may I present Miss Leah Chapman, my sister."
Sister . . . She would not have guessed. "How do you do."
Mr. Chapman added, "My sister is a great help to me."
"In your . . . work, do you mean?" Abigail asked.
"Yes."
"Your father mentioned the parson is a good man."
"Did he?"
Leah smiled. "Father is biased. But in this instance, he is perfectly right."
William grinned at his sister. "Not that you're an impartial judge or anything."
Abigail felt left out of a private joke but said, "Then I shall look forward to meeting him."
They both turned to stare at her.
"But . . . you already have," Miss Chapman said, a little wrinkle between her brows. "My brother here is our curate. Recently ordained and our parson for all intents and purposes."
"Oh . . ." Abigail breathed, taken aback. She knew that curates occupied the lowest rung of the church hierarchy—assistant clergymen without a living of their own.
"Perhaps you refer to Mr. Morris, our rector," William added kindly. "He does visit from time to time."
"Not often enough," Leah said with a sniff. "He leaves far too much on your shoulders, William. And pays you far too little."
Abigail felt her cheeks heat. "I am sorry. I didn't realize. I mistook you for a . . ."
His eyes twinkled. "A manservant? Groundskeeper? Churchwarden? Yes, I answer to all of the above. No offense taken, Miss Foster. We are a small parish. I do whatever needs doing."
Leah said, "You do too much, if you ask me."
"Well, thankfully, I have you to help me. I dread the day you up and marry and leave me to my own devices."
Leah's eyes dulled, and she darted a glance at Abigail. "Small chance of that, you know."
"I know no such thing."
Uncomfortable, Abigail said, "I was rather surprised to find the church in use and left unlocked, when . . ."
"When we guard the manor so closely?" Mr. Chapman gamely supplied. "Papa is only adamant about keeping people out of the house. The house of God is open to one and all. I hope you will join us on Sunday?"
Abigail smiled but said noncommittally, "Perhaps."
The next night, Abigail left the inn and slept for the first time at Pembrooke Park. Her room was cleaned and ready, as were the kitchen and servants' bedchambers. Her father's room had been aired and was to be cleaned next—though there was little hurry, since he had been summoned back to Town to review some final details for the sale of the house and sign over the deed. He said he was comfortable leaving her, now that she had a maid and the other servants to attend her. Abigail had swallowed her disappointment, telling herself she should be proud her father had regained some of his confidence in her.
Polly came up to help her undress. Afterward, she thanked the young woman and bid her good-night. Abigail certainly hoped it would be good. She always had difficulty sleeping in a strange place. After she blew out her bedside candle, she lay awake for what seemed like hours, hearing every groan of wind through the windows, and every creak the old house made. Even after she fell asleep, she awoke often, not sure what had disturbed her and forgetting where she was. She reminded herself she was not alone in the house. There was no need to be frightened—the servants were there.
Why did that thought bring little comfort?
She was about to drift off again when she heard something. A whirring rise and fall, like a warbling brook or garbled, distant voices. Mrs. Walsh and Duncan had rooms belowstairs. Their voices wouldn't carry all the way from there. Though voices might carry from the attic above. Perhaps her room was under the sisters' room and she was hearing their conversation. Abigail could not identify any particular voice, or even its gender. In fact she wasn't certain it was a voice at all. It could be a trick of the wind, winnowing through the chimneys.
As Abigail listened, she suddenly heard a ghostly moan, "All alone. All alonnnnne . . ."
She gasped and lay still, listening hard. But all she heard was the wind. Surely she had imagined the voice. Yes, of course, she told herself, long into the night. It had only been the wind.
In the morning, Abigail stayed in bed later than usual, having slept poorly. It was Sunday, but Abigail decided against attending church. She wasn't ready to meet all those strangers, to feel their stares as she, the newcomer, entered. And what if they did things differently in the country? She would feel uncomfortable and uncertain what to do. Her family had attended divine services only sporadically in London, when they had not been out too late the night before, or when her mother decided they ought to show up for appearances' sake, especially if a prospective suitor was known to be devout. Besides, Abigail had several letters to write, and she would finally have the time to do so.
Polly brought up a breakfast tray and helped her dress before leaving to attend church herself. Mac had strongly suggested the servants be given a day of rest on the Sabbath, so they might attend church and visit their families. Abigail had agreed, wishing her own family were there so she would not be alone.
After breakfast, Abigail reread a letter she had received at the inn the day before from Gilbert's sister. Susan expressed regret that Abigail had left Town and concern over her family's new situation. She had also added a postscript:
You described Pembrooke Park as being a remote place near the tiny hamlet of Easton and the village of Caldwell. Interestingly enough, Edward and I have heard of Caldwell. One of the magazine's regular contributors lives there. What a small world it is!
Abigail idly wondered who it was. She dipped a quill in ink and began her reply, trying to sound optimistic about the change in their circumstances, to ward off her friend's pity or worry. She was fine. They were fine. She asked the name of the local writer, in case she encountered this person.
But she soon found herself distracted and rose and crossed the hall to her father's room. From his window, she saw a few wagons and gigs stopping on the other side of the bridge. The habit of leaving horses and vehicles was well ingrained, she saw, though Mac had finally agreed to removal of the barricade. Duncan had not enjoyed the task, she knew.
Other families came on foot from nearby Easton, greeting one another as they passed through the gate. The church bell rang, startling Abigail after the silence of the empty house. The last of the parishioners disappeared inside, and with a sigh Abigail returned to her letter.
Later, when the service ended, Abigail again rose to watch the congregation depart. As the small crowd diminished and trickled away over the bridge, she finally saw the Chapmans emerge—Mac, a middle-aged woman who must be his wife, William, Leah, the younger girl, and a red-haired boy as well. They talked and laughed as they walked across the courtyard on their way home. Mac's cottage was somewhere just beyond the estate grounds. William, she'd gathered, had recently moved into the small parsonage behind the church, though clearly he still spent time with his family.
The dog, so fierce when she'd first seen him, bounded over and joined the family with a lolling tongue and wagging tail. The tall red-haired boy of perhaps fifteen tossed a stick to him and then went chasing after the dog. His younger sister followed suit. Mac called some ireless admonishment after them, while his wife laughed and took his arm. Behind their parents, Leah took William's arm as well. The sweet picture of familiar affection caused a little ache in Abigail's heart. Her own family was not terribly affectionate. But she'd always secretly hoped that she and Gilbert would make up for it with their own children someday. Tears bit her eyes, and she blinked the painful thought away.
As though sensing he was being watched, William Chapman glanced back, looking up at the house. Although she doubted he could see inside the dim room on the sunny day, she stepped away from his view.
Later that afternoon, Abigail buttoned a spencer over her day dress—preparing to go out for a walk—when someone knocked on the front door. Since the servants had not yet returned from their day off, Abigail jogged lightly down the stairs and answered it herself, hat and gloves in hand. She felt a momentary hesitation about opening the door to a stranger—or possible treasure hunter—while she was alone in the house, so she was relieved to recognize the caller as William Chapman, basket in arms. Nothing about his fashionable green coat, patterned waistcoat, or simple cravat marked him as a clergyman.
"Good afternoon," she said.
He glanced behind her toward the empty hall. "Servants abandon you already?" A wry glint shone in his boyish blue eyes.
"No," she assured him. "Not at all. They are enjoying a day of rest."
"That was generous of you."
"Your father's idea."
"Ah. Yes, he isn't shy about offering his ideas on how I ought to conduct things on Sundays either."
"Oh?"
"He is the parish clerk, after all. So . . ." He shrugged helplessly.
"You poor man," she teased. William Chapman was handsome, she decided. His hair was darker than his father's, more auburn than red. And he was nearly as tall. His features were pleasing—straight nose, broad mouth, and fair skin.
He held up his hand. "Don't get me wrong, I have the utmost respect for my father. But he can be a bit . . . overbearing at times. I wouldn't want you to think you were the only one on the receiving end of his . . . suggestions."
He smiled, causing vertical grooves to frame his mouth and his large eyes to crinkle at the corners. Abigail felt a flutter of attraction.
"Here, this is for you. A welcome basket from my sister." He held forth the basket, bulging with gifts: embroidered hand towels, homemade soap, tins of tea and jam, a loaf of bread, and a mound of muffins.
"My goodness. Did she make all this herself?"
"Most of it, yes—even the basket—though Kitty helps with the soap, Mamma is the baker, and my father is famous round the parish for his jams."
"No . . ."
"Oh yes. Walking about as land agent, he's discovered all the best patches of wild strawberries, gooseberries, and blackberries. Plus, he's long had the run of the Pembrooke orchards. I hope you shan't tell the new tenant. . . ." He winked.
"His secret is quite safe with me. Especially since he shared his jam. But . . . why didn't your sister come herself? I would have liked to thank her in person."
He grimaced as he considered his reply. "Leah is a bit . . . not shy exactly, but cautious around strangers."
"Oh. I see. I did wonder, when I saw you escorting her away the day we arrived. Actually, when I saw you with her and a younger girl too, I thought they were your wife and daughter. . . ."
"Ah." He crossed his arms behind his back and rocked on his heels. "No, I am not married. I have not had that privilege. Though I was—" He broke off, and she thought she saw pain flash across his eyes before he blinked it away. "You saw my two sisters, and I have a brother as well. Kitty looks young for her age, but she is twelve."
"I see." Abigail stood there awkwardly for a moment, unsure whether she ought to ask him in. "I would invite you in to share this with me, but as I am alone in the house, I . . ."
He waved away the offer. "No, no. I have no intention of begging an invitation and wouldn't dream of depriving you of a single bite. Though if you share the jam with Mrs. Walsh, you shall have a friend for life."
She smiled up at him. "Then I shall indeed."
Duty discharged, William Chapman knew he should excuse himself, but felt oddly reluctant to part ways with the lovely newcomer. He forced himself to say, "Well, I can see you are dressed to go out, so I shan't keep you."
"I was only going for a walk," Miss Foster said. "I have been indoors all day and haven't had a chance to explore the grounds yet, so . . ." Her words trailed away.
Was she hoping he would join her? Unlikely, yet there was only one way to find out.
"A beautiful day for it," William agreed. "Would you mind some company?"
"Not at all."
He smiled. "A walk is exactly what I need after Mamma's roast dinner."
She returned his smile with apparent relief. "Just let me set this inside and put on my things."
A few moments later, she joined him in the courtyard wearing gloves and a straw hat.
"After you." He gestured her toward the side of the house, and they walked around it. "Other than the church, everything I love is back here."
Behind the house, lush green vines with white flowers climbed the manor walls. In the rear courtyard, a terrace overlooked a neglected rose garden, overgrown topiaries, and a lily pond.
He said, "It isn't as beautiful as it once was, of course."
"Perhaps when the house is ready, I might give the gardens some attention."
"Mamma would be happy to help. She loves a garden. And Papa would be eager to offer you many suggestions of how to go about it."
The two shared another grin.
They passed a walled garden, potting shed, and orchard. William pointed toward a large pond beyond. "That's the fishpond. Robert Pembrooke left Papa the use of it, along with ownership of our cottage, in his will."
"Robert Pembrooke . . ." Miss Foster echoed. "Is that who lived here before us?"
"Not immediately before. He died twenty years ago."
William did not expand on his reply. His father didn't want him inviting questions about the manor's former occupants.
As if sensing his reserve, she asked instead, "Where is your family's cottage?"
"Come. I'll show you."
"I don't want to intrude."
"Then I'll just point it out to you. You should know where it is, in case you ever need anything, or if there is ever any . . . trouble." Lord willing, there would not be, William thought, though his father was full of dire predictions and warnings.
He led her past the former gamekeeper's lodge, then along a well-worn path through a grove of trees, carpeted with green-and-white wood anemones. Nestled in a clearing sat his family's white cottage with a thatched roof.
She paused to look at it from a polite distance. "How charming," she murmured.
He regarded the place fondly. "Yes, I suppose it is."
After a moment, she asked abruptly, "Is your family as happy as they seem?"
He considered her unexpected question, pursing his lips in thought. "Yes, for the most part we are a happy lot. Or perhaps content is the better word. We have our squabbles like any family, but woe to anyone who tries to harm a Chapman." He tried to smile but felt it falter. "If only Leah . . ."
She regarded him in concern. "If only Leah, what?"
Why had he said anything? "I am not criticizing," he hurried to assure her. "But Leah has struggled with anxiety for as long as I can remember. I wish I could help her. Scripture says fear not. And perfect love casts out fear, but nothing I say—or pray—seems to make any difference."
"Love without fear . . ." Miss Foster murmured, considering the notion. "It doesn't sound very practical, I'm afraid. For the more one loves, the more one has to fear losing."
He looked at her, a grin tugging his mouth. "Impractical, maybe. Difficult, yes. But what a beautiful way to live."
He cocked his head to one side, allowing his gaze to roam her lovely face. "You value practicality, I take it, Miss Foster?"
"Yes, I do." She drew herself up. "Speaking of which, perhaps I ought to get back to the house and let you return to yours. I am certain you must be tired after services."
"A little weary, yes. But nothing a quick nap can't fix." He turned and gestured for her to lead the way back.
As they walked, she said tentatively, "Thank you for not pressing me about attending church."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He had been a bit disappointed when she hadn't come but had no intention of pressuring her. Instead, he sent her a sidelong glance and said wryly, "You'll come when you're ready. I hear the sermons are quite . . . interesting."
She shot him a puzzled look. Had he piqued her interest? He certainly hoped so.
# Chapter 5
That night, Abigail went up to bed early, weary from sleeping so poorly the night before and hoping she would sleep better her second night at Pembrooke Park.
Polly helped her undress, cheerfully chatting about church—"Mr. Chapman preaches the shortest sermons. Witty too. Some folks don't appreciate it, but I do . . ."—and about the afternoon she and Molly had spent with her parents and brothers out on their family farm. She also mentioned Duncan had just returned from visiting his mother in Ham Green, several miles away. As Abigail listened to the girl's happy account, she was glad she had heeded Mac's advice and given the servants the day off.
After Polly left, Abigail crawled into bed with a book she'd found in the library—a history of the Pembrooke family and manor. But she'd read only a few pages before her eyelids began drooping. She set aside the book and blew out her bedside candle. Lying there, Abigail thought back on the day's conversation with Mr. Chapman. They had touched on so many topics—family and fear and church . . .
Engulfed in darkness, her ears focused sharply, trying to catalogue every sound. For once identified, she would no longer need to fret about it. That howl? The wind through the fireplace flue. That rattle? A window shaken by the wind. Telling herself she would grow used to the sounds in time, she determinedly pulled the bedclothes to her chin, pressed her eyes closed, and willed sleep to come.
Then she heard something new. A creak, like a door opening nearby. Probably only Polly, she thought, checking to see if the windows in the master bedchamber had been shut after yesterday's airing.
Faint footsteps reached her ears. In the corridor outside her room? No—it sounded more muffled, like footsteps on carpet and not wood. Was it coming from the next room? The room on that side of the wall was to be Louisa's. Why would anyone be in there, when they hadn't even started cleaning it yet?
A scrape—like a chair leg across wood? She was probably imagining things. It was likely only a simple creak of the house, of damp, warped walls and floorboards. After all, it was well past working hours and a Sunday yet.
Sleep, she told herself, closing her eyes again. Fear not.
In the morning, Abigail was still sound asleep when Polly came in with hot water and a breakfast tray.
"Oh. Sorry, Polly. I intended to be up before you came." Abigail pushed back the bedclothes and hurried to the washstand. "I didn't sleep well last night. The house makes so many odd noises. Have you noticed?"
"What sort of noises?" Polly asked.
"Oh, you know. Creaks and groans. Though last night I heard footsteps, long after you had gone to bed."
"You likely imagined it." The girl's eyes twinkled. "Or perhaps the place is haunted, like the village children say it is."
"Haunted?" Abigail echoed, drying her face. "By whom? I suppose my father and I have angered some ghost of Pembrooke past by moving in here?"
"Well, someone did die here twenty years ago. Was killed some say. Probably his ghost what does the haunting."
"Who died here?" Abigail asked. "One of the Pembrooke family?" She recalled Mr. Chapman saying a Robert Pembrooke died twenty years ago.
Polly's mouth slackened, face growing pale. "No, miss. I never said a word about the Pembrookes, did I? Please don't tell anyone otherwise. I don't know anything about the family. How could I? I was talkin' about a servant—that's all."
Abigail regarded the young woman, surprised by her panic. Hoping to lighten the moment, she teased, "Which servant? A cheeky housemaid?"
But the girl did not smile. "No, miss. Robert Pembrooke's valet. Walter something, I heard his name was, but that's the last word I'll say on the subject. I've said too much already."
Abigail blinked. "Very well, Polly."
The housemaid stepped to the closet. "My mouth will be the death of me yet, and you don't want me hauntin' the place, flapping my ghostly lips all night. Now, let's get you dressed. . . ."
When Abigail left her bedchamber a short while later, she paused at the door of the room that would be Louisa's. The door was closed, as it had been the day before. She opened the latch and inched it open, the mounting creak familiar. Is that what she'd heard last night?
At first glance the room seemed undisturbed. But then, in the morning light slanting through the unshuttered windows, she saw something. She frowned and bent to look closer. Yes, unmistakable. Footprints in the dust, all the way to the wardrobe. She had not even bothered to look inside yet, but someone had. The footprints appeared notably larger than her small shoes. So probably not one of the housemaids checking the windows.
Might it have been their manservant, Duncan? She didn't like the idea of a man roaming about a lady's bedchamber at night. Though she supposed he might have checked the windows as a favor to Polly, whom he seemed eager to help. But what business had he opening a wardrobe in an unoccupied room at night?
Later that day, Polly surprised her by handing her a letter—the first to be delivered directly to the house. The letter was addressed to her, in care of Pembrooke Park. Abigail did not recognize the handwriting, nor the crest pressed into its wax seal. It bore a Bristol postmark, but she could not think of any acquaintance who lived there. She peeled away the seal and unfolded the outer page, revealing a second page within. Costly indeed.
The outer page bore only a single line: I think you are the very person to read this. . . .
The page within was of a smaller size. One edge was ragged, as though torn from a notebook.
When first I arrived at Pembrooke Park, I was chilled by the tomblike silence of the place, the unnatural stillness. I shall never forget the tea service, spread atop the cloth-covered table, as though the occupants had merely risen to look out the window at the arrival of an unexpected carriage but had been yanked from the house then and there, never to return. The tea was now a filmy residue at the bottom of bone china. The scones hard and dry. The milk soured. The kettle and cups abandoned in haste, like the house itself.
I asked the housekeeper why she had not cleaned the place, and she said she'd been told to leave everything as it was. I wondered if she meant, so the constable could search the house for evidence. After all, someone died there only a fortnight before—an accident, I'd been told. But it was clear she didn't believe that for a minute.
Abigail sucked in a breath—stunned by the words, the similarities to her own experience upon entering Pembrooke Park for the first time. No one had died there recently, as far as she knew. Though Polly had said a valet died there twenty years ago. She read it again. The timing seemed different—the writer describing entering the house abandoned for weeks, not years—yet eerily similar all the same.
Was it a page of an old journal, torn out and mailed to her? Or a recent work of fiction? Who had written it, and why?
The next day, Abigail saw Leah Chapman walking across the bridge and hurried to catch up with her.
"May I walk with you, Miss Chapman?"
The woman stiffened, then recovered, saying politely, "If you like."
"Where are you off to?"
"Taking a basket to Mrs. DeWitt, who is ailing again."
"Thank you for the basket you sent over for me," Abigail said. "I wish you had delivered it yourself. I would have asked you in for tea and shared those delicious muffins with you."
"My mother makes them. They are very good, yes," Miss Chapman replied, ignoring the implied invitation.
Abigail added, "I'm sure Mrs. DeWitt will enjoy them as well."
"Oh, for her there is broth and syllabub. Poor dear hasn't many teeth."
"I see. How thoughtful."
Leah shrugged. "It isn't much. William is the thoughtful one. He visits her every week."
"Has he lived in the parsonage long?"
She shook her head. "Only since he was ordained. Our rector, Mr. Morris has the living. But he resides in a much larger and newer house in Newbury."
"So far?"
She nodded. "One of the reasons he doesn't come here very often. William conducts most of the services, calls on the sick. When he returned after his ordination, Mr. Morris offered him the use of the parsonage. Likely eases the man's conscience for paying him so poorly. And he knows William will keep the place in better repair than if it remained empty."
"Yes. I can well imagine."
Leah slanted her an empathetic look. "Is the manor in very bad condition?"
"Come and see for yourself."
"No, thank you."
"I don't blame you."
"Oh?" The woman's caramel-colored eyes widened. "Why would you say that?"
"I've heard the rumors."
Leah stopped and looked at her askance. "What rumors?"
"Take your pick: that someone was killed there, that the house is haunted—not to mention the threat of treasure hunters and thieves . . ."
"Ah, those rumors." Leah nodded and walked on. "And do you believe them?"
"Not all of them. But the house does make strange sounds at night. Probably round the clock, but I only hear them at night." Abigail forced a little chuckle. "I don't suppose you would come and spend the nights with me until my father returns?"
"I'm afraid that would be quite impossible," Leah said, lips tight.
"I was only joking," Abigail defended. "Or mostly joking." Again she forced a little chuckle, taken aback by the woman's adamant refusal. It was on the tip of Abigail's tongue to tell Miss Chapman about the letter she'd received, apparently confirming at least one of the rumors—about someone dying there—but seeing the woman's wary expression, Abigail decided to keep it to herself.
Abigail bid Miss Chapman farewell at the door of Mrs. DeWitt's cottage, and returned to Pembrooke Park alone. As she approached, she was surprised to see a man disappear around the side of the house. Her heart gave a little lurch. Torn between locking herself inside the manor and seeing who it was, she crept to the corner of the house and peered around it. There, where a chimney stack jutted from the wall, a man stood, staring up at the windows, hands behind his back. Was this one of the treasure hunters?
She swallowed and cleared her throat. "May I help you?"
The man turned, and she was both relieved and disappointed to recognize William Chapman.
He glanced over at her sheepishly. "Ah . . . Miss Foster. Good day."
Was he embarrassed to have been caught snooping, or guilty of worse? Surely he was not one of the treasure hunters, looking for a way to sneak inside without being seen?
"Are you looking for something?" She glanced up in the direction he'd been staring.
He shrugged. "Just wondering which room they'd put you in."
She looked at him askance. "And why should you want to know that?"
Had he been hoping for a glimpse of her through her bedchamber window—and him a clergyman . . . ?
"Only curious."
She said, "Father insisted I choose whichever room I liked for myself."
"And which did you choose?"
"I hardly think it would mean anything to you even if I told you. Unless . . . are you more familiar with the house than you let on?"
"I haven't been inside since I was a boy."
She decided to come right out with her suspicion. "Coming upon you just now, I confess I thought you might be one of the treasure hunters your father warned me about, looking for a way to break in."
He looked at her in astonishment. "Are you serious?" He gave a little bark of laughter. "I assure you, Miss Foster. Had I wanted to get inside Pembrooke Park, I could have done so at any time."
"Because your father has the key, do you mean?"
"No, that is not what I mean."
She waited for him to explain, but instead he ran a hand over his jaw and said, "I promise you, Miss Foster, I shall not break in to Pembrooke Park. But . . . if you are willing to give me a tour sometime, I would like to see the old place again. See what all the fuss is about."
"Would your father approve?"
"Not likely. But I can't see any harm in it."
She hesitated. "Very well."
"Thank you. I can't now," he said. "I'm off to read the newspaper to Mr. Sinclair. But perhaps tomorrow?"
"If you like," Abigail agreed, wondering if she ought to have put him off until her father returned. And propriety was not what most worried her.
# Chapter 6
The next afternoon, Duncan found Abigail in the library and announced that she had callers. "Will Chapman and his sister," he said, a slight curl to his lip.
She rose. "Oh yes, he mentioned wanting to see the house. Though I am surprised Miss Chapman came along."
"It's not Miss Leah. It's the younger girl."
"I see." She supposed Mr. Chapman brought his sister along as a chaperone of sorts and wondered if he was concerned about propriety more for her sake or his. "Will you let them know I shall be there in just a few minutes? I need to get this letter in today's post."
He stiffened, then said, "Very well, miss."
"Where have you put them?" Abigail asked, dipping her quill.
"I left them in the hall. Only a curate, isn't he? Not so high and mighty, whatever he or his father might think."
Abigail was taken aback by the servant's bitter words, but he had already turned on his heel and left the room before she could fashion a suitable reply. She quickly finished her letter, put it with the rest of the day's outgoing post, and hurried into the hall.
Mr. Chapman and Duncan stood talking in terse tones, while Kitty sat on the sofa beside the door several feet away, idly flipping through a magazine. As Abigail neared, Duncan turned and stalked toward the back stairs, avoiding her gaze as he passed.
She looked at William Chapman, her brows raised in question. "Is . . . anything the matter?"
He pulled a regretful face and stepped nearer to speak to her out of earshot of his sister. "Not really. Duncan isn't fond of me and did not enjoy having to wait on me like a servant."
"But he is a servant."
"Yours, yes, but not mine. At any rate, it's nothing you need be concerned about, Miss Foster. It's all in the past."
He drew himself up. "Now, enough of that. Here I am, ready for our tour. I've brought Kitty along. I hope you don't mind. I knew she would enjoy seeing the place."
"Not at all. She is most welcome."
His sister looked up at her words, and Abigail greeted her. "Hello."
"Kitty, this is Miss Foster," William said. "Miss Foster, my younger sister, Katherine."
The adolescent wrinkled her nose. "But I am only called Katherine when Mamma's vexed, so Kitty will do nicely, thank you."
Abigail smiled. "Kitty it is. Now, what would you like to see first?"
The girl rose eagerly. "Everything! You can't imagine how I've wondered about every room, walking by this place my entire life and never seeing inside."
"Then every room you shall see." Abigail squeezed her hand. And for a moment it was as if she were looking into Louisa's face at Kitty's age. A Louisa who had often looked up at her with fond affection, trust, and even admiration. Abigail's heart ached a little. Sometimes she missed those days. Missed their formerly close relationship. Missed her.
Abigail gave the two Chapmans the grandest of grand tours. Using information gleaned from the book of Pembrooke's history she'd found in the library, she described the house, its style, and the approximate ages of various additions with enthusiasm, incorporating architectural details she'd learned from Gilbert.
In the salon, Abigail noticed Kitty's attention stray. She cut short her monologue and instead gestured toward the old pianoforte, inviting Kitty to play the neglected instrument. The girl sat down and plunked out a few tentative notes.
Abigail became aware of Mr. Chapman's curious look. "Sorry," she said. "I got a little carried away."
"Not at all. I am only surprised by how much you know about architecture. Most impressive."
She shrugged, self-conscious under his admiring gaze. "It's nothing, really. I have always been fascinated by the subject."
"May I ask why?"
"I had a neighbor growing up, a boy named Gilbert. His father made his fortune in the building trade, and Gilbert planned to follow in his footsteps by becoming an architect. His enthusiasm was contagious, I suppose. I found myself borrowing his books, going with him to observe construction sites and the like."
"I see . . ." He studied her with measuring interest. "And where, may I ask, is this Gilbert now?"
She darted a glance at him, feeling her neck heat. She hoped she hadn't revealed her feelings—embarrassing feelings better kept hidden.
"In Italy. Studying with a master architect."
"Ah. And do you wish you were with him?"
"Me? Studying in Italy? Women don't do that sort of thing, as you know."
"I didn't mean studying," he clarified. "Though it's a shame you could not. I meant, do you wish you were with him?"
The burning flush crept from her neck into her cheeks, and she could not meet the man's blue eyes.
"I . . ." She hesitated. "Actually, I think it may be my sister he admires now." Agitated, she rushed on, "I don't know why we are talking about this. We are to be talking about Pembrooke Park." Abigail redirected her attention toward Kitty, walking closer to the pianoforte while the girl played a simple piece by rote.
Moving to stand at her elbow, Mr. Chapman said quietly, "Forgive me, Miss Foster. I should not have asked so personal a question. A professional tendency, I'm afraid."
She formed a vague smile but avoided his eyes. "I understand. Now . . . shall we continue?"
Kitty rose and asked to see her bedchamber. "You were given the pick of all the rooms, William told me. I want to see the one you chose."
"Then you shall. But I hope you won't be disappointed. I did not pick the grandest room."
"No?"
Abigail looked at the adolescent's wide, shining eyes. It wouldn't be long until Kitty raced toward womanhood, but for now, she was still in large part a little girl. "No. But when you see what's inside, I think you will approve my choice."
Abigail led the way upstairs.
At her door, William hesitated. "You two go ahead. I shall . . . wait here."
Another nod toward propriety, Abigail guessed. But as soon as she gestured Kitty into the room, she wished he had been there to witness his sister's delight.
"Oh, my goodness!" Kitty enthused over the dolls' house. "Look at this! It's wonderful."
"Yes, someone worked very hard on it and collected a great many pieces."
Kitty knelt before the open rooms, then looked back at Abigail over her shoulder. "I suppose I shouldn't touch anything?"
"You may touch whatever you like, but I would ask that you return everything to where you found it."
"I shall. I promise."
"There are dolls in the drawer below," Abigail offered.
Kitty eagerly opened the drawer. Her smile changed to a questioning frown as she slowly drew forth the headless doll.
"I found him that way," Abigail explained. "I haven't had a chance to repair it yet."
Kitty set it aside and began experimentally opening doors and cupboards, admiring all the tiny utensils and bowls in the kitchen.
She held up a miniature woven basket. "I have one very like this. Leah made it for me for my birthday."
"Yes, I have seen the fruits of her labors," Abigail said. "I hear I have you to thank for the sweet-smelling soap in my welcome basket."
Kitty shrugged. "I helped—that's all." She opened the door of a small wardrobe and extracted something. "Look, here's another doll."
Ah. The "sister" doll Abigail had wondered about had been hidden inside a miniature wardrobe. Another boy's prank, she guessed.
For a few minutes more, Abigail watched Kitty with pleasure. But then she remembered her brother waiting alone in the corridor. "I'll be right back," she said, and the girl gave a distracted nod without looking up from the dolls' house.
Abigail stepped back into the corridor and walked into the central staircase gallery. But she did not see William Chapman. Where had he wandered off to?
Across the gallery, she noticed an open door to one of the two large bedrooms—the one she'd chosen for her mother—and walked over to it. Inside, she found Mr. Chapman staring up at a portrait over the mantel.
He glanced over and noticed her there in the doorway. "I hope you don't mind. The door was open, and you left me to my own devices for quite some time."
Abigail did not remember the door being open but didn't press him.
"Kitty is investigating an old dolls' house."
"Ah. That explains it." He folded his hands behind his back and looked around the room. "Was this Robert Pembrooke's room, do you think?"
"I don't know. Why do you ask?"
"My father is forever talking about Robert Pembrooke. Robert Pembrooke this. Robert Pembrooke that. He was master of the place when Pa first came to work here."
"It might be. It's one of two large bedchambers facing the front of the house. So yes, I imagine one of them was the master's bedchamber. I suppose your father could tell us for certain."
Glancing around, Abigail noticed a drawer of the dressing chest left ajar and felt suspicion nip at her.
"Here you two are," Kitty said, stepping into the room. She followed her brother's gaze toward the framed oil painting over the mantel—a portrait of a gentleman in formal attire. "Who is it?" she asked.
"Robert Pembrooke," Mr. Chapman replied. "There's another portrait of him in the church, hung there to honor him, since he and his family were its primary benefactors. Miss Foster and I were just theorizing that this might have been his bedchamber when he lived here."
Kitty shook her head, gesturing about her. "But look at this flowery upholstery and those rose-colored drapes and bed-curtains. And that dressing table is a woman's, to be sure. I think this must have been where the lady of the manor slept, for she would more likely keep a portrait of her husband than he—unless he was a very vain man."
"Good point, Kitty," William said. "This does appear a feminine chamber, now you mention it." He looked at Abigail. "Does her portrait hang in the other large room, then?"
Abigail frowned in thought. "I don't think so. At least, I don't recall seeing it."
"Let's go look," Kitty said, whirling toward the door and setting off down the corridor.
"Kitty!" William mildly chastised, following behind.
Abigail laughed. "It's all right. I don't mind."
Kitty slowed when she reached the room, pushing open the door with apparent reverence. Abigail and William quietly followed her inside.
Sunlight shone through the tall oriel window, dust motes whirling in its angled rays. The second large chamber mirrored the first, with the bed, fireplace, and window in the same positions. They all looked expectantly over the mantel. There was a painting of a lady there—not a young woman, as they'd expected, but rather a matronly looking woman with wispy white hair and deep grooves framing her mouth and crossing her brow. The painting was not as large as that of Robert Pembrooke either. Odd, when everything else about the two rooms seemed symmetrical.
"That can't be the man's wife," Kitty said, clearly disappointed.
"Not unless his portrait was painted in his prime and hers in later years," Abigail suggested.
"She didn't live that long," William said.
Abigail turned to him in surprise. "What?"
He shrugged. "It's all supposition at this point anyway. That woman could be anyone."
Abigail said, "Perhaps I shall ask your father."
William hesitated. "I . . . wouldn't advise asking him more than necessary, Miss Foster. He doesn't like talking about the old place or his days here."
"I thought you said he talks about the occupants a great deal."
"Robert Pembrooke, yes. But . . . no one else."
"Why not?"
"I . . . don't think I ought to conjecture. Papa wouldn't like to find he'd been the subject of idle talk."
Abigail let the matter drop. "Well then. Have you two seen enough?"
Mr. Chapman chewed his lip, then said, "I would like to see the servants' hall belowstairs, if I might, and the workrooms."
She tilted her head to regard him. "May I ask why?"
"It's the only area I was allowed in as a boy, and I wonder if it's changed."
Abigail shrugged. "Very well. This way."
She led them downstairs, through the dining room and servery, and then navigated the steep stairs, warning Kitty to be careful.
Belowstairs, they walked along the main passage, with doors opening from it to the servants' hall, larders, kitchen, and scullery.
In the kitchen, Mrs. Walsh glanced up from her worktable, frowning to discover unexpected visitors, but her frown melted away at the sight of Kitty.
"Kitty, my love, what a treat to see you. Speaking of treats, come be the first to try my new batch of ginger biscuits. I'm sure the mistress shan't mind." She gave Abigail a look sparkling with both humor and challenge.
"Indeed she won't mind," Abigail assured her with a grin.
"By the by, miss," Mrs. Walsh said. "Many thanks for sharing Mac's jam and Kate's muffins with us. We all enjoyed them a great deal. . . . Well, most of us."
"I am glad to hear it. I did as well."
"You're a lucky girl, my duckling," Mrs. Walsh tweaked Kitty's cheek. "Having two such fine cooks in your family."
"They've nothing on you, Mrs. Walsh," Kitty said around a bite of biscuit. "Mum's never tasted half so good."
Abigail glanced over her shoulder to share a smile with William Chapman, but the threshold where he'd stood was empty. She stepped to the door and peered around the doorjamb, surprised to see him lift a door latch at the end of the passage, only to find it locked.
"Looking for something?" she asked.
He glanced up, his fair complexion flushing. "Just wondered where this leads to. I used to play hide-and-seek here as a boy, but I can't remember . . ."
Abigail's stomach prickled with suspicion. First he'd disappeared while they were upstairs, opening doors and drawers and who knew what, and now poking about the cellar? She remembered again what Leah had said about William being paid very ill by the stingy rector. Was he tempted to supplement his meager income with treasure hunting?
Abigail hoped not. She had begun to think he might admire her. But perhaps he was only interested in the house and had feigned admiration to gain admittance. With a sinking feeling, Abigail considered the notion. It was far easier to believe an interest in treasure than an interest in her.
Certain she was right, Abigail said little as she walked them out. But then Mr. Chapman surprised her yet again.
He turned to her and said, "Miss Foster, will you dine with my family this evening, since you're on your own here?"
She hesitated, not sure how to refuse. "It isn't very much notice. Won't your family mind?"
"Not in the least. They shall be delighted, and heaven knows Mamma is used to me showing up with guests at mealtimes. I am no cook, and the parsonage kitchen is from the dark ages."
"Very true," Kitty said. "Yes, do come, Miss Foster."
William added, "Mother has been pestering Leah and me to bring you by. She wants to meet our new neighbor."
Seeing Kitty's hopeful smile, Abigail said, "In that case, I will happily accept. Thank you."
"Excellent. Will five o'clock be convenient? We eat unfashionably early here."
"I don't mind at all." She smiled and drew herself up. "Well, I had better go back down and let Mrs. Walsh know not to make up a tray for me."
They bid her farewell and turned to go. But then Kitty turned back once more. "Oh, I hear people in London dress up for dinner. But no need. We're informal at home."
Abigail looked to her brother for confirmation.
"Kitty is right. You are perfect as you are." He held her gaze as he said it.
Abigail felt her cheeks warm. Surely he was referring to what she was wearing—that's all.
Avoiding his eyes, Abigail addressed his sister. "Thank you, Kitty. That is good to know."
Kitty nodded and smiled. "We girls must stick together."
William walked his sister back home. He was glad he'd thought to invite Miss Foster to dinner. She had been alone too much of late. And he hoped it would make up for his less than polite behavior during the tour. His curiosity was natural enough, but he ought to have restrained himself.
Beside him, Kitty pulled something from her pelisse pocket.
"What is that?" he asked.
"It's a basket. From the Pembrooke dolls' house."
William stopped in his tracks, stunned. "You took it?"
She rolled her eyes and scoffed, "I am not stealing it. Only borrowing it. I want to show Leah."
"Why?"
"It looks very much like the baskets she makes, does it not?"
He squinted at it but failed to be impressed. "Looks like any old basket to me. Did you ask if you could borrow it?"
"I meant to when I came and found the two of you. But then we began talking about the portrait and I quite forgot."
"You must give it back to Miss Foster. And apologize for taking it." He gave her his most withering look of clerical exhortation.
She screwed up her face. "Of course I will."
When they entered the cottage, there sat his mother and sister in their customary chairs in the sitting room, knitting.
Kitty hurried over to her sister. "Look at this."
Leah took the little basket in her fingers. "Is this the one I made for you?"
"No. That's why I wanted to show you. I found it in the dolls' house at Pembrooke Park. Did you give one to the girl who used to live there?"
Leah's brow furrowed as she looked from her sister to the basket, but before she could reply, their father came in from the next room, frowning.
"What were you doing in Pembrooke Park?" he asked.
Kitty said, "Miss Foster gave William and me a tour. I'll give the basket back—I just wanted to show it to Leah."
Leah said, "I'm sure Kitty meant no harm, Papa. But of course she must return it when she next calls."
"I don't want her going back there."
"Please don't be angry, Papa. I wanted to see inside. William did too."
"I have told you all that I don't want you going over there. I—"
"I don't see why not," Kitty protested. "Miss Foster is living there now, and she is perfectly amiable. William must think so too. For he invited her to have dinner with us tonight."
William felt his ears redden at the insinuation.
"Tonight?" his mother echoed. She raised her eyebrows and pierced him with a startled look. "Did he indeed?"
The Chapman cottage sat nestled in a wood bordering the estate grounds—on the same side of the river—which allowed Mac to guard the place from outsiders who had to cross the bridge to reach the house, unless they knew the back way through the wood. Abigail had seen the Chapman home from a distance on her walk with William Chapman, but approaching it now, cast in the golden late-afternoon sunlight filtered through a canopy of lime trees, Abigail thought it looked more charming than ever—like a painting in soft hues of gold, green, and ivory. Dark green shutters framed its windows, and tulips and daffodils crowned window boxes beneath. A low stone wall surrounded the cottage, the enclosed space filled with cheerful kitchen and flower gardens boasting blooming herbs and spring flowers. The only object marring the idyllic picture was a high-fenced dog kennel on one side—the dog within barking furiously as Abigail opened the gate.
She heard Mac Chapman's voice before she saw him stalking out from a side door, sternly chastising his dog. "Brutus. Quiet. Down!"
Drawn by the hubbub, a woman in mob cap and apron hurried out the front door. "Sorry about that. Don't worry. His bark is worse than his bite." She winked. "The dog's too."
The wink, the grin, the bright blue eyes identified the woman as William Chapman's mother.
"You must be Miss Foster," she said. "I'm Kate Chapman. A pleasure to meet you. What a welcome! Your second inauspicious welcome at our hands! I am surprised you could be persuaded to join us. Come inside, my dear. The dog will calm down when he can't see you—the scary stranger."
Abigail returned the woman's smile, liking her immediately. Mrs. Chapman was a pretty woman in her early fifties with golden-brown hair and dancing blue eyes. Her teeth were a bit crooked but together formed a warm and welcoming smile. She showed none of her husband's suspicious nature nor her elder daughter's wary reserve.
"William would no doubt have escorted you over, but I've sent him to the Wilsons' for fresh cream. Should have done it earlier, I know, but I'm a bit scattered by the prospect of such august company!"
"Really—you oughtn't to have gone to any special trouble."
Mrs. Chapman opened the door for her. "Of course I must! And do be sure and notice Mac's collection of shooting trophies. Knowing you were joining us, he spent the last hour polishing them."
"Oh! I feel terrible. Your son assured me you would not mind—that you have guests all the time."
"He may have exaggerated just a bit, my dear. To put you at your ease, no doubt. And don't mistake me—I have been longing to meet you."
She took Abigail's arm and led her through the vestibule and down the passage. "Mary! Check the fish, if you please." She looked back at Abigail and explained, "We have a plain cook, and she is very plain indeed. We're attempting a fine dinner for you, my dear, but no guarantees."
"What may I do to help?" Abigail asked. "I'm afraid I haven't much experience, but I am happy to try."
"Oh, my dear—I like you already." She squeezed Abigail's arm. "Come back to the kitchen."
She followed the woman toward the back of the house and into a chaotic kitchen, with a worktable strewn with flour and mixing bowls and a stove covered with pots and stewing pans.
"Something smells good," Abigail said.
Leah looked up from where she sat, shelling peas. "Oh! Miss Foster. We are behind schedule, I'm afraid."
"I don't mind in the least. Give me something to do."
Mrs. Chapman snagged an apron from a peg on the wall, whisked it around Abigail, and tied the strings. "Look at that tiny waist! I had one of those once upon a time." She winked and plunked a bowl of glistening red strawberries on the table before her. "Stem these, if you wouldn't mind."
"I don't mind at all."
Mac Chapman came in, and drew up short at seeing her there at the worktable with his wife and daughter. "Miss Foster, you may wait in the sitting room, if you like, whilst we finish—"
"I am happy to help." She smiled at him.
He looked from her to his daughter, to his wife, and sadly shook his head. "It isn't right, my dear. Two such fine young women, working like kitchen maids, when they ought to be living like ladies."
"Mac . . ." Mrs. Chapman sent a meaningful glance toward Abigail.
"It's all right, Papa," Leah said. "Miss Foster has said she doesn't mind, and you know I don't. There is no place I'd rather be."
When Mac left the kitchen for more wood for the fire and Mrs. Chapman retreated into the scullery to consult with the cook about a sauce for the fish, Abigail leaned nearer to Miss Chapman and asked softly, "What did your father mean?"
Leah glanced toward the door, then whispered, "Oh, he thinks I should have married some wealthy gentleman by now." She ducked her head, self-consciously averting her gaze.
Why hadn't Leah Chapman married? Abigail wondered, looking at her lovely profile and thick golden-brown hair. She was certainly pretty enough. But she looked to be in her late twenties if not thirty. Was it too late for her? Was she destined to remain a spinster? Perhaps Leah and Abigail had that in common.
Kitty bounded into the kitchen, welcomed Abigail enthusiastically, and joined them at the table. She dug out a fistful of pea pods to help her sister, chatting happily all the while. Abigail decided to keep the rest of her questions to herself.
William hurried through the kitchen door, regretting how long he'd been away on what should have been a quick errand. But Mr. Wilson had talked on and on. . . .
He stilled right there in the threshold. Stopped so abruptly the cream sloshed over the edge of the pail. The scene that greeted him was as unexpected as it was delightful: Leah laughing at something their father said. Miss Foster—Miss Foster—sitting at their kitchen table as though one of the family, laughing right along with her.
Mac said, "No, now, you two will be thick as thieves in no time, I see, and I shall be in trouble."
How wonderful to see Leah smile—really smile, eyes and all. To laugh with ease in the presence of someone not of their immediate family. When had he last seen it?
His father glanced up. "There you are, Will. Milk the cow yourself and separate the cream?"
Kitty added, "You have been gone an age."
His mother ran her gaze over him. "You were supposed to fetch cream, my dear, not wear it. Good gracious, your shoes. Kitty, get a cloth, will you? And, Jacob, take that pail from your brother before he drops it. He seems dumbstruck."
William hadn't noticed Jacob at his elbow, waiting for him to move past the threshold so he might enter the kitchen as well. William surrendered the pail to his gangly brother and smiled sheepishly at his guest. "What a poor host I am, Miss Foster. To invite you and then be so tardy in joining you. I see you have already been initiated into the pack in my absence?"
"Yes. And happily."
"I am glad to hear it."
"Wash your hands, Jacob." His mother snatched the pail from him. "And then I need you to whip the cream with a little sugar."
"Let Will do it," the fifteen-year-old said sullenly. With his red hair, green eyes, and frown, he looked very like their father.
"Lazy bones," William gently chided him. "Tell you what. Half in two bowls and a race to see who can thicken his faster."
Jacob met his gaze with a gleam in his eye. "You're on." He turned to their father. "Care to place a wager, Pa? Me against William?"
"No, you know we Chapmans don't gamble," Mac said sternly. Then he winked at Kitty and whispered, "Sixpence on William."
She giggled and shook his hand.
"Oh, you two . . ." Mrs. Chapman sighed, but obliged with two mixing bowls and whisks. She poured even amounts of cream in each bowl and eyeballed a palmful of ground sugar. "Dinner will be at midnight at this rate."
William took up his whisk and readied for the challenge. "Ready. Steady. Go!"
"Back up, Miss Foster," his mother warned, "or you'll end up wearing your pudding."
He and his brother began whisking, now and again each looking at his rival to check his progress, only to grimace in effort once again.
"I don't want butter, mind," his mother said. "There, that's enough."
"Who won?"
His mother declared it a tie.
"May I taste?" Kitty blinked up at him.
"You may." William extended the whisk toward her, and she stuck out her tongue, but at the last moment, he tapped it to her nose instead, leaving a dollop of whipped cream on her small pert nose.
Taking the teasing in stride, Kitty fingered the cream from the tip of her nose to the tip of her tongue and pronounced it delicious.
After the filling meal, flavored with plenty of conversation around the table, William suggested a walk to stretch their legs. Miss Foster offered to help with the dishes but his mother refused, insisting both Leah and Abigail accompany him for a walk and leave the dishes to the rest of them, to the groans of Jacob and cheerful compliance of Kitty.
While the women collected their bonnets and wraps, William stepped outside to wait for them, drawing in a breath of cool evening air, refreshing after the warmth of the small house.
A man on horseback approached, causing Brutus to launch into ferocious barking.
"Brutus!" William hollered, but the dog paid little heed.
As the rider neared, William recognized Andrew Morgan. Seeing his old friend gladdened his heart. Andrew's father had recently inherited nearby Hunts Hall from a cousin, after the man's death. Before that, the two young men had become acquainted when Andrew's family visited Hunts Hall over the years. Later, they were at school together.
Andrew dismounted and tied the rein to the gate, the horse jigging a bit, clearly unsettled by the barking dog. His father came out and, to the horse's relief, quieted Brutus far more successfully than William had done.
Andrew came up the path, hand outstretched. "William, you old devil. Though I suppose I ought not call you a devil, your being a clergyman now. Good to see you, old man."
"You as well, Andrew. How are you?"
"Excellent. Enjoyed traveling about, but I'm glad to be back."
"I'm sure your parents are glad as well."
"Yes, Mother wants more grandchildren. Talks of little else."
"And do you mean to oblige her?"
Andrew cocked his head to one side. "Oh, I see how it is. Hoping for rich fees for performing the marriage and all those christenings, ey?" Andrew grinned. "What about you? Any progress in that area?"
William felt his smile falter. "No. I'm . . . afraid not."
Andrew sobered. "Sorry, Will. Have I brought up a sore subject? If it helps, last I saw Rebekah she was as big as a mother bear and half as cheerful. Though she has since been delivered of a strapping son."
"Yes, I heard." William shifted, and said awkwardly, "And I am not suffering in that regard, Andrew, I assure you. Though I was sorry to hear about her husband."
"Were you?"
"Of course."
The door opened behind him, and Leah and Miss Foster stepped out, wearing bonnets and pelisses and pulling on gloves as they came. William was struck again at Miss Foster's beauty. The bonnet framed her face and softened her angular features. Her dark eyes contrasted strikingly with her creamy skin. Beside him, Andrew Morgan stared as well. Had he imagined his friend's sharp intake of breath? He glanced over and found the man's gaze riveted on the ladies—or had one lady in particular caught his eye?
His sister stilled upon seeing his companion, her smile falling away, her features stiffening to the wary lines she always wore when confronted by a person not of close acquaintance.
"Leah, you remember Andrew Morgan, I trust?" William hastened to reassure her. She had met Andrew a few times in the past when he'd visited his father's cousin, though it had been more than a year since the two had seen one another.
Leah curtsied. "Yes. How do you do, Mr. Morgan."
Andrew bowed. "I am well, thank you, Miss Chapman. And you . . . you are in good health, I trust?"
"I am. Thank you."
William was surprised by the stilted greeting, especially on his gregarious friend's part.
Recalling his manners, William turned to Abigail. "Miss Foster, may I present my friend Andrew Morgan. Mr. Morgan, our new neighbor, Miss Foster."
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Foster. It is a rare thing to have a new neighbor in this sleepy parish."
William explained, "Miss Foster and her family have let Pembrooke Park."
Andrew's eyebrows rose. "I had heard the old place was occupied at last, but I must admit I assumed by some undertaker or ghoul—not a lovely young lady like yourself. You are quite alive, I take it?"
Miss Foster shot him a bemused grin. "Quite alive, I assure you."
"Excellent. Well, welcome to the neighborhood."
William explained to her, "Andrew's parents live in Hunts Hall, on the other side of Easton. Papa is their agent. But Andrew here has been traveling abroad most of the twelvemonth since they moved in."
Abigail nodded her understanding. "Then you are a newcomer as well, Mr. Morgan."
"I suppose I am." Andrew smiled. "I say, what propitious timing. Mother is having a little dinner party in a fortnight to welcome me to Hunts Hall. She's inviting several relatives and friends of hers, and gave me leave to invite a few friends of my own. Why don't the three of you join us? Say you will, or I shall be bored to tears."
William hesitated, glancing at Leah to see how she would react.
She looked away from Andrew's eager face, clearly disconcerted, and demurred, "Surely your mother did not mean for you to invite just anyone you happened to meet."
"You are hardly just anyone. William and I were at Oxford together. And you are his sister. And—"
Miss Foster interjected, "Thank you, Mr. Morgan, but you needn't feel obligated to include me just because I happened to be here. But include Miss Chapman, by all means."
"Now, no more refusals or polite demurs, I beg of you. I shall have Mamma dash off official invitations as soon as I return home. No filling your social diaries with anything else in the meanwhile, hear?" He wagged a teasing finger.
"Oh yes, a busy social diary indeed," William agreed wryly. "We shall do our best to squeeze you in."
Later, after Mr. Morgan had taken his leave, William led the ladies around the gardens. When he suggested it was time to walk Miss Foster home, Leah begged off, leaving William the honor of walking Miss Foster home alone. He did not mind in the least.
As they strolled across the manor grounds, Miss Foster commented, "Your friend seems an amiable fellow."
"Indeed he is. And he seemed impressed with you, I noticed."
"Me? Hardly. He only had eyes for Leah."
William looked at her in surprise. "Did he?"
"Yes. I don't know how you failed to notice."
"Hm . . ." William considered her observation. On one hand, he was relieved to know that his handsome and wealthy friend had not already set his sights on Miss Foster, but he was disquieted by the thought of his being smitten with his sister. It would be interesting to see what happened now that Andrew had returned—apparently for good—with the intention of settling down and giving his mother grandchildren. He supposed everyone in Easton considered Leah Chapman, at eight and twenty, on the shelf and there to stay. Would Leah be able to overcome her reluctance and allow herself to be courted?
Whatever happened, William hoped Leah wouldn't be hurt. He himself knew what it felt like to be disappointed in romance. He had been rejected and lived to tell the tale, but his sister was so much more sensitive and isolated than he was. Nor was her faith the solid rock his had become, a faith that sustained him when disappointments came. He would pray for her. He would pray for them both.
Miss Foster began, "May I ask, Mr. Chapman, about Oxford. How did you . . . ?"
"Afford it?" he glibly supplied. "You may well wonder, considering my father's background. Even my mother's."
"I'm sorry. I meant no offense. I am only curious."
"You are a very curious creature—asking questions about many things, I have noticed."
"Forgive me, I—"
"In this instance, I don't mind in the least. As you know, my father was Robert Pembrooke's steward, and Mr. Pembrooke relied on him a great deal. It is a great matter of pride—of honor—to my father. A steward or servant who takes pride, reflected though it may be, from the honor or rank of the family he serves is nothing new. But Robert Pembrooke rewarded my father's faithful service with more than just words. Though not an old man when he died, Robert Pembrooke had already written his will.
"I previously mentioned he left my father the cottage and land it sits on, as well as use of the estate fishpond, but he also left him a tidy sum. Father might have invested that sum and lived off the interest fairly comfortably. Instead he invested that money in my education. I hope he doesn't regret the investment."
"Of course he doesn't," Miss Foster said. "His pride in you is perfectly obvious."
William shrugged. "Pride makes me uncomfortable, Miss Foster."
"I only wish my own father . . ." She stopped, allowing her sentence to trail away unfinished.
He glanced at her troubled profile. "Wish what?"
"Never mind," she said, avoiding his gaze.
They reached the front of the house and stood awkwardly at the door.
She glanced away across the courtyard, toward the gate and river beyond, and frowned. "Who's that?"
He turned to follow her gaze and saw a figure in a green cloak cross the bridge and disappear from view.
His stomach tightened. "I don't know. I only caught a glimpse."
But that one glimpse was enough to make him uneasy. It brought back a boyhood memory—lads telling ghost stories about a faceless man in a hooded cloak, coming to kill anyone who got in his way.
# Chapter 7
That night, as Abigail went about her usual bedtime routine, she thought back to dinner with the Chapmans. She realized that at some point during the cream whipping and teasing and conversation between William Chapman and his family, she had come to dismiss the fleeting suspicions she'd had about the man. She liked him, and liked his family. And she missed her own.
She settled into bed with her sketch pad, attempting to draw William Chapman's face. But it proved too difficult for her. She idly sketched the Chapman cottage instead, the neat lines, shutters, and charming thatched roof.
She wondered again what Mr. Chapman had meant when he said, "Had I wanted to get inside Pembrooke Park, I could have done so at any time." She still didn't know.
Abigail stopped, her drawing pencil pausing midstroke. What had she just heard? Footsteps outside her bedchamber? She should be used to servants going about their duties, she told herself. They'd had even more servants in London, setting fires and answering bells at all hours.
She set aside her drawing things and picked up an old novel she'd found in the library. She read for several minutes, but the account of an evil monk pursuing an innocent young lady chilled her. Shutting the cover decisively, she laid the book on her bedside table and leaned over to blow out her candle. But at the last second she stopped and let it burn. Abigail settled under the bedclothes, the flickering light casting shadows on the papered walls. How she longed for her father's return. The dark house would seem less frightening once he was there.
She closed her eyes but, hearing a door whine open somewhere, abruptly opened them. Polly, she told herself and turned over.
Then she heard a muffled tapping sound. Tapping—at this hour? It was only a branch tapping against a window, she speculated. Or perhaps a woodpecker in a tree nearby, looking for insects. Did birds do so after dark? She had no idea. They must, she decided, and turned over yet again.
In the distance, something clanged like a tiny cymbal, brass upon brass. Abigail lurched upright, her heart in her throat. A water can—someone dropped a water can. Or kicked one, accidentally in the dark.
But it was no good. She knew she'd never sleep until she checked. She turned back the bedclothes and climbed from bed, wrapping a shawl around herself and wiggling her feet into slippers. Picking up her candle, she opened the door and listened. Silence. She tiptoed into the gallery, avoiding the many pairs of eyes glaring down at her from portraits of Pembrookes long dead.
She heard the faint sound of retreating footsteps padding down the stairs.
Heart pounding, she gingerly leaned forward and peered over the stair rail, her candle's light barely penetrating the darkness below. A hooded figure floated down the last few stairs. Stunned, she blinked. But when she looked again, the stairs were empty. She had probably only imagined the dark apparition.
With a shiver, she decided that was the last time she would read gothic fiction. It was back to architecture books for her.
She turned toward her room, but then changed course and crossed the gallery, lifting her candle to survey the closed doors until she spied one left ajar. There—the room that would be her mother's. The same room in which she had seen an open drawer when William Chapman toured the house.
She inched the door farther open and lifted her candle. The drawers were closed this time. But . . . there on the dressing table a hinged jewelry box stood open, and beside it lay a brass candle lamp, on its side. Heart pounding, she walked forward and felt the wick. Still warm.
Trembling, Abigail padded down the back stairs. She could have pulled her cord, but the bells rang in the servants' hall, and she preferred not to wake Mrs. Walsh. Nor was she eager to wait in the dark alone.
Reaching the former butler's room belowstairs, which Duncan had claimed for himself, Abigail knocked.
She heard a groan from within, followed by the creak of bed ropes, and then the door opened a few inches. There stood Duncan, hair tousled and chest bare. She hoped he wore something below but did not dare look down.
"What is it?" he grumbled.
"Sorry to disturb you. But I'd like you to check the house and make sure all the doors are locked."
"Already did. As I do every night."
"It's just . . . Mac warned me about intruders, and I thought I heard someone. Saw someone actually, and—"
"Saw what?"
"I . . . am not sure. But please check."
He smirked. "Had a nightmare, did ya? Shall I bring you some hot milk?"
Irritation flashed. "Will you check the doors or must I wake someone else to do your job for you?"
He frowned. "No need to wake the whole house. Not when you've already woken me."
She became aware then of the defensive way he held his door, only slightly ajar. She had at first thought he did so to shield his nakedness, but the longer he stood there without shirt or apparent modesty the more she doubted that was the real reason.
Good heavens! Had he brought some light-skirt into the house?
She narrowed her eyes. "Do you have someone in there with you?"
His head reared back in surprise. He looked over his shoulder into the room as if to ascertain the answer for himself, then opened the door wider. She saw clutter and mussed bedclothes, but no one else in the dim room.
He raised an arm over his head, leaning his elbow against the doorjamb, causing his bulky muscles to flex. He smiled down at her. "I'm flattered, miss. But no, I'm on my own. This time."
Anger now chased away her last remnants of fear. Better an apparition than a cheeky manservant who thought himself irresistible.
She drew back her shoulders. "Never mind. I shall check the house myself."
His smirk faded and he lowered his arm. "No, now, miss. Sorry." His demeanor softened. "Not used to young ladies coming to my room at night—that's all. Just give me one minute to put on a shirt. . . ."
Together, they checked the house and doors and found them all locked, just as Duncan had said. Upstairs, she showed him the candle lamp on its side.
"So that's where that lamp ended up," he said, righting it. "I wondered. Polly borrowed it from the lamp room the other day. She must have left it up here."
"But . . . what would she be doing in here?"
He shrugged. "Some errand or other." He pointed at the white covering on the dressing table. "Didn't you send her up with that cover when it came back from the lace repair woman?"
That's right, she had. She'd forgotten that. How foolish.
Had the wick been warm at all, or had it been a trick of her fevered imagination? She reached out a hand, now perfectly steady, and touched the wick again. Stone cold.
Definitely no more gothic novels for her.
The next day, when Molly brought her the day's post, Abigail took it eagerly, hoping for something from her family. Instead, she received a second letter with a Bristol postal mark in that unfamiliar hand. Enclosed was another journal page.
I heard footsteps outside my bedchamber last night. And then I heard the door to the linen cupboard open and someone sifting through its contents. A housemaid, I told myself.
Then I heard the door across the gallery whine open. The guest room perhaps. But we have no houseguest at present. In fact, we never have guests here at sprawling Pembrooke Park, though we'd had them often enough when we lived in our few rooms in Portsmouth. Why would a servant be entering an unoccupied guest room at this hour? Especially when the housekeeper makes them rise and shine while it's still dark, to hear the maids tell it. Unless it wasn't a servant at all. . . .
Was one of my siblings trying to make me believe the house is haunted? I doubt either of them would dare risk Father's wrath by getting out of bed at such an hour.
Or was it Father himself? I felt a shiver pass over me at the thought of him prowling around in the dark, entering rooms unexpectedly. Was it not enough that he roamed about all day, opening cupboards and tapping walls, like some deranged woodpecker?
At that moment, my own door creaked open and I froze, my heart in my throat. But it was only the cat. Apparently, I'd failed to latch the door properly. The cat jumped up in bed with me. But for once the soft orange tabby proved little comfort.
Tonight I think I will lock my door.
With a little shiver, Abigail set the letter in her bedside table drawer with the first, then pulled on a pelisse to ward off the chill. At least the writer had found a cat to explain away the noises and doors opening, before she'd gone and made a fool of herself to a smug manservant. Abigail wished she had been as fortunate.
She left her room, crossed the gallery, and walked into her mother's room once more—this time in the light of day. Though Duncan had removed the brass candle lamp, the hinged jewelry box on the dressing table stood open as before.
Curious, Abigail leaned closer to inspect the box, and fingered through its contents. Brooches, a few strings of beads and another of coral. Her fingers hesitated on a pin, and she lifted it from a tangle of beads and chains. The brooch was made of gold in the shape of . . . an M, perhaps? She turned it over. Or a W? She replaced it, and inspected more colorful baubles and a few nicer pieces, but she found nothing of significant value. No "treasure." Though she supposed someone might have helped himself to anything valuable already, leaving her none the wiser. Perhaps she ought to have taken an inventory on their first day. But it was too late now.
On Sunday, Abigail looked through the gowns in her wardrobe, wondering what to wear to church, which she planned to attend for the first time that morning. In London, the soaring church they'd sporadically attended was immense and crowded, so few knew whether they attended or not, especially as Louisa was always slow getting ready and they often arrived so late that they'd had to sit in the back or, heaven forbid, in the gallery.
But here in rural Berkshire, with the small church located on her very doorstep, she felt she ought to attend. Her presence or absence would surely be noted by the small congregation. And by the Chapmans. She guessed Leah Chapman would be glad to see her there, and her neighbor's esteem seemed an elusive yet worthwhile goal. And yes, she admitted to herself, she was curious to see the Reverend Mr. Chapman in his clerical role.
At the bottom of the wardrobe, something caught Abigail's eye. She bent to look closer and was surprised to find a small doll pressed into the corner. Polly must not have noticed it when she'd put away her things. With a shrug, Abigail placed it in the dolls' house drawer with the others.
Polly entered, and with her help Abigail dressed in a printed muslin gown with modest fichu tucked into its neckline and a warm blue spencer. Then she tied a demure bonnet under her chin, tucked a prayer book under her arm, and set off across the drive. She had fussed too long with her appearance, and by the time she walked through the gate into the churchyard, the bell began to ring, signaling the beginning of the service.
Her heart beat a little harder than it should have for such a mundane excursion. Her palms within her gloves felt damp. Where was she to sit? Would it be presumptuous to sit in the Pembrooke box? What if she inadvertently took someone's regular seat? She dreaded the thought of all those eyes on her, judging her every move.
When she opened the door, she saw the congregants already seated and scanned the pews for an inconspicuous place to sit.
Mac appeared, his beard neatly trimmed, and dressed as dapper as any London gentleman in black coat, waistcoat, and trousers. "Miss Foster, good to see you. Allow me to show you to your seat."
Ah, that's right, Abigail thought. Mr. Chapman had mentioned his father served as parish clerk. He led her up the aisle, all the way to the front row. As Abigail feared, she felt many pairs of eyes upon her. Reaching the box on the right, Mac opened the low door for her.
"Are you sure I should sit here?" she whispered.
An odd wistfulness clouded his green eyes. "The residents of the manor have always sat here, lass. It's good to have someone sitting here again, even if it's not who it should be. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."
With that dour benediction, Abigail took her seat. She noticed Andrew Morgan and an older couple seated across the aisle from her in the other place of honor.
A whisper hissed from a few rows back. "Miss Foster!"
Abigail looked over and saw Kitty Chapman, pretty in ivory frock and straw bonnet. The girl beamed and waved enthusiastically until her mother laid a gentle hand on hers and admonished her to sit quietly. Kate Chapman sent an apologetic smile Abigail's way, and Abigail smiled in return. Leah, beside her mother, nodded politely in her direction.
Abigail glanced up and saw the candles in the chandelier above her had been lit for the service. She wondered if William Chapman was even now in the vestry wiping the soot from his hands before donning his white surplice. She felt a grin quiver on her lips at the thought.
A moment later a side door opened and that very man entered. She blinked at the sight of ironic and playful William Chapman in white cleric's robe. Hands clasped, he beheld his congregation with a benign closed-lip smile before making his way to the altar. For a moment his gaze landed on her. Did a flicker of doubt cross his fair eyes? She hoped he was not sorry to see her, nor that he had guessed her secret motive for attending.
Mac, in his role as clerk, pronounced in a loud voice, "Let us sing to the praise and glory of God the forty-seventh psalm."
Abigail found it strangely affecting and edifying to hear the small clutch of congregants in this humble parish church raising their voices together in the praise of their Maker. In the soaring London church, there had been instruments and professional singers, but somehow the music here was all the sweeter for being performed by the peaceful and pious inhabitants of this rural village. The congregation sang and prayed alternately several times. The tunes of the psalms were lively and cheerful, though at the same time sufficiently reverent. William Chapman read the liturgy. The responses were all regularly led by his father, the clerk, the whole congregation joining in one voice.
Mr. Chapman looked at his father meaningfully, and Mac took his cue, rising to stand at the reading desk and positioning spectacles on his long, narrow nose. He traced his finger along the page of the book, already open on the stand, and read in a deep voice. "A reading from the first chapter of James, the last two verses. 'If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.'"
William Chapman nodded his thanks to his father and then climbed the stairs into the pulpit. "Good morning, everyone," he began informally, smiling at the congregation, looking from face to face. He turned his smile on Abigail. "And welcome, Miss Foster. We are pleased to have you among us. Those of you who have not yet met our new neighbor will wish to do so after the service."
He glanced down at his notes, cleared this throat, then began his sermon.
"A man I recently met told me that he was not interested in religion because religious people were a bore, not to mention hypocritical, pretending to be righteous while inwardly being as selfish and sinful as the next man. And during my years at St. John's College in Oxford, I heard many fellows and professors espousing that very view. Bemoaning the fact that Sunday services are often attended only for appearance sake, while our churches echo empty during the week on high days and holy days.
"Jesus himself clashed with the religious leaders of his day, namely the Pharisees, who were guided by their own tradition and man-made rules and less by love for God or their fellowman. Jesus wanted fellowship with them, but they were not willing to come to Him, nor to receive Him. Relying instead on their outward adherence to the law.
"Are you religious? Am I? If being 'religious' means following a set of rules so we can impress others, so that we can appear righteous—instead of cultivating a deep relationship with the Savior himself—then I agree with the detractors. I am not interested in that sort of religion. And, I suggest, neither is the Lord. Jesus offers forgiveness and love to all who truly seek Him, believe in Him, and worship Him. Regardless of which pew we sit in on a Sunday morning. Or our annual income. Or our family connections."
Abigail slid lower in her seat. Was that comment directed at her?
"He is waiting for you to come to Him," he continued. "To rely on His guidance and goodness. To listen and obey and serve. Are you listening—spending time reading His Word and seeking His guidance in prayer? Are you serving Him and your fellowman—the widows and orphans among you? I hope you will this week."
Did she spend time listening, obeying, and serving? Abigail asked herself. Not really. Not enough, at any rate.
"Let us pray . . ."
Abigail blinked as around her heads bowed and eyes closed and Mr. Chapman led them in prayer in preparation for the offering and Communion. She didn't recall ever hearing a sermon so brief and to the point. If she had, she might have attended more often. Around her the whole congregation joined in solemn prayer, and the sound of it touched Abigail's heart.
William had meant to go on to expound on several verses in Matthew 23 and John 5, but having Miss Foster there in the front box, staring at him with those keen dark eyes, had unsettled him, and he'd quite forgotten. His parishioners, especially the older ones, already gave him grief about his short sermons. And he would hear about this one, no doubt.
After the service concluded, he proceeded down the aisle to bid farewell to his parishioners at the door and to receive their comments. Although the title officially belonged to the rector, most called William Parson as a term of fond respect. But there was one exception.
"I must say, Mr. Chapman, that was an exceedingly short sermon today," Mrs. Peterman began. "Could you not be bothered to compose a longer one? I do wonder what we are paying you for."
"You pay him nothing, Mrs. Peterman," Leah tartly retorted, coming to stand near his elbow. "And the rector pays him a very small sum indeed."
Mrs. Peterman humphed. "Apparently you get what you pay for."
"You are correct, Mrs. Peterman," William admitted. "The sermon I delivered today was shorter than I intended, and I apologize. Did you have any concerns about the content itself, or only its brevity?"
"I didn't much care for the content either. I have half a mind to write to Mr. Morris and tell him his curate spends insufficient time in his duty. Perhaps you ought to spend less time fawning over pretty girls from the pulpit, and more time making sermons!"
"He only welcomed Miss Foster," Leah objected. "He certainly did not fawn over her."
William's mother joined the trio and, with a keen look at William, took the older woman's arm. "I would be happy to introduce you to Miss Foster, if you'd like, Mrs. Peterman," she offered. "A charming young woman."
Mrs. Peterman sniffed. "I think she's received more than enough attention for one day."
The woman's husband spoke up at last. "Now, my dear," Mr. Peterman soothed, "you overstate your case. Our good parson did nothing improper." He gave William an apologetic look. "And I for one appreciate short sermons." He winked.
William nodded. "I shall keep that in mind, sir."
"Don't listen to him," Mrs. Peterman protested. "The only saving grace of your short sermons is that my husband hasn't sufficient time to fall asleep and embarrass me."
The old man clucked and gently led his wife into the churchyard.
William glanced at his sister, eyebrows raised. He had never heard her speak so sharply to anyone.
"I am sorry, William. But she vexes me no end."
"I understand. And I appreciate your loyalty. But remember that she is one of my flock, and I am supposed to love and serve her."
"I know. But I cannot stand to hear her criticize you. I don't think she has any idea how hard you work and how much you do for your flock, as you call them."
"At least she has the courage to tell me what she thinks to my face."
"Unlike most of the sour tabbies who merely grumble and gossip behind your back?"
"Precisely." He grinned. "Though I wouldn't say it quite so . . . colorfully."
"I hate to see you ill used," Leah said. "You're easily twice the clergyman Mr. Morris is. Were it in my power, I would see you had the living in this place."
"Shh . . ." Mrs. Chapman said, eyes round in concern and laying a hand on her daughter's sleeve. "That's enough, my dear."
Leah glanced around at her mother's gentle warning, as if suddenly aware of the listening ears around her. "You're right. Forgive me. Like the Pharisees, I apparently need to learn to bridle my own tongue."
After the service, Andrew Morgan led his parents across the aisle toward Abigail and introduced them. Mr. Morgan senior was a rotund, handsome man with a smile as broad as his son's. Mrs. Morgan, a thin, sharp-featured woman, had shrewd eyes that instantly put Abigail on her guard.
"Ah yes. Miss Foster. I have heard of you."
Abigail smiled uncertainly. "Have you?"
"Yes. Well. A pleasure to meet you. Andrew tells us he has invited you to our little dinner party."
"Your son is exceedingly polite, Mrs. Morgan. But do not feel obligated—"
"I don't feel obligated—in this case. It is a pleasure to extend an invitation to you. Your father is in London, I understand?"
"Yes, but he should return soon."
"And your mother?"
"She remains in Town with my younger sister, guiding her through the season. They are staying with my great aunt in Mayfair but will be joining us at season's end."
"Mayfair, ey? Well. I shall include your father in the invitation as well. Tell him he is most welcome."
"Thank you, Mrs. Morgan. You are very kind."
The woman was impressed, Abigail saw. She was familiar with prestigious Mayfair but not, apparently, with her father's financial ruin. Her good opinion—and her invitation—would likely evaporate if she learned the truth.
After bidding the Morgans farewell, Abigail walked out of the church alone.
"Miss Foster!" Kate Chapman called a cheerful greeting and, leading William by the arm, walked over to join her. "I'm so glad you came today. Doesn't our William make excellent sermons?"
"Indeed he does," Abigail agreed sincerely, though she had not heard all that many.
"Short sermons, I think you mean, Mamma," William said good-naturedly.
"Brevity is a virtue in my view, yes," Abigail said. "But I also found the words convicting and to the point. Virtues as well."
"Not all would agree with you."
"Well, Miss Foster," Mrs. Chapman said, "you must join us for dinner later this afternoon. Cook has left us a roast of beef and several salads. I shall not even have to put you to work this time."
Abigail hesitated. "I would love to, truly. But Mrs. Walsh has left me a tray, and I don't think . . ."
Leah said, "You can save it for supper. Mrs. Walsh can't mind that."
"Actually, she could," Kate Chapman said with a little frown. "Tell you what. Join us next Sunday instead. That will give you plenty of time to give Mrs. Walsh notice—all right?"
"You do plan to attend church again next Sunday?" Leah asked.
Abigail hadn't meant to commit to every Sunday by attending once, but she found she didn't mind. She had enjoyed it, actually. "Yes, I do."
Leah smiled. "I am glad to hear it."
How pretty and young Leah Chapman looked when she smiled. Abigail thought attending church and gazing at Leah Chapman's brother every week would be a pleasant price to pay for the woman's approval. And hopefully her friendship.
# Chapter 8
On Tuesday, the post brought the promised invitation from Mrs. Morgan, and a third letter from Bristol in that ornate feminine hand. Pulse accelerating, Abigail took the journal page into the library to read in private.
Her portrait is missing. How strange. I don't think anyone else has noticed. I suppose it's not surprising I had not noticed it earlier. For I have not dared to enter Father's bedchamber before today. But he has gone to London on some business or other related to his brother's will. So I felt safe in entering.
I have been in Mamma's rooms often enough. And over the mantelpiece in her bedchamber hangs a portrait of a handsome gentleman in formal dress. When I asked who it was, she said, "Robert Pembrooke," and we both stared up at it.
It was the first time I had laid eyes on my uncle Pembrooke's face. And considering he was dead, it was the only way I would ever see him.
"Did you ever meet him?" I asked.
"Once. Years ago," Mamma replied. "The day your father and I were married."
"Was this his wife's room, then?"
"Yes. So the housekeeper tells me."
My father had claimed Robert Pembrooke's room, but I know better than to think he'd done so in a nostalgic attempt to be close to his older brother after their long estrangement and his recent passing. No, I have heard him rail against the injustice of being a second son too often to think so.
I tiptoed into the master bedchamber, assuming I would see Elizabeth Pembrooke's portrait above the mantelpiece as I had seen Robert Pembrooke's over hers. I was wrong. The rooms are quite similar in other respects, though the furniture is heavier and the bedclothes more masculine. Had her portrait never been painted? Or had it been removed for some reason?
Whatever the case, in its place hangs a portrait of an elderly matron with drooping features and mob cap—someone's grandmother, perhaps.
I asked Mamma if she had ever seen Elizabeth Pembrooke. No, she had not.
"Why not?" I asked. "What happened between Uncle Pembrooke and Papa to cause such a rift between them?"
"It's the old story, I imagine," Mamma replied. "Rivalry and jealousy. But I don't know the details. He never told me. And I'm not sure I want to know."
A postscript had been added to the page in a darker ink color.
I found a portrait of a beautiful woman hidden away, and think it might be Elizabeth Pembrooke. I wonder who hid it. And why.
Where had she found it? Abigail wondered. And where was it now? Gooseflesh prickled over her as she reread the words. She felt as if someone had been watching them the day she, William, and Kitty looked for Mrs. Pembrooke's portrait and found the one of the old woman instead. Was someone secretly observing her movements and then sending journal pages related to her comings and goings?
Did the writer live nearby? Near enough to see her? But what about the Bristol postmark? Heaving a sigh she shook her head. She wasn't going to figure it out on her own.
Abigail went in search of Mac Chapman and found him oiling his guns in his woodshed.
"Mac, what can you tell me about the former residents of Pembrooke Park? Not Robert Pembrooke—I mean the people who lived here after his death. His brother's family, I believe."
He shot her a wary look, then returned his focus to his task. "What about them?"
"Their names, to begin with. And how long they lived here."
He began, "After Robert Pembrooke and his family died—"
She interrupted him to ask, "How did they die?"
Mac huffed a long-suffering sigh. "Mrs. Pembrooke and her wee daughter died during an outbreak of typhus, as did many that year. Robert Pembrooke was laid very low indeed and died the following year. A fortnight after his death, his brother, Clive, moved in with his family. But they were here only about two years."
"Why did they leave so soon after moving in—and so suddenly?"
"I don't know. I never pretended to understand Clive Pembrooke, and I cannot pretend I was sorry to see them go."
"Were you there when they left?"
Mac shrugged and re-oiled his cloth. "I showed up as usual one morning to meet with Clive Pembrooke, only to find the place deserted. The housekeeper at the time told me the missus had let all the servants go without notice, though she paid them their quarter's wages in full. We have'na seen the family since."
"So Mrs. Pembrooke knew in advance they were leaving? And that's why she sent the servants away?"
He turned to study her, eyes narrowing. "Why are you asking all these questions?"
"I . . . am only curious."
Should she tell him about the letters? Instead she asked, "Is there a portrait of Elizabeth Pembrooke somewhere? I've seen the one of Robert Pembrooke, but not his wife."
He frowned. "Why do you ask me that?"
She shrugged. "You were the steward—you knew the family. And the old woman in the portrait in the master bedchamber . . . Who is she?"
"Robert Pembrooke's old nurse, I believe. But again, why are you asking? Why do you care?"
"It's only natural I should care about what went on in the place I now live."
His green eyes glittered like glass. "You know what Shakespeare said about 'care,' Miss Foster?"
She nodded. "'Care killed a cat.'"
"Exactly." He tossed down his cloth. "Look. I don't want to talk about the Pembrookes or the past, Miss Foster. Not with you, nor with anyone. Let it lie."
Abigail held his gaze a moment, then turned to go.
Mac called her back. "Miss Foster . . . if Clive Pembrooke should ever show his face at the manor, promise me you'll let me know directly. I know it's unlikely. But, I never thought the house would be occupied again after all this time either, and here you are."
Abigail was surprised by the request but agreed. "Very well, I shall."
"He may not give his real name," he warned. "He might come under some guise or assumed name. . . ."
She frowned. "Then how will I know who he is? Is there a portrait of him somewhere, or has he some distinguishing feature?"
"No portrait that I know of. He did look something like his brother, though not as tall, and rather paunchy after two years of idleness, though who knows how the past eighteen years have changed him."
"That isn't terribly helpful," Abigail said.
Mac held up a finger as a memory struck him. "He always wore the same long cloak, left over from his navy days. With a deep hood for standing watch on deck in rough weather. It is unlikely he would still be wearing it after all these years, but if a man shows up at your door wearing such a thing, be on your guard."
In spite of herself, Abigail shivered. "I shall indeed." She remembered the hooded figure she thought she saw on the stairs—but she had only imagined that, hadn't she?
In spite of Mac's warnings, Abigail did not let the matter lie. Wondering if any of the former servants still lived in the area, she looked in the library, hoping to find the old household account books or staff records but finding nothing of the sort. Odd, she thought, unless such ledgers had been kept in the former butler's room or housekeeper's parlor. She asked Mrs. Walsh if she had come across any old staff records, but she had not.
"Were you acquainted with any of the former servants?" Abigail asked her.
"That was long before my time," Mrs. Walsh said. "I only moved to the area ten years back."
Abigail thanked the woman. As she left the housekeeper's parlor, Abigail paused at the former butler's room across the passage. Steeling herself, she knocked briskly. The door creaked open. She waited, but no one answered. Through the crack, she glimpsed a rumpled bed, a wad of faded green wool amid the bedclothes, and a pair of discarded trousers tossed on a chair. As mistress of the house, she had every right to look in a servant's room. Dared she? She placed her hand on the door and opened it a few inches more. . . .
"At my door again, miss?"
Abigail started and looked over her shoulder to find Duncan smirking down at her.
She drew herself up. "There you are. Good. I was looking for the old household account books, or staff records. Thought the butler might have kept them."
"And why do you want those?"
"Just curious about the former servants. If any of them still live in the area."
He crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. "Let's see . . . Not many, that I know of. One housemaid married and moved away, I understand. Another died. As did the old gamekeeper, last year."
Remembering something Mac had said, Abigail prompted, "Mac mentioned a former housekeeper . . . ?"
"Did he?" Duncan asked, brows high. "I am surprised he would."
"Do you know her?"
He nodded. "Mrs. Hayes. I am acquainted with her niece, Eliza Smith."
"Does Mrs. Hayes live nearby?"
"Yes. In Caldwell. She is all but blind now, Eliza says, and her mind isn't as sharp as it once was. Eliza takes care of her now."
Duncan obliged her by describing the house and where to find it, ending with, "Be sure and tell Miss Eliza I said hello."
"I shall." Abigail thanked him and went upstairs.
Donning hat and gloves, she set out for a chilly walk. The day was sunny, but the wind was brisk. As she crossed the bridge, a heron rose from the river and sailed over the wood, where the ash trees and some of the young sycamores were in full flower and leaf. She walked through nearby Easton and on to neighboring Caldwell, enjoying the sight of vivid bluebells among the trees.
Reaching Caldwell, she easily found the modest, well-kept house and knocked on its door. An intelligent-looking woman in a printed frock, fichu, and apron answered. She had reddish-gold hair, blue eyes, and a rather long nose, and was perhaps a few years older than Abigail.
"Hello. I am Miss Foster, new to Pembrooke Park. And you must be Eliza."
"That's right."
"Duncan asked me to say hello."
"Did he?" Eliza blushed and looked down awkwardly.
Abigail followed her gaze and noticed the woman's work-worn, ink-stained hands. She said, "I hoped to pay a call on your aunt. If she is . . . able to receive visitors?"
Eliza smiled, which made her somewhat plain features pretty. "How kind, Miss Foster. Come in." She stepped back, and Abigail followed her into the entryway.
"Auntie so rarely receives callers these days—except for Mac Chapman, kind man that he is."
Abigail hesitated. "William Chapman, do you mean?"
"No. His son used to come, but now his father comes in his stead."
"Oh." That surprised Abigail. She added, "And Miss Chapman, I suppose?"
"No. Just Mac," Eliza said. "He comes by every week at least. Helps us keep the house in good repair, and brings things for Auntie. But otherwise . . . it's as if people have forgot her."
Abigail wiped her feet on the mat. "It's kind of you to look after her."
Miss Smith shrugged. "She looked after me, when I was a girl. Raised me as her own after she left Pembrooke Park."
The young woman didn't mention her parents' fate, Abigail noticed, but decided not to ask.
Abigail's gaze rested on a brooch pinning together the ends of the linen fichu around the woman's neck. She'd seen something like it before. . . .
"Pretty brooch," she commented, admiring the letter E in gold, or perhaps brass.
The woman touched it self-consciously. "Thank you, it was a gift. I'd forgot I had it on. If you will wait here a moment, I will see if my aunt has awakened from her nap." She slipped into the next room.
While she waited, Abigail glanced idly around the entryway, noticing a bonnet and veiled hat on pegs near the door. Then she looked through the open door into a small kitchen. A pot of something sat simmering on the stove, sending savory aromas throughout the house. Upon the worktable lay writing paper, quill, and ink, and what appeared to be a stack of quarto-sized periodicals.
Eliza reappeared and said, "She's awake." She hesitated, then added, "I have to warn you, miss. Her memory isn't very keen. Or her mind. You can't take everything she says as fact. Or to heart."
Abigail nodded her understanding and followed the woman into the dim parlor.
"Auntie? There's someone here to see you. A Miss Foster. She lives at Pembrooke Park now and wanted to meet you." Eliza began opening the shutters for Abigail's benefit.
A diminutive white-haired woman sat hunched in an armchair, knitting needles clenched in her gnarled hands. She lifted her head and sightless eyes. "Pembrooke Park? No one's lived there for years."
Abigail stepped forward. "My family and I have only recently moved into the house."
"You live there? You're not her, are you?"
Abigail hesitated. "Not who, Mrs. Hayes?"
"The girl that used to live there?"
"No. I have only lived in Pembrooke Park for the last month or so."
"And not a Pembrooke, you say?"
Eliza sent her an apologetic glance. "No, Auntie. Remember, this is Miss Foster."
"Well, Miss Foster," Mrs. Hayes said tartly, "does she know you're living in her house?"
Abigail blinked. "Does who know, Mrs. Hayes?"
"You have to forgive us, Miss Foster," Eliza said. "It's a long time ago and we don't remember details so well."
"I remember perfectly well," her aunt snapped. "Miss Pembrooke. His daughter, of course."
Assuming she was speaking of Clive Pembrooke's daughter, Abigail said gently, "I have never met her. Do you know where she lives now, Mrs. Hayes?"
"Where who lives?"
Eliza winced in embarrassment.
Praying for patience, Abigail repeated, "Miss Pembrooke?"
"I haven't the foggiest notion. She told me to lock the house and not look back, and I haven't. Said she wouldn't look back either, not like Lot's wife. No matter what."
Abigail frowned, trying to follow. "Mrs. Pembrooke told you that, do you mean?"
"Not Miss Elizabeth. The other one."
"Are you talking about Clive Pembrooke's wife?"
The woman shuddered and crossed herself. "Don't say his name, miss. Not if you value your life."
"There, there, Auntie," Eliza soothed. She glanced up at Abigail. "If you will excuse me a moment, Miss Foster. I need to stir the soup. I'll make some tea as well."
After Eliza departed, Mrs. Hayes tsked and said, "Poor Eliza. Living here in this small house . . . waiting on me like a servant." She sighed. "How unfair life is."
"I think she is happy to do it," Abigail said. "She told me you took care of her after you left Pembrooke Park."
Mrs. Hayes nodded, expression distant. "Aye. Dark days them were. . . ."
When she said nothing more for several moments, Abigail asked, "Why did Clive Pembrooke's family leave, Mrs. Hayes? Did you see them go?"
She shook her head emphatically. "I was in my bed. Mindin' my own affairs. I saw nothing. Heard nothing. I was fast asleep all night."
The line "The lady doth protest too much" crossed Abigail's mind. But she said only, "I see. So you were in the house, but when you rose the next morning, they were gone? The whole family?"
Mrs. Hayes nodded. "I was sorry to see the missus go. Always decent to me she was."
"Had she planned to leave for some time? Mac said you'd all been paid through the end of the quarter and let go."
Again she nodded. "I think she feared what he would do to us if we were there when he discovered his family had left 'im. He was away hunting, you see. But he came home early and figured out what she was plannin'—that's my guess. And tried to put a stop to it." She shook her head. "Poor Master Harold."
"Master Harold?" Abigail said. "What happened to him?"
"I don't know. I saw nothing."
"Mrs. Hayes, what do you think happened that night, if you were to guess?"
"I think he found her valise. Packed to leave. And her purse full of the money she'd been saving. Either that, or one of the boys gave it away. Not the girl. Not one for talkin', she weren't."
"And what did Clive Pembrooke do when he found out they were planning to leave him?"
"Don't know exactly. I may have heard a gunshot that night. Or maybe it was only a lightning strike. In the morning, after everyone had gone, I found blood on the hall floor."
Abigail sucked in a breath. "Blood? Whose blood?"
"Can't say for sure. I may have peeked, or I may have only dreamt it."
"Are you saying Clive Pembrooke shot someone?" Abigail asked in horror. "Someone of his own family . . . ?"
"I never said that. You didn't hear it from me. In the morning, everyone was gone. All gone! I saw the blood, see. But no body. So I must have dreamt it, hadn't I?" Her voice rose. "Don't tell a soul, miss! Not a soul! We don't want Master Clive to come back and exact vengeance, do we?"
Abigail swallowed and shook her head. She glanced through the open door into the kitchen to gauge Eliza's reaction. Eliza had gone to prepare tea, but at the moment she sat at the worktable writing something.
Abigail lowered her voice, trying not to rile Mrs. Hayes further. "Did they take the carriage? Were the horses gone?"
"Aye. The coach and carriage horses were gone. And Black Jack."
"But they took none of their belongings?"
"Oh aye, the mistress and the children took one valise each. But not one thing was missing from Clive Pembrooke's room. I even asked Tom to come in and look, to see if he agreed."
"Tom? Tom who?"
"Tom Green. The footman. Everyone knows that." The old woman frowned. "Now, what was your name again?"
Eliza came in with a tray, and Mrs. Hayes's attention was soon fully focused on her tea and toasted muffin. Abigail decided not to press the matter any further for the time being, and the conversation turned to more general topics of weather and parish life. When Eliza offered her more tea, Abigail noticed she no longer wore the brooch.
"Your brooch is gone," she said. "I hope you didn't lose it."
Eliza ducked her head. "No, I only took it off. Didn't want it falling into the soup."
"What? Who fell?" Mrs. Hayes asked. "He said Walter fell to his death, but I know better. He was pushed."
Walter? Was that the name of the valet who died in Pembrooke Park, Abigail wondered, trying to remember what Polly had told her.
"Hush, Auntie. Miss Foster admired my brooch—that's all."
Mrs. Hayes nodded over her teacup. "Ah. E for Eliza. That's right."
Later, as she walked home, Abigail reviewed what she'd learned from the letters, along with the information she'd gleaned from Duncan, Polly, Mac, and now Mrs. Hayes. Abigail wondered where Clive's family was now. The letter writer was apparently his daughter. The "Miss Pembrooke" Mrs. Hayes had mentioned. Abigail thought again of Eliza bent over quill and paper. She should have asked her what she was writing.
When she returned to Pembrooke Park, Abigail decided to do a little writing of her own. She went into the library, retrieved paper, quill, and ink, and wrote a letter to the solicitor.
Dear Mr. Arbeau,
I would like to ask the name of your client, the executor you mentioned of Pembrooke Park. I would also like an address so that I may write to this person. Or more accurately, so that I may write back in reply to her letters. You see, Mr. Arbeau, someone is writing to me here. Someone who has lived here before and is evidently female. I deduce the person must be Miss Pembrooke, though I suppose I may be wrong. In any case, would you please give me the name and direction of your client? Or if you prefer, ask your client if I may contact her?
Thank you for your assistance in this matter.
Sincerely,
Miss Abigail Foster
Molly knocked on the open library door and brought in the day's post—a letter from Mamma.
"Thank you, Molly." Abigail opened it and read.
Dear Abigail,
I hope this letter finds you in good health and spirits, and settling well into Pembrooke Park. Your father gives a good account of your efforts, but says it is well Louisa and I were not there to see it in its initial, neglected state. I know you will endeavor long and admirably to put it to rights for us before we arrive at the end of the season.
Speaking of the season, your sister has made quite an impression, I can tell you. Several well-connected gentlemen of means have expressed their admiration. She is enjoying herself tremendously, and you would be thoroughly proud of her. She sends her love, as does dear Aunt Bess, who has been the most gracious hostess during our stay here.
Your father asks me to tell you that he intends to return at month's end, but if you need him sooner for any reason, you are to write and let him know. He trusts you are well looked after by the servants and the protective former steward he told us about. I assured him you were more than capable of taking care of yourself, and with the maids to attend you, there should be no concern for propriety. Why, here in London Louisa ventures into Hyde Park with only one servant as escort, and there you have a staff of five! But if you are uneasy without your father there with you, do let us know.
Before I forget, I wanted to mention that Gilbert Scott has returned from Italy and accepted a position with an esteemed architect here in London. With his new polish and promising future, Gilbert is turning many heads, including our Louisa's. He has called at the house once or twice and sends his regards. I am still holding out for a title at present, but your sister could make a worse match.
Abigail's heart pounded. Gilbert . . . back in England. If only she were in London to see him. How she longed for her old friend's company—to hear all about his travels and see his latest drawings and plans. To see him smile at her . . . But was she fooling herself? If he had set his sights on pretty Louisa, he would be directing his smiles at her from now on. She recalled the letters Gilbert had written to her, in which he'd asked her why Louisa had not replied to his letters. Abigail had allowed herself to hope that Louisa's apparent interest in Gilbert Scott had faded. But now that he had returned more "polished and promising" than ever, had her hopes been dashed?
Abigail sighed and pulled forth another piece of paper. Ignoring the little stab of loneliness, she wrote back to assure her parents that she was just fine on her own.
After the Sunday service, the congregation waited until the clergyman and those in the front boxes exited before filing out behind them. So Abigail was the first to greet Mr. Chapman at the door and then step outside. As she walked toward the manor, she glimpsed movement in the churchyard and was surprised to see Eliza Smith turning from one of the graves. Abigail paused where she was while the young woman walked her way, wearing a pretty bonnet and blue overdress, her brooch peeking out from beneath her shawl.
Eliza looked up at her in surprise. "Church out already?"
"Yes, another short sermon today." Abigail wondered why Eliza and her aunt, apparently such favorites with Mac Chapman, had not attended church.
"And how is your aunt today?" Abigail asked politely.
"About the same. I don't bring her to church anymore. Never know what might come out of her mouth and disrupt the service."
"Oh. That's too bad—for you both."
Eliza shrugged. "I don't mind. I come on my own now and again. Sit in the back and slip out early. But today I had another destination in mind. . . ."
Visiting her parents' graves, Abigail guessed but did not say so.
Eliza glanced across the drive toward Pembrooke Park. Eyes on its windows, she asked, "Which room have they put you in, Miss Foster?
"I have a small bedchamber in the west wing."
"Ah. The one with the dolls' house. Miss Eleanor's old room."
Abigail hesitated. That was a name she had not heard before. It must be the given name of the Miss Pembrooke Mrs. Hayes had mentioned. "Um, yes, or so I assumed." She wondered why Eliza was familiar with the room. She asked, "You have been inside the house, I gather?"
"Oh, I . . ." Eliza ducked her head, suddenly self-conscious. "Well, a few times. Mamma died while Auntie still worked here. And now and again when our neighbor was unable to watch me, I would stay with Auntie belowstairs."
"I see. It must have been hard for you, after your mother died."
"Yes, and my father gone too . . ." Eliza's eyes misted over. "The happiest days of my childhood were those spent playing here. I snuck upstairs to explore once, but I slipped and fell. Mr. Pembrooke himself picked me up and patted my head. Instead of reprimanding me, he gave me a sweet."
"Which Mr. Pembrooke?" Abigail asked, doubting the kindness of the infamous Clive.
"Robert Pembrooke, of course."
Eliza inhaled a long breath and drew herself up. "Well, if you will excuse me." She turned to go.
"May I walk with you?" Abigail asked, knowing she had a few hours until her dinner with the Chapmans. "I long to stretch my legs after sitting on that hard bench."
"If you like."
The two young women walked companionably toward Easton, on the way to Caldwell. The warm May breeze felt good on Abigail's skin. Hawthorn blossoms dotted the hedgerows, and two whitethroats chased each other through its branches, singing all the while. The meadows beyond were yellow with cowslips, and the air smelled of apple blossoms.
Abigail drew in a deep, savoring breath. "Spring is so much more vibrant here than in London," she observed. "Have you been there?"
"No, not yet," the woman said wistfully. "Maybe someday."
"I imagine it's difficult to get away with your aunt needing someone to look after her."
"Yes, it would be."
As they passed the public house in Easton, Duncan swept out, then drew up short at the sight of his mistress. "Ah. Miss Foster."
"Hello."
"I saw Miss Eliza. And I hoped she might walk with me to Ham Green."
Abigail glanced at Eliza, saw the flush of pleasure she tried to hide.
"Then I shall leave you to it," Abigail said with a smile. "A good day to you both. And do greet your aunt for me."
"I shall, Miss Foster. Thank you."
Abigail continued her walk alone for a time, then turned and started back. As she strolled again down the tree-lined road, she remembered when she and her father had first arrived in Mr. Arbeau's carriage and were stopped by the former barricade. Now she crossed the bridge unimpeded, admiring the marsh marigolds and silvery white lady's smocks growing along the riverbank.
She looked ahead and was surprised to see two boys run through the churchyard. They threw open the church door, and from within she heard the hum of many voices before the door closed again, muffling the sound. Was there some special service she was unaware of?
Deciding to follow, Abigail entered the churchyard. As she did, she glanced over to where she'd seen Eliza standing earlier. Sure enough, flowers lay on one of the graves. She squinted, but the name on the headstone was not Smith as she'd expected. It was Robert Pembrooke.
She must have mistaken the spot Eliza had stood. Blinking away confusion, Abigail continued on to the church door. She quietly opened it and crossed the vestibule on the balls of her feet, to keep the heels of her half boots from disrupting the quiet within.
Inside she saw William Chapman sitting amidst several older boys and girls, their heads bowed over slates. Leah was sitting with a group of younger children, heads bent over books. William glanced up, and his quick smile at seeing her lightened her heart.
"Excuse me for a minute," he said to the children. "Colin, you're in charge."
The older boy nodded, and William walked over and joined Abigail at the back of the nave.
"Sorry," she whispered. "I didn't mean to interrupt."
"No problem."
"I saw a few children coming back to church and wondered what was going on. You must think me a terribly nosy neighbor. Are you teaching them the Scriptures, or . . . ?"
"We teach reading, writing, and ciphering, as well as the catechism, yes."
"Don't they go to school?"
"Our little Sunday school here is the only education some of these boys and girls will receive."
"But why?"
"Most begin farming with their fathers as soon as they are able or are apprenticed by age thirteen or so, or sent out to service, in the case of girls. For many, Sunday is their only day free to learn."
Abigail glanced at Miss Chapman. "And your sister teaches as well?"
"Yes, she is excellent with the younger children especially."
"Has there always been school here?"
"No, it's something we've started recently."
A young man raised his hand, and William excused himself to answer his question.
Leah came over and greeted her. "Hello, Miss Foster."
"Miss Chapman, it is very good of you and your brother to teach these children."
She shrugged off the praise. "I enjoy it."
"I suppose their parents contribute something—or is the schooling free?"
Leah shook her head. "I understand some schools charge a penny or twopence a week to help defray the cost of books and slates, but William insists we charge nothing. He buys what we need out of his own modest income."
"I'm sure if others knew of the work you're doing here, they would be happy to help."
"You're probably right. But William is proud and hates to ask for anything."
William returned and clearly overheard his sister's last few words. "You give me too much credit. I have asked for donations of books and supplies and have received a few, though many people don't believe in educating the poor. Some say it's futile, or even dangerous—rendering them insolent to their superiors."
"I take it you disagree?" Abigail asked.
He nodded. "I think every person deserves to understand enough of basic mathematics to take care of his expenses and know when he's being overcharged. To be able to read the newspaper and keep abreast of what is going on in the world. To know how to write a letter to a loved one. And to read the greatest love letter of all—the God-breathed Scriptures."
He flushed. "Forgive me. I did not intend to preach another sermon today."
"That's all right," Abigail said. "I admire your passion. And your efforts."
He grinned. "I'll take your admiration. But I'd prefer your help."
Abigail felt her brows rise. "Me? How can I help?"
Leah said, "Good idea, Will. You could help me with the younger children, Miss Foster. Take Martha there. She's joined us only recently. Neither of her parents can read, so she's a bit behind the others."
"I have no idea how to teach . . ."
"Just listen to her read aloud, and when she struggles, help her sound out the words troubling her."
"Very well," Abigail agreed.
She sat with the little girl for half an hour and did as Leah suggested. She soon found herself transported back to her younger days, sitting with Louisa when she was four or five, helping her read a children's book.
The time passed quickly and pleasantly, and soon Mr. Chapman announced it was time to clear away for the day. Around her, books closed and children rose and began stacking slates.
"All right, time for a closing hymn," Leah said.
The children gathered, and Leah named the hymn, "'Lord, Accept Our Feeble Song.' Ready?"
The children nodded and opened their little robin mouths and began to sing.
"Lord, accept our feeble song!
Power and praise to Thee belong;
We would all Thy grace record,
Holy, holy, holy Lord!"
As they warbled out the melody, Abigail tried not to wince, thinking, Feeble song, indeed!
When they finished, Leah suggested, "Shall we sing another?"
This time Leah named a hymn Abigail was familiar with, and she joined in.
"Glory, glory everlasting
Be to Him who bore the cross,
Who redeemed our souls by tasting
Death, the death deserved by us!
Spread His glory
Who redeemed His people thus. . . ."
William turned to stare at her. "My goodness, Miss Foster. You have a lovely singing voice."
She felt her cheeks heat. She hadn't meant to sing above the others or to show off. "Thank you. Sorry. Go on."
Leah chuckled. "Don't apologize, Miss Foster. You have a gift. Perhaps you might lead the children in singing from now on?"
Abigail hesitated. "I don't wish to usurp anybody's role."
"Don't worry about that," Leah said. "The two of us have more than enough roles as it is, I assure you. You would be doing me a favor."
"You would be doing all of us a favor," William added. The approval shining in his eyes did strange things to Abigail's heart.
She smiled self-consciously. "Then it shall be my pleasure."
Recalling their mother's dinner invitation, William and Leah asked Abigail to walk home with them, and Abigail happily agreed. She enjoyed the simple Sabbath meal of cold meat, pie, and salads, and a lovely sponge for dessert. She also enjoyed talking with Leah, the camaraderie and sparring between siblings, Mac's grumpy sense of humor, and Mrs. Chapman's infectious laugh. She did not mind the admiration in William Chapman's eyes either.
After the meal, Leah played a few hymns on their old harpsichord, and the family all sang together. Abigail tried to imagine her own family doing something so simple and reverent, but she could not.
Before she left, Abigail invited Kitty to come home with her and amuse herself with the dolls' house again, assuming her parents didn't mind. The girl eagerly accepted. Her parents less so.
"I'm sure Miss Foster doesn't want you loitering about, messing up her room and disturbing her things," Mac said.
"I don't mind," Abigail assured him. "Besides, they aren't my things really. Seems a pity that no one should enjoy them. I would be happy for Kitty's company, if you can spare her."
"Very well, if you are certain," Kate said. "But don't overstay your welcome, Kitty. And be sure to return everything to its proper place before you leave."
"Yes, Mamma."
William remained behind to discuss some church matter with Mac, and Abigail was oddly disappointed not to have his escort home. But she smiled and thanked everyone for their hospitality, glad to have his younger sister's company at least.
When Abigail and Kitty reached the house, the two went upstairs together. There, Kitty pulled a small basket from her pocket and handed it to her.
She said sheepishly, "I borrowed this the last time I was here, to show Leah. I shouldn't have done so without asking, and I apologize."
Abigail pressed her hand warmly. "I forgive you. Thank you for telling me." She nodded toward the dolls' house with a smile. "Now, go on."
Kitty said, "You needn't stay with me, if there is something else you need to do."
"Not at all. As I told your mother, I will enjoy your company. This house is far too empty and far too quiet." Except at night, she thought.
"I think I shall write to my mother right here at my dressing table. Oh," Abigail recalled, "I found another doll in the back of my own wardrobe. I've added her to the drawer."
The girl went eagerly to the cabinet and knelt before it and was all but lost from view, save for flashes of movement through the dolls' house windows.
"I adore these miniature furnishings," Kitty said. "The tiny balls of knitting wool. These tiny plates and pots and baskets."
"I do too," Abigail agreed, sitting at the dressing table and uncorking her inkpot. "Especially the miniature books with real pages."
"Where? Oh, I see. Here in the drawing room. This fat black one is supposed to be a Bible, I think. But its pages are blank. . . . Look! Someone has written in it."
Abigail rose and walked over. "Where? I don't recall seeing any writing."
"Here in the last two pages. They were a bit stuck together—from the ink, perhaps."
Kitty held up the miniature black book, her thumb holding it open to the spot. Abigail gently took if from her and squinted at the tiny writing. Foolishly, she hoped for a secret message. A clue to the location of the treasure, if one existed, even as she silently chastised herself for being ridiculous. She was glad Kitty could not read her private thoughts. Abigail was supposed to be the wise older female. Instead she felt like a silly adolescent, excited at the prospect of a secret treasure map.
But no map or message met her gaze. At least not that she could instantly decipher. Not even full words: Gen 4 Eat + ed. Num + 10.
"Does it mean something, like a code?" Kitty asked. "Or is it just scribbles?"
"I don't know."
"Gen and Num could be Genesis and Numbers. Books of the Bible," Kitty said, looking at the book over her shoulder.
"You're right." Abigail smiled at the girl. "Spoken like a fine clergyman's sister."
Kitty peered closer. "Genesis 4 and Numbers 10 . . . ? But see that symbol? Is it a plus sign or a t?"
"A plus sign, I think."
"Numbers plus ten? Ten books later?"
"We're looking for a code to decipher, when it probably means nothing," Abigail said. "Perhaps some child decided to write in the blank pages to make it seem more like a real book, but was caught in the act and stopped before he or she finished."
Kitty frowned. "Odd words to write."
Abigail agreed. "I wonder why he or she wrote these particular words in the back. Even I know Genesis is in the beginning of the Bible, not here at the end."
"Maybe it's a secret message." Kitty's eyes shone. "About a hidden treasure . . . ?"
Abigail looked at her. "You've heard the rumors too?"
"Of course." The girl glanced around Abigail's bedchamber. "Have you a Bible?"
"No," Abigail admitted, somewhat sheepishly. She had her lovely leather edition of the New Testament and Psalms and a prayer book but rarely delved into the Old Testament.
"Have you seen the Pembrooke family Bible somewhere?" Kitty asked. "Maybe there's a clue tucked inside at these pages."
"Good idea."
A knock sounded at the open door. Abigail looked over in surprise. William Chapman's profile came into view, though he averted his eyes, not looking directly into her bedchamber. In case she was dishabille?
"Kitty? Papa asked me to stop by and remind you not to stay too late. You are minding Mrs. Wilson's twins tonight."
Ignoring this, Kitty said, "William will know." She called to him, "William, does Genesis 4 and Numbers plus 10 mean anything to you?"
Abigail went to the door and opened it all the way, giving the man a welcoming smile. "I'm afraid we've stumbled upon a little mystery. Just a game, no doubt."
"I let myself in. I hope you don't mind," he said. "But the door was open, and as I know the servants have the day off . . ."
"William, what is Genesis 4 about?" Kitty called again.
He pursed his lips in surprise and then recollection. "Cain and Abel and their descendants, I believe. Why?"
She thrust the tiny book in his face, and he gently took it from her and held it at a better angle to read.
His eyes narrowed in thought. "Genesis 4. Eat plus e.d. Eated . . . Ate? Perhaps Genesis 4:8?"
"Oh! I had not thought of that. You're so clever, William," Kitty enthused.
Abigail privately agreed.
"Numbers plus ten . . ." he continued. "Ten books later? That would be . . ." He murmured to himself through the books. "Second Chronicles. Or perhaps it means to add ten to the chapter or verse? Four plus ten, meaning Numbers fourteen? Or eight plus ten equals eighteen?"
"Which is it?" Kitty asked.
"I haven't the foggiest. Have you a Bible handy, Miss Foster?"
"Not the Old Testament, I'm afraid."
"Then I'm glad for an opportunity to spur your interest in cracking open that volume."
"Even for a game—and no doubt a wild-goose chase in the bargain?"
He said gently, "One might open the book idly, but one never knows what treasures one might find."
She snapped her head up.
His blue eyes twinkled. "Though I'm guessing that's not the type of treasure you had in mind."
Abigail said, "Come. If you are both so interested, let us go down to the library. No doubt there's a Bible there. Perhaps even the family Bible."
Together they went downstairs and looked through the library—its desk and shelves—but found no family Bible. Too bad, Abigail thought. She would have liked to look inside and seen the births, marriages, and deaths recorded in the front leaves of the Pembrooke family Bible.
Mr. Chapman offered to run across the drive to the parsonage and retrieve his own Bible. He returned a few minutes later with a well-worn copy.
He opened the volume and flipped through the first thin pages. "Here we are. Let's see if I remembered correctly. Genesis 4:8. 'And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.'"
Kitty frowned. "Perhaps that isn't the right verse."
"Perhaps it is . . ." he murmured.
Abigail wondered what he meant.
"And what about Numbers?" Kitty asked.
Mr. Chapman flipped past the rest of Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. He skimmed through Numbers 18 but apparently nothing caught his eye. Then he turned to Numbers 14. "Verse eight is about the land of milk and honey. . . ." he murmured. He slid his finger to verse eighteen, and read it aloud, "'The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.'"
"I like the first part of that verse but not the second," Kitty said.
"Does God really do that?" Abigail asked. "Visit the iniquities of the father upon his children for generations to come? That doesn't seem fair."
Mr. Chapman took her question seriously. "I don't believe children are guilty of their parents' wrongdoing. But we have all seen people who suffer because of their parents' neglect or abusive behavior, or other wrongdoing. And children often follow in their parents' footsteps." He shrugged. "Like it or not, sin has consequences. Which is why God lovingly warns us against it. Thankfully, He is merciful and ready to forgive if we ask Him. But that doesn't erase natural consequences of our actions. Cause and effect."
Abigail thought of her own father. He might forgive her—and hopefully, someday, Uncle Vincent as well—but that didn't erase the consequences he and the entire family would suffer. Oh, how she wished she could correct the mistake before it affected her sister and herself, not to mention their children and children's children. What kind of inheritance could her father, could any of them, leave for future generations now?
Kitty frowned. "Another depressing verse. And I can't see that it's any sort of clue about a secret room or treasure."
"I'm afraid you're right," Abigail said, sharing a sad smile with the girl. "I'm sorry our discovery didn't turn out to be more amusing."
"This may not be a clue about a secret room," William agreed, "but that doesn't mean it isn't a message."
Abigail felt foreboding prickle through her. "Or a warning."
That night, Abigail lay in bed as she often did with drawing pencil and sketch pad in hand. She sketched idly, this and that. Plus signs and numbers giving way to letters of the alphabet. She began sketching the letter E—Eliza's brooch. She hesitated, turning the pad on its side, and suddenly remembered where she had seen a pin very like it. Had Duncan taken it from the jewelry box on Mrs. Pembrooke's dressing table to give to his lover? Her stomach cramped at the thought. The footsteps in the night, the candle lamp on its side, Duncan not wanting her in his room . . . It all rushed back through her mind, and with it the distasteful conclusion that Duncan had stolen the brooch. She hoped she was wrong. She would check the jewelry box, and if the brooch was missing . . . well, she would talk to Mac. He would know what to do.
In the morning, she returned to the mistress's bedchamber and opened the jewelry box, expecting the worst. Instead, there lay the brooch—not an M or W as she'd originally thought, but an ornate E, exactly like the one she'd seen Eliza wearing. Apparently the design was more common than she'd thought. Guilt and self-recrimination made her feel nauseated. She had misjudged Duncan and would endeavor to be kinder to him in future.
Later that day, Abigail received two letters. The first, a terse reply in Mr. Arbeau's neat hand.
Miss Foster,
I am in receipt of your letter but cannot satisfy your request. I have been instructed to not divulge the name of my client until he or she directs me to do so. I have contacted my client to communicate your wishes, but the request has been denied for now. My client neither confirms nor denies knowledge of the letters you mention. I do not intend to begin a guessing game with you, Miss Foster. But assuming this is your first and last guess, I can tell you that I have no client by the name of Miss Pembrooke.
I remain,
Henri Arbeau
The second letter was another missive in that now-familiar feminine hand. A newspaper clipping had been enclosed in the outer letter. She first read the handwritten note, addressed to her personally.
Miss Foster,
If anyone named Pembrooke comes to the house and asks for entry or shelter, I beg you refuse his request—despite his surname and likely protestations of his rights and even assertion that he is the owner of the place. For my sake and for your own well-being, as well as your family's, resolutely send him on his way. If he demands to know on whose authority you refuse him, you may refer him to the solicitor who let the house to you. He is paid well to deal with such difficulties.
This advice differed somewhat from what Mac had asked of her, but it held a similar edge of warning. After this note, a space had been left blank, followed by another single line.
In case you have not yet learnt this history of your newly acquired home, I thought I would send the enclosed to you.
Abigail picked up the clipping from a newspaper. In faded ink, someone had handwritten in the corner: 4 May 1798.
Stabbed? Good heavens. Mac had mentioned nothing about a stabbing. The report made Abigail feel queasy. She could not help but imagine her reaction had thieves broken in to their London home and stabbed her father when he caught them in the act. How awful. Robert Pembrooke had been everything a gentleman should be, if Mac Chapman's account was not overly biased. What a tragic waste of life.
According to the newspaper, officials had wanted to question the valet. Had they suspected him of foul play? Mrs. Hayes had rattled on about "Walter's" fall at Pembrooke Park. Clearly, the report of his death had not reached London quickly, if ever.
Had the valet fled the scene of his crime? But then, why return to Pembrooke Park? Or had he returned to report the news of his master's death, only to somehow fall to his own death?
Again Abigail wondered why Miss Pembrooke—in spite of Mr. Arbeau's denial, Abigail still believed it could only be her—was writing to her, sending her information from the past and warnings for the future. Good heavens. If Clive Pembrooke had not bothered to come knocking in eighteen years, he surely wouldn't do so now out of the blue, during the very first month she happened to live there. That would be too much a coincidence to be believed. Unless . . . Might the house being opened and occupied be the very trigger to raise the sleeping threat from unconcerned slumber at long last?
Where had that thought come from? Abigail shook her head at the fanciful notion. Very unlike her usual pragmatic nature. It was time to organize the larder, or sort her belongings, or . . . something.
# Chapter 9
The day of Andrew Morgan's welcome home party arrived, and Abigail found herself looking forward to it more than she had looked forward to anything in a long time. It was to be her first social event with her new neighbors, other than the homey meals she had shared with the Chapmans. She planned to wear a pretty evening gown and ask Polly to help her dress her hair a little more elegantly than the quick, serviceable coil she usually preferred.
Andrew Morgan was an amusing, handsome man and would no doubt be a charming host. But Abigail especially looked forward to spending the evening with William Chapman. And she looked forward to seeing Leah in a different setting as well—dressed formally and the object of Mr. Morgan's attentions, if she didn't miss her guess. She was quite certain Mr. Morgan admired Miss Chapman. How wonderful if the two fell in love and were married. She would like to see Leah Chapman happy, and believed it was her family's fond wish for her as well.
True to her word, Mrs. Morgan had included Charles Foster in her invitation, but Abigail's father had yet to return.
Midmorning she received a note from him, apologizing but saying he had been detained in London even longer than he'd originally expected—called in again by the lawyers and Uncle Vincent in the dreaded bankruptcy proceedings. Poor Papa . . . Abigail sighed upon reading the words and the unwritten frustration between them. And poor Uncle Vincent.
She sent Duncan over to Hunts Hall with a note to Mrs. Morgan, modifying her earlier response, expressing her father's regrets but reiterating her anticipation of the evening.
William Chapman had told Abigail that he and Leah would stop by in their gig at six and the three of them would drive to Hunts Hall together.
Abigail began getting ready hours early. Polly and Duncan carried up pail after pail of hot water so she could have a real bath in a tub in her room, instead of the sponge or hip baths she usually made do with to avoid causing them extra work. She bathed and washed her hair, Polly coming in to help her rinse it with a reserved jug of clean warm water.
Later the maid helped her cinch long stays over her shift, before helping her into her gown. The dress Abigail had chosen for the evening was not as formal as a ball gown but was one of her finer evening dresses: gauzy white muslin with narrow blue stripes, a scalloped flounced hem, and crossover bodice. Polly curled her hair and pinned the curls high atop her head, with several braids looped like garlands at the back. Abigail missed the family jewels, which would have looked so well with the dress and its V neckline, but she made do with a single string of blue glass beads.
"You look beautiful, miss," Polly breathed.
"Thank you, Polly. If I do, the credit goes to you."
Abigail pulled on long gloves, then tucked a handkerchief into a reticule, stringing the small bag over her wrist. She carried a bright woven cashmere shawl for the ride home, should the evening grow cold, and made her way downstairs five minutes before the appointed time.
It felt strange to wait alone for callers—and to be attending a social event without family present. She hoped her father would not disapprove of her going alone. She didn't think he would and wondered again how soon he would finish his business and be able to join her.
She glanced out the hall windows, and there came the Chapmans' old grey harnessed to their gig. As Morgan's land agent, Mac had the use of a fine bay, leaving the rest of his family to share their old carriage horse. The small open carriage would be snug with the three of them, but Leah had assured Abigail that the entire family regularly traveled in it, though two had to sit on the back gate and Mac rode alongside.
Leaning forward to better view the gig, Abigail frowned. William Chapman sat at the reins, as she'd anticipated, but no one sat beside him. Abigail let the drapery fall as her thoughts raced and her stomach sank. Was Leah ill? Had William come to tell her they would not be going after all?
Duncan crossed the drive with unusual speed to hold the reins as Mr. Chapman hopped nimbly down. Was it her imagination, or did Duncan appear disappointed as well to see only Mr. Chapman in the gig? Abigail had mentioned to him in passing that both were expected, to emphasize the propriety of the arrangements.
Outside the two men exchanged a few words, and then William strode toward the door. She should have waited for one of the servants to open it for her, but she was too anxious to know what had gone amiss. She opened it on his first knock, and he seemed slightly taken aback.
"What's happened?" Abigail asked quickly. "Where is Leah?"
For a moment he stared at her, his gaze roving over her face, her hair, her gown. Slowly he removed his hat. "You look beautiful, Miss Foster."
"Thank you." She ducked her head, allowing herself a moment to relish the rare compliment, then asked again, "Is Leah all right?"
His face twisted. "I'm afraid Leah will not be joining us after all. She claims she feels too ill to go."
"Oh no. What is the matter?"
"My guess is a bad case of nerves and illogical fear. She honestly feels poorly, though whether brought on by anxiety or any real malady, I cannot say for certain. But she begs that you and I go on without her so as not to disappoint Mr. Morgan altogether."
"He will be disappointed by her absence no matter what."
"Yes. And I realize you, um, may not be comfortable going with only me."
Abigail hesitated, aware of Duncan watching them from the drive and of Molly hovering in the hall behind her.
Abigail drew her shoulders back and said in a pleasant, audible voice, "I am so sorry your sister will not be able to join us after all. But it is perfectly proper to ride in an open carriage to attend a party of respectable people." She lowered her voice, struck with another thought. "But I am thinking only of myself. What about you? If you prefer not to attend the dinner with me alone, I will understand."
"Miss Foster, I have been looking forward to this evening all week, and not because of the Morgans or the meal in store for us there. And certainly not to enjoy the company of my sister, dear though she is."
Abigail's cheeks warmed at his implied compliment. His striking blue eyes looked directly into hers, and the silence stretched between them.
She looked away first. "Well, if it won't pose a problem for you . . ."
"It may cause a bit of talk, I can't deny. But I am willing to brave it if you are."
"Then I should still like to go, yes. For Mr. Morgan's sake."
He raised his auburn eyebrows. "Only for Mr. Morgan's sake?"
Again she ducked her head.
"You look even prettier when you blush, Miss Foster."
She refused to meet his playful gaze and instead walked past him. "Shall we go?"
Mr. Chapman easily passed her with his long stride and reached the gig ahead of her, offering his hand. She flicked a glance into his handsome face, laid her white glove in his dark one, and allowed him to hand her up into the carriage. Then he walked around to his side, climbed in with graceful ease, and accepted the reins from Duncan.
Abigail smiled down at the manservant. "Lock up, will you please, Duncan? We are going to dinner at Hunts Hall, and I am not sure how late I shall be."
"Very good, miss."
Mr. Chapman called, "Walk on," and turned the horse through the gate. They crossed the bridge and followed the narrow, tree-lined road leading to Easton, then turned onto the Caldwell Road. The sun hung low in the western horizon, shining golden through the trees. They passed picturesque thatched cottages and well-tended farms divided by stone walls and blooming hedgerows. Birds called and in the distance a dog barked.
"What a lovely evening," Abigail said to break the silence.
She felt his gaze on her profile. "Lovely indeed."
They turned from the road through an iron gate and onto a long curved drive. At its end lay a squat square manor house, not as large as Pembrooke Park but elegant, with shaped hedges and formal gardens flanking its façade.
Ahead of them, a fine black barouche driven by a dignified coachman dropped off its occupant, hidden from their view, and drove around to the rear of the house. August company, Abigail thought, reminding herself not to be intimidated. Or at least not to show it.
As the Chapman gig reached the circular drive, a footman in livery and powdered wig exited the house and ceremoniously strode forward, extending a hand to help Abigail down. A groom appeared on the other side to take the horse and carriage to the stable around back.
As they walked to the front door, Mr. Chapman said quietly, "I'm sorry I can't deliver you in a fine barouche."
"Don't be. It doesn't matter to me."
"Nervous?" he asked, offering her his arm.
"Yes," she admitted. "You?"
"Not in the least. I likely would have been, had Leah been here. Nervous for her. But you, Miss Foster, can handle yourself in any situation, I think."
She raised her brows. "We shall see about that."
William liked the feel of Miss Foster's hand on his arm. Her presence, he thought, would be sweet enough to compensate for the lukewarm reception he anticipated from Mrs. Morgan. Nor did he look forward to feeling like an outsider among the other guests, most of whom were from a higher social sphere. He was used to such snubs from his years at Oxford, but that didn't mean he had learned to enjoy being looked down upon for his humble birth.
Mr. and Mrs. Morgan stood inside the vestibule, receiving guests. Three women stood nearby, talking in low tones to one another.
Mrs. Morgan welcomed him civilly, if coolly. "Ah, Mr. Chapman. Welcome."
At the sound of his name, one of the three women whirled, mouth parted in surprise and, if he was not mistaken, alarm. Did she know he was a clergyman and dread his presence? Assume he would spoil their fun? Some people thought so, he knew.
The woman was handsome and dark haired, perhaps thirty or a little older. Her companions were a matronly looking woman in her forties and a young woman of about twenty—a mother and daughter, perhaps.
William pulled his gaze from the stranger's startled face and said to his hostess, "And this is Miss Foster."
"Yes, we met at church. A pity your father is unable to join us."
"Yes," Miss Foster said. "Thank you for understanding."
Mrs. Morgan turned to the three women. "Ladies, if you will allow me, I shall make informal introductions."
The women turned.
"Mr. Chapman is our curate and was at school with Andrew," Mrs. Morgan began. "And Miss Foster is new to the area. But you know how Andrew is, all goodness. He invited her to join us."
"Very neighborly, I'm sure," the youngest woman said.
Mrs. Morgan gestured first toward the handsome dark-haired woman. "My late brother's wife, Mrs. Webb. And beside her, my dear old friend, Mrs. Padgett, and her lovely daughter, Miss Padgett, who have come all the way from Winchester to be with us tonight."
"To welcome dear Andrew home, we would have traveled farther yet," Miss Padgett said.
"You are very kind." Mrs. Morgan beamed, then turned to Abigail. "Miss Foster, you are from London, I understand?"
"Yes, born and bred."
Mr. Morgan spoke up. "Miss Foster is living alone for all intents and purposes in Pembrooke Park, abandoned these eighteen years. Quite a singular young woman to attempt it."
"And . . . your family is . . . ?" Miss Padgett let the question dangle.
"My father was here with me until recently, when matters of business necessitated his return to Town. He plans to return any day, and my mother and sister will be joining us at the end of the season."
Miss Padgett and her mother nodded and listened to Miss Foster politely, but William noticed the third woman, Mrs. Morgan's sister-in-law, kept glancing his way. The woman did not wear mourning so was not a recent widow. Did he make her so uncomfortable? He hoped he had not the opposite effect on her. She was too old for him, and he was there with Miss Foster. . . . No, surely he was mistaken. He turned and met her gaze directly.
A challenging glint shone in her grey-blue eyes. "Mr. Chapman, was it?"
"Yes."
"Forgive me for staring. You . . . remind me of someone."
"Have we met before, Mrs. Webb?"
She hesitated, lips parted. "I . . . don't think so." She turned to Miss Foster and held out her hand. "And a pleasure to meet you, Miss Foster. How are you getting on here? Missing London?"
It was a relief when the woman's keen gaze shifted to his companion.
"Actually, I miss London far less than I imagined I would," Miss Foster replied. "Although I miss my family, of course."
Mrs. Webb smiled thinly. "And how do you find living in the formidable Pembrooke Park?"
"Oh, it's quite something. A beautiful old house."
"But surely, after being uninhabited for so long . . . ?"
"It was difficult at first, I own. A great deal of dust and the like. But we've an excellent staff and have slowly put the place to rights."
"I am glad to hear it. No evidence of break-ins or damage?"
"Nothing beyond the usual decay one might expect. Mr. Chapman's father has taken it upon himself to guard the place, to keep out would-be thieves and vandals. Even repaired the roof himself, in his spare time."
"Did he indeed?" Mrs. Webb's thin brows rose, clearly impressed.
Hearing this, Mrs. Morgan said, "Well, he was once the Pembrookes' steward, after all, and old ways die hard."
Mrs. Webb ignored her. "That was excessively good of your father, Mr. Chapman."
Miss Foster glanced at him shyly. "Yes, it was."
She did not, William noticed with relief, recount how Mac had met them at gunpoint.
"Foster . . ." Mrs. Morgan echoed thoughtfully. "Your father wasn't mixed up in that awful bank failure business, I trust?" Her nose wrinkled in distaste.
Miss Foster's lip parted to reply, but she hesitated. "I . . ."
Mrs. Webb interrupted, "No, the names were something else, I recall. Austen, Gray, and Vincent, I believe. I thought of investing in their first bank a few years ago—such charming men and so certain of their success. But in the end, Mr. Webb talked me out of it."
Mrs. Morgan nodded. "Sounds like Nicholas. He had a good head for business and always made excellent decisions."
"Except in his choice of spouse, I think you mean, sister dear?" Mrs. Webb said archly, leaving everyone listening to understand Mrs. Morgan had not approved of her brother's choice of wife.
The attention had been deflected from Miss Foster, but William did not miss her averted gaze and distracted manner. There was something to the bank story, he guessed. He felt grateful to Andrew's aunt for diverting the conversation.
"Has Mr. Webb been gone long?" William asked kindly. He did not recall hearing anything about the man's death, which was understandable as the Webbs did not live in the area.
"Two years," she replied. "Hence you see me out of my widow's weeds. Never cared for black."
"Nor I," William said wryly, since clergymen stereotypically wore black, though he preferred not to.
Humor sparked in the woman's eyes, and she chuckled appreciatively.
"I don't see anything funny." Mrs. Morgan sniffed.
Mrs. Webb said, "Olive, do be a dear and allow me to sit by Mr. Chapman and Miss Foster. I think I shall enjoy their company."
"But . . . you are one of our honored guests, sister. I planned for you to sit on Mr. Morgan's right."
"Oh, I can talk to him tomorrow. Humor me."
Mrs. Morgan sighed. "Very well."
Andrew, who had been cornered by several men clustered around the decanters, broke away from the group and strode over beaming. "Will, good to see you. And Miss Foster, thank you for coming." He looked around. "But where is Miss Chapman?"
William made her apologies.
Andrew's smile fell. "I am very sorry to hear it. I had been looking forward to seeing her again. Er, seeing all of you, of course. You will tell her she was missed, won't you, ol' boy?"
"I shall."
"It's no use trying to sit by either Mr. Chapman or Miss Foster," Mrs. Webb teased. "For I have claimed them as my dinner companions."
Andrew smiled at the woman. "I knew you were an excellent judge of character, Aunt Webb."
"Yes, of course. Do tell Miss Chapman we hope she feels better," Mrs. Morgan interjected. Then she abruptly turned to Miss Foster and asked, "And how old is your sister, Miss Foster?"
"Nineteen."
"Ah yes, the perfect age to enjoy the season. Miss Padgett had a very successful season last year. Did you not, my dear? Yes, you see, Miss Padgett is not yet twenty. So young and full of life. I was married at eighteen, you know. It is so much better when the bride is young. Don't you agree, sister?"
Mrs. Webb shrugged. "I was very young when I married Nicholas, but we were not blessed with children even so."
"I already had three children by the time I was Miss Foster's age. What about you, Mrs. Padgett?"
Mrs. Padgett demurred, blushing and protesting that her hostess would not trick her into owning her age.
Meanwhile Mrs. Webb sidled closer to William and whispered, "What is my sister-in-law going on about? Does Andrew admire an older woman I don't know of?"
William sighed. "Andrew did invite my sister to come tonight, but that doesn't necessarily indicate a special regard."
"Ah. And how old is your sister?"
"Eight and twenty."
One dark brow rose. "So that is what we are calling old these days, is it? Then I am quite ancient, for I am even older than that. No doubt your sister was wise to stay home and avoid all this. Though I don't like to think of anyone cowering before my sister-in-law. Not if Andrew truly admires her."
"Again, I do not presume to guess where his affections lie."
"Yes, yes, Mr. Chapman." She patted his arm. "You are all discretion, never fear."
The butler announced that dinner was served, and people lined up according to precedence, with Mrs. Webb breaking social ranks to wait to enter the dining room with her chosen companions. Andrew, William saw, was nudged to lead in Miss Padgett. William offered an arm to Mrs. Webb, who accepted with a conspiratorial wink. Then he offered his other arm to Miss Foster.
The guests made their way into the dining room lit with candelabras and decorated with centerpieces of fruits and flowers. Footmen in livery and powdered wigs stood at attention, waiting to lay second, third, and fourth courses to a table already crowded with silver serving dishes, domed platters, and a massive soup tureen.
William held a chair for Mrs. Webb, but a footman reached Miss Foster's chair before he could do so. They sat down, and William counted himself fortunate to be seated between two lovely, intelligent women who initiated meaningful conversation and, more importantly, appreciated his sense of humor.
Abigail enjoyed Mr. Chapman's and Mrs. Webb's company as much as she enjoyed the meal: a first course of spring soup and crimped salmon, followed by duck with orange sauce and peas, braised tongue, beetroot and cucumber salad, and strawberry tartlets. Dishes were passed and savored for more than an hour. Around her, Abigail heard snatches of other conversations in progress, most of it vague pleasantries—the weather, betrothals from earlier in the season, upcoming shoots, races, and house parties.
Mrs. Morgan, a third of the way down the table, leaned forward suddenly and addressed her. "And why are you not in London, enjoying the season with your sister, Miss Foster?"
Mr. Chapman, she noticed, glanced over and watched her carefully, awaiting her response.
She said easily, "I have had my season. Two, actually. It is Louisa's turn."
"Did you enjoy your seasons?"
She shrugged. "Well enough, I suppose."
"But no offers of marriage came of it?"
"Um . . ." Abigail paused awkwardly. "Evidently not."
"Mamma!" Andrew Morgan gently chided. "Don't interrogate our guests. Besides, you are all supposed to be fawning over me and asking about my time abroad and all my adventures."
"Had you any adventures?" Mrs. Webb asked gamely.
"Give me another glass of this excellent claret and I shall tell you tales to make your ears burn."
"Hear, hear," Mrs. Webb said, lifting her glass.
"Andrew . . ." his mother warned.
"Oh, let the boy talk, my dear," Mr. Morgan senior urged. "It is why we are here after all."
And Andrew happily obliged.
Abigail silently thanked the man for coming to her rescue.
Later, as dinner was winding down and conversation quieted to small duets and trios around the long table, Abigail finally began to relax.
Mrs. Webb turned to William and asked, "I hope you don't think I am interrogating you, Mr. Chapman. But I would like to hear about your family. They all . . . live nearby . . . ?"
"Yes. My mother and father live not far from Pembrooke Park. Father is Mr. Morgan's land agent now, so that may explain why your sister-in-law takes exception to her son's choice of guests."
"Ah," she murmured noncommittally.
"I have two sisters, Leah and Kitty," William continued. "And a brother, Jacob."
"And, are they all ginger haired like you?"
"Ginger? I wouldn't go that far . . ."
He sounded almost affronted, Abigail thought, biting back a grin.
"My hair isn't as red as my father's, or my brother's for that matter," he explained. "And the girls have light brown hair, like our mother."
"I see. And they are all in good health?"
"Yes. Thank God."
"I am glad to hear it."
"And your family, Mrs. Webb?" Abigail asked. "Have you brothers or sisters?"
"I always wanted a sister," she said. "Here both of you have sisters, but I never did."
"I have one to spare if you'd like," William teased.
She smiled. "I doubt your parents would approve of that."
"Where do you live, Mrs. Webb?" Abigail added, "If you don't mind my asking. Not too far from your relatives here, I hope?"
"I have lived in several places, what with Mr. Webb being with the East India Company for many years. So no, not close to Easton, I'm afraid. In fact, I have not been here in years."
"How good of you to come for Andrew's homecoming, then."
"I was happy to come. He is a dear boy, and my husband was quite fond of him."
She looked closely at Abigail. "I do hope things have been . . . peaceful . . . since you've moved in to Pembrooke Park? No trouble?"
"Oh yes. For the most part. Very peaceful."
"For the most part? What does that mean, I wonder?"
"Oh, you know how old houses are. They creak and groan and make all sorts of odd noises. I understand the village children claim the place is haunted. But I've yet to see any evidence of that."
"I am relieved to hear it. Nothing . . . unsettling . . . since you've been there? No one where they ought not be?"
Abigail thought of the footsteps in the dust, the mislaid candle lamp, and the figure in the cloak. "I have seen no ghosts, I assure you, Mrs. Webb. And all I've heard is an old house complaining of its years and neglect, nothing more." To herself she added, I hope.
Candlelight glinted in Mrs. Webb's blue-grey eyes. "It is not the ghosts you need worry about, Miss Foster, but human beings that are very much alive."
Later, Abigail and Mr. Chapman rode home in the gig. Abigail was very aware of being alone with a man—a man she found increasingly attractive. Though she wondered if she would have found him quite so attractive had Gilbert not disappointed her.
It was late, but the moon shone brightly, and she could see Mr. Chapman's profile quite clearly. His straight nose, his firm, fair cheek. The waves of auburn hair falling over his ear, and his long, sculpted side-whiskers.
Perhaps sensing her scrutiny, he glanced over at her. "Did you enjoy yourself?" he asked.
"I did. And you?"
"Yes. More than I dared hope."
She wasn't certain what he meant but wished he would keep his eyes on the road so she could study him unobserved.
He turned the horse back toward Easton. As they passed through the sleepy hamlet, he slowed the horse to a walking pace. Candles flickered in the public house and a few other windows, but otherwise the street was quiet, shops closed, people abed for the night.
Leaving the hamlet, he clicked the horse to a trot, but the wheels hit a deep rut. The gig lurched and she swayed, knocking into his arm. Instinctively, he slid the reins into one hand and threw his other around her shoulders to steady her. "All right?"
She swallowed, self-conscious in his embrace. Self-conscious about how much she liked the warm security of his arm around her, her side pressed firmly to his. "Ye-yes. Fine."
He removed his arm and she shivered, whether from his nearness or the night air, she wasn't certain.
"You're cold," he observed. He halted the horse right there on the road and tied off the reins. He dug under the seat and pulled forth a folded wool blanket.
"I'm fine, really," she insisted. "I have my shawl."
"You're not fine. You're shivering. You females and your thin muslins. It's a wonder you don't all freeze to death."
He draped the blanket around her and settled it on her shoulders, his hands lingering. "Better?"
"Yes, except now I feel guilty that you are freezing."
"Then sit close to me and I shan't notice anything else."
Her gaze flew to his—saw his crooked grin, the playful sparkle in his eye. Sitting close as they were, their faces were very near. His breath was warm and smelled of cinnamon. Or perhaps that was his cologne. Whatever it was, it was spicy and masculine and made her want to lean nearer yet.
The horse stamped his hoof impatiently, no doubt eager to return to his stall and feed bucket.
She did not purposely move closer to him, but as the rock and sway of the carriage brought them nearer together, their shoulders brushing and occasionally their knees, she did not pull away, nor attempt to keep a proper distance between them. She did not want him to freeze, after all, she told herself, knowing all the while it was schoolgirl logic Louisa might have used to justify flirting with a man, but at the moment, not caring. It was dark, and they were alone, and dash it, it was cold. She liked the man, and she trusted him enough to know he would not take advantage of any of those factors. At least, not inappropriate advantage.
When they reached Pembrooke Park, Mr. Chapman tied off the reins and alighted from the gig. Coming around, he reached up, but instead of offering one hand to her, he lifted both. She hesitated, meeting his gaze with brows raised in question.
In a low voice, he said, "May I?"
His gloved hands hovered near her waist. In reality, she could have managed the step down with only a hand to assist her, but she pressed her lips together and silently nodded.
He grasped her waist and gently lifted, lowering her easily to the ground. For a moment longer, his hands remained, and he murmured, "You do have a tiny waist."
His hands felt large, strong, and sure. She swallowed nervously. Uncomfortable standing there so close to him, yet in no hurry to step away.
Behind him, the front door opened, and he released her. Glancing over, she saw Duncan standing in the doorway, candle lamp in hand.
With a rueful smile, Mr. Chapman offered his arm. Abigail placed her gloved hand on his sleeve and he tucked it into the crook of his elbow. Together they walked to the house.
"You two were out late," Duncan observed, his eyes narrowed. In suspicion, or disapproval?
"The dinner party was quite a long affair," Mr. Chapman said, coming to her defense.
Abigail added, "I didn't realize we would be back quite so late. Thank you for waiting up."
"I am surprised a clergyman thinks it wise to be out so late. And without a chaperone yet. I seem to recall someone giving me a setdown for keeping a lady out after dark once upon a time."
Insolent man, Abigail thought, torn between offense and curiosity. Who did he mean?
"That situation was entirely different, as you will recall," Mr. Chapman replied. "The lady in question was out without her parents' consent."
Duncan rebutted, "As is Miss Foster, I believe."
Mr. Chapman met the man's challenging glare. "Your concern for your mistress is touching, Duncan. Take care your respect equals that concern."
Aware of the mounting tension between the men, visible in their clenched jaws and taut postures, Abigail extracted herself from Mr. Chapman's arm and said gently, "It is late, and I had better go in. Thank you again for the lovely evening, Mr. Chapman. And do give your sister my best."
# Chapter 10
In the morning, Abigail lay snug in bed for a time, thinking back to the dinner party the night before, and the carriage ride home with Mr. Chapman. Mr. William Chapman . . . She liked his name.
She had not liked Duncan's reception when they'd arrived home. His sneering disapproval had spoiled an otherwise lovely evening. Had she done wrong, in spending so much time alone in the curate's company? She hoped not.
She recalled a few other moments that had been less than idyllic as well. Mrs. Morgan asking her in front of all of those people if her seasons had resulted in any offers of marriage. And later, Mrs. Webb's comment, "It is not the ghosts you need worry about, but human beings that are very much alive." Abigail wondered if she referred to treasure hunters in general or some specific human.
She rose, wrapped her shawl around herself, and wandered over to her mother's bedchamber. She stood at the window, looking toward the church. The grey day seemed as ambivalent as she—not sunny, but not raining. A fine mist hung in the air like a gauzy grey curtain. The window glass was foggy, and what lay beyond was as difficult to see as her future.
She tried to hold on to the happiness she had felt in the carriage the night before, but the quiet, lonely house drew it from her—her family so far away, Gilbert even farther . . .
Something caught her eye. A figure beyond the low churchyard wall. Abigail wiped a circle in the foggy glass and peered closer. Was it Eliza Smith again? Whoever it was wore a dark blue cape and hat with a heavy veil over her face. Her head bowed.
Perhaps it wasn't Eliza. Perhaps it was a widow come to visit her recently deceased husband. Or a mother grieving her child. She would ask Mr. Chapman if a family in the parish had suffered a recent loss.
Whatever the case, the sight of the lone figure in the misty grey churchyard moved Abigail with pity.
Several days later, two letters arrived for Abigail—the first was from her mother.
Dear Abigail,
Your father is sorry the bankruptcy business has kept him in London for so long—far longer than he anticipated. We trust you are managing fine on your own, as usual. But do let us know if you are unhappy or need anything. I must say, it is a balm having your father here with us at this time. Things are not progressing quite as well as when last I wrote, and his company is a comfort.
Unfortunately, the details of the bank incident have become public and have begun to overshadow Louisa's season—for otherwise I have no doubt she would be an absolute triumph. As it is, she has been overlooked by a few highly placed parties who would no doubt be clamoring for her attention if not for the banking scandal. A few gentlemen have continued to call in spite of these circumstances, which are of course quite beyond poor Louisa's control. Their parents, however, do not share their enthusiasm. Regardless of these few setbacks and the occasional cut direct or spiteful comment, Louisa seems blithely and blessedly unaware and remains in good spirits.
Gilbert Scott continues to impress wherever he goes. It is a comfort to know that his regard has not been affected by the news of our change in circumstances.
Abigail's heart plummeted, thoughts of William Chapman fading. Gilbert . . . how she missed him. And would go on missing him apparently. She sighed and set the letter aside.
Hoping for something diverting, she opened the second letter, another old page torn from a journal.
The secret room. Apparently its location has been lost over generations and renovations. Does it even still exist? Did it ever? My father certainly thinks so. Why his sudden determination to find it now, when he lived in this very house as a boy? Has he some reason to believe something valuable has recently been hidden there?
The servants swear ignorance. The steward scoffs at the idea of hidden treasure. But that does not dissuade my father. He searches. He taps. He pokes. He pulls books from floor-to-ceiling bookcases. He looks behind portraits and up flues. He swears and curses and keeps looking. Occasionally in his frustration, he drinks himself into a stupor, and for a few days or a week he gives it up. But then another bill comes, or he sees a blood horse he wishes to buy, and he begins his frantic searching all over again.
A few days ago, he unearthed stacks of house plans and pored over them for hours. He hid them from the servants and even my brothers—not wanting to give anyone ideas. Not trusting anyone.
But he didn't hide them from me. I don't think he believes a mere girl capable of finding anything he cannot. He doesn't see me as a threat. In fact, I think he barely sees me at all.
So I waited until he left the house and looked at those drawings myself. I admit I can make no sense of them. Cannot decipher which solid or dashed lines mean original vs. new walls vs. doors or windows. And in truth, I have no idea which of the plans has even been carried out. For the drawers of the library map table hold more house plans than actual maps, it seems to me.
But one thing did catch my eye. A detail in those plans that does not jibe with something I have seen in the house itself. Or am I not thinking of the actual house at all, but rather its scale model? I think I will compare the dolls' house to the plans tomorrow. . . .
Abigail felt a thrill of anticipation skitter up the back of her neck. Perhaps she could see something in the house plans the writer had missed. It might be worth a try. At any rate, she would certainly find the search interesting.
She went down to the library, folded back the window shutters, and stepped to the large map desk near the center of the room. She pulled out the deep, shallow drawers in order, starting at the top left and working her way down. There were old maps of the world, the West Indies, Europe, England, London, Berkshire, the parish, and the estate grounds.
Finally she found a sheaf of old drawings—building plans—yellowed with age. Were they the latest? Had the plans been implemented, or had they been passed over in favor of some other architect's vision? She spread them atop the map table and flipped through them quickly, looking for dates. She found an old one marked with roman numerals from the 1600s. It showed a central manorial hall with side wings for stabling, a gate, and a porter's lodge, which no longer existed. In fact someone had written Destroyed over it. By fire, most likely.
She flipped through several more pages until she found a plan that looked more recent. She saw no date, but the block handwriting seemed more modern and the ink less faded than the others. In this plan, a new addition had been built in the rear courtyard of the house, adding a drawing room below and a bedchamber above. That plan or at least one very like it had been carried out. The bedchamber above the drawing room was the newer one she planned to give Louisa. There were a few other details she was less sure of. If only Gilbert were there to help her understand everything she was looking at.
She retrieved a notebook and drawing pencil, donned bonnet, spencer, and gloves, and went outside on the temperate May afternoon. She slowly walked along the front of the house, surveying its exterior, noting the oriel windows, the gabled roof, and chimney stacks. She started toward the side of the house but paused at the sound of trotting horse hooves.
She turned and watched as a well-dressed gentleman on a dappled grey horse rode across the bridge. Andrew Morgan. He raised a hand in greeting and nudged his horse across the drive in her direction.
"Hello, Miss Foster."
"Mr. Morgan. Nice to see you again."
"I am out today issuing more invitations. Do you think I shall have better luck this time?"
With Leah Chapman, she guessed he meant. "I don't know, but one can always hope."
"Precisely. That is exactly what I am doing. How is Miss Chapman, by the way? Have you seen her?"
"I have. And she seems quite . . . recovered."
"Excellent. I am just on my way over to pay a call. In the flush of success from her little dinner party, Mother has decided to outdo herself by hosting a masquerade ball at Hunts Hall, just as we used to do back home. You are invited, of course. I do hope you will join us."
"Thank you. When is it to be?"
"The tenth of June. She is planning to invite friends from Town as well." Parroting his mother, he said with exaggerated hauteur, "'It is to be Easton's social event of the year.'"
"Of the decade, by the sound of it," Abigail amended.
"I shall tell her you said so. It will give her something to crow about to all her friends."
Abigail grinned.
"Good day, Miss Foster." Mr. Morgan tipped his hat.
"Good day, Mr. Morgan."
Before Abigail could continue her study of the exterior, a carriage and horses rumbled over the bridge. Goodness. Today was her day for receiving callers, apparently. She waited near the door while the yellow post chaise crunched across the drive and halted in front of the house.
A groom hopped down, opened the door, and let down the step. Her father alighted—he had returned at long last! Abigail felt unaccustomed tears prick her eyes. She had not realized how lonely she had been until that moment. She blinked the tears away, put on a smile, and walked forward to greet him.
"Hello, Papa. Welcome back."
She hesitated, not sure she should expect an embrace considering the rift between them, especially when he had spent the last several weeks dealing with tedious bankruptcy proceedings she might have prevented.
He gave her a weary smile and kissed her cheek. "Abigail. Good to see you looking so well. I have been worried about you, here all alone."
Her heart squeezed. "I am well, Papa, as you see."
"You weren't too lonely without us?"
"I . . . no, I managed just fine. Though I am of course glad you're here now."
"Well. Good. Good."
"Come inside, Papa. I shall call for tea."
"I confess I could drink a whole pot and eat half a loaf after that journey."
"That I can manage as well." She took his arm, and together they walked inside, Pembrooke Park immediately feeling more like home.
Her study of the house and building plans would wait.
William sat sipping tea with his mother and sister in their cottage when Andrew Morgan stopped by to invite him and Leah to a ball. His sister received his friend's invitation with cool reserve, saying only that she would think about it. William had not pressed her at the time, not wishing to embarrass her in front of his friend. Though he didn't miss their mother's look of concern.
Once Andrew left, Kate Chapman said gently, "You might have at least thanked Mr. Morgan for the invitation."
"But I don't wish to go," Leah said.
Their mother's face clouded. "My dear, you've had so little entertainment in your life, enjoyed such limited society."
"By design," Leah said, then added quickly, "and by preference."
"Whose preference?" William asked. "Yours or Papa's?"
"William . . ." His mother frowned.
"I mean no disrespect, Mamma," he said. "But Leah is not a little girl any longer. I don't know why Papa insists on sheltering her so."
His father entered the house at that moment, pulling off his hat. He paused in the doorway, looking from one guilty face to the next. "What's all this, then?"
"Mac," his mother began, choosing each word carefully, "Mr. Morgan called to invite Leah . . . and William . . . to attend a ball at Hunts Hall. Isn't that nice? Wouldn't it be nice for our Leah, who's never had the opportunity to attend anything so grand?"
"I don't want to go, Papa," Leah said quickly. "It's all right."
"But, Leah," his mother insisted, "you ought to go to a ball. Every girl should, at least once in her life."
His father dropped his hat on the sideboard. "She doesn't want to go, Kate. Why push her?"
"Why don't you want to go, Leah?" William asked. "What are you afraid of?"
His sister did not deny the charge. She ducked her head, twisting her hands before her.
"Leave your sister alone, Will. You don't understand—that's all."
"Nor have I ever understood why you are so overprotective."
His father's eyes flashed. "That's right. You don't understand. So keep out of it."
"Mac . . ." Kate breathed.
William, too, was taken aback by his father's sharp reprimand. He prayed for wisdom, took a deep breath, and tried again. "The Morgans are a perfectly respectable family."
"That may be," his father allowed, "but we don't have any idea who else might be attending this soiree of theirs." He spit out the word as if it were burnt gristle.
"I am sure they are inviting other respectable people. What are you worried about?"
"It's all right," Leah repeated. "I haven't a proper gown anyway, and would no doubt make a fool of myself."
"But you love to dance, Leah," William insisted. "And so rarely have opportunity, beyond our little family Christmas parties. You learnt at school, I remember. And forced me to master every dance you knew."
"That was a long time ago."
"Perhaps Miss Foster might give us a refresher course. She no doubt knows the newer dances. And I'm sure Andrew Morgan would be happy to assist." He attempted a teasing grin, but Leah did not return it.
He added, "And if we embarrass ourselves by turning left when we are supposed to turn right, we shall have our masks on, remember, so no one shall know who we are."
"Masks?" their father asked.
"Yes, it's to be a masquerade ball."
"Is it?" Their father considered, chewing his lip. "And you would be there with her all the while?"
"I would," William assured him. "I would make certain no man made inappropriate advances to Leah, if that is what you are worried about."
Leah reddened, protesting, "I hardly think we need worry about that—at my age."
Their father looked at Leah. "Perhaps they are right, my dear. Perhaps it is time you enjoyed yourself. Started living."
She threw up her hands. "And what do you call what I've been doing?"
"Waiting." He flicked a look at William and said no more.
Leah sighed and excused herself, saying she would consider what her family had said.
After they taught Sunday school the following Sabbath, Abigail led the children in two hymns, then helped Leah pick up supplies and tidy the church.
Adding another slate to the stack in her arms, Abigail asked quietly, "So, are you going to the masquerade ball?"
"I don't know. I told my family I would think about it. But I am not familiar with the new dances and haven't a proper costume, so . . ." She allowed her words to trail off on a shrug.
"The invitation simply read, 'Masks required.' So I think we may wear traditional ball gowns and masks. You are welcome to one of my gowns. And I would be happy to teach you the popular dances, though I'm no dancing master."
"William suggested you might be willing to do so. But I couldn't ask that of you."
"You are not asking; I am offering. And I have several ball gowns. Not this year's style, but you might find one to suit you. We are not so different in size. If not, I shan't be offended."
"I am sure they're lovely, but—"
"Please. Come over and at least look. All right?"
"Go to Pembrooke Park . . . ?"
"It isn't haunted, I promise. And my father is back, so we shan't be alone in the house. Or I could bring a few gowns over to your house, if you prefer."
"No, it isn't right for me to ask that of you." Leah lifted her chin. "I shall come." She bit her lip. "May I bring someone from my family along?"
"Of course. Bring Kitty. I've been meaning to ask her over again in any case."
"Very well. I shall."
They had agreed to a time for the following afternoon. When the hour neared, Abigail began listening for the door, and when she heard the bell, hurried eagerly from her room. Descending the stairs, she glanced down into the hall and saw Duncan opening the door to their visitors, the Miss Chapmans. Even from that distance, Abigail could see his posture tense.
For a moment, he stood there not saying a word. Not ushering them inside.
Leah, she noticed, dipped her head and murmured an awkward hello.
Kitty showed no such reticence. "We're here to see Miss Foster," she announced. "We've been invited."
Abigail crossed the hall. "That's right. You are very welcome. I've been expecting you."
At this, Duncan turned stiffly and stalked away. She watched him go, then turned a questioning look toward Leah, but she merely shrugged with an apologetic little smile.
One of these days, she would ask about Duncan's history with the Chapmans. But not today, when Leah had finally agreed to her first visit.
"Come in, come in," Abigail urged.
Kitty beamed and walked in eagerly, but Leah hovered on the threshold, glancing warily around the hall and up to its soaring ceiling. Mr. Foster came out of the library for a moment to greet their guests before retreating back to his books and newspapers once more.
Abigail asked Miss Chapman, "Do you want to tour the house first, or proceed directly to the gowns?"
Leah's gaze strayed from one formal portrait to the next. "So much to see . . ."
"Have you been in the house before?" Abigail asked.
"Years ago. With my father."
"Ah. Back when he worked here."
She nodded vaguely. "How strange to walk through that front door. After all these years. . . ."
"I can imagine," Abigail agreed.
Kitty grabbed her sister's arm. "Come on, Leah. Let's go upstairs."
Leah resisted the younger girl's tug, her wide-eyed gaze following the stairway up to the first landing.
Abigail wondered why she was so nervous. Was it more than the rumors? Did she have some bad experience with one of the former occupants? Had one of the Pembrooke brothers she'd heard about been cruel to the neighbor girl—the steward's daughter?
Giving up, Leah allowed her sister to pull her toward the stairs. Leah looked ruefully over her shoulder at Abigail. "Sorry. Perhaps I ought to have come alone."
"That's all right. I can guess where she's headed."
They ascended the stairs, Leah's head swiveling back and forth, taking in the framed portraits, tapestries, and intricately carved panels. Abigail followed, oddly proud of the house and its ability to awe, though she was only a tenant.
At the top of the stairs, Leah paused before a glass display table filled with framed miniature portraits and silhouettes, but again Kitty tugged her along. Abigail knew the girl's goal—the dolls' house.
As they approached her bedchamber, Leah hesitated again, staring at the door.
"Come on, Leah. I want you to see the dolls' house," Kitty insisted.
"It's all right," Abigail assured Leah.
Leah formed an unconvincing smile and allowed Kitty to lead her into the room, Abigail trailing behind.
Kitty went at once to the dolls' house on its stand and knelt before it. Leah followed more slowly, turning in a slow circle to take in the canopied bed, the window seat, the wardrobe. She reached out a hand and touched the bed-curtains. Then the smooth oak surface of the dressing table.
"It's lovely, isn't it?" Abigail asked gently.
"Yes, it is," Leah breathed. "You have a charming room."
"It isn't mine," Abigail said with a shrug. "But I am glad I have the use of it for a while."
"So am I."
Leah gave her a genuine smile, and Abigail's heart warmed. Maybe they'd become good friends yet.
"Come and see," Kitty urged, and Leah went over to stand at her sister's shoulder. "Isn't it wonderful?"
"It is indeed."
"Have you ever seen anything like it?"
"Not in ages, no."
Abigail wondered if Leah had ever played with the daughter of the house. They'd been neighbors, after all.
Abigail turned to open the trunk she'd asked Duncan to bring in earlier. But for several minutes, Leah remained where she was, her gaze fastened on her little sister so enthralled with the dolls' house.
Abigail returned to Leah's side, watching as Kitty moved a small doll up the stairs and laid her on a canopied bed. Abigail glanced at Leah's profile, expecting to see an indulgent smile there. Instead, she was surprised to see tears in the woman's eyes.
Leah must have sensed her gaze. She glanced over and self-consciously wiped at her eyes. "I'm fine. It's just . . . good to see her so happy."
Abigail awkwardly reached out and squeezed Leah's hand. "She is more than welcome to come here and play any time she likes."
Leah blinked away the tears, then looked at Abigail with a distracted smile. "You are very kind. She would enjoy that, obviously."
"Come, let's look at the gowns. I was never a diamond of the first water, I'm afraid. I hope you aren't disappointed."
"I'm sure I won't be."
Abigail removed a protective layer of tissue and began lifting gowns from the trunk and laying them on her bed. She smoothed her hand over an elegant off-white muslin with an embroidered bodice and sheer lace over-sleeves. Its full skirt had a slightly shorter hem to allow for freedom of movement in dancing.
"I was thinking this one might look well with your coloring. But you are welcome to any that suit your fancy."
"It's lovely," Leah breathed.
"Would you like to try it on? See how it fits you? We have time to make a few alterations if needed."
A girlish smile dimpled Leah's cheeks. "Very well. If you'll help me."
Abigail happily did so, unfastening the back of Leah's day dress and then helping her on with the ball gown and lacing up the back.
Leah looked down at her neckline, pressing a self-conscious hand to her décolletage. "It's a little low, isn't it? I feel as though all is on display."
"Not at all. It's the fashion for evening wear. Though we could always tuck a little lace, if you prefer."
Abigail turned Leah toward the long cheval looking glass in the corner. "It's very becoming on you."
Leah looked at herself, unable to suppress the smile that sprung to her face.
"You're right—the dress is beautiful."
"You're beautiful, Leah," Kitty said in breathless awe, her attention lured away from the dolls' house at last. "You look like a duchess."
"I feel like one in this," she allowed, holding out the skirt and swaying side to side.
Abigail smiled. "Then you'll wear it?"
"But it's yours."
"I've had my joy of it. It is your turn. I hope you don't mind that I've worn it before you."
"Not at all. I haven't a mask, but I am sure I can fashion one. . . ."
Abigail dug once more in the trunk. "I have several from masquerades I attended in past seasons." She held up three. "If you'd like to wear one of them."
Leah selected the largest of them. "Perfect. Thank you. But what shall you wear?"
"I think this one." She held up a small oriental mask ornamented with glass beads. "And this dress."
Abigail set aside the mask and lifted a ball gown of white-on-white striped muslin with a low square neckline, a high belt of green, and matching green ribbon trim on its short, puffed sleeves. "What do you think?"
"It's lovely. When did you last wear it?"
Abigail thought. "At the Albrights' May ball." She had danced with Gilbert that night, she recalled, with a wistful little sigh. "And here I thought my dancing days were over."
"Yours, Miss Foster? Then what about mine? I am several years older than you are."
Abigail cocked her head to the side and regarded her new friend. "Oh, I think your dancing days are just beginning."
Later, as they left Abigail's room, gown folded over Leah's arm, Kitty pointed across the gallery. "We think that was Mr. Pembrooke's room." She gestured to the right. "And that was his wife's."
Leah's eyes lingered on the closed doorways. She looked over at Abigail. "Would you mind terribly if I peeked in?"
"Not at all. Go ahead."
Abigail followed as the Miss Chapmans crossed the gallery. Leah slowly opened the door and entered the mistress's bedroom—the room they assumed had been occupied by Mrs. Pembrooke—and the Mrs. Pembrooke before that.
Hands behind her back, Abigail stepped inside and glanced around the room once more. "My mother shall have this room, when she arrives."
"Yes," Leah said quietly. "It is perfect for the lady of the house."
Leah ran a hand over the original bedclothes, now aired and cleaned. Then she touched the recently repaired lace cover on the dressing table. She fingered the vanity set—perfume bottles, hand mirror, and hairbrushes, murmuring, "I cannot believe all of this is still here. . . ."
"I know. I can't believe they took so little with them when they left."
Leah turned, her gaze arrested by the portrait over the mantelpiece. The handsome gentleman in formal attire.
"Your brother believes that is Robert Pembrooke," Abigail said. "I gather he has seen another portrait of the man. Though we haven't asked your father to confirm that."
Leah nodded. "William is right."
"You met him?" Abigail asked.
"I did, yes. Though it was a long time ago."
"The other portrait is missing," Kitty said.
Leah dragged her eyes from the image to look at her sister. "Hm?"
"The portrait of the missus, to match this one. Come and see . . ."
Leah shook her head. "No, Kitty. That's Mr. Foster's room now."
"Oh, he won't mind," Abigail assured her.
Kitty led the way along the galley and into the master bedroom. She pushed open the door and stepped inside, gesturing with a sweep of her arm. "See?"
Leah looked around at the masculine bedclothes, the heavy mahogany furniture, the desk and leather-padded chair near the window. She walked slowly over, ran her fingers over the blotter on the desk, and rested her hand on the arm of the chair. Finally, she turned, glancing up with interest over the mantelpiece.
"You can tell that was hung later," Kitty insisted. "It should be a larger portrait, like the one in the other bedchamber. And I shall never believe that is Robert Pembrooke's wife."
"No," Leah agreed. "I suppose it's only natural that the new family wanted to hang their own portraits. In fact, I am rather surprised the portrait of Robert Pembrooke still hangs in the lady's bedchamber."
"I wonder where they put the one of Robert's wife," Abigail mused.
"Are you simply guessing there was such a portrait, or has someone said so?" Leah asked.
Abigail shrugged, not wanting to mention the letter. "Guessing, I suppose."
"It's a mystery," Kitty pronounced.
Leah slowly shook her head. "Not so mysterious, Kitty, surely. Someone new moves in and doesn't want someone else's wife or ancestor staring down at them in their beds? Doesn't sound like a mystery to me."
Kitty flicked a hand toward the portrait. "Who'd want that old biddy staring down at them instead?"
"Kitty . . ." Leah gently admonished. "That isn't kind."
"Mac said she might have been Robert Pembrooke's old nurse," Abigail commented. "Do you recognize her?"
Leah shook her head. "I have never seen her, that I recall."
Abigail considered the portrait. "You have to admit she is a stern-looking woman of considerable years," she said diplomatically. "And all that black crepe . . ."
"And those eyes . . ." Kitty shuddered.
"All right, you two—that's enough," Leah said. "You shall give yourself nightmares." Leah gave one last glance at the portrait, and admitted, "And I might not be far behind."
The gowns for the masked ball settled upon, Abigail's thoughts moved next to the dancing. She spoke to William Chapman about the brush-up class he had suggested, and he in turn paid a call on Andrew Morgan, who eagerly agreed to join them. The dance practice was arranged for Saturday. Mrs. Chapman offered to accompany them on the Pembrooke Park pianoforte. Abigail invited her father to join them, but he declined.
At the appointed hour, Abigail and Leah entered the salon together.
Inside, Mr. Chapman and Mr. Morgan rose as one. Mr. Chapman watched his sister's face carefully, Abigail noticed, while Mr. Morgan bowed, looking confident and eager.
"Shall we begin?" Abigail suggested. "As there are only four of us, perhaps the Foursome Reel?"
Mrs. Chapman, already seated at the pianoforte, struck a few experimental notes. The old instrument was out of tune but would suffice.
The gentlemen stepped toward the center of the room, while Leah hovered near her mother.
Abigail and Mr. Morgan demonstrated the opening steps, while the Chapmans watched. Then, so that each couple had the benefit of an experienced partner, Abigail suggested Mr. Morgan dance with Miss Chapman, while she danced with Leah's brother.
Leah reluctantly crossed the room to join them. Together, they walked through the dance the first time, then again up to tempo. Mr. Morgan, Abigail saw, gently whispered or gestured to Leah, or turned her in the right direction when she needed a reminder. Soon both William and Leah had mastered the steps and patterns.
Abigail realized this "class" was a good reminder for her as well, as she had not danced in nearly a year. "All right, Mrs. Chapman, I think we're ready for music."
Mrs. Chapman nodded, and Abigail said to the others, "I will call out the steps the first time through to remind you. Watch Mr. Morgan if you forget what to do."
Mrs. Chapman launched into the jaunty introductory bars. Then Abigail said, "Ready, and . . . set to your partner."
Leah and Mr. Morgan began the swishing side-to-side step, which Leah performed with lithe grace, looking more like a young debutante than a woman nearing thirty. Andrew Morgan danced with effortless skill, his eyes lingering on her appreciatively.
Leah glanced up and, finding Mr. Morgan looking at her so closely, ducked her head. But not before Abigail saw the blushing smile on her pretty face.
Would a man like Andrew Morgan—eldest son and heir of Hunts Hall—take a respectable interest in a steward's daughter? Abigail hoped so. She prayed Andrew Morgan's intentions were honorable—and extended well beyond fondness for a friend's sister.
Mr. Chapman, meanwhile, danced quite competently beside her, step for step, their hands and sides occasionally brushing, as they moved through the dance. Abigail tentatively met his gaze, as etiquette dictated. In return, he smiled warmly down at her. When the dance called for the joining of hands, his long fingers enveloped hers, and Abigail felt their warmth spread through her.
Abigail realized she had missed dancing, especially with an attentive, handsome partner like William Chapman. She'd forgotten the pleasure of whirling hand in hand, or skipping down a line of friendly faces, and returning smiles of men and women alike. Of good company, good cheer, and good music. Perhaps she was not quite ready to put herself on the shelf after all.
Once more she glanced at Leah, who seemed to be enjoying herself as well. She wanted to say to her new friend, "See? You are here in Pembrooke Park, and nothing bad has happened." But she made do with catching Leah's eye and sharing a smile.
William Chapman was enjoying the dance lesson more than he'd imagined he would. He could barely keep his eyes from Miss Foster, noticing the graceful sway of her slender figure in a becoming gown, the pink flush of happy exertion in her cheeks, the dark curls bouncing at her temples.
He enjoyed the feel of her smaller hands in his as they turned around each another, her lovely profile several inches below his. Her skin shone smooth and fair, her dark brows well-defined arches above her lovely brown eyes. She looked up at him and smiled into his face. His chest tightened, and he returned the gesture, though a little unsteadily.
Standing so near her, he smelled rose water and springtime in her hair, and longed to kiss her cheek right then and there. Knowing his mother was in the same room helped him overcome the urge.
He reminded himself that this young woman was a member of his congregation, his flock. But at that moment, he wished she were far more.
They went on to learn two newer country dances and another reel, then finished with a review of the customary last dance of many a ball, the Boulanger. When the final tune ended, everyone clapped for his mother.
She beamed at them. "Well done, one and all." She glanced at the long-case clock and rose. "Good heavens, I had better get home and check on dinner or it shall be eggs and cold kippers." She smiled good-naturedly and gathered her shawl.
"Thank you so much for playing for us," Miss Foster said. "I for one enjoyed every minute of it."
William and Morgan were quick to agree. Even Leah nodded shyly.
Miss Foster continued, "May I suggest one more class before the ball?"
Everyone assented, and they picked another day and time.
William left a short while later, relieved to know the skills he'd learned during his years at Oxford had not evaporated in the intervening months. He was also relieved to see Leah looking more relaxed and enjoying herself. He was not quite sure how he felt about his friend's obvious interest in his sister, and again prayed Leah wouldn't end up being hurt.
# Chapter 11
William glanced from the vestry into the nave, and his heart sank. Empty. Was no one coming? Would he be forced to read the annual prayers in honor of the King's birthday to vacant pews? The ill monarch was still a popular figure—far more so than his son, the prince regent—though the regency and the weather had cast a pall over the day.
William could usually count on his family to attend prayers during the week, if no one else, but his mother and sister were spending the day with their grandmother, who had taken a fall. And his father had been called out early that morning to help a tenant repair a fence before all of his livestock escaped. In the absence of his parish clerk, William went into the entry porch and rang the bell himself, then returned to the vestry.
Resigned to the lonely task, William donned a white surplice, determined to do his duty—flock or not.
He reentered the unoccupied church and stepped to the reader's desk with a sigh.
The outer door banged open, and a figure scuttled in beneath a dripping umbrella, slipping on the slick threshold. He glimpsed wet half boots and damp skirt hems. The umbrella lowered, revealing its bearer's face.
William's heart rose. Miss Foster.
He felt comingled relief and embarrassment to have her witness his failure to draw a crowd.
She looked about her, uncertainty etched on her brow. "Did I mistake the time?"
"No. I was just about to begin."
Shaking the rain from her umbrella, she said, "I am sorry I'm late. I thought if I waited, the rain might lessen. But quite the opposite, I'm afraid. No doubt that's what has kept the others at home."
How kind of her. "Thank you for braving the weather, Miss Foster."
She shrugged, uncomfortable under his praise. "Easy for me. I live the closest. Save for you." She hesitated. "My father . . . isn't much of a churchgoer, I am afraid. I hope you aren't offended."
"Not at all. Won't you be seated?"
"Oh yes, of course. Forgive me, I'm holding you up." She left her wet umbrella and walked forward, her heels echoing across the nave.
She straightened her bonnet and took her customary seat. She looked charming with coils of dark hair made springy by the dampness framing her glistening face.
He cleared his throat and began, "Today we meet to honor our venerated sovereign, King George the Third. And to pray for divine healing and protection in his fragile state of health."
He looked down at the official prayer he was meant to read but hesitated. He glanced up once more.
Miss Foster sat there, hands clasped in her lap in the posture of dutiful listener.
He admitted, "I feel silly standing here, pretending to talk to a crowd."
Lips parted, she glanced to the side as though to verify he was talking to her. "You . . . don't look silly."
He stepped from behind the desk and walked toward her. "Would you mind if we made this less formal, since it is only the two of us?"
"Not at all."
He placed a hand on the low door of the enclosed box. "May I?"
"Of course," she said, but he did not miss the convulsion of her long white throat as she swallowed.
William sat beside her, several feet of space between them on the pew.
"Shall we pray?"
She nodded and solemnly closed her eyes. For a moment he sat there, taking advantage of her closed eyes and proximity to look at her, allowing his gaze to linger on the fan of long, dark lashes against her fair cheek, her sweet upturned nose, and delicate pink lips. Then he cleared his throat and shut his own eyes—not that he felt closed eyes were required to commune with his creator, but he knew he needed to block out this particular feminine distraction.
"Almighty God, we pray for King George, as you have instructed us to pray for the leaders you have placed in authority over us. We ask that you, Great Physician, touch his body and his mind and restore him to health. We pray for his son, the prince regent, who rules in his stead, and ask you to guide him. Oh, that he would seek to walk in your ways.
"Father, we are grateful that you are our perfect eternal King, sovereign forever, and that you love us and forgive us and adopt us as son and daughter. We are in reality unworthy peasants, but you see us as prince and princess, children of the King, through the sacrifice of your Son, Jesus, our savior and deliverer, and it is in His name we pray. Amen."
"Amen," she echoed.
They sat there a few moments in silence, William looking straight ahead, knowing he should move away but not wishing to.
She asked quietly, "Is that what you'd planned to say?"
He shrugged. "I prayed what was in my heart. If you would prefer I read the formal prayer, I will happily oblige. . . ."
"That's not necessary. I was only curious. I like that you are less formal in your prayers and sermons. Less practiced."
"Less practiced," he repeated with a quick grin. "Now you sound like the parishioners who admonish me to practice more to make up for the deficiencies of my delivery."
He felt her gaze on his profile and wondered what she saw.
She said, "I can hardly conceive of a more difficult profession. People can be nearly impossible to please, but you have to be polite and react with Christian forbearance and pretend to care about each and every grievance."
"I hope I do more than pretend to care."
"Yes, I think you do. I see that you care about your parishioners. In word and deed. You have my sincere admiration—you and your sister both."
He looked at her, taken aback by her praise. His heart warmed, and he sat taller against the hard wooden pew. She gazed at the altar, with no coy or flirtatious looks or apparent awareness of the deep compliment she had paid him, nor her effect on him.
The candle on the reader's desk guttered and swayed in the draughty nave. The rain tapped against the roof, and in the distance, thunder rumbled. His stomach grumbled in reply, and William felt his neck heat in mild embarrassment. He braved a sideways glance at her.
She grinned. "Hungry?"
"Very."
It was on the tip of his tongue to invite her into the parsonage for something to eat, only a few feet beyond the vestry door. But he knew he should not. Not just the two of them alone in his rooms.
As if reading his mind, she said, "Would you like to come over to the manor and join me for tea? Do you think that would be all right, since my father is there?" She added, "I suppose you have to be very careful."
Very careful indeed, he thought. The eyes of God—and Mrs. Peterman—are everywhere.
"I have another idea," he said. "We were to have cider today after the service, in honor of the occasion. Why don't I fetch us two glasses?"
"If you like."
He rose. "I'll be right back." Making haste into the vestry, he replaced white gown with coat and hat and dashed across the rain-slashed path to the parsonage. He returned a few minutes later with a basket.
She met him in the vestry. "You're dripping wet!"
"Not too bad." He handed her the basket and shed his long coat and hat.
"You might have borrowed my umbrella."
"Now you offer," he teased. He pulled a chair from the corner of the room toward the small desk and chair against the office wall. He wished for the hundredth time the old place had heating—a simple hearth or even a stove.
He poured two glasses of cider and prised up the lid from a tin of biscuits his mother had brought over the day before.
He handed Miss Foster a glass and lifted his own. "Will you drink King George's health with me?"
"I shall indeed." She lifted her glass, and they both sipped.
He offered her the tin.
She eyed the biscuits in surprise. "Don't tell me you made these."
"What do you take me for—useful?" he quipped. "No, Mamma is the baker in the family."
Miss Foster took a bite. "And very accomplished she is."
But William's mind was not on cider or biscuits. He found his gaze lingering on Miss Foster's beguiling mouth and lovely white teeth as she nibbled dainty bites of ginger biscuit. He swallowed.
In the small room, she sat very near, their knees only inches apart, and he could smell something flowery and feminine—perfume or floral soap. He noticed a crumb on her lower lip, and watched in fascination as her pink tongue licked it away. He felt a stab of longing and took a deep, shaky breath. Steady on, Parson. Steady on.
"Miss Foster," he said, his voice low and not perfectly even. "I am very glad you came."
"To church?" she asked.
"To Pembrooke."
She smiled. "So am I."
The damp weather persisted. From the morning-room window, Abigail looked out across the drive toward the church, remembering fondly her time there with Mr. Chapman. She had seen him again during the second dance class, which Abigail thought went even better than the first. She had been so pleased to see Leah looking relaxed—and enjoying Mr. Morgan's company.
From beyond the rain-spotted glass, movement caught her eye. It was the woman in the dark blue cape and veiled hat again, walking into the churchyard, something bright yellow in her hands. Was it Eliza Smith? She had seen a small veiled hat on a peg in Mrs. Hayes's cottage, though it hadn't been a full, heavy veil like this one. And there was something about the woman's posture that suggested wealth and breeding.
Molly came in with fresh coffee and the newspaper.
"Molly, do you know who that is . . . in the churchyard?"
The lower housemaid walked over to stand beside her at the window. "No, miss. Don't recall seeing a woman in a veil like that round here before."
Abigail thanked the girl. She sat back down, took a sip of coffee, and read the headlines, but she soon found her attention returning to the churchyard. She went to the hall cupboard, pulled on a hooded mantle and gloves, and stepped outside. But by the time she crossed the drive, the woman was gone.
Abigail entered the churchyard anyway, and walked to the spot where she thought the woman had stood—if she was not mistaken, also very near the place Eliza Smith had stood not so long ago. She saw no fresh graves, no temporary crosses or sparse grass yet to grow in. By appearances this plot of graves had lain undisturbed for decades. She looked closer at the trio of headstones and read the names: Robert Pembrooke, Elizabeth Pembrooke, and Eleanor Pembrooke, Beloved Daughter, surrounded by many other Pembrookes of generations past. She supposed it wasn't so surprising that the grave of the well-liked lord of the manor should receive visits from not one but two women in as many weeks. Though this time flowers—a bouquet of yellow daffodils—had been left on Eleanor Pembrooke's grave rather than Robert's.
She looked at the death dates. Robert Pembrooke died twenty years ago, as Mr. Chapman had said. Killed in London, she now knew from the newspaper clipping. His wife and daughter had died only a few days apart the year before. Typhus, Mac had said. Poor Mr. Pembrooke, to lose his wife and child at the same time like that. How sad. His final year could not have been a happy one. And then to die so violently himself. . . .
She stood there a moment longer, missing her own mother and sister, and then returned to the house. Her father would be coming down to breakfast soon and she wanted to be there to greet him.
Another letter arrived three days later, and when Abigail read its first line, hair rose on the back of her neck, and she experienced that prickly sensation one sometimes feels when being watched. She looked at the date—the letter had been sent the day after she had visited the churchyard. How eerie and fascinating that she should receive this particular journal page after so recently visiting those particular graves.
I visited their graves today. Robert Pembrooke. Elizabeth Pembrooke. Eleanor Pembrooke. As well as my grandparents and great-grandparents. But I felt little connection to them. Only guilt. I don't feel I have any right to claim kinship with these people, nor any right to live in their house.
I put flowers on Eleanor Pembrooke's grave. After all, it is her bedchamber I occupy. Her canopied bed I sleep in. Her dolls' house I amuse myself with. She and her mother died in an epidemic that swept the parish last year. Although she was younger than I, I wish I had known her.
Father was keen to see the birth and death dates for his brother's wife and offspring, so he looked for the family Bible but could not find it. He then went and spoke to the rector, asking to see the parish records. He says familial feeling drives him. A longing for communion and closure. But I know better. He wanted to see the proof with his own eyes that his brother's family are all dead. He found the proof he was looking for, but I wished he had not.
I admit I sometimes wonder who put Robert Pembrooke in his grave. They say some nameless thief killed him. But as I listen to my father rant and hear the scurrilous things he says about his brother, I have to wonder if the thief has a name after all. A name I know all too well.
Heart pounding, Abigail read the final paragraph again. Did it imply what she thought it did? Then she remembered Mac's warning about Clive Pembrooke.
Perhaps it meant exactly that.
William called on ailing Mr. Ford. Afterward, he thought he might stop by and see Mrs. Hayes. He had not visited the woman in some time but knew his father often did so. He glanced up at the ominous sky, hoping the rain would hold off a little longer.
As he approached the house, he was surprised to see his father dropping an armload of chopped firewood near the door with a hollow clunk.
"Papa. I could have done that. Or Jacob."
"I don't mind."
"I was just going to call in. How is she?"
"About the same, physically. Though her mind is slipping." His father wiped a handkerchief over his brow and said, "You know, Will, I think it best if you leave the visiting to me."
"Oh, why?"
Mac shrugged. "We're old friends, she and I. Worked together at Pembrooke Park. Unless . . ." He glanced at the house and lowered his voice, asking, "Or is it Eliza you were hoping to see?"
"Not especially, no."
Eliza was a pleasant, pretty woman, whom William had known since childhood. In fact, one of his earliest memories was playing hide-and-seek with her belowstairs in Pembrooke Park. He might once have considered courting her—before Rebekah had turned his head and broken his heart. Before Miss Foster . . .
"Good." His father continued, "You don't want to encourage a girl like Eliza, or give others the impression you are courting her."
"What do you mean, 'a girl like Eliza,'" William asked. "An orphan?"
"No, that's not what I mean." Mac grimaced. "Never mind. I would simply prefer to call on her and her aunt myself. All right?"
There was more going on than his father wanted to tell him, William realized, but he decided not to push the matter.
"Very well, Papa. I shall leave you to it."
On his way home, a heavy rain began to fall. William put up his umbrella and braced himself for a damp walk. A short while later, he drew up short at the sight of Abigail Foster standing huddled beneath a mulberry tree on the edge of the Millers' farm.
"Miss Foster?" He diverted from the road, stepping over a puddle to reach her. As he neared, he noticed the rain had curled the hair around her face into spirals. She looked both miserable and charming. His eyes were drawn to her lips, stained dark red. The sight of those unusually red lips, in such contrast with her fair skin, captivated him. He found himself staring at her mouth. Wishing he might kiss her.
Instead he asked, "Are you all right?"
She nodded. "I went out for a walk and wasn't paying attention to the sky. This tree doesn't offer much protection, I fear, but some."
"But it does offer refreshment, I see."
"Oh. Yes." She ducked her head and tucked stained fingers behind her back. "I did eat a few mulberries. Well, more than a few. I'm wet and cold but at least not hungry." She glanced down at a stained hand. "I didn't want to spoil my gloves. This will come out, won't it?"
"Eventually."
"I must look ridiculous."
"On the contrary. You look charming. I confess I've never eaten mulberries. But on you they look delicious." Good heavens, had he just said that aloud? He felt his ears heat. Just what he needed—to draw more attention to his prominent ears.
He collected himself. "Would you care to share my umbrella, Miss Foster? I hate to see you catch your death. We have a ball tonight, remember."
"Thank you." She took a step nearer, and he positioned his umbrella over the both of them.
"And what are you doing out in the rain?" she asked.
"Calling on Mr. Ford. Recovering from an apoplexy, poor soul."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"It appears he'll be all right in time. Thank God."
"Do you pay calls in all weather?"
"When the need arises, yes, my trusty umbrella and I venture bravely forth." He smiled, hoping to make light of the comment, not wishing to boast.
"You are very kind, Mr. Chapman. Very good."
"Kind, perhaps, but only God is truly good. I am all too aware of my failings to allow you to saint me just yet."
A gust of wind blew the rain at a sharp angle, down Miss Foster's neck. She shivered.
"Here." He repositioned the umbrella directly over her head.
"But now you are getting wet," she protested. "Stand closer," she insisted, and he was only too happy to comply.
He should have simply given her his umbrella, or walked her directly home. But he was enjoying her company too much to do the practical thing. The rain fell around them like a curtain, blurring out the landscape around them.
"It's like we're all alone in the world," she said. "Under a little canopy of our own."
"Yes," he agreed, his eyes again lingering on those berry-stained lips.
"I like the rain, actually," she said, looking across the pasture. "The way it makes the colors of the leaves and flowers more vibrant. The way it smells. The way it makes you feel thoughtful and yet more alive . . ."
"My goodness, Miss Foster. That is quite poetic. And here you call yourself a practical creature."
"I am. Usually."
"Well then, I am glad I'm here to share this rare moment with you." He held her gaze a moment, then said, "Do you know, I have always thought of mulberries as bird feed."
"You've really never eaten them?"
He shook his head.
"Then you must try one." She reached out and plucked another from the tree.
"Oh no." He held up his last pair of good gloves in defense.
"Allow me. My hands are already stained."
Who could resist such an offer? He allowed her to feed him a berry, enjoying the intimate act of her delicate fingers near his lips, placing a berry in his mouth.
"Well?" she asked in eager anticipation.
He chewed, concentrating as though very serious. "Difficult to tell. A bit sour, and crunchy. Consistency of a grub."
"That's the seeds. But it shouldn't be sour. I must have given you one that wasn't quite ripe." She searched until she found a deep purple berry. "Here, try this one. It will be delicious, I promise."
He ate the berry. Then, unable to resist, he captured her upraised hand in his, bringing her purple fingers to his lips for a slow, lingering kiss.
She sucked in a little gasp of surprise, but not, he thought, displeasure.
"You're perfectly right," he said. "Delicious."
Her voice thick, she whispered, "Would you like more?"
He looked into her wide brown eyes, innocent yet unknowingly alluring. His gaze dropped to her red lips. Oh yes, he wanted more. And knew her lips would be far more to his liking than even her fingertips had been. Instead he cleared his throat. "I never knew mulberries could be quite so tempting. But for now, you and the birds are welcome to them."
He noticed her shiver again. "Here, take my coat. . . ."
"No, I couldn't."
He handed her the umbrella. "Hold this for me a moment." He shrugged out of his long greatcoat, the cold air biting his bones even through his fitted wool coat. He whipped it around her and settled it over her, enjoying the excuse to allow his hands to linger on her shoulders.
"I don't want to drag it on the ground," she said plaintively, glancing down at her ankles. Being several inches shorter than he, it grazed her hem but remained above the damp ground.
"It's fine," he assured her.
"But we can't have you catching cold. I have been here long enough to see how many people depend on you. I would never forgive myself if I caused you to fall ill."
A small price to pay for one of your smiles, he thought.
Seeing the admiration shining in her deep brown eyes, satisfaction thrummed through him. His hand reached out of its own accord and stroked her cheek. "You had better take care or your words will quite go to my head and there will be no living with me after that." Living with me? Where had that come from?
She chuckled awkwardly, ducking her head, but he noticed pink tinge her complexion.
"Only teasing, Miss Foster."
"Yes. I have come to realize how much you enjoy teasing me."
"It is quite bad of me, I know." He swallowed. "But if we stay huddled out here alone much longer, I shall be tempted to do much more than tease you."
She flashed a look up at him from beneath her lashes. What did he see there? Alarm, fear . . . hope?
He cleared his throat. "Come, Miss Foster. The rain has let up a little. Allow me to walk you home before I lose my head." Or my heart.
Again, that nervous little chuckle. "I cannot imagine the respectable clergyman doing anything improper."
"Your confidence is misplaced, Miss Foster. I daresay you are safe with me, yes. But though I may be a clergyman, I am still a man. And you, as I hope you know, are a very attractive young woman."
She blushed and averted her gaze.
He grinned. "I shall never see a mulberry again without thinking of you." He angled away and offered her his arm. "Come."
With a wobbly smile, she put her arm through his, allowing him to escort her home.
When she returned, Molly greeted her at the door. Abigail wondered briefly where Duncan was.
"Miss Foster. There you are. There's a caller come. Your father asks that you join them in the drawing room as soon as may be."
It reminded Abigail of a similar summons when Mr. Arbeau had first come to them in London. Had he returned?
"Who is it?"
Eyes wide and expectant, the girl lowered her voice and said, "A Mr. Pembrooke, miss."
Abigail started and felt her pulse race as though a ghost had been announced or a man come back from the dead. Foolish girl, she chastised herself. Not Robert Pembrooke. Hopefully not his long lost brother either, but some other more distant relation.
She met the housemaid's curious gaze as evenly as she could. "Mr. Pembrooke?" she repeated, needing to confirm the name.
The girl nodded almost frantically.
"Very well. Thank you, Molly." She thought again of Mac's warning, and the letter writer's plea that she send away anyone named Pembrooke. But he had arrived while she was out. Was it too late?
Molly helped her remove her wet things and brought a cloth for her hands and face. Then Abigail stepped to the hall mirror and tidied her hair.
The drawing room door opened, and her father came out, flushed and harried looking.
"Abigail! There you are. Thank heavens." He closed the door behind himself. "You won't believe it. A Mr. Pembrooke is here. I fear he may be the rightful owner of the place and has come to tell us he wants his house back."
Abigail's heart pounded. Oh no . . . Had he really come to ask them to leave when they had barely settled in? After all the work to ready the place—was someone else to enjoy the fruit of their labors? But if he was the owner, whose estate funds had paid for the renovations and servants, who were they to complain? Would they have to begin their house search all over again? It would be a rude awakening indeed to have to move into some small cottage or townhouse after living in magnificent Pembrooke Park.
Abigail whispered, "Has he said that's why he's come?"
"No, he hasn't stated his business, and I haven't asked him, truth be told. Didn't give him the chance to speak. I seated him, ordered tea, asked the housemaid to look for you, and then excused myself to see if you'd been found. I left him with the tea tray, no doubt set with his own china!"
"Calm yourself, Papa. We were offered this house, remember. Asked to agree to stay for a twelvemonth at least. Perhaps this isn't Mr. Arbeau's client at all. Which Mr. Pembrooke is it?"
"Said his name was Miles, I believe."
The name meant nothing to her. At least it was not Clive Pembrooke—the brother Mac had warned her about.
"All right. Well, let's not keep him waiting any longer or he will think us very rude indeed."
"Right." Her father opened the door and ushered her inside.
The gentleman seated at the tea table rose when she entered. He looked to be about thirty years old. He was of average height and impeccably dressed with brown hair swept over his forehead and sharply defined side-whiskers coming forward to a point, which emphasized his cheekbones. His eyes were dark and framed by long lashes. He was handsome, if a bit dandyish, with a quizzing glass hanging by a ribbon from his waistcoat, and a walking stick near at hand.
"Mr. Pembrooke, may I introduce my daughter, Miss Foster."
"Charmed, Miss Foster, charmed." He bowed with gentlemanly address.
Abigail curtsied. "A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pembrooke. Please, be seated."
He pulled out the chair beside him. "You will join us for tea, I hope."
"Thank you." Abigail sat in the proffered seat, Mr. Pembrooke reclaimed his seat next to hers, and her father sat across from them.
She asked, "Shall I pour?"
"If you would." Mr. Pembrooke nodded. "Ladies always seem to do so with such impeccable grace."
"Now that you have set such a high standard, Mr. Pembrooke, I shall no doubt spill it all over myself."
"I doubt that. But if you do, it shall be our secret." He smiled at her, revealing a narrow space between his front teeth. His smile lent his face a boyish quality she found disarming.
She finished pouring, handed round the plate of shortbread, and began, "You are the first Pembrooke we have had the pleasure of receiving. Is it you we have to thank for the opportunity to let this fine old house?"
"Not I, no. I have only recently returned from overseas."
"Oh . . . I see," Abigail faltered. "Then, may I ask your connection to the family? My father is keen on genealogy, but I confess, I am not as familiar with my father's Pembrooke relations."
"Are we related? Delightful!" He beamed at her. "I am so pleased to hear the old place has family living in it again. About time, I'd say."
She exchanged a quick glance with her father and felt her anxiety release a bit, like air from a balloon.
Mr. Pembrooke sipped his tea, pinky finger lifted, then set down his cup in its saucer with impeccable manners. "Forgive me. You asked about my family. My parents were Clive and Hester Pembrooke. My father was born and raised here. And later, we lived here for a time when I was a boy. I haven't been back since."
Then why are you back now? Abigail wanted to ask, but instead she gently inquired, "And where, if I may ask, are your parents living now?"
"In the ever after, Miss Foster. In the ever after. At least my mother, God rest her soul. She left us last year."
"I am sorry."
"Yes, as was I. Especially as I had been out of the country for so long. The war and all, you understand." He looked about him once more. "Thought I'd like to see the old place again, now I've returned. I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all. You are welcome, of course." Abigail considered her next question, then asked tentatively, "I am surprised Mr. Arbeau didn't write to let us know to expect you."
"Mr. Arbeau? Who's that?" he asked, his expression open and politely curious.
"Oh. I . . . assumed you would know him. Sorry. He's the solicitor who arranged for us to let Pembrooke Park on behalf of its owner. I thought—"
"Owner?" he asked, looking mildly concerned.
"Ah. Well, he didn't say owner specifically, now I think of it. Rather the executor of the estate, I believe he said."
"Ah, yes." He raised his chin. "That would be Harry. Well good. About time, as I said. None of us has ever wanted to live here. But it would be a pity to let the place fall to ruin."
"I agree." Abigail felt the remaining anxiety seep away. Easygoing, friendly Miles Pembrooke had put them at their ease. She supposed Harry was his brother but didn't ask. She decided she had pried quite enough for their first meeting.
"You say you have been out of the country, Mr. Pembrooke," her father said, crossing his legs. "May I ask where?"
"Indeed you may. Gibraltar. Have you ever been?"
"No. But I have heard of it."
"It's twice as beautiful as they say, and twice as dangerous."
Mr. Pembrooke went on to entertain them for a quarter of an hour with tales of his time in Gibraltar.
When he finished, her father said, "You must join us for dinner, Mr. Pembrooke. How long are you planning to visit the area?"
"I haven't decided."
"Well then. You must stay here with us."
Miles Pembrooke held up his hand. "No, now, I didn't come to beg an invitation. I only wanted to see the old place again."
"Well, it's too late to start a journey now. You must at least stay the night. I insist. The servants have recently finished readying the guest room. Is that not so, Abigail?"
Abigail hesitated. Again the letter writer's admonition flashed through her mind: "If anyone named Pembrooke comes to the house . . . send him on his way." Yet she found herself liking the man, and though she was not sure how she felt about him staying in the house with them, she found herself unable to politely decline. The estate was likely still in his family. Might even be his one day. She rose. "Yes. If you will give us a few minutes, I will see that all is in order."
"That is very kind. Excessively kind, I must say. But I don't want to inconvenience you."
"No trouble at all," her father said. "You are family, after all."
Miles Pembrooke offered his charming, boyish smile. "We are indeed. Happy thought. Well then, I accept. And gratefully."
Abigail thought of the masquerade ball that evening. She couldn't very well extend an invitation to this man. It wasn't her place to do so. How awkward. "I am afraid, Mr. Pembrooke, that I have a prior engagement tonight. I hate to be rude and desert you, but—"
"Don't give it another thought, Miss Foster. You go and enjoy yourself. I shall be perfectly fine here on my own. I may poke about just a bit—see my old room, that sort of thing—if you don't mind."
"Of course not. Make yourself at home," Abigail said, hoping she would not come to regret those words.
Her father spoke up, "I was not planning to attend anyway, Mr. Pembr—"
The man interrupted pleasantly. "Miles, please."
"Very well . . . Miles."
She noticed her father did not offer the use of his Christian name in return, but then again, he was quite a bit older than his guest.
Her father continued, "I was included in the invitation, but as I have never even met the family, I declined. I was in London on business when Abigail made their acquaintance. The Morgan family—perhaps you know them?"
"I'm afraid I have not had that pleasure, that I recall."
"They are new to the area," Abigail explained. "Mr. Morgan inherited Hunts Hall from his cousin."
"I do recall the name Hunt, yes."
Her father said, "You and I shall dine together then, Miles. If that suits you."
"Very well, sir. I look forward to it. And I shall look forward to improving my acquaintance with your lovely daughter as well. Perhaps tomorrow?"
Abigail smiled. "Tomorrow it is, Mr. Pembrooke. Do let us know if there is anything you need while you're here."
"I shall. Thank you. You are generosity itself, and I am ever in your debt." He bowed.
Abigail excused herself to inform Mrs. Walsh of their guest and to ask Polly to put fresh bedclothes on the guest bed and carry up hot water. But even as she did so, she couldn't help but wonder if inviting Miles to stay would land them all in hot water.
# Chapter 12
With the upper housemaid's help, Abigail dressed for the ball. She tied silk stockings over her knees and stepped into shift and underslip. Polly cinched long bone stays over her shift, and helped her on with the white gown, doing up the lacing and the tiny decorative pearl buttons at the back of the bodice. The maid curled her hair with hot irons, pinning up the majority with soft height, but leaving bouncy ringlets on either side of her face. She pinned tiny white roses amid the curls, to match her shimmering muslin gown.
While Polly made the final touches to her hair, Abigail powdered her nose and brushed just a hint of blush on her cheeks and lips. Then she touched dainty dabs of rose water to her neck and wrists. Finally she pulled on long white leather gloves, and Polly helped her tie them with ribbons above her elbows.
"You'll be the prettiest girl there," Polly assured her.
"I doubt that, but you are kind to say so." Abigail gave her reflection in the glass a final look. She did look pretty, she admitted to herself. And without Louisa in attendance, she felt she just might hold her own with the likes of Miss Padgett from Winchester.
Taking her reticule, mask, and a colorful India shawl with her, Abigail went downstairs and was surprised but pleased to see her father waiting in the hall.
He rose from the sofa, his eyes widening. "You look beautiful, my dear."
The endearment sounded a bit stilted, stiff from lack of use since their falling-out, but she was happy to hear it nonetheless.
"Thank you, Papa."
Perhaps this was a taste of the favor Louisa was accustomed to receiving—people ready to forgive her anything because of her beauty. It felt strange. Good and somehow deflating at once. Was she only to be treated well when she put such efforts into her appearance? She felt weary at the thought.
"Mr. Pembrooke will be down for dinner shortly, no doubt, but I wanted to be here to see you off."
He helped her settle her shawl around her and gave her shoulders a quick squeeze. "Have a good time, Abigail. Mr. Morgan is sending his carriage?"
"Yes. For the Chapmans as well. It should be here any time."
"Very thoughtful of Mr. Morgan. Is there something I should know? Shall I expect a call from him sometime soon?" His eyes twinkled.
Confusion flared, followed quickly by comprehension. "Oh. No, Papa! Mr. Morgan doesn't admire me. Not in that way. He may admire Miss Chapman, I think, though his kindness extends to me as well, as her friend."
Frown lines creased his brow. "But you are a lady, Abigail. A gentleman's daughter. I don't know that I like you being reduced to the same level as Mac Chapman's daughter. . . ."
"Father, don't say that. Miss Chapman is everything good and ladylike."
"Well." He drew back his shoulders. "Don't hide in her shadow, Abigail. Our circumstances may be reduced, but you are a Foster—kin to the Pembrookes. Remember that, and do us proud."
Her father's snobbish vanity made Abigail uneasy. Who were they to view themselves above others? It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that some people in the area had tied the name Foster to the banking scandal, knowing it would knock him down a peg or two. But looking at him now, in the fading evening sunlight slicing through the hall windows, her father suddenly looked older than his fifty years. Perhaps he had been knocked down enough already.
The rumble of carriage wheels and the jingle of harnesses announced the arrival of the Morgans' coach-and-four.
Her father opened the door and she bid him good evening. Outside, a liveried groom hopped down off the rear board to open the coach door and let down the step. Mr. Chapman and Leah were already inside.
Leah said, "You look beautiful, Miss Foster."
"Yes, she does," Mr. Chapman agreed, eyes shining.
"So do you," Abigail said, admiring Leah's curled hair and glowing complexion, the dress so becoming on her.
"Which of us?" William joked.
"The both of you."
He grinned. "Forgive me, Miss Foster. I did not mean to beg a compliment."
"Yes you did. And why not?" she teased. "It's a pleasure to see you formally attired—and not in black forms or surplice."
"You think this is formal?" Mr. Chapman said. "You've never seen me in my university gown—then you would be truly impressed." He winked at her.
Mr. Chapman did indeed look handsome in his dark frock coat, striped waistcoat and elegant cravat, breeches and white stockings outlining muscular calves. The man obviously did more with his time than compose sermons.
Noticing Leah's nervous expression, Abigail reached over and squeezed her hand. "Are you all right?"
"I shall be," she replied, with a brave smile.
They arrived at a Hunts Hall awash in light—torches lined the drive and candle lamps glowed in every window.
"Time for our masks," Abigail reminded them, pulling forth her own. "Though we probably won't need to wear them all night."
"I don't mind," Leah said, tying on hers.
William followed suit, his mask a thin strip of black silk with cut-out eyeholes.
The groom helped Abigail and Leah down, and William escorted them to the door. Inside, liveried footmen took their wraps. Since it was a masked ball, no butler called out the names of those arriving, which would of course render the masks futile.
In truth, masks did not disguise everyone's identity. Abigail knew she would recognize Andrew Morgan with his curly dark hair and athletic build, mask or not. And there was no disguising William Chapman's deep red hair. And the black mask framed his telltale blue eyes to great advantage.
Leah, however, in a gown so much more elegant than her usual plain dress, and with her hair curled and arranged so beautifully atop her head, looked far different than her usual self. And with the large mask she'd chosen to wear, extending from forehead to mouth, she was nearly unrecognizable.
Andrew, however, no doubt identifying William, lost no time in coming over to greet them.
"Who are these mystery women?" he teased. "And how does such an ordinary ginger-haired fellow come to have two such enchanting ladies on his arm? It isn't fair." He gazed at Leah warmly. "Do me the honor of taking my arm, miss, whoever you may be." He playfully offered his arm, and Leah took it with a faint smile, though Abigail did not miss the nervous tremor of her hands as she did so, nor her eyes darting around the room from behind her mask.
"Will she be all right, do you think?" Abigail whispered after Andrew led Leah away.
"I hope so," Mr. Chapman said. But he looked worried as well.
He and Abigail strolled slowly around the anteroom for a few minutes, Mr. Chapman greeting the people he recognized and performing introductions.
From inside the ballroom, musicians struck up a minuet.
"I don't care for the minuet, Miss F . . . fair lady. But if you have your heart set on it, I will of course dance it with you."
"I don't mind sitting it out."
"Then may I have the honor of the next set?"
"You may indeed."
He bowed. "I am off to pay my respects to Mr. and Mrs. Morgan. If I can find them. But I shall be back to claim you."
She nodded and walked slowly into the ballroom, taking in the modest number of dancers opening the ball. Were Mr. and Mrs. Morgan among them? She thought not. But there was Andrew Morgan dancing the old-fashioned, formal minuet with a lady not Leah Chapman. Had he abandoned her already? Apparently, his mother had insisted he open the ball with a different young lady. Miss Padgett, she guessed, taking in the woman's blond ringlets, low-cut heavily flounced gown, and tiny mask, no wider than a pair of spectacles.
Abigail looked this way and that for Leah but did not see her in the ballroom. So she returned to the anterooms—card room, vestibules, and then dining room, where servants were busy setting up an overflowing buffet table for the midnight supper.
She asked a footman where the ladies' lounge was located and found Leah inside, staring at her masked reflection in a cheval looking glass. Seeing Abigail, she quickly touched a hand to her coiffure.
"Just checking my hair," she said. But again Abigail noticed her hand tremble.
Abigail stepped nearer. "What's wrong?" she asked quietly.
Leah shook her head. "It's nothing really. Mrs. Morgan has every right to ask her son to open the ball with the lady of her choosing. Who wasn't, of course, me."
Abigail pressed her hand. "Come, let's join the others," she urged. "No doubt Andrew will want to dance with you as soon as his duty allows."
Leah forced a smile. "You go on. I'll be there in two minutes, I promise."
"Very well. But if you're not, I shall come back and drag you out." Abigail winked, pressed Leah's hand once more, and left the lounge.
Crossing the hall, she was about to return to the ballroom, when a man's profile caught her attention. She froze, heart pounding.
"Gilbert . . . ?" she called. She would recognize him anywhere, ill-fitting mask or no.
He turned to face her, eyes widening behind his mask. "Abby! I had no idea you knew the Morgans."
"Nor I you."
He walked nearer. Though not a tall man, he still cut an impressive figure in his evening coat, waistcoat, and cravat. He said, "I only recently met Mr. Morgan in Town. He hired my employer to design an expansion for Hunts Hall and invited us down for several days. A bit of a house party."
"I see. I was glad to hear you had returned from Italy safely."
"Thank you, yes. It was an excellent experience, but I'm glad to be back in England."
His eyes lingered on her face, masked though it was. "And I must say I am relieved to see you looking so well. I feared the move would be difficult for you."
"It has been a great deal of work, but I've enjoyed it. It's a wonderful old house. You should come by and see it while you're here. In fact I was thinking of you only last week, wishing you were here to help me decipher some old house plans I'd found." She suddenly realized how forward she might sound. "Forgive me, I'm prattling on. I'm sure you shall be much too busy. . . ."
"I would enjoy seeing your new home, Abby," he quickly assured her. "In fact, I wouldn't miss it. Susan would never forgive me if I came all this way without seeing our old neighbors."
"Susan . . ." The memory of his sister and her old friend squeezed her heart. "How is she?"
"Excellent, last I saw her. And your father? He is in good health, I trust?"
"He is—and will be glad to see you."
Gilbert reached out and gently lifted her mask from her eyes to her hairline, his touch sending nerves and warmth through her. Again his gaze roved her face—her eyes, her mouth, her hair. "I can't get over how well you look." He smiled. "I've missed you, Abby."
She lowered her gaze from his admiring one. "Thank you," she murmured, and an awkward silence followed. She forced herself to ask casually, "And how was Louisa when you saw her last?"
It was his turn to look away self-consciously. "Oh . . . well. She seemed in good spirits at the Albrights' ball. You and I danced at that a few years ago, you may recall."
"I do," she managed in a choked little voice.
He continued, "Louisa was sorry, but all her dances were spoken for save the final Boulanger by the time I arrived. She was greatly in demand and generally admired by the gentlemen, if not their mammas. But she seemed happy enough to see me. Full of apologies for not writing more often. You had all been quite busy with selling the house and the move and all, I understand."
"Ah . . ." Abigail murmured noncommittally, for in truth Louisa had done very little. She said gently, "Louisa is young and has had her head turned by all the attention. I'm sure when the fanfare has faded and the invitations dwindle, she'll come back down to earth and remember her . . . friends."
He slowly shook his head. "I hope she does come back down to earth, as you say. And the sooner the better, for her sake. But I . . . But never mind that. I am so glad to see you. I—"
Mr. Chapman appeared. "There you are, Miss Foster. I've come to claim you for our dance."
He looked from her to Gilbert and hesitated. "But if you are . . . otherwise engaged . . ."
"Mr. Chapman, allow me to introduce an old friend from London, Mr. Scott. Mr. Scott, this is Mr. Chapman, our parson and neighbor."
"How do you do, Mr. Chapman?"
"Well, I thank you." The two men shook hands. "A pleasure to meet any friend of the Fosters." Mr. Chapman sent Abigail a raised-brow look of question.
Abigail said, "I had no idea Mr. Scott would be here tonight."
"A pleasant surprise, I hope," Gilbert put in.
"Of course."
Mr. Chapman smiled. "Well, if you wish to visit with your old friend, I shall release you from your obligation and leave the two of you to talk."
"Not at all, Mr. Chapman," Abigail assured him. "I am looking forward to our dance. If you will excuse us, Gilbert?"
Gilbert bowed. "Of course. Perhaps I may have the pleasure of a later dance?"
"If you like."
Mr. Chapman offered his arm, but she noticed a subtle stiffness in his bearing.
He looked down at her in concern and asked quietly, "Are you all right?"
"I . . . think so. It was quite a shock seeing him here."
"Is he the architect who disappointed you in favor of your sister?"
She pressed her eyes closed. "I wish now I'd never mentioned it."
He laid his free hand over hers. "Any man who would let you go for another woman isn't worthy of you, Miss Foster."
"You have never met my sister." And I wish you never would, she added wistfully to herself.
He pursed his lip. "When I came upon the two of you, I was certain I saw admiration in his eyes. Nearly challenged him to a duel on the spot."
She managed a grin. "What you saw was fond affection between two old friends. That's all."
He looked at her, eyes wide in compassion. "You are not very convincing. Are you sure you wish to dance?"
"Yes. Quite sure."
"Shall I make passionate love to you to make him jealous?"
Abigail felt her cheeks heat, and Mr. Chapman stopped in his tracks, stricken. "Forgive me, Miss Foster. What a cavalier thing to say. Have I shocked you terribly?"
"A bit, yes. Not very parson-like of you, I will say. I admit the notion is not without appeal, but I shouldn't like to use you in such a manner."
"I promise you, Miss Foster, it would take very little acting ability on my part."
She looked up at him and saw the sincerity shining in his blue eyes, and her heart squeezed. "Thank you, Mr. Chapman. You are very kind to restore my fragile feminine ego."
"My pleasure."
The musicians finished their introduction, and around them couples filled in, ladies and gentlemen facing one another in long columns. Across the ballroom, Abigail saw that Gilbert had been partnered with Miss Adah Morgan, Andrew's younger sister. She forced her attention back to William. Unfortunately, he had noticed the direction of her gaze, but he smiled gamely and took her hand in his as the dance began.
Together they danced their way up the line. As they waited their turn at the top of the dance, Abigail noticed a striking woman in a fine black ball gown looking their way. No mask marred her pretty face, and she appeared remarkably attractive for a woman in mourning. She was a very young widow, perhaps Abigail's own age or even younger.
"Who is that woman in black?" Abigail asked her partner.
"Hm?" William turned to look and stumbled.
"She is staring at us." Abigail added, "As I have never met her, I assume she is looking at you."
"That is Rebek—er, Mrs. Garwood."
Her eyes flashed to his as he fumbled the words. She saw the sparkle leave his eyes, replaced by stoic acceptance.
"Andrew's elder sister. Recently married, and even more recently widowed."
"So young," Abigail breathed.
"Yes. Completely unexpected. I did not realize she would be attending. In mourning as she is."
"I see," Abigail murmured. And with another glance at him, thought, Oh yes, I do see. . . .
When their dance ended, Mr. Chapman excused himself and went to ask his sister for the next, dutiful brother that he was. His kindness warmed Abigail's heart. Abigail went to the punch table and accepted a glass from a footman, then found a place along the wall to catch her breath.
A woman joined her in the out-of-the-way corner. Her gaze flickered over Abigail's hair and mask. "Miss Foster, I presume?"
Abigail turned to the thirtyish woman in a peacock-blue ball gown. She wore no mask, and Abigail easily recognized her thin dark brows, blue-green eyes, and sharp nose. "Yes. It is good to see you again, Mrs. Webb."
The woman nodded. "My sister-in-law is in quite a pique, I can tell you, over so few of her guests embracing the spirit of the masquerade."
"And where is your mask?" Abigail asked.
Mrs. Webb arched one thin brow. "Oh, disguise of every sort is my abhorrence,"
Abigail grinned. "Ah! That is from Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy says it to Elizabeth Bennet."
Again the woman nodded. "I am impressed, but not surprised. I had already pegged you as a kindred spirit." She lifted a hand. "Look about you. Most of the guests have already removed their masks. Except that woman dancing with your Mr. Chapman. Who is she? Do you know?"
Abigail turned and saw William Chapman dancing a reel with Leah, still masked.
"That is Leah Chapman, his sister."
"Ah, the dastardly 'older woman' Mrs. Morgan wants Andrew to pass over for young Miss Padgett?"
"Yes. Unfortunately."
The woman's keen eyes fastened on hers. "Are you well acquainted with Miss Chapman?"
"Fairly well, though she is a rather private person. Even so, I can say unequivocally that she is a genteel, accomplished woman of good character."
"Yes, yes. But has she anything more interesting to recommend her? Is she good company, able to laugh at herself, or a witty conversationalist? Has she any intelligence in her pretty head?"
"Yes, definitely. All of the above," Abigail replied. "And she has read Pride and Prejudice three times, Sense and Sensibility twice, and Mansfield Park only once."
The woman's eyes glinted with wry humor. "That is in her favor, indeed. I can tell you are an excellent judge of character, Miss Foster, and I shall put in a good word for her with the Morgans, based on your high opinion."
"I would be happy to introduce her, if you like, and you may decide for yourself."
"Perhaps another time. But first, tell me. Does your high regard extend to her brother? Are the two of you . . . ?" She let the question dangle, but her arched brow and her meaning were clear.
Abigail's cheeks heated. "Oh, I . . . No. We have only recently met."
"But you admire him," she suggested, eyes alight.
"Well, yes, I suppose I do. But . . . that is, we are not . . . courting."
"Pity." Mrs. Webb turned to look at Mr. Chapman once more. "I would like to see him happy, since my sister-in-law disappointed his hopes once before."
"Oh? How so?"
"I overheard her talking to one of her cronies. Congratulating herself on putting a stop to a courtship between Mr. Chapman and her daughter Rebekah a few years ago. Olive was very pleased with herself when Rebekah married rich Mr. Garwood instead. And now that he is gone, she fears the lowly curate will try once again to woo the wealthy widow. Her words, mind, not mine."
Abigail suddenly felt queasy. "And would Mrs. Garwood welcome his attentions?"
"I don't claim a close acquaintance with my elder niece, living distantly as we do. I gather her previous regard for Mr. Chapman was genuine, but she is only recently widowed, so . . ." She shrugged. "Time will tell."
"Yes," Abigail murmured. "I suppose it will."
Mrs. Webb sent her a sidelong glance. "So, how goes life at Pembrooke Park since I saw you last?"
"Very well. My father has rejoined me from London. I confess I feel more at ease with him there. And we have a houseguest."
"Oh?"
"He just turned up today, without warning. Used to live there, I gather."
Her eyes widened. "Good heavens. Who is it?"
"Miles Pembrooke—son of the previous occupant."
"Miles . . . Pembrooke?" She blinked. "I am surprised."
"As were we. We feared he'd come to reclaim the house for himself and cut short our lease."
Mrs. Webb looked into her empty glass. "I thought everyone in that family was long gone from the area."
"So did I. But he's recently returned from abroad and says he just wanted to see the old place again. Father invited him to stay."
Her brows rose again. "Did he indeed? That is . . . unexpectedly gracious of your father, isn't it? To invite a stranger to stay? With an unmarried daughter under the same roof?"
Abigail shrugged. "He is family, after all. Though granted, we are only distantly related."
"It does not . . . worry you?"
Abigail inhaled thoughtfully. "I confess the timing does give me pause. That he should happen to return just after we've opened up the house again—when it had been shut up for so long. But he seems harmless. Quite polite and charming, really."
"Be careful, Miss Foster. Appearances can be deceiving."
Abigail turned to look at the woman, surprised at her somber tone.
Gilbert approached and bowed. "Miss Foster. It is time for our dance, I believe."
Abigail dragged her gaze from Mrs. Webb's concerned face to Gilbert's smiling one.
"Oh, yes." She lifted a hand and began introductions. "Mr. Scott, have you met Mrs. Webb, Andrew Morgan's aunt?"
"I have not had that pleasure. How do you do, ma'am?"
"Very well. Thank you," Mrs. Webb drew herself up, cool distance returning to her expression. "You two enjoy your dance."
Gilbert and Abigail joined the line of couples as the woman at the top of the set called for a country dance.
"Are you enjoying yourself, Abby?" he asked.
"I am. And you?"
"I hope you weren't sorry to see me here."
"Surprised, yes, but not sorry."
"Good. You seem to have made many friends here already."
"I have been fortunate in that, yes."
"Mr. Chapman seems quite taken with you."
Abigail looked away from Gilbert's inquisitive gaze. "I don't know about that."
"Oh, come. Even a thick-skulled male like me could instantly see he admires you. I would be jealous, if . . . I had any right to be."
"You, jealous?" Abigail forced a laugh. "Don't talk foolishness. I've never seen you jealous in my life. Let's talk of something else. I notice you have been quite in demand tonight."
"Only because there are many ladies in want of partners and Mrs. Morgan is determined to remedy that."
"I don't know. . . . She is very exacting, and if she singled you out for the honor of dancing with her young daughter, you must have done something to earn her regard."
"It's not her regard I'm concerned about." He looked at her earnestly. "Are we all right, Abby, you and I? Susan boxed my ears after my going-away party. Charged me with being insensitive and selfish. You are very important to me, and I hope we are still . . . friends?"
"Of course we are, Gilbert. Now hush and let's dance."
After he danced with his sister, William offered to fetch her some punch, but when he returned with two glasses to where he'd left Leah minutes before, he could not find her. Looking all around the ballroom without success, he then went out to the hall. He finally found her in a quiet corner of the vestibule, still wearing her mask.
"Leah, what are you doing back here? Come in with the others."
She shook her head. "I need a few minutes alone. So many people staring. Whether because they are trying to figure out who I am, or because they cannot figure out why Leah Chapman has been invited, I don't know. But . . . I should never have come."
"Leah, you are too sensitive. You imagine stares and criticism, when there are only looks of curiosity or admiration for a beautiful woman. A moment later everyone has returned to his or her own thoughts—his empty glass, or unpaid bills, or gout . . . Not you, my dear, I promise."
She tried to chuckle, but it fell flat. "Did you see how Mrs. Morgan greeted me? She could not have expressed her disapproval any more clearly without saying the words aloud. Why did Andrew invite us? Why expose us to such mortification?"
William took her hand. "I don't think Andrew puts as much stock in birth and rank as others do. I am sure he had no intention of hurting you. He merely wished to spend time in your company."
Leah nodded and then looked at him with empathetic eyes. "Forgive me, William. Here I am feeling sorry for myself, while you . . ." She winced. "Is it difficult seeing Rebekah again?"
"Not too bad." He pulled a face, not wanting to talk about the painful past. "Now. Let's go kick up our heels and show the world how resilient we Chapmans are."
Leah managed a wobbly grin, then stilled, staring across the hall through the open door beyond. "That woman. I know her, don't I?"
William turned to look. He saw Mrs. Webb conversing with Andrew's father, neither of them wearing masks. "That is one of Andrew's aunts. We met her at his welcome home dinner. But I'm surprised you would know her, as you weren't there."
His sister stared at the woman, frowning in concentration. "I'm not certain I do. But there's something . . . familiar about her."
"Shall we go over and meet her?"
Leah adamantly shook her head. "No."
"You could take off your mask now, you know," William said gently. "Nearly everyone else has by now."
"That's all right. I'm more comfortable this way. And we won't be staying much longer, will we? Shall I see if Miss Foster is ready to leave? After this dance with her old friend?"
After their dance, Gilbert escorted Abigail to the side of the room and excused himself to speak to Mr. Morgan senior, his host.
Leah approached surreptitiously and whispered, "Miss Foster, will you be ready to leave soon?"
Abigail looked at her in surprise and concern. "If you like. Why? What's the matter?"
"Nothing, I—"
"Miss Chapman, there you are," Andrew Morgan called, striding over to join them. "Tell me I am not too late to claim a dance. I have been dreadfully occupied with host duties all evening but am free at last. Please say you will dance with me?"
"But . . ." Leah hesitated, looking at Abigail for help. "I think we are leaving. Are we not, Miss Foster?"
Seeing Mr. Morgan's crestfallen expression, Abigail hurried to say, "That's all right. I can wait another set if you are engaged. In fact I shall enjoy watching you dance and seeing the fruits of our little lessons at Pembrooke Park."
Gilbert returned to her side. "No sitting out for you, Miss Abby. If no other man has been wise enough to snap you up, then I insist you dance again with me."
Abigail glanced quickly around the room and saw William Chapman speaking gravely to Andrew's widowed sister. At that moment, Mrs. Morgan appeared with young Miss Padgett in tow and presented her to Mr. Chapman as a potential dance partner. She then took her daughter's arm and led her away.
Abigail returned her gaze to Gilbert. "All right," she agreed.
Mr. Morgan clapped Gilbert on the back. "Good man, Scott. Knew I liked you."
"Oranges and Lemons" was called, a square-set dance for four couples. Gilbert offered Abigail his arm and led her onto the floor. Around the ballroom, couples grouped together. Abigail and Gilbert found themselves with Andrew Morgan and Leah, William Chapman with Miss Padgett, and a fourth couple they did not know.
The music began. Gilbert reached out and took Abigail's hand, and around the square the other couples joined inside hands as well. She liked the feel of her gloved hand in his, his familiar smile, the comfortable way he held her gaze without awkwardness. As they danced and laughed with the others, she felt a thread of their old camaraderie vibrate to life, tighten, and pull. She had missed it. Missed him.
The couples stepped forward and back twice, then released hands. Each honored his partner, then turned to honor his corner. The men joined hands and circled around before bowing to their partners, then their corners once more. Then the ladies followed suit.
"Lovely partner, Mr. Chapman," Abigail said when the dance brought them together.
He nodded. "I agree." He held her hand a little longer than the dance required and looked into her eyes. "Though not as pretty as my first."
The pattern was then repeated in the opposite direction. When Gilbert reclaimed Abigail's hand at last, he said, "I'd forgot what a good dancer you are."
She caught Mr. Chapman's eye across the square. "I've had quite a bit of practice lately."
Gilbert smiled. "It shows."
Abigail now and again glanced at Andrew Morgan and Leah as they danced. The man couldn't take his eyes off her, masked or not. Leah, for her part, tried in vain to suppress the smile on her pretty face. It was the happiest Abigail had ever seen her.
Before they parted for the night, Gilbert asked Abigail to name a time for him to call the following day. They settled on two o'clock, though Abigail said she would be at her leisure all afternoon.
He bowed over her hand, then looked up at her, eyes sparkling. Abigail's heart squeezed to see such warmth and fondness in Gilbert's eyes. It had been too long.
Don't be a simpleton. He is just being friendly. She reminded herself that she was the only person Gilbert really knew there, so of course he would seek her out. They were comfortable with each other. They had history. Their families were old friends. She told herself all this with her practical sensible mind, but her foolish heart still beat a little too hard.
While they waited for the Morgans' coach-and-four to be brought around, William stood companionably with Miss Foster. His sister stood a few yards away, talking to Andrew. They had already bid him and his parents farewell, but Andrew had insisted on escorting Leah out, clearly reluctant to let her go.
He felt Miss Foster's gaze on his profile. She asked quietly, "Was it awkward for you? With Andrew's sister there?"
He looked at her in surprise.
"I hope you don't mind. But Mrs. Webb mentioned you once courted her."
"Ah." He lifted his chin in understanding. "Actually, it was not as bad as I would have guessed. I confess having you there with me was quite a balm."
She looked up at him sharply.
Concern filling him, he said, "Forgive me. I don't mean to presume anything about our . . . friendship. But even if you think me an absolute dunderhead, the fact that Rebekah Garwood saw me enjoying myself with a beautiful woman eased the sting. Not to mention nipping in the bud any supposition that I hope to wrangle another chance with her, now that she is widowed."
Miss Foster pressed her lips together, then asked, "You don't wish another chance with her?"
He looked at her, surprised at her boldness. He inhaled and looked up at the night sky as he considered the question. Then he met her gaze and said quietly, "Not anymore."
William watched her face. Did she believe him? Was she relieved? He hesitated to ask the same question of her. He had seen her with Mr. Scott. Seen the way the young man looked at her, his proprietary air as he escorted her across the room. The easy familiarity in which he held her hand and smiled into her face as they danced and laughed together.
The sight had filled William with an uncomfortably sickly feeling he recognized as jealousy—stronger even than what he had felt when Rebekah broke things off with him in favor of Mr. Garwood. He didn't like it—knew it to be an unworthy emotion. But heaven help him, he felt it all the same.
The carriage arrived, and the groom opened the door for them, giving a hand up to both Miss Foster and Leah. Then William climbed in after them and, after vacillating for a second, sat beside his sister. Andrew stood at the window and gave them all a final farewell.
William glanced at Leah, saw the contented smile there, and hoped it would remain, even as he doubted it.
As the coach rumbled away, something William saw outside the window drew him upright. There, through the throng of waiting carriages and horses, passed a figure in a full-length green cloak, like those worn by naval officers on deck during storms. Why would anyone wear a deep hood on such a fine night, unless he meant to conceal his identity? Was it the same person he and Miss Foster had seen crossing the bridge near Pembrooke Park?
William's pulse rate accelerated. He glanced in concern at his sister, fearing she would see the figure as well, but was relieved to see her gazing idly out the opposite window, a dreamy smile still hovering on her lips. He would not be the one to send it flying by drawing her attention to a sight that would surely frighten her. So he said nothing.
Perhaps he was wrong. It had been a masquerade ball, after all. Perhaps the cloak was part of some man's costume. He hoped that's all it was. Even so, he would have to tell his father. Just in case.
# Chapter 13
Even though Abigail was tired from being up late the night before, she resisted the urge to sleep in, rising only an hour past her usual time. She summoned Polly by a pull of the bell cord, when the kind young woman no doubt intended to let her sleep, not even tiptoeing inside to turn back the shutters. Abigail went to the washstand, resigned to the notion of washing her face in last night's cold water, but was surprised and pleased to find it warm. Polly had snuck in without waking her. The housemaid was certainly skilled. Thoughtful in the bargain.
While she waited, Abigail washed for the day and began brushing out her hair, extra full and curly from the night before. She thought back to Polly's eager questions when she had helped her undress after the ball. Her maid had wanted every detail, and Abigail did her best to supply them, assuring her she had enjoyed herself and that everyone had admired her hair. Polly had beamed.
The housemaid entered a few minutes later. "You're up early, miss. Thought you'd sleep till noon after all the doings last night."
"We have a guest, so I thought it best to rise and be hospitable."
"He and your father are already eating breakfast, so no hurry. Mrs. Walsh is in a tizzy, having a gen-u-ine Pembrooke to cook for, and Duncan is in a foul mood at having another to tote and carry for, as you can imagine."
"Yes, I can well imagine." In fact, her father was the only person Duncan didn't seem to mind serving. He served him cheerfully, and in turn her father thought highly of him.
"How's that blister this mornin'?" Polly asked.
Abigail regarded her little toe. She had danced quite a bit last night—more than she had in a year's time—and her dancing slippers had rubbed a tender spot.
"Oh, it's fine."
"The price you pay for bein' the belle of the ball."
A small price, indeed, and well worth the minor discomfort, Abigail thought. She had enjoyed being sought after as a dancing partner. A new experience.
Polly stepped to her closet. "Your buff day dress and cap today, miss?"
"Em, no," Abigail said. "I was thinking of my blue walking dress."
The maid turned in surprise. "Going out again?"
"I am expecting a caller this afternoon."
"Oh? One of the gentlemen you danced with last night, paying a call? How romantic! I'll do your hair up nice again."
"It is only an old friend of mine from London."
"A gentleman friend?" Polly's eyes glinted mischievously.
"Don't go seeing romance where there is only friendship," Abigail said to the maid, silently reminding herself to heed her own advice.
When Abigail went down to breakfast twenty minutes later, she found her father and Mr. Pembrooke seated in the dining room lingering over coffee, tea, and conversation.
Her father saw her first. "Good morning, Abigail."
Miles Pembrooke rose abruptly. "Good morning, Miss Foster. A pleasure to see you again."
She dipped her head. "Good morning, Mr. Pembrooke. I hope you slept well?"
"For the most part, yes. Except for the ghosts I heard rumbling about all night."
Abigail drew up short. "Ghosts?"
He smiled playfully. "Only in my mind, I assure you. No need to be alarmed. Being here has stirred many memories."
She helped herself to tea and toast from the sideboard, and then took a chair across from his.
He sipped his tea, eyeing her with amusement over his cup brim. "Don't tell me I frightened you, Miss Foster. You do not strike me as the sort of female to believe in ghosts or gothic tales."
"I . . . don't. But this old place makes many noises that might be mistaken for nighttime visitors of some sort. I do hope you were able to sleep, considering."
"The first night in a new bed is always a struggle. I'm sure I shall sleep better tonight."
Abigail shot a quick look at her father.
Miles apprehended her surprise and said, "Your kind father has invited me to stay on longer. I hope you don't mind."
"Oh, I . . . Of course not," Abigail faltered, but she felt suspicion trickle through her mind and pinch her stomach.
She nibbled her toast and collected her thoughts. "Have you . . . specific plans while you are here? Former acquaintances you wish to visit?"
At that moment, Molly knocked softly on the open door and entered, bobbing a curtsy. "Begging your pardon, miss, sir. But a messenger from Hunts Hall delivered this for Mr. Pembrooke. He's outside, awaitin' his answer."
"For me?" Miles asked in surprise. He accepted the folded note and read it. His dark eyebrows rose. "I've been invited to call at Hunts Hall at my earliest convenience."
He looked up at Abigail. "You must have mentioned me to your hosts."
"I don't recall mentioning you to the Morgans, though I may have done. I hope that doesn't pose a problem?"
"Not at all."
Abigail said, "I did not realize you were acquainted with the Morgans."
"Neither did I." He smiled and rose to leave. "If you will excuse me, I shall let my horse remain in the stable and go directly with the messenger. That way I can pay my respects without delay."
Surprised, Abigail watched him go. Her surprise increased when she noticed him limp and use his walking stick for support—the implement not merely a dandy's affectation as she'd originally assumed.
Her father followed her gaze, then said, "War wound, he told me."
"Ah."
"Did you have a good time last night?"
"I did, Papa. Thank you. And you'll never guess who was there. . . . " At the raising of his eyebrows, she supplied, "Gilbert Scott."
His mouth momentarily slackened. "You don't say."
Abigail explained Gilbert's connection to the Morgan family through his new employer.
Her father nodded in understanding, then said, "I hope you invited him to call on us while he's here."
"I did. He seemed eager to see you again, and the house as well."
"Emphasis on the latter, no doubt, and who could blame him? I'm surprised we haven't had more people showing up, asking to tour the place."
Abigail managed a weak grin and nodded her agreement, thinking of Miles Pembrooke. Strangers showing up for tours was not what worried her.
Abigail situated herself in the drawing room ten minutes before two o'clock. She had forewarned Mrs. Walsh she would likely be asking for a tea tray. She didn't wish to appear as though she'd been eagerly awaiting Gilbert's visit, but she knew better than to request any baked goods without giving Mrs. Walsh proper notice.
Arranging her skirts around her, she picked up a book, a biography of architect Christopher Wren, but found it difficult to concentrate.
Her palms were damp. She felt jumpy and nervous, quite unlike her normal reserve.
Stop being foolish, she told herself. This was Gilbert, plain old next-door Gilbert, whom she'd known through his awkward, pudgy days, his blemish days, his voice-changing days. Whom she'd played with and argued with and studied with and . . . loved. She began to perspire anew.
Two o'clock came and went. Two thirty. Three. Abigail's heart deflated, and her stomach sank. She'd been nervous for nothing. Worn a pretty dress and had Polly arrange her hair . . . for nothing.
Her father came in. "No sign of Gilbert?"
Abigail shook her head, astonished to find tears stinging her eyes. She sternly blinked them dry and said as casually as she could, "Apparently I misunderstood him. Or the Morgans had other plans for him today."
"That's it, no doubt. I'm sure he'll be by when he can. I'll be in the library. Do let me know when he comes."
Abigail nodded and resolutely turned a page in her book.
A few minutes later, Molly popped her head in and looked curiously about the room, probably sent by Mrs. Walsh to discover how long to keep the water hot.
"Apparently we shall not be needing tea after all," Abigail said, rising. "Please apologize to Mrs. Walsh for me and let her know my father and I will happily eat whatever she has prepared for our dinner tonight."
"Very good, miss."
Abigail left the drawing room, feeling restless. Should she change her clothes? No, she decided. She was wearing a walking dress, so she would walk. Gathering bonnet and gloves, she went outside and walked back to the gardens. She stopped in the old potting shed and found shears and a basket, planning to cut flowers. Instead she began pulling weeds from a border of lilies. She had asked Duncan to do so, but he had yet to get to it. Perhaps it was time to ask Mac to recommend a gardener or at least a youth who could help with outside chores. Next she yanked a clump of grass from the flower bed. The exertion felt good. She released a bit of frustration with every weed she yanked from the ground. If only she could root out her worries and disappointments as easily.
Weary at last, she returned the gardening tools to the shed and made her way back to the house. As she rounded the front, Gilbert appeared, crossing the drive on foot, hands extended in supplication.
"Abby. Forgive me. I know I'm late. Mr. Morgan gathered all the men for a shooting tournament, and I didn't feel I could refuse, being a guest there and with my employer no less. The contest lasted far longer than I anticipated. But I remembered you said you were at your leisure today, so I decided to come over late. Have I been presumptuous?"
"You know you are welcome, Gilbert. Papa will be happy to see you."
"But are you?"
"Of course I am."
He smiled into her eyes, and for a moment she felt herself falling into them, but then she drew herself up. "So, who won the tournament?"
"A young sir somebody. I forget. But then Mr. Morgan summoned his land agent, and he easily bested our champion."
"Mac Chapman?"
"Yes, that was his name."
"I am surprised Mr. Morgan brought Mac into the contest."
"Wanted to give the proud young buck a setdown, I gather. Either that or he is awfully proud of his agent."
"He used to be steward here," Abigail said. "I am fairly well acquainted with him. He's our curate's father."
"Ah. The red-haired chap. I should have guessed." He smiled playfully. "The local competition."
Abigail realized they were no longer talking about a shooting competition. Was Gilbert flirting with her?
An annoying tendril of hair kept blowing across her face. She brushed it away with a swipe of her glove.
Gilbert smiled indulgently, reached out, and stroked her cheek.
She stilled, inhaling a long breath.
He held up his buff glove to show her the smudge of soil there. "How did you manage to smear dirt on your face, fair lady?"
"Oh . . . I was pottering about in the garden." She ducked her head, self-consciously wiping the spot again. She glanced up at him tentatively. "All right?"
"More than all right. Perfect."
Her cheeks heated. She was not accustomed to Gilbert paying her compliments. No doubt a skill he'd learned in Italy. Weren't Italian men notorious for flirting with every female they encountered? It didn't mean anything.
She gestured toward the house. "So, what do you think?"
"Beautiful."
Something in his voice caused her to turn her head. His eyes remained on her face.
She'd had enough. "I'm talking about the house, Bertie, as well you know." She referred to him by an old nickname, hoping to dissolve the unfamiliar tension between them.
Gilbert dragged his eyes from her, up toward the house, taking in its gables, arches, and elaborate oriel windows.
He released a low whistle. "You live here?"
She nodded. "It's something, isn't it."
They slowly walked around the house. After they turned the corner, Gilbert paused and pointed up. "Looks like a water tower. Do the upper floors have running water?"
"No. Only the kitchen belowstairs."
"Hm. The main hall is clearly fifteenth century. But that shaft looks like a later addition to me."
"To accommodate a servants' staircase, perhaps?"
"Bit narrow for that." He squinted upward. "But if it was a water tower, evidently it has fallen out of use. Cheaper and easier to have servants haul water than to maintain the system, apparently."
They walked around the back of the house.
"Another later addition," Gilbert noted, gesturing toward the two-story structure occupying part of the rear courtyard.
"Yes. That's the drawing room on the ground level, and a lovely bedchamber and dressing room above."
"Your bedchamber?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I thought Louisa would like it."
He said nothing, but his gaze lingered on its windows.
From the side of the house, her father came striding toward them, hand extended, smile creasing his thin, handsome face. "Gilbert! How good to see you here, my boy."
"Mr. Foster. A pleasure to see you again, sir."
The two shook hands.
"I saw you from the windows," her father said. "I hope you don't mind, but I was eager to greet you."
"Not at all, sir."
"We were just coming in to find you," Abigail said, hoping that the servants had not already eaten all the cake.
In the spacious, sunny drawing room a few minutes later, the three visited together over tea and slices of cake, her father asking Gilbert questions about his family and his new position. Then he asked, "How long can you stay?"
Gilbert glanced up at the clock on the mantelpiece. "I should return in time to dress for dinner."
That didn't give them much time. Abigail smiled at Gilbert. "Before you go, may I show you those house plans I mentioned?"
Gilbert met her gaze with a knowing look and rose. "Very well."
He bid her father farewell, and he and Abigail excused themselves.
As they crossed the hall, Abigail asked, "May I tell you something in confidence?"
His eyes roved hers. "Of course."
She led the way into the library and stepped to the map table. Behind her she heard the door latch click and turned in surprise. Gilbert had shut the door, and now walked toward her, a small smile on his face.
Abigail licked dry lips and looked away. She retrieved the old plans from their drawer and spread them atop the map table, her hands slightly unsteady.
"You really wanted to show me house plans?" he asked, his voice tinged with surprise.
She shot him a questioning look. "Yes. . . ." Realization dawned, followed by embarrassment. "Did you think it a ruse to get you alone? My goodness, Gilbert. You were in Italy too long."
He sighed playfully. "Can't blame a man for hoping . . ."
She turned away sharply, but he touched her arm, his voice apologetic. "Abby . . ."
She gentled her voice and faced him. "You should know that Mamma has written to me. She mentioned that you have called on Louisa since your return."
"Ah. . . ." He finally had the decency to look sheepish.
She inhaled and turned back to the plans. "Yes, I really wanted your opinion on these plans. You see, there are rumors of a secret room somewhere in Pembrooke Park, and if it exists, I want to find it."
"A secret room?" he echoed, brows rising.
"Yes. Supposedly it hides a treasure of some sort, though the former steward assures me those rumors are nonsense. Still, I would like to find the room."
"Have you anything to go on beyond the rumors?"
"A little. I've received a few letters from someone who used to live here. She mentioned studying the plans for clues." Abigail decided not to mention the dolls' house to Gilbert when he already looked skeptical.
"And did this former resident find the room?"
"She hasn't said. Yet."
He gave her a doubtful glance.
"Just look at them, Gilbert, and tell me what you see."
"Very well." He sighed. Offended, or disappointed?
He began a casual survey, then frowned and bent his head closer to the drawings.
"May I have more light?"
"Certainly." She went and drew back the drapes all the way and opened the shutters.
Gilbert pored over the drawings. "These are a series of renovation plans. Do you happen to have the original plans?"
"I don't know about original. But these are older. Before the west wing was added."
She spread another set beside the others.
He compared the two. "Yes, see? At some point, the tower was added in the corner there. Probably mid-1700s, when many modernized their ancestral homes by adding water closets. A cistern on the roof collected rainwater, which then ran down through a series of pipes drawn by levers below. Then at a later date, another wing was added in front of the tower."
He looked up at her, eyes alight with interest of a different sort now. "Perhaps it is time you gave me the tour of the house."
Satisfaction. This was the inquisitive Gilbert she knew.
Together they walked from the library into the main hall. There, he pointed up. "This is the original hall, open several stories high to allow the smoke of open fires to dissipate in the days before chimneys. You can see that staircase is a later addition, as well as the gallery above it."
They walked through the morning room and into the dining room. Gilbert glanced around, then stepped to the corner of the room and pressed his hand against a panel of wooden wainscoting. The panel slid open.
Abigail's heart lurched and she hurried forward. "Did you find it?"
"I found the hoist from the kitchen belowstairs."
"Oh. I hadn't noticed that before." Embarrassment singed her ears.
"No doubt the servants raise trays with this pulley, and lay breakfast on the sideboard before you raise your pretty head from the pillow."
Hearing Gilbert mention her pillow felt strangely intimate. Silly female, she remonstrated herself. Had she not hit Gilbert with her pillow on several occasions when they were children?
He walked to the other side of the dining room, to a narrow door beside a recessed china cupboard. "Having looked at the older plans, I would have imagined the servants' stairs on this side of the room." He opened the narrow door, but it led only to a linen cupboard.
"What's above this room?"
Abigail thought. "My bedchamber." She hesitated. "Would you like to see upstairs as well?"
"If you don't mind showing me."
"Of course not." Abigail led the way up the hall staircase, around the gallery railing, past the door to Louisa's room. She supposed she should offer to show him, but she did not. She saw how he had looked up at the windows, and she had no wish to help him imagine Louisa in her bedchamber, or anywhere else for that matter.
"Is there a housemaid's closet on this floor?" he asked.
"Not that I know of."
They proceeded to her bedchamber. She opened the door and looked inside, making sure she had left no item of feminine apparel in plain view. She saw the room with new eyes—with Gilbert beside her, the flowery pink bed-curtains and dolls' house suddenly seemed too little-girlish.
He hesitated on the threshold. "May I?"
"Of course," she whispered, feeling self-conscious about having a man in her bedchamber—even if the man was her childhood friend. Abigail remained in the doorway. Polly walked past with an armload of linens, her eyebrows rising nearly to her hairline to see a man disappear into her mistress's bedchamber. Abigail gave her a closed-lip smile and said quietly, "It's all right."
Gilbert walked slowly around the room, pausing to look at the dolls' house. "Someone went to a lot of trouble. My employer built a scale model of his London house for his daughter. It was quite the undertaking."
He paused again at the door to her closet. "May I?"
"If you like."
He opened it and knocked on the wooden panels, pulling and pushing on the various shelves and gown drawers within. Then he opened her oak wardrobe cupboard beside it and pushed and prodded there as well. "No false back or moving panels."
"No. I couldn't find one either."
"And the dining room is below us?"
"Yes."
"So the kitchen hoist is on this wall downstairs."
"Right."
In the end, he shook his head and said, "In my professional opinion, I would say your 'secret room' was this closet. At some point, it might have served as a housemaid's closet or water closet, but the pipes have been removed. Perhaps the door was not as it is now, but a hidden panel like the one used to conceal the hoist below it."
"Ah . . ." Abigail swallowed her disappointment. "I should have known there was a logical explanation for the rumors." She sighed.
He gave her an indulgent grin and tweaked her chin. "Not too disappointed, I hope."
"No." She braved a smile. "There is an attic as well, with a storeroom and a few servants' bedchambers, if you would like to see them, but . . ."
"What time is it?" He glanced around for a clock and not finding one pulled out his pocket watch and consulted the face.
"I had better head back or I shall be late for dinner, and Mrs. Morgan will scowl at me."
"Horrors," Abigail teased.
He patted his pocket and said, "Before I forget, Susan sent a name you asked for. She says she'll write a proper letter soon, once their next edition is printed." He extracted a slip of paper from his pocketbook and handed it to her. "A writer for her magazine, I think she said?"
"Mm-hm." Abigail read the name but didn't recognize it: E. P. Brooks. "Thank her for me."
Together they walked companionably back downstairs and to the front door.
"Thank you for coming," she said.
"Better late than never, I hope."
"Yes, definitely. I hope you enjoy the rest of your stay at Hunts Hall."
"I don't know how much of my time shall be my own, but if I find myself free, may I call again?"
"Of course. You are always welcome."
"Thank you, Abby." He reached out and gently grasped her fingers. Bending low, he pressed a slow kiss to the back of her hand for the first time in her memory.
The spot remained warm and sensitive long after Gilbert had crossed the bridge and disappeared from her view.
For nearly an hour after Gilbert departed, Abigail walked around the house and about her tasks in a contented daze, thinking she would give up her search. If Gilbert was right, there was no secret room, beyond perhaps her own closet. But the notion left her unsatisfied. Perhaps Gilbert was wrong. For all his education and experience and travel, he didn't know everything.
Illogical or not, she put on her bonnet and clean gloves and went back outside. Again she walked slowly around the house, looking up at the rooflines, the windows, and the tower Gilbert had pointed out, perhaps eight feet square. Something caught her eye in the tower, some twenty feet or more above her. There were no windows in that narrow wall. But . . . what was that? It appeared as if the stones of a roughly rectangular section were lighter than those around it. As if there had been a window there decades ago but it had been filled in.
Perhaps if the tower had begun as a servants' staircase and then been converted to a water tower or water closets, windows would have been unwanted. Might that explain it?
"What are we looking at?"
Abigail started and whirled about, surprised to see William Chapman standing there, hands behind his back, staring up at the house as she'd been doing.
"Mr. Chapman. You startled me."
"Forgive me. I didn't intend to."
She pointed out the area above. "Do you see that section of lighter stone—at about the second level?"
He squinted up at it. "Yes. It looks as if there used to be a window."
"That's what I thought."
"No big mystery," he said with an easy shrug. "Many people have bricked over or otherwise covered unnecessary windows, to avoid exorbitant glass taxes."
That was logical. She felt foolish not to have thought of it herself. Likely some thrifty owner or steward of generations past had ordered some of the windows to be filled in to save money. Had he covered other windows as well? It didn't make sense to brick over merely one window for tax reasons. She stared up higher, trying in vain to see evidence of another filled-in window on the level above. She did not see one at the ground level either.
A gig came rumbling up the drive. Abigail glanced over and saw Miles Pembrooke seated beside the coachman, returning from Hunts Hall. When the gig halted, Miles gingerly climbed down, one leg buckling a bit before he righted himself. He waved to thank the driver and turned toward the door. Seeing them standing there at the side of the house, he lifted his hat and hobbled toward them, leaning on his stick.
"That's Miles Pembrooke," she said. "Do you know him?"
Beside her William stiffened but said nothing.
"Hello, Miss Foster," Miles called out as he neared. "Don't you look a picture in that bonnet."
"Thank you, Mr. Pembrooke. Did you enjoy your visit to Hunts Hall?"
"It was most . . . enlightening." Miles glanced with interest at William. When Mr. Chapman said nothing, Miles looked back expectantly at her.
"Forgive me," Abigail said. "I thought perhaps you two knew each other. Miles Pembrooke, may I introduce William Chapman."
"Will Chapman . . ." Miles echoed. He offered his hand, but William continued to stare at the man's face, as if he didn't notice. "I can't believe it," Miles said, shaking his head in wonder. "You were but a wee ginger-haired scamp last I saw you. Perhaps, what, four or five? Darting about the place like a redbird. Of course I was only a lad myself."
"What brings you here, Mr. Pembrooke?" William asked, his voice uncharacteristically stern and clipped.
Miles hesitated, then took a step nearer Abigail. "I wanted to see the house again. And my good friends and distant relatives the Fosters have been kind enough to invite me to stay. Haven't you, Miss Foster?" He beamed at her.
She felt self-conscious and illogically guilty under Mr. Chapman's disapproving gaze. "Yes, Father is very kind," she murmured.
"I saw your father today, Mr. Chapman," Miles said. "Though only from a distance. Shot a cork off a bottle at fifty yards. How well I remember Mac. He frightened the wits out of me when I was a boy. Though not nearly as much as—" Miles broke off. "He is in good health, I trust?"
"Yes."
"Do greet him for me."
"I shall certainly tell him you're here."
Arms crossed, William glanced at her and then looked at Miles, as if expecting the man to excuse himself and take his leave.
But Miles held his ground. He looked from Mr. Chapman to Abigail, as though trying to sort them out. Finally he said, "Miss Foster, you have not been here that long, I gather, so you have only recently become acquainted with our former steward and his family. Is that right?"
"Yes. They are excellent neighbors. And perhaps you are not aware, but Mr. Chapman here is our curate."
"Will Chapman? A clergyman? Inconceivable." His dark eyes glinted with humor. "You can't be old enough."
"I am indeed. I am nearly five and twenty, and recently ordained."
"Astounding. Well. Good for you."
Still neither man made a move to leave. Miles glanced up at the exterior of the house. "And what have you two found so interesting out here?"
Mr. Chapman looked at her, waiting for her to answer. But for some reason, she was hesitant to point out the stoned-in window to Miles Pembrooke.
In her stead, Mr. Chapman reluctantly began, "Miss Foster just noticed that—"
"That the clematis are climbing the wall in such profusion this year," she interrupted. "Had you noticed? I adore flowering vines on old houses."
Both men blinked at her.
Miles politely agreed, "Very charming, yes."
Abigail hesitated. She didn't want to mention the secret room, but thinking Miles might be able to tell her something about the tower, she said tentatively, "We were discussing past renovations to the house, Mr. Pembrooke. Do you know anything about it?"
He pursed his lip and shrugged. "You may ask me anything, Miss Foster. I am yours to command. But remember I lived here as a boy between the ages of ten and twelve, not an age to notice things like walls and climbing vines."
"You're right. Never mind. Shall we go in? I imagine Father is already dressing for dinner. Will you join us, Mr. Chapman? You would be most welcome."
With another uneasy glance at Miles Pembrooke, Mr. Chapman said, "Thank you, Miss Foster. I should enjoy that. But perhaps another time?"
"Very well."
"And now I shall bid you both good day." He made a brief bow toward Abigail, and then turned and walked away, not in the direction of the church and parsonage, but rather in the direction of his parents' home.
Miles watched him go. "Hard to believe Will Chapman is so grown. Almost makes me feel old."
Abigail followed the direction of his gaze on William's retreating back. Then she felt Mr. Pembrooke's focus swivel to her.
She glanced over, saw another glint of humor in his brown eyes. "That was your cue to assure me I am not at all old, Miss Foster."
Abigail complied. "You are not old, Mr. Pembrooke. I'd guess you are only, what, thirty?"
He pressed a hand to his heart. "You cut me deeply, miss," he said, with melodramatic flair. "I shan't be thirty for two whole months yet."
"Then I beg your forgiveness," she said, matching his mock serious tone.
"And I shall forgive you . . . on two conditions."
"Oh?"
"Tell me how handsome I am and agree to sing for me after dinner."
"Mr. Pembrooke!" she mildly protested.
He ducked his head and playfully pouted. "You don't think me handsome?"
"Yes, you are handsome, as you well know. In fact you would be more so if you did not beg compliments."
"Touché, madam. And you will sing for me? I hear you have a lovely voice."
"Who told you that?" She doubted either William or Leah would have offered the information to this relative stranger.
"Some lads I met along the way. They asked me who I was and where I lived. When I told them I was a guest at Pembrooke Park, they said, 'That's where the lady who sings like the angels lives.'"
"The boys exaggerated, I assure you."
"Allow me to be the judge of that." He offered his arm. "Shall we?"
William found his father cleaning his guns after the recent shooting tournament.
"Papa, have you heard the news? Miles Pembrooke has returned. He's staying in the manor as a guest of the Fosters."
His father's whole body stiffened, and his eyes narrowed. "The devil he is."
"It's true. I just met him. In fact, he said he saw you today out at Hunts Hall, but from a distance, while you were shooting."
"Did he indeed? Good thing I didn't see him. Though I doubt I'd recognize him after all these years."
"Dark hair. Dresses like a dandy. He walks with a limp now, and carries a stick."
"A stick? But he can't be more than, what, thirty?"
"Something like that. An injury of some sort, apparently."
"Does Leah know?"
"Not from me. I came to you first."
"Good. Don't say anything yet. First we need to know why he's here and where he's been all these years. Where is the rest of his family?"
"He said he is only here to see the house again. But I did not demand to know his intentions or the whereabouts of his family upon our first meeting."
"You should have."
"Then perhaps you ought to pay a call yourself."
Mac rose. "I shall indeed."
William grasped his father's arm. "I know you have reason to despise Clive Pembrooke. But remember this is not that man himself but his son—who was only a boy when it all happened."
"I know. But I also know that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree."
After dinner, Miles and Abigail adjourned to the drawing room. Her father said he would join them after he smoked his pipe alone, as he always did, since his family had never liked the smell. A short while later, Molly brought in coffee. As she set down the tray, she leaned near to Abigail and whispered that Mac Chapman was waiting in the hall.
The news surprised Abigail, but she said, "Ask him to join us."
A minute later, Mac appeared at the drawing room door. He'd removed his hat but still wore his Carrick coat. He said, "I wish to speak with Mr. Pembrooke, if you don't mind."
"I . . ." She looked toward Miles in concern. "Do you mind?"
"Of . . . course not," Miles said, then asked Mac, "May Miss Foster stay?"
"You may not want her to hear our conversation."
"Miss Foster may hear anything I say to you. I would like her to stay."
"If you wish."
Abigail resumed her seat, torn between wishing she might have been excused this scene and curiosity to hear more.
Mac remained standing. "Why are you here, Mr. Pembrooke?"
The man's confrontational stance and glinting eyes reminded Abigail of her first sight of Mac Chapman, gun in hand, ready to shoot any intruder to protect his beloved Pembrooke Park.
Miles appeared slightly nervous, but anyone targeted by that green-eyed glare would be.
"I . . . I wished to see Pembrooke Park again. That's all."
"Why do I doubt that?"
"I have no idea." Mr. Pembrooke's brow furrowed. "Mr. Chapman, I don't know what I have done to so vex you, but I—"
"Do you not? You were only a boy at the time, but you're a man now. Surely you heard the rumor about your father and Robert Pembrooke's death."
"Yes. And I am sorry to say the rumor is likely true."
Mac's eyes flashed. "You mean he admitted he killed his own brother?"
Miles raised a hand. "I never heard him admit it, no, but I am ashamed to say I can believe it of him."
Abigail thought of the Genesis verse referenced in the miniature book. "Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him."
Mac clenched his jaw. "And where is he now? Did he send you here to check up on the old place and . . . the lot of us?"
"Heavens no. I have not seen Father since we left Pembrooke Park eighteen years ago."
"We thought you all left together."
Miles shook his head. "My mother, brother, sister, and I left together. Father was . . . delayed."
"Is he still alive?"
"I . . . don't know. As I said, we have not laid eyes on him these many years. My mother believed him dead, but there is a part of me that fears he might still be alive."
"Fears?" Abigail asked.
Miles looked at her. "You did not know my father, Miss Foster, or you would not ask such a question."
"True enough," Mac agreed. "And the rest of your family?"
"My brother died not long after we left here, and my mother died last year. There is only my sister and me now."
Abigail interjected, "But you said Harry was the executor of the estate. I assumed you meant your brother. But how can that be if he is dead?"
Miles turned to stare at her. "Oh! No, Harri is my sister. Short for Harriet."
"Oh . . ." Abigail said, feeling foolish. But then she realized it was the first time she had heard the given name of the executor, the person who had likely been sending her the journal pages—Harriet Pembrooke.
Mac asked, "And how long will you be staying?"
"I have not yet decided. Mr. Foster has been kind enough to invite me to stay on as long as I like."
"Has he indeed?" Mac pierced Abigail with an accusing look, then returned his focus to Miles. "Do you intend to take over Pembrooke Park?"
"Me? Good heavens, no. Besides, there is some question of ownership."
"A problem with the will?" Mac ventured.
"You'd have to ask my sister, but I believe the will is clear. Pembrooke Park was to go to Robert Pembrooke's oldest child. It isn't entailed away to the male line, as you may know."
Mac nodded. "Aye, I know."
"Since his family have all died, my father would have been next in line. As he is missing, the lawyers have it tied up in probate, and Harri refuses to pursue the matter. She doesn't want the place, but nor is she keen on seeing it come to me for some reason. Which is fine by me, as I have no interest in living here again—beyond a visit, of course." He smiled broadly at Abigail. "And a very pleasant visit it is."
"Why not?" Mac asked, clearly skeptical.
"Bad memories here for us, as you might guess. Though being here with such charming hosts has soothed some of the bad memories, I own. Yes, I could quite get used to living in such fine quarters, with such pleasant company." Again he smiled at her, his eyes shining with possessive warmth that sent a prickle of unease through Abigail's stomach.
"I would'na advise it," Mac said.
"Oh? And why not?" As much challenge glinted in Miles's eyes as in Mac's.
"You'd best be on your way. And leave these good people in peace."
"Peace?" Miles looked at her and asked pleasantly, "Am I disrupting your peace, Miss Foster?" He pressed a beseeching hand to his chest. "Pray, do tell me if I am, and I shall leave forthwith."
Mac's eyes narrowed. "I'll be watching you."
Miles smiled. "I am flattered, Mac, by your attention."
Her father came in and drew up short at finding Mac Chapman there. "Oh, I didn't realize . . ."
"I was just leaving." Mac stepped to the door, then turned back. "I trust your houseguest will very soon follow my example."
After the conversation between Mac and Miles, something niggled at Abigail, some little detail that lingered on the murky edges of her memory. Why did Miles's sister allow the will to languish in probate? And why warn her to turn away anyone named Pembrooke? Did Harriet Pembrooke want the "hidden treasure" for herself? The second verse marked in the miniature book—the one from Numbers—flitted through her mind: "Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." Was that somehow related?
After Polly helped her into her nightclothes, Abigail sat on the edge of her bed and pulled out the bundle of letters and journal pages. As she reread the last one she'd received, one line jumped out at her: A detail in those plans that does not jibe with something I have seen in the house itself. Or am I not thinking of the actual house at all, but rather its scale model?
That was the detail she'd been forgetting. Had Abigail overlooked a clue about the secret room in the dolls' house itself? She crossed the room and regarded the model of Pembrooke Park.
There were the master's and mistress's bedchambers with their matching fireplaces, except for the missing miniature portrait, just as in the house itself. Two smaller bedchambers lay beside each large bedroom, instead of behind them across the gallery as they were in reality. But surely this was a simple contrivance for practicality, to make all the rooms of the dolls' house accessible from one side.
Abigail knelt in front of the dolls' house until her knees ached, opening tiny doors, and searching the drawer beneath by candlelight. Nothing. She noticed a black streak painted up the kitchen wall above the open hearth. A very realistic effect. But otherwise she saw nothing she hadn't noticed before. Suddenly she glimpsed her reflection in the looking glass and stilled.
What was she doing? She was a woman of three and twenty, not a little girl. And a practical woman at that—not some dreamer or desperate gambler. She rose stiffly and returned to her bed. She closed her eyes and listened but heard nothing. The house was unusually quiet. No winnowing voices. No trespassing footsteps. When was the last time she had heard any? Apparently Duncan, or whomever it was, had long ago given up the search.
It was time for her to do so as well.
She blew out her candle and pulled up the bedclothes. As of tomorrow, she would lay aside her search for treasure and find a more useful way to spend her time. She had been foolish to entertain the notion. To hope.
Would Gilbert expect the woman he wed to bring a hefty dowry into the marriage? He was just starting out in his career, likely many years away from financial success. Even a poor clergyman like William Chapman no doubt hoped for a wealthy wife, or at least one with some sort of dowry. She sighed. It couldn't be helped. She had no dowry, and the majority of her father's wealth was gone. And no mythical treasure was going to appear to replace it.
The next afternoon, another letter arrived. Abigail had begun to fear she had received her last word from that source. She opened it right there in the hall and read the journal page eagerly.
How strange it feels to benefit from the misfortune of others. To live in the house of relatives I have never met and now, never shall. My father says I am being ridiculous.
"This is your grandparents' house—the house I grew up in. I have every right to be here, and so do you."
If this is my grandparents' house, why have I never been here before? Why no Easter visits, Christmas dinners, or leisurely summer holidays?
Apparently there was a falling out between him and his parents when he was young, and he'd had to join the navy to earn his own way in life—as he often told us, part bitter, part proud. But now he seems determined to act the part of a landed gentleman, ordering fine suits and fast horses. He wants so badly to win the admiration of our neighbors, and is growing increasingly angry as he realizes that taking over his brother's house has not brought him the respect he sees as his due.
I once had an aunt who died of typhus. I once had a cousin who died as well. A girl like me, who liked pretty frocks and played with the dolls' house in my room—her room.
Aunt and Uncle Pembrooke. Eleanor. I feel I am coming to know them at least a little, through what they left behind. Beautiful clothes, well cared for. Beautiful gardens, well appreciated. Beautiful pianoforte—well used.
They were reverent or at least religious. There is a family Bible hidden away, and a well-worn prayer book in the family box in the estate church, though we attend but rarely.
The girl was loved. Cherished even, if the carefully stored baby clothes mean what I think they mean. Indulged, if the dolls' house was hers and not our grandmother's collection.
And the girl knew, I believe, where the secret room was. Discovered it, and kept it to herself. As I have.
Aha! Abigail thought in triumph. The writer had found the secret room. Unless she had some reason to prevaricate, to lead Abigail on a wild-goose chase for her own personal amusement. And why would that be? Unless . . . Was she hoping Abigail would do the work—find the treasure for her? But if she already knew where the room was, why would she give a stranger clues to its whereabouts?
Gilbert would say that the room the writer had found was likely now the closet in her bedchamber. However, Gilbert might have missed something. After all, he had not read the journal pages. Perhaps she ought to have shown them to him. But she prized them as her personal secret to savor. . . .
Abigail went down to the library, determined to look at the plans again.
# Chapter 14
Over the next few days, Abigail endeavored to study the plans and search the house at every opportunity, but her search was hindered by the presence of a houseguest. Miles Pembrooke took an active interest in her concerns and movements and often asked to accompany her whenever she went for a walk or even to sit in the library, saying he would simply keep her company while she read or wrote letters or whatever she was about.
She felt she couldn't—or shouldn't—study the plans with Miles looking over her shoulder. So she made great headway in the novel she was reading entitled Persuasion. She would be able to give it to Leah in a few days' time at this rate.
One afternoon, the post arrived as she prepared for what she hoped would be a solitary walk. Her heart lifted to see another letter in that now-familiar hand, but Miles came upon her before she could open it, and she quickly slipped it beneath a letter from her father's solicitor.
His eyes glinted knowingly. He must have seen her less-than-deft attempt at concealment.
"A letter?" he asked. "From whom, pray tell?"
"I . . ." Abigail hesitated. She believed the letter writer was Miles's own sister. Likely he could look at the writing and confirm whether that was true, and the mystery would be solved. Why then did her spirit catch at the thought of showing it to him?
Abigail lifted her chin. "Forgive me, Mr. Pembrooke. But I hardly think it your concern."
"Ah! A love letter, is it? I am all devastation."
"No, it is not a love letter."
"Then what has you looking so flushed and secretive?"
"Your persistence, sir!" she protested.
"From Mr. Scott, perhaps? Or the good parson?"
"Neither. And that is my last word on the subject. However, if you'd like the new Quarterly Review, I am sure my father would not mind your reading that to your heart's content."
He reached out and stroked a thumb across her chin, smiling indulgently. "You are charming when you're vexed, Miss Foster. Has anyone ever told you that?"
"No."
"Ah. That honor is mine at least. If not first in your esteem, at least I am first in something."
Deciding to forgo her walk, Abigail excused herself, took the letter upstairs, and carefully latched the door of her bedchamber before opening it.
The letter began with two lines in bold print:
I hear you have a houseguest by the name of Pembrooke. Why did you not heed my warning?
This was followed by a long letter written in that familiar script. It was not a page from a young girl's journal, as most of the others had been, but instead appeared to have been written recently.
We had been living in Pembrooke Park for more than a year when I first saw her. She stood in the rose garden, staring up at the house with haunted eyes. I stood at my bedchamber window, contemplating the grey sky, wondering whether or not to bother going out for a ride or if I would end up soaked. Riding was the only diversion I enjoyed, beyond reading novels. I had no friends. Not one. We had not been in Easton long before I realized our neighbors despised us. It was almost as if they feared us. Why, I wondered, when they don't even know us? It seemed devilish unfair to me.
No one allowed their daughters to accept my invitations. Nor their sons to spend time with my brothers. The boys at least had each other. But I had no one. Maybe that is why I noticed her. A girl, perhaps a few years younger than myself, standing close to the house and partially hidden behind the rose arbor. I wondered if she was bent on mischief or simply afraid to be seen. Did she think we would run her off, not realizing I, at least, would welcome her warmly, so rare was a visitor to Pembrooke Park?
I thought I had seen most of the village girls at least from a distance, at church or on market days. But I had not seen her before. She had golden hair peeking out from her bonnet and wore a stylish spencer over her frock. She didn't look poor, but neither was she a girl "equal to my station," as mother referred to it. That was how she tried to console me—telling me it was just as well no girls my age called, for she wouldn't want me to spend too much time in the company of uneducated rustics, not when I was well on my way to becoming an accomplished young lady. I confess I snorted a bit at that. A year earlier, we'd been living in a pair of shabby rooms in Portsmouth and wearing castoff clothing. Of course that was before Father had received his prize money and helped himself to the contents of his brother's safe.
The first time I saw the girl with haunted eyes, I did nothing. When I noticed her a few days later, I raised my hand, hoping she would see me. But she didn't. So I opened the window, thinking I would call out a greeting, but the sound of the latch startled her, and she bolted like a wild hare fleeing a fox.
When the girl didn't return for several days, I went in search of her. Eventually I found her in a hideaway she had made between the potting shed and walled garden, quite out of view of the house. To a casual observer—or a boy—the arrangement of planks, bricks, colorful glass jars, and a pallet covered with a cast-off petticoat might look like an odd collection of rubbish. But I saw it for what it was. A playhouse.
Not wanting her to flee again, I decided not to risk a direct approach. Instead I returned later in the evening to leave flowers in one of those glass jars along with a note assuring her I meant no harm and asking if I might play with her the next day. I signed it, Your Secret Friend.
I was afraid she would leave as soon as she discovered the note and knew someone had been in her hiding place. Instead, when I walked over the next afternoon, she stood there and watched me approach, looking solemn and older than her years.
"Why do you want to play with me?" she asked.
I decided to be honest with her. "Because no one else will."
"And will you promise not to tell anyone?"
I nodded. "I promise. It shall be our secret."
"Very well." She tilted her head in thought. "You may call me Lizzie," she said. "And I shall call you . . . ?"
"Jane," I supplied, giving her my middle name. Afraid she would refuse to associate with me if she knew who I really was.
And that was the beginning of our secret, mismatched friendship. We met nearly every afternoon when the weather was fine, for most of that summer. We performed the little plays I had written, and played house, creating families and situations and lives more appealing or interesting than my own—likely than her own as well.
I didn't ask about her family, because I didn't want to invite similar questions in return. I didn't want to talk or even think about my real family. Especially my father. I wanted to escape for an hour or two into the company of this new friend. And into a world of make-believe.
Before long, I figured out who her family was, and heard her real name. And I assume she learnt mine. But we never spoke of it. It was as if to do so would break the spell and end our private world, the sanction of our friendship.
But all too soon it ended anyway. My little brother saw us together, and she was afraid word would get back to her family. She left me a note behind a loose brick in the garden wall. Ending our friendship as I had begun it. Fitting, I remember thinking later. At the time, I thought only how unfair life was.
Abigail felt a heavy sense of sadness as she finished the letter. She wondered where the girls were now, and if they ever saw each other again. If Harriet Pembrooke, or "Jane," had ever made another friend. And what of Lizzie, the village girl? Was she married, with a little girl of her own playing house somewhere nearby? Or was she alone?
Wherever the girls were, Abigail hoped they were happy. But somehow, after reading this account, she doubted it. Again she wondered if she should show Miles the letters. Why was she so hesitant to do so? Perhaps she could at least ask Miles about his sister.
She went and found him in the library, perusing the fashion prints in a copy of the magazine Susan and Edward Lloyd published.
"May I join you?"
"Of course!" he said, beaming. "Look at this well-dressed couple in their new fashions for spring. That could be you and me—we are easily as handsome. And what about this promenade dress and tall hat? I think it would suit you."
She glanced at it with feigned interest. "I never cared for ostrich plumes. But that bicorn hat would look well on you," she added, earning herself a smile.
She sat down with her novel, and he returned to his magazine. The ticking of the long-case clock had never sounded so loud.
After a few minutes pretending to read, she said casually, "Miles, may I ask about your sister?"
"What about her?" he said, eyes still on the page.
"Where does she live, for starters?"
He looked up at her. "She splits her time between Bristol and London, I believe. When she's not traveling about."
Abigail thought of the Bristol postmark on the letters she received. "How does she fare? Are you two in contact?"
He shrugged. "Not really. I've only seen her twice since I returned to England."
Seeing his discomfort, she changed the subject. "I was surprised when you told Mac your brother had died. I don't think anyone here knew that. I suppose no one thought to send word back to the parish."
Miles nodded vaguely. "We only lived here for two years after all."
Abigail swallowed, and then said tentatively, "May I ask how he died?"
"You may well ask. You may ask how . . . and why. I know I did for years. Still do."
She waited for him to explain, the clock ticking loudly again. But he did not. He sat there, wiping at some invisible spot of dirt on his breeches.
Abigail said gently, "I spoke with old Mrs. Hayes, who used to be the housekeeper here. She's blind now, poor old dear. She told me she found blood in the hall after your family left."
"Blood?" Miles echoed. "What a thought!" He tucked his chin. "I say, Miss Foster, you read too many gothic novels. My dear brother was alive when we left here. And is now buried in a churchyard in Bristol, near my mother's family."
"And . . . your father?"
"I honestly don't know. We never saw him again. And I hope we never shall." He rose abruptly. "Now, if you will excuse me, I am weary and would like to rest before dinner."
"Of course. I am sorry to have upset you. I shouldn't have pried."
He paused beside her chair and reached down his hand. Uncertain of his intention, she tentatively raised her own. He took it in his and pressed it warmly.
"You do not upset me, Miss Foster," he whispered with a sad smile. "You are a balm to my soul."
Standing in the nave of the church the next afternoon, Abigail handed William another taper as he replaced the spent ones in the chandelier.
"May I tell you something?" she began.
He shifted his weight on the ladder. "Of course."
"I haven't told anyone yet, though I'm not sure why. It's been going on for some time."
He looked down at her, a wary light in his eyes. "What has?"
"I have been receiving letters."
"Letters?" he asked carefully. "From a gentleman?"
"No. At least I don't think so. They're anonymous."
"A secret admirer?"
"Of course not. From someone who used to live here."
He stiffened. "From Mr. Pembrooke?"
"No. From his sister, Harriet, I think. About the years she lived here."
"Why would she not sign them?"
"I don't know. But some of what she writes does not reflect well on her father, so perhaps anonymity gives her the courage to divulge her secrets."
"What sort of secrets?"
"Apparently she was afraid of her father. She also writes about her friendship with another girl from the village."
"Oh, who?"
"Someone called Lizzie."
"Lizzie is a common name. No surname?"
Abigail shook her head. "And Harriet didn't give her real name for fear the girl wouldn't associate with her. I gather the Pembrookes were ostracized while they were here."
"Yes, they were."
"I wonder where the girls are now," Abigail continued. "They would be about thirty, give or take a few years, if I've done my sums correctly. Do you know any Lizzies that age?"
William paused to consider. "Mrs. Matthews's given name is Elizabeth. She is in her early thirties—the woman with the five boys?"
"Ah, yes."
"And Mrs. Hayes's niece is named Eliza. I don't think I've ever heard anyone call her Lizzie, but it's possible. . . . Though she is only in her midtwenties.
Abigail thought of Eliza, taking care of her aunt, who once worked and lived in Pembrooke Park. She had seen Eliza writing something, and standing near Pembrooke graves in the churchyard. . . .
William climbed down the ladder, adding, "I could ask Leah—she might remember if there were any other girls by that name."
"Thank you. Or I could ask her myself next time I see her. Was Leah acquainted with Harriet Pembrooke?"
"I don't think so. She was away at school for a year when they lived here."
"Still, it wouldn't hurt to ask."
William slanted her a telling glance. "I forget you don't know my sister all that well yet. She doesn't like to talk about herself. Or the past. Or the Pembrookes."
Abigail nodded, recalling Leah's reticence to enter Pembrooke Park, and again wondered if she'd had a bad experience there. Or if one of the Pembrookes had mistreated her. She couldn't imagine charming Miles doing so. He'd only been a boy at the time. And Harriet had been so desperate for a friend.
The older brother? Or Clive Pembrooke himself? Abigail felt a little shiver pass over her. She prayed she was wrong.
# Chapter 15
The next day Gilbert sent over a note, letting Abigail know he was returning to London. He had not visited her again. Could he have not at least come and said good-bye? Drawing her shoulders back, she went and gave her father the news with feigned nonchalance.
Abigail left her father and Miles playing a game of backgammon and took herself out of doors. She walked to the garden and began pulling weeds again, to clear her mind, to think, and to avoid Miles for a while. Natty Mr. Pembrooke would not be offering to help her in this chore, she knew.
The day was sunny and mild, and her only company was the occasional bee and a pair of warblers flitting about a wild service tree, its white blooms garlanding the garden wall.
Sometime later, Kitty Chapman appeared and joined in the task without being asked.
Abigail paused to smile at the girl. "Thank you, Kitty. I would be happy to pay you something for your trouble."
"That's all right. I needed to get out of the house for a while anyway. Will and Papa were arguing about something."
"Oh? I'm sorry to hear it."
The girl shrugged, then brightened. "But I wouldn't say no to some flowers, if you wouldn't mind."
"Of course not. Help yourself."
They pulled weeds for a time, then Abigail walked over to the potting shed for shears. She hesitated, looking at the quiet corner between the potting shed and the walled garden with a pinch of sadness, thinking of the time the two secret friends had spent there. For a moment she closed her eyes and imagined them, could almost hear their young voices, reading lines from some play. She breathed deep, and found the air smelled deliciously of thyme and honeysuckle. She opened her eyes and was surprised to find two butterflies had alighted on her rose-colored sleeve—a garden white and an orange-tipped butterfly. So different, yet so alike. The sight stilled her for some reason. Then the two fluttered away in opposite directions.
Abigail rejoined Kitty in the garden and handed her the shears. She watched as the girl began selecting oxeye daisies, yellow irises, lilies, and wild roses.
"Who will you give the flowers to, Kitty?"
"My grandmother. She has come to stay with us."
"Has she?"
The girl nodded, adding some greenery to her clutch of blooms. "She's had another fall, and Mamma frets so. Grandmamma says she'll be up and about in no time and wants to return to her own house as soon as may be, but . . . well, we'll have to see."
"It's kind of you to bring her flowers."
"I thought they might cheer her. We only have the three bedrooms, and I share with Leah. So we put her in Jacob's room and set up a little bed for him in the back porch. William's offered to have him in the parsonage, but Papa wants him at home. I thought the flowers would help decorate my brother's room. And hopefully overcome the smell of his foul stockings." Kitty grinned and winked. The expression reminded Abigail of William's wry smiles and mischievous winks.
Abigail said, "I hate the thought of all of you being cramped when we have so much room, but I don't suppose your father would allow you or Jacob to stay at Pembrooke Park while your grandmother is recuperating?"
Kitty shook her head, an impish glint in her eye. "You suppose correctly."
They finished their work, then Kitty said, "Come to the house, Miss Foster. Grandmamma would love to meet you."
"And I her. But . . . what about the argument?"
"Oh, it's sure to have blown over by now." Kitty shielded her eyes. "In fact, there goes Will now."
Abigail glanced over her shoulder and saw Mr. Chapman leaving the grove and striding toward the parsonage. She was surprised he did not stop to say hello, but perhaps he had not seen them there in the garden.
"See?" Kitty grinned at her. "Coast is clear."
But first Abigail asked Kitty to follow her into the house and belowstairs, where they found a simple glass vase for the flowers and asked Mrs. Walsh for something to take as a welcome gift. When they explained who it was for, Mrs. Walsh's reserve fell away and she bustled about, gathering a bottle of jugged hare and a small plum pudding to take to Mrs. Reynolds, apparently an old friend of hers.
Armed with gifts, Abigail walked back to the Chapman cottage with Kitty. She met Mrs. Reynolds ensconced in the small bedchamber, bound leg raised on a cushion. The pleasant-looking old woman, in face very similar to Kate Chapman, accepted the flowers and gifts with smiling gratitude. Abigail talked with her for several minutes before wishing her a speedy recovery and excusing herself.
Leah was waiting for her outside and seemed happy to see her. "Can you stay and talk for a few minutes?" she invited, offering her a glass of lemonade.
"I would like that. Thank you."
The two women sat on a bench in the little garden in front of the house, since it was a beautiful day, and because the house was quite crowded at the moment. They talked about everyday things for a few minutes—Leah's grandmother coming to stay, the upcoming Sunday school lessons, and the glorious weather.
Then Abigail said tentatively, "We have an unexpected houseguest as well. Have you heard?"
"Yes. Papa told me."
Abigail hesitated. "Kitty mentioned your father and brother had a row earlier. I hope that's not what they argued about?"
"No. Not . . . directly." Leah avoided her eyes and asked, "How is it going with him there?"
"Fine, I suppose," Abigail said. "Miles is quite charming, really. Though I do wonder how long he plans to stay."
She noticed Leah begin to fidget, her grip tightening on her glass.
"But let's not talk about that," Abigail said quickly. "I haven't seen you in several days. Tell me what has been happening since I saw you last. Any word from Andrew Morgan?"
Leah's pretty face fell, and Abigail knew she had wandered from one sore topic to another.
Leah looked off in the distance and said flatly, "I don't think I will be seeing Mr. Morgan again."
"Why do you say that? I am certain he admires you."
Leah nodded slightly. "Admiration is one thing. But he is too honorable to do anything about it. I overheard his mother, you see, chastising him for even inviting me to the ball. Apparently, William has sufficient respectability as a clergyman and former schoolmate of Andrew's. But his parents cannot overlook the fact that my mother had been in service. And my father, as their agent and a former steward, is little higher."
"But certainly Andrew will persuade them."
She shook her head. "I am older than you, Miss Foster, and a little wiser in the ways of the world, so don't be offended if I disagree. When a woman marries a man she also marries his family, for better or for worse. And that is how it should be. I shouldn't want a man who would have to extricate himself from his family in order to be my husband, nor a man who would alienate himself from my family in order to please his. And his parents clearly want him to marry someone else. You saw Miss Padgett—young and wealthy. It is not as though I ever stood a chance, objections to my parentage or not."
Abigail reached over and pressed her hand, feeling a painful twinge of empathy. For a moment the two sat in companionable silence.
Then Leah added, "The Morgans are new to the parish, you see. They only visited the area a few times before inheriting Hunts Hall. They don't know . . . can't be expected to understand . . ."
When her words trailed off, Abigail prompted, "To understand what?"
"How . . . well respected Mac Chapman is, and—"
At that moment, Kitty ran out of the house, waving a piece of paper over her head like a flag. "Jacob has a love letter. Jacob has a love letter. . . ."
Jacob came barreling after her, long arms pumping. "Give that back! It's mine!"
Leah sent Abigail a wry glance. "And how very genteel my family truly is."
On Sunday morning, Abigail glanced at her father, intently slicing his sausages, then looked across the breakfast table at Miles.
"Mr. Pembrooke," she began, "I . . . don't suppose you'd want to go to church with us?"
Miles opened his mouth. Closed it again. And then smiled at her fondly. "Thank you for inviting me, Miss Foster, however equivocally done."
"I did not mean to—"
He held up a hand to forestall her protests. "I understand. And don't worry—I am not offended. I did not plan to go in any case. I could not stand to face him."
Her father spoke up. "To face Mac Chapman, do you mean? Come, Miles. I hope you don't mind, but Abigail mentioned the rumors about your father all those years ago. Stuff and nonsense the lot of it, I imagine. But you cannot let a few small-minded busybodies keep you from living your life and going where you will." He laid down his knife and fork with a clank.
"You are kind, Mr. Foster. But I don't stay home to avoid Mac or any one particular person. I meant that I dare not face God." He added in apparent good humor, "It is His house, after all. And I am definitely not an invited guest, if you know what I mean. I don't belong there."
"Of course you do." Abigail's heart twisted to see the wounded vulnerability on the man's face, beneath his humorous façade. "Church is for everyone," she said. "And so is God. Did Jesus himself not eat with sinners and tax collectors?"
"You flatter me, Miss Foster."
"I don't mean that you—"
"Heavens, you are fun to tease." He patted her arm. "No, no. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and shall consider what you say. But for now I will stay here. I will not interrupt the worship of all those good souls, and you can't pretend my attendance wouldn't do so. It is not as though I could sneak into the place, what with a mere two dozen parishioners?"
"Give or take," Abigail allowed.
"There, you see. But I shall wait here for you. And . . . if you thought to include me in your prayers, I should not mind."
"I shall indeed," Abigail earnestly assured him.
After Sunday school that day, Abigail took Leah's arm, planning to walk her home and hoping for a private chat on the way. She began, "If you are determined not to see Andrew Morgan, then I should like you to meet Miles. I know you don't like strangers, but he isn't—not really. He is a distant relative of my father's and your former neighbor. And yes, he is a Pembrooke, but he's very agreeable—and quite handsome."
Leah protested, "Miss Foster, I don't—"
Abigail looked up and paused, surprised to see the very man in question on the path. "There he is now. Come, let me introduce you."
She tugged, but Leah froze like a statue, her arm as yielding as a stout branch.
Seeing them, Miles Pembrooke smiled and walked over, his limp less noticeable. Perhaps he made more effort to conceal it when meeting new people, or at least when meeting pretty ladies.
"We were just talking about you," Abigail said and turned to Leah. "Miss Leah Chapman, may I introduce Mr. Miles Pembrooke."
Abigail watched Miles for his reaction. Saw his eyes widen slightly and his expression soften as his gaze roved Leah's gentle features, her large pretty eyes and honey-brown hair. His head tilted to one side as he regarded her in apparent admiration and . . . something else—curiosity, or perhaps recognition.
He bowed low to her. "Miss Chapman, what a pleasure."
Leah stared at him. Dipped a stiff curtsy without removing her gaze from his face. Dare Abigail hope she was as taken by his handsome face and polite address as he obviously was with her beauty?
"Mr. . . . Pembrooke?" Leah echoed in a high, pinched voice.
"Yes. Miles," he clarified, tilting his head to the other side. "I believe we have met before, Miss Chapman. When we were children. I don't flatter myself you would recall."
"Did we?" Leah asked almost timidly.
"Soon after you came home from school, I believe it was. Of course that was years ago. I no doubt made a nuisance of myself, mischievous boy that I was. At least, my sister always thought so."
"Ah. Yes. Perhaps. Well. As you say, it was a long time ago." Leah tried to extract her arm from Abigail's, but Abigail held fast.
Leah swallowed and asked, "So . . . what are you doing here now, Mr. Pembrooke?"
"I wished to see my old home again—that's all."
"And where is the rest of your family?"
"My mother died last year, God rest her soul. My brother died not long after we left here."
"I am—" it seemed as if the word stuck in Leah Chapman's usually polite mouth—"sorry to hear it."
"Are you? Or are you glad there are a few less Pembrookes in the world?" Miles's grin did not reach his eyes.
Leah's mouth slackened. "Of course I am not glad—"
"We are the last of a dying breed, you know," Miles continued amiably. "My brother died young. My sister has had no children. And I have not been blessed with a spouse to shower with love as I have long wished for. And you, Miss Chapman? Dare I hope you are not yet attached?"
She paled. "I am not attached, nor have I plans to become so, especially . . ." She let her words trail away.
Hurt shone in his round eyes. "Especially to a man like me?"
"That's not what I meant. But no, I could never become attached to a Pembrooke. No offense."
He looked at her with a sad smile but said nothing.
Leah cleared her throat and asked, "Your sister is in good health?"
"Yes. Last I saw her."
"And will you be staying long in the area?"
"I have not yet decided."
Abigail spoke up, "How interesting that you two knew each other as children. Has Miss Chapman changed a great deal in your estimation, Mr. Pembrooke?"
Miles smiled. "Well, you must remember I was only a boy of eleven or twelve at the time, and not really noticing girls. But I will say Miss Chapman has grown uncommonly pretty."
Leah looked away, disconcerted by his admiring gaze.
William Chapman approached, hesitated at seeing the three of them talking together, then strode forward, face thunderous.
"Leah! What are you doing? Come with me. Now."
Leah blinked up at her brother. "William?"
"Come." He took her arm and turned cold eyes on Abigail. "Excuse us, Miss Foster."
"Mr. Chapman, what is it? What have I done?"
He turned on Miles sharply. "Stay away from my sister, Mr. Pembrooke. Do you understand me?"
Miles's mouth drooped open. He looked at Abigail, and she met his stunned, hurt expression with one of her own.
Abigail stayed Miles with a quick hand to his sleeve, then hurried after William and Leah.
She caught up with them outside their cottage. "Mr. Chapman, wait."
He urged Leah inside, then whirled on Abigail. "What were you thinking? To introduce him to my sister? If my father had come upon them instead of me . . . I shudder to think what might have happened."
"But why? I don't understand."
"That's right. You don't. And it would be better for all involved if you stayed out of matters that don't concern you."
Tears stung her eyes. Never had she imagined William Chapman speaking to her in such a cutting tone. Or imagined seeing such anger in eyes that had previously regarded her with warm friendliness—even, she thought, admiration. But that look was now soundly replaced with disillusionment and betrayal. Did he feel betrayed on his friend Andrew's behalf? Or was he so prejudiced against Miles? Even if the old rumors about Clive Pembrooke were true, it shocked her that he would blame the son for his father's wrongdoing. Especially when Miles had been so young at the time. But perhaps he was not as compassionate as she'd believed him to be.
Even so, thoughts of losing his admiration and Leah's friendship were like twin knives thrust into her heart. Tears filled her eyes. She turned away to hide them and returned to Pembrooke Park alone.
Miles was waiting for her in the hall. "My dear Miss Foster, are you quite all right? You look very ill indeed. I do hope Mr. Chapman has not overly upset you."
"And I hope his rudeness has not offended you. I am quite at a loss to explain it. Usually he is perfectly amiable and polite. I have never seen him treat anyone so unkindly."
Miles studied her face, his expression measuring and disappointed. "Oh dear. Apparently you admire the man a great deal. I am sorry to have caused strife between you." He certainly appeared sorry. But she somehow doubted he would lose any sleep over it.
He added, "I had hoped the old prejudices would have faded after all this time. Against me and my sister, at any rate. I am the first, you see, to dip my toe back into this pond, to make known my presence. Harri is very reluctant to do so. She remembers all too well how people shunned us when we lived here. As I said, I don't really blame anybody for those days. My father being the sort of man he was. But now? After all this time? I do not look forward to telling Harri she was right not to trumpet her presence."
After Miss Foster turned away in retreat, William closed and latched the cottage door and turned to face Leah.
Expression pained, she asked, "Do you think that was wise?"
"Wise?" he echoed. "I find you in tête-à-tête with Miles Pembrooke, and you ask me if my actions were wise?"
"Hardly a tête-à-tête. Miss Foster was there as well, you remember. You should remember, having hurt her feelings in such a callous manner."
He blinked away the image of Miss Foster's wide, pained eyes. "But why were you even talking to him, considering . . . everything?"
"I was constrained by politeness. Miss Foster introduced us."
He looked heavenward, jaw clenched and biting back an oath.
"Why do you look so fierce? Remember she is not acquainted with our family history, as you have recently become. You were quite harsh with her. With them both."
He shook his head, his emotions still in a tangle. "I didn't think. Only reacted. My only thought was to protect you. To remove you from harm's way."
"Did you really think he would have harmed me—then and there? Do you not see that by your very noticeable overreaction you have brought me to the notice of Mr. Pembrooke, rendering my own attempts to appear civil and unaffected void? Have we now not raised questions in his mind? Made him think twice about my history with his family?"
"I hope not." He pressed his eyes closed and sent up a prayer for mercy.
"I know this is hard for you," Leah said. "I have had years—almost my whole life—to get used to the idea. To learn to hide my feelings." She laid a hand on his arm. "I do understand, William. And I hope Miss Foster will as well. Eventually."
# Chapter 16
For the next few days, the entire Chapman family seemed to make a point of avoiding Abigail, and Pembrooke Park in general. Not even Kitty stopped by, and there was no invitation to dinner after the midweek prayer service for their rector, Mr. Morris, who had come down with a worrisome fever. During the service, William and Mac avoided meeting her eye, and Leah departed as soon as the service concluded without staying to chat. Abigail began to fear that she had lost Leah's fledgling friendship and her brother's admiration forever.
Abigail tossed and turned in her bed well past eleven that night but was unable to fall asleep. She rose and paced her room, then quietly crossed the gallery into her mother's empty room. From its windows facing the churchyard she could see the parsonage. A light shone in the window.
Mr. Chapman was up late. Could he not sleep either? Oh, God, help me heal the rift between us.
Knowing she would not sleep unless she did something, Abigail decided to take a risk. She returned to her room, pulled on stockings and shoes, and slipped a dressing gown and shawl over her nightdress. Taking a candle lamp with her, she tiptoed back into the gallery. Seeing no light under her father's door, she decided not to disturb him and crept quietly down the stairs.
The servants had likely been asleep for some time. Even so, she tiptoed across the hall, quietly unbolted the door, and let herself outside, closing the door as silently as she could. The night air shivered through her muslin nightdress, and she wrapped the shawl more tightly around herself as she hurried along the verge, avoiding the gravel of the drive. She entered the moonlit churchyard, not allowing her gaze to linger on the gravestones or the swaying willow branches bowing in grief over the dead.
She shivered again, only partly from the cold.
Reaching the parsonage, she paused to collect herself. Her heart beat hard, more than the slight exertion of the walk justified. She took a deep breath and knocked softly. Then again.
A moment later, she heard faint footsteps within, the latch clicking, and the door opening. There stood William Chapman. Dressed in trousers and shirtsleeves, his shirt open at the neck, his hair tousled, his eyes weary, then widening in surprise as he recognized his late-night caller.
"Mr. Chapman, forgive me for showing up on your doorstep at such an hour. I saw your light, so I hoped I wouldn't wake you."
"No, I was not asleep." He gestured vaguely toward the desk inside, where a candle lamp burned and a Bible lay open, paper and quill nearby.
"I couldn't sleep," she said. "I feel terrible. I never meant to upset Leah, or you. I did not think it through. Or realize how strongly you felt about the Pembrookes. Won't you forgive me?"
"Miss Foster . . ." He paused, opening the door wider. "Here, step inside out of the cold for a moment."
She hoped she would not get him into trouble—or ruin her own reputation in the bargain. But she was too cold, and too upset, to worry about propriety at the moment.
He did not invite her any farther than the entryway, she noticed, and left the door ajar behind her. Again he gestured toward the desk. "I was writing you a letter. For it is I who should apologize to you. For a moment I thought I'd fallen asleep mid-letter and dreamt you on my doorstep."
She shook her head. "I should never have stuck my nose in. What was I thinking to introduce Mr. Pembrooke to your sister? Me—playing matchmaker! As though I have any experience in courtship."
"True. I don't recommend a future in matchmaking for you—or for anyone, for that matter. Even so, I should not have spoken so harshly to you. I overreacted, and I apologize."
"I have heard the rumors about Clive Pembrooke, of course," she said gently. "I know people believe he may have killed Robert Pembrooke. And I know how highly your father esteemed that gentleman. Had Mac reacted so vehemently, I would not have been shocked. But—"
"But that I, a clergyman, would hold the sins of the father against his son?"
Again, the Numbers verse ran through her mind. "Yes. After all, his family did nothing to yours."
"I am afraid it is not quite that simple, Miss Foster."
"If Miles did something—either as a boy or since his return, I am certain he would be happy to try and make amends."
"It is not within his power to do so."
"I don't . . . understand."
William ran a weary hand over his face. "I know you don't. And again, I'm sorry. There is more to the story, but it isn't my story to tell. Just believe me when I tell you, we have reason to dislike and distrust our former neighbors. No good can come from trying to foster a relationship between Miles Pembrooke and my sister."
She shook her head. "I shall never try that again. Be assured of that. I have learnt my lesson. I only hope Leah will forgive me in time. And you will too."
"I have already done so. And I hope you will forgive me."
"Of course I do."
A grin quirked his lips. "And here I've been sitting an hour, trying to compose an apology that was accepted in five minutes."
She managed a wobbly smile.
Then, remembering something, she said, "I know you offered to ask Leah about anyone named Lizzie she might know, but never mind that now. I—"
He said, "Actually, I think it would be best to leave Leah out of these sorts of questions, Miss Foster. All right?" A hint of defensiveness crept into his voice again, and Abigail regretted mentioning it.
"Very well."
He looked suddenly over her shoulder, eyes narrowing. "What's that?"
"Where?" She turned to see what had caught his eye.
"That light in the window."
She looked, and there in an upper window, light from a single candle bobbed past. Her breath caught. "That's my mother's room. But it's unoccupied at present."
Who was in there? The candle was partially shielded, not reflecting on its bearer, perhaps by design.
"It's probably Duncan. Or one of the maids," she supposed aloud.
"At this hour?" He frowned. "Did you happen to lock the front door when you left?"
"No. I didn't think to. I didn't plan to be gone more than a few minutes."
William Chapman's jaw clenched. "Perhaps I should go rouse my father. . . ."
"Your father and his gun? I don't think that necessary. Or wise. Perhaps it's my father wandering about for some reason."
"Looking for you?"
"I wouldn't think so." The thought pinched her with guilt. She hoped not. She didn't want to worry him, but nor did she want him to learn she'd left the house at night to speak to a man.
"Let's go see who it is." William grabbed his coat from its peg and shrugged it on. "I don't want you entering the house alone. Just in case a prowler has let himself in."
He grasped her hand and led her across the lawn, taking the verge as she had done earlier to avoid the gravel drive, and then stepped lightly across the paving stones to the front door. He opened it with care, listened, then stepped in first, keeping her shielded behind his body. The main level was dark and quiet.
"Come on," he whispered, leading her across the hall and up the main stairs. She liked the feel of his larger warm hand engulfing hers. Her heart pounded a bit too hard from his proximity, and the sense of danger in the air.
"This way," she whispered at the top of the stairs, gesturing toward her mother's bedchamber. She felt rather brazen, holding his hand, but did not let go.
The door to her mother's room stood ajar. Had she left it open when she'd looked from its window?
"Shh," she urged. They paused where they were, listening. A faint tap-tapping reached them from within. Again, he stepped in front of her, shielding her and slowly pushing open the door wide enough to enter.
In a dim arc of candlelight, Miles Pembrooke stood, candle in one hand, tapping against the wall with his stick, ear pressed close to the wood. Listening for the sound of an empty chamber behind the paneling?
"Looking for something?" William asked, his quiet voice cracking like a cannon in the dark room. Miles jumped, and Abigail squeezed William's hand a bit too hard.
For a moment Miles froze, like a thief caught. Then he relaxed and a smile eased across his face.
"You two frightened the wits out of me."
Abigail asked, "What are you doing in my mother's room, Mr. Pembrooke?"
"I think you mean my mother's room, Miss Foster. Or at least it was. I was looking for, ah, some memento. I'd hoped perhaps something of hers had been left here."
"This late at night?"
"Yes, I found myself awake and missing her. And you, Miss Foster? I am surprised to see you up and about and keeping company with our good parson so late at night."
Abigail glanced at William, then away, releasing his hand at last. No explanation presented itself.
"Miss Foster need not explain herself to you, Mr. Pembrooke," William said. "But I judge it safe to say that a memento wasn't all you were looking for. The treasure, I take it?"
"Well, yes, if you must know. I've been thinking about my father's obsession with a treasure hidden somewhere in the house. All stuff and nonsense no doubt."
"No doubt."
Abigail said, "In future, Mr. Pembrooke, if there is something you wish to see in the house, or if you want to visit your mother's former room, you need only ask. That is, until my own mother arrives, of course."
"Of course."
"Surely Mr. Pembrooke doesn't intend to stay that long," William said, sending the man a challenging look. "Do you?"
"Ah. Well, I have no definite plans. Though I admit I have been looking forward to making the acquaintance of the rest of Miss Foster's family. We are related, after all."
"Only very distantly," Mr. Chapman said, smile forced.
"Well, closer than you will ever be."
"Is that so?"
"Yes."
For a moment the two men stood, eyes locked, shoulders squared, jaws clenched.
Abigail hurried to diffuse the tension, saying, "All right, gentlemen. It is late, and I think it time we all called a truce and returned to our bedchambers. All right?"
"Very well," Miles said, shuffling to the door, his limp less noticeable than usual.
They followed him out into the gallery.
William Chapman waited until the door to the guest room had closed behind Miles, before he turned to Abigail once more. "Are you sure you'll be all right? I hate the thought of him here in the house with you."
"Mr. Pembrooke is harmless, I assure you. A thief I might believe, but not a murderer. Besides, my father's room is just there."
"Even so, promise me you will lock your bedchamber door tonight and every night."
In the darkness she could not clearly see his eyes, but his voice rumbled in solemn concern.
"Very well. I shall."
Now that Mr. Chapman had forgiven her, she thought she would sleep soundly at last. But perhaps a locked door would be a good idea as well.
The next day, Abigail paid a call at the Chapman cottage, hoping to make things right with Leah as well. Leah herself came to the door, and Abigail braced herself to be rebuffed.
"I've come to apologize, Miss Chapman," she began. "I hope you will forgive me. If I had known there was such enmity between you and Mr. Pembrooke, I would not have made the introduction. I never intended to upset you."
Leah sighed. "I know you meant no harm, Miss Foster. Come, let's take a walk, shall we?"
The two walked through the grove together. Abigail did not risk, however, trying to take her arm.
Abigail said, "I didn't realize you were even acquainted with Mr. Pembrooke."
Leah shrugged. "I was away at school when Clive Pembrooke moved his family into Pembrooke Park. But they were still here when I returned—though they remained only about a year longer."
"Did you meet Miles then?"
"Not that I remember. He was only a boy. And my father wouldn't let us have anything to do with the Pembrooke family. He mistrusted—even detested—Clive Pembrooke, and that distrust extended to his wife and children as well. I was forbidden to set foot on the grounds, even though our property was adjacent to the estate."
"Surely you saw each other at church or around the village?"
She shrugged again. "The Pembrookes didn't often attend church. And when they did, they had their box in front—entered after we were all seated and left before the rest of us. By the time I returned from my year at school, everyone in the village was either afraid of them or hated them. I didn't care about the parents, I supposed they deserved it. And the Pembrooke boys had each other and didn't seem to notice."
"And the girl?" Abigail prompted. "You must have met her."
She resolutely shook her head. "I never officially met Harriet Pembrooke. But I saw her from a distance. And that was enough to make me feel sorry for her. I often wonder where she is now, and if she is happy."
Yes, Abigail thought. So do I.
"When they left," Leah continued, "everyone was relieved. Now Miles Pembrooke's return has raised the old fears once more." She sighed and looked pensively off into the distance.
Abigail took a deep breath and asked gently, "Did one of the Pembrookes do something to hurt you in some way?"
Leah glanced at her with troubled eyes, then looked away. "Me? How could they hurt me . . . ?"
Abigail bit her lip. "I don't know. But again, I am sorry."
"I know you are. And I forgive you." Leah managed a smile and took her arm. "Now, let's finish our walk."
When she returned to the manor, Abigail walked into the servery, hoping for a cup of tea, and stopped midstride, taken aback to see Duncan and Molly standing shoulder to shoulder, heads together.
"What is going on here?" she asked, her tone sharper than she'd intended.
Molly straightened and whirled, face suffusing with color. "I . . . Sorry, miss. We were only talking for a minute. Honest."
Duncan slowly raised his head, sending her a lopsided grin. "I was showing Molly a most interesting book." He lifted a thin, well-worn volume in his hands.
The girl's eyes begged for understanding. "That's right, miss. That's all."
"Thank you, Molly. Go about your work, please," Abigail said.
The maid bowed her head and hurried from the room.
When they were alone, Duncan said, "It's an old copy of Steele's Navy Lists. You might find it interesting as well. It's most telling about your houseguest—a man who passes off his limp as a war wound to gain sympathy from females."
Abigail frowned. "Mr. Pembrooke is not pretending to have a limp, I assure you."
"Pretending, exaggerating, I don't judge. It worked, didn't it? He looks harmless—the poor injured war hero—and is invited in to stay like some wounded pup." He shook his head. "Probably murder us all in our beds."
"Duncan. I don't appreciate your attitude, or your gossip."
"Ain't gossip, miss. I know you don't think much of me, but you have to give me credit. I did my research. He's right here on page 72. Served on the Red Phoenix. Do you know anything about the Phoenix, miss?"
She shook her head.
His eyes glinted. "One of the only ships to escape the war with barely a scratch."
Abigail's stomach soured. "Perhaps he was injured in a land skirmish then, or during training."
"Whatever helps you sleep at night, miss." Duncan's voice dripped with sarcasm. "Far be it from me to discredit a war hero."
Later that afternoon, Abigail received the new edition of the Lloyds' magazine in the post and took it into the morning room to read while she drank her tea. The magazine held news articles, fashion prints, poetry, and short stories. She read the magazine mostly out of loyalty to Susan Lloyd, and because it made her feel closer to her friend to recognize her "voice" in an editorial, or piece of society news, although most of the articles were written by others.
Abigail flipped past the fashion prints and skimmed the table of contents.
One author's name caught her eye. Condensed as the type was, she at first misread the name as Pembrooke, but then looked closer: E. P. Brooks.
Ah! The local author . . .
She turned to the gothic story, entitled "Death at Dreadmoore Manor." She skimmed through the introduction of a young woman, the daughter of an earl, kidnapped after his murder and raised as a lowly housemaid by plotting relatives. Unprotected, the poor young woman was left to her own defenses when an evil rake came calling. Would someone discover her true identity and rescue her in time?
The story reminded Abigail of Cinderella stories she'd heard, and a French opera, Cendrillon, she'd seen in London. The young heroine of the story was selfless and unbelievably good-natured in the face of hardship. The preening, mustachioed villain with a maniacal laugh came across as nearly comical instead of terrifying, as the author no doubt intended. Although she was no expert, Abigail thought the writing quite good, despite its flaws.
Again, she regarded the author's name, E. P. Brooks—or rather, her pseudonym—as Susan had told her most female writers submitted under a nom de plume.
She thought again of Eliza's ink-stained fingers and the periodicals she had seen in her kitchen. Could it be . . . ?
Abigail decided to pay another call on Mrs. Hayes and Eliza. The older woman was napping in a sitting-room chair when she arrived, but Eliza invited Abigail into the kitchen to wait while she put the kettle on. "She'll rouse herself when the tea kettle whistles."
Abigail casually wandered around the kitchen while Eliza set the tea tray. With a jolt of recognition, she saw the latest edition of the Lloyds' magazine on the table, and ventured, "I read this as well."
Eliza glanced over. "Do you? I thought I was the only one in the county who subscribed."
"No." Abigail added tentatively, "In fact, the editor is a friend of mine." She watched the woman's reaction.
Eliza's hands momentarily stilled over the sugar bowl. Then she said, "Oh? How interesting."
"Yes, she finds it very interesting work. Do you . . . enjoy the magazine?"
"I do, yes, when I find the time."
Abigail was disappointed Eliza didn't take the opening she'd offered but decided not to press her. Perhaps she was mistaken in the matter.
Eliza picked up the tray. "Come, Miss Foster. Let's join Auntie and have a nice visit."
Abigail followed the woman into the sitting room.
The old housekeeper looked up eagerly at their entrance. "Another visitor? Has Master Miles called again?"
"No, Auntie, it's Miss Foster."
"Oh . . . too bad." The woman's expression fell, and she turned her attention to the tea.
Eliza explained, "Mr. Pembrooke called here a few days ago."
"Did he?" Abigail asked, taken aback.
"Indeed he did," Mrs. Hayes said over her teacup. "And how well he has turned out. So charming and well spoken. Twice the gentleman his father ever was. But you didn't hear me say a word against the man." She turned sightless eyes toward the door, as though Clive Pembrooke himself might be hovering nearby.
Eliza held up the plate. "Here, Auntie, have a biscuit."
She took one, adding, "And so attentive to Eliza."
"He was only being polite," Eliza insisted, pouring another cup.
Mrs. Hayes shook her head. "I may be blind, but even I could see he was interested in you."
Eliza sent Abigail a pained look, silently shaking her head to signal her disagreement.
Abigail took her hint and changed the subject. Lifting her teacup, she began tentatively. "You mentioned your aunt raised you, Miss Smith. May I ask about your parents, if that is not too painful a question?"
"Painful, no, though perhaps a bit uncomfortable for delicate ears."
Abigail tipped her head back in surprise. "Oh? How so?"
"My mother was housemaid at Pembrooke Park until she came to be with child."
"Oh." Abigail swallowed, the hot tea scalding her throat and her eyes watering. "I . . . see . . ."
Eliza looked at Mrs. Hayes. "And we don't talk about my father—do we, Auntie?"
"Your father was a good man," Mrs. Hayes insisted. "He let her stay on at Pembrooke Park far longer than many a master would have."
Abigail stared. Good heavens. Was she insinuating Robert Pembrooke was Eliza's father? Or even . . . Mac? Is that why he visited so often? Helped around the house? No, it couldn't be. She reminded herself that Mrs. Hayes wasn't in her right mind.
The former housekeeper took a noisy sip, then turned in her general direction. "You do know that Robert Pembrooke had more than one daughter, don't you, Miss Foster?"
No, that was one rumor she hadn't heard.
"Auntie . . ." Eliza warned, with a worried glance at Abigail. "We are not to talk about that."
Mrs. Hayes sipped again, then set down her cup with a clank. "Miss Foster living in Pembrooke Park. It isn't right! Not when another young woman deserves it so much more. E for Eliza. E for Eleanor . . ."
Did Eliza fancy herself a Pembrooke? The astounding question was on Abigail's lips, but she swallowed it down with hot tea and bile.
Eliza gave Abigail a tight smile. "You mustn't listen to her, Miss Foster. Lord knows, I don't most days."
Abigail forced a smile in return. "Your mother died when you were very young?"
"Yes. I was only five."
"I'm sorry."
Eliza shrugged. "I don't remember her very well. Or my father for that matter. Though Auntie tells me he passed on his way with words to me."
Abigail thought again of the local writer's pseudonym: E. P. Brooks. A play on E. Pembrooke, perhaps? Maybe neither aunt nor niece were quite sound of mind.
Suddenly eager to quit the place, Abigail thanked the women for tea and took her leave, feeling queasy from the bitter cup and uncomfortable conversation.
When she neared the bridge on her walk home, a black barouche rumbled past, forcing Abigail to step to the far edge of the road. She had seen the equipage before, she thought, but she couldn't remember where. Heavy draperies hung on the windows, obscuring her view of the occupant.
Continuing on her way, Abigail became aware of an acrid odor. She sniffed and walked on. Was someone burning brush? Crossing the bridge, she looked ahead to the estate. A crow shrieked and flew away, drawing her attention skyward as she followed its flight. Her heart thudded. A roiling column of grey and black smoke spiraled upward . . . from the church? No, behind it. The parsonage!
For a moment Abigail remained frozen, mind whirling. William. She looked this way and that and saw no one to call to. Then she hitched up her skirts and ran—through the gate and around the church to the parsonage.
Flames shot from the rear window. Abigail pushed through the door and looked inside. There was William, trying to beat out the flames leaping up the window curtains.
Seeing her, he yelled, "Ring the bell!"
Why hadn't she thought of that? She ran back through the churchyard, jumping over abandoned gardening tools and a watering can, and hurried into the porch. Hands quaking, she reached for the rope spooled on spokes high on the wall away from youngsters' reach, and nearly too high for her as well. Rising on tiptoe, she managed to uncoil the rope. She gave it several jarring pulls, the clang, clang, clang lacking the usual solemnity of a service toll. Then she ran back to the parsonage, pausing to snatch up the watering can and carry it with her. Not that one pail of water would do much good against the growing flames, but it was all she could think to do.
Duncan called from Pembrooke's front door, "What is it?"
"Fire!" she yelled back, pointing toward the billowing smoke.
Duncan gaped upward, then disappeared back into the house. She hoped he had some idea of how to help. Reentering the parsonage, she saw daggers of flame leap from the curtain onto William Chapman's shoulder and arm.
"William! You're on fire!" she shouted.
The roar of the fire had grown, and he didn't appear to hear her. Stepping forward, she sloshed the contents of the watering can onto his shoulder, missing the mark, and getting half of it on his neck and the back of his head. Still, it extinguished the flame.
He whirled at last, stunned.
"Your arm was on fire," she said. "What else can I do?"
"Gather everyone you can and start a fire brigade. And pray."
She blinked. She had no experience with one and not much with the other. But she hurried outside to do his bidding.
With relief she saw Mac—stern, competent Mac—barking orders and forming a line down to the river, which was thankfully quite close, encircling most of the estate as it did. Duncan, Molly, Polly, Jacob, Leah, Mrs. Chapman, and even Kitty ran over from the direction of the cottage, stables, and perhaps the potting shed with various pails and cans. Other people ran over the bridge from the direction of nearby Easton and began filling in the line. She recognized several of the older boys from Sunday school among them, as well as Mr. Peterman, Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Matthews, and several other parishioners she knew by face if not by name.
Her eyes stung from the smoke and the awful beauty of seeing a close-knit community sweating, straining, and working together like the loyal family they were.
Abigail joined the line.
Half an hour later, they'd managed to put out the fire. By then, the greater portion of the rear wall and two interior rooms were all but destroyed.
"Kitchen fire, was it?" someone asked.
Another quipped, "That's what happens when you give a bachelor his own kitchen."
"Never leave a cooking fire unattended." Mrs. Peterman wagged her finger at William. "If you had a wife, she would have known better."
Her husband added, "Don't worry, Parson—we'll help you patch 'er up."
Patch? Abigail thought incredulously. It would take far more than a patch to repair the damage.
William said little, neither confirming nor denying their theories. He stood, hands on hips, staring at the ruined parsonage, jaw tense and soot-streaked, his red hair marled with black.
The villagers began to drift home, Mrs. Chapman and Leah thanking everyone for their help as though hosts at a party. Or a funeral.
When only Abigail and his father stood beside him, William said, "This was no kitchen fire."
Mac asked, "No? What do you think, then, Will. A spark from the stove?"
"In my bed?" William snapped. "I think not."
"In your bed? I thought it started in the kitchen."
William shook his head, mouth pursed, his eyes measuring, thinking. . . .
"Did a candle lamp fall or something?"
"No, Papa."
"Are you saying you don't think it was an accident?"
"Keep your voice down, but yes. Someone started that fire."
"You can't know that."
"If you mean can I prove it? No. But I know it. In here." He pressed a hand to his chest.
"But who would do such a thing?" Mac asked. "And why?"
Abigail spoke up, "I don't know if I should mention it or not, but I saw a black barouche drive past when I walked up the lane and spied the fire."
"Whose barouche?"
"I don't know, but there can't be many vehicles that fine around here."
William shook his head. "I don't think we need to look any farther than Pembrooke Park for a suspect."
"Duncan, do you mean?" Abigail asked, having witnessed the manservant's clear dislike of the Chapmans.
Again he shook his head.
Abigail blinked. "You don't mean Miles? I can't believe he would do such a thing."
"He was clearly angry with me last night, and perhaps jealous in the bargain."
Mac's eyes narrowed. "What happened last night?"
"I'll tell you later, Papa." He looked at her. "Where is Mr. Pembrooke now?"
As if summoned by their conversation, Charles Foster came jogging over, Miles Pembrooke hobbling behind with his stick.
"Molly just came and found us," her father said. "Is everyone all right?"
"Did you not hear the bell, Papa? Or see the smoke?"
"We were playing chess in the drawing room—it's at the back of the house, so we didn't see anything. We did hear bells but assumed it was some special service we didn't know about."
William and his father exchanged a look. Was he chagrined to have suspected Miles unfairly? Or did he suspect him still?
"Good heavens, Mr. Chapman," Miles said, pulling a face. "Your shoulder looks horrendous."
"Hm?" William craned his neck to look at it.
Mac frowned down at the angry patch of charred shirt and skin, which looked as if some wild cat had clawed William's shoulder. Perhaps the shock and his focus on putting out the fire had masked the pain, for it seemed as if William—as if all of them—were only now becoming aware of the injury. He swayed slightly.
"Sit, lad. Here," his father said, guiding him to one of the kitchen chairs they'd dragged out to salvage from the flames.
He sat heavily down.
"I'll ride for the surgeon," Miles offered, surprising everyone. "Those burns should be seen to."
"Mr. Pembrooke, I don't—"
"Don't worry. I can't run with this leg, but you've never seen anyone saddle a horse faster." He turned and began hobbling toward the stable. "Mr. Brown still surgeon here?"
"Aye," Mac called after him. "Same green house."
True to his word, Miles Pembrooke was seen galloping over the bridge on his horse a short time later.
After he had gone, Charles Foster looked at William and said kindly, "Come, son. Let's get you into the manor. "You can't stay here. Not with all the smoke. The surgeon can see you there."
Soon William found himself lying on a velvet sofa in the Pembrooke Park morning room. How strange it felt to be there, his parents and the Fosters gathered around him. A clean sheet covered the fine old velvet—the housekeeper had seen to it—and considering his sooty state, William took no offense.
Mr. Brown had come, tended his burns in private, and laid an ear to his chest to listen to his heart and lungs. Then he'd asked the others to join them.
"I'll be back tomorrow to check on the bandages and reapply salve," he'd announced. "I recommend plenty of rest and liquids for a few days. And clean air—stay clear of the parsonage."
"But I need to board up the broken windows, at least, and cover the hole in the wall."
"Now, lad, don't you worry about that," his father said. "Leave it to me."
"That's right. Listen to your pa," Mr. Brown admonished him. "Don't try to return yet. Not with all that soot and smoke in the air. Bad for the breathing." He looked at Mac. "Keep him from overexerting himself for a few days at least."
"If I have to tie him down."
Kate Chapman added, "We'll nurse him at home, Mr. Brown."
"But there isn't room," William said. "Not with Grandmamma staying with us now."
"My wife's mother has recently moved in with us while she recovers from a fall," Mac explained. "But we'll make do."
William shook his head. "I don't want to put anyone from their beds."
Mr. Foster spoke up. "Your son must stay here with us, Mac. We have so many spare rooms. You and your family may come and go as you please—and Mr. Brown, of course—until your son is quite recovered and the parsonage repaired."
"We could'na do that, Mr. Foster. But thank you for your offer."
"Why on earth not? Come, Mac, it would be our pleasure. The least we can do for our parson and neighbor."
"It is a very kind offer, but—"
"You may have your pick of the empty rooms upstairs. Or we might fit out this room, if you prefer, so he doesn't have to negotiate the stairs."
"I am not an invalid," William objected. "But even so, I must say the notion appeals to me. For one, if I might have this room here at the front of the house, I could keep an eye on the parsonage. If the fire was the work of vandals, I would be on hand to see their return."
He glanced at Miss Foster to gauge her reaction and then addressed her father. "I sincerely appreciate the offer, Mr. Foster. And hopefully after a few days, the worst of the smoke will have cleared and I will be able to make sufficient repairs to return."
"That seems a bit optimistic, Will," Mac said. "I think the damage is worse than you realize."
Mr. Foster said, "You are welcome to stay as long as need be. We don't mind at all. Do we, my dear?"
Miss Foster's face remained impassive, her hands folded primly before her. "Not at all, Papa."
Abigail walked out of the room with her father, leaving Mr. Chapman to rest, while Mac went to gather necessities for his son.
When they were out of earshot, she said, "That was very kind of you, Papa."
He said, "You know, I quite liked doing it. I must say I was surprised by the surge of . . . em, patronage I felt. I suppose this is what it must feel like to be of the manor born, to experience a paternal fondness for one's tenants and neighbors. A compulsion toward condescension and benevolence. Yes, I could quite get used to being lord of Pembrooke Park."
His words stirred warnings in Abigail. "Be careful not to grow too accustomed to it, Papa. Remember what Mr. Arbeau said. You have not inherited the place. You are merely its tenant."
"For now, yes. But once the tangle of the will is figured out . . . who knows?"
"Miles Pembrooke knows, I would imagine. Or his sister perhaps."
He sighed. "I suppose you're right. Still, I could see myself here. Doing . . . this. Forever."
She touched his arm. "We shall enjoy it while we can, Papa. But try not to become too attached to the place, all right? I would hate to see you disappointed again."
He patted her hand. "That's my Abigail. Always the practical one."
Her brave smile faltered. "Yes. That's me." She added, "I don't mean to steal your joy, Papa, and I quite agree with you—you would make an excellent lord of the manor, as you say. In fact, I was quite proud of you just now when you offered Mr. Chapman a place to stay."
He sent her a sidelong glance. "Yes, I thought you might like that."
She looked up at him in surprise, relieved to see no censure in his expression but rather an understanding light in his eyes. She tried to act nonchalant, as if she had no idea what he meant, but she could not quite stifle a small grin.
The grin faded, however, when she thought of Miles Pembrooke. He would not be happy to learn he was no longer their only houseguest.
# Chapter 17
And so, feeling eager and self-conscious, Abigail oversaw the arrangements to settle William Chapman in Pembrooke Park's morning room—an informal parlor with large windows where a family might spend time together reading, playing games, or doing needlework.
Mac returned to the parsonage and brought back a valise of William's least smoky clothes. His mother and sisters took the rest home to be cleaned. While they were gone, Abigail and the servants fitted up the sofa with proper bedding, and brought down a small bedstead from the attic for Mac, who was determined to stay with his son for at least that first night to make sure he fared well, had everything he needed, and didn't trouble the Fosters inordinately.
This answered the question in Abigail's mind of who would help William dress and bathe, since his burned arm was wrapped and not terribly useful. With Mac there, she would not yet have to ask much more of Duncan, who would not be eager to serve Mr. Chapman.
Mrs. Walsh, however, was only too eager to have a Chapman under the same roof to cook for and immediately went about preparing a selection of healthful soups and jellies, as though William were ill and not simply injured. She refused Kate Chapman's offer to send over food, saying, "I would enjoy nothing better than cooking for our curate. You'll not rob me of that pleasure, I trust?"
Mrs. Walsh brought the tray up herself that evening, making a fuss over William. He thanked her warmly, but said, "Only for tonight, mind. I shan't let you spoil me for long. I'm not really an invalid, Mrs. Walsh, though I do appreciate all the trouble you are taking over me."
"Aye, and what else would I do?" She winked and told him she wouldn't be satisfied until he had eaten every bowl clean.
She offered to bring a tray for Mac as well. He politely but firmly refused. "I shall go home to Kate's table. Don't want her getting jealous," he teased lightly, "or our cook, for that matter." But a wary glint in his eye made Abigail wonder if he had other reasons for not wanting to dine in Pembrooke Park.
Abigail ate in the dining room as usual that evening, with her father and Mr. Pembrooke. When her father mentioned William Chapman was in residence, Miles surprised her by reacting with apparent approbation.
"You are all goodness, Mr. Foster," he said. "I declare. I am quite proud to be related to you. First you invite me to stay and then our poor injured curate. Your generosity knows no bounds."
"Well, I wouldn't go that far," Mr. Foster said with a wry twist to his lips, but his eyes shone at his guest's praise.
Miles looked at her with a knowing grin. "And wise to put him on the ground level, sir, away from the family bedchambers. A clergyman cannot be too careful—one's reputation is not to be trifled with."
Was that a barb directed at her? Abigail wondered. Her father had shown no such scruple about keeping Miles Pembrooke away from the family bedchambers. But then again, he considered him family and therefore harmless.
Abigail hoped he was right.
After dinner, Abigail gathered her courage, reminding herself it was perfectly acceptable for a hostess to check on her injured houseguest. The morning room door stood ajar, which made her feel more comfortable in approaching and knocking softly on the jamb.
"Come," Mr. Chapman called in reply.
She pushed wide the door but remained in the threshold. William lay on the sofa, cocooned in bedclothes, his wrapped arm propped on a cushion. Hands, face, and hair scrubbed clean.
"Just checking to see if you have everything you need."
"I do. Thank you."
She glanced about the room. "Where is your father? I thought he was staying with you tonight?"
"He is. But he insisted on going to Mr. Brown's for laudanum. He should be back shortly."
She winced in empathy. "Is the pain very bad?"
"I've felt better," he allowed.
"I . . . should leave you. If there is nothing I can do."
"Stay and talk to me until he returns. Won't be long. I could use a pleasant distraction."
"Of course—if you like." Leaving the door open behind her, she crossed the room and sat in an armchair facing the sofa.
Closer now, she noticed the tension in his jaw and mouth, as if gritting his teeth against the pain.
He asked, "How is Mr. Pembrooke taking the news?"
"Actually, he congratulated my father on his largesse."
He chuckled. "I am sorry if I accused him unjustly. And I do hope you are . . . comfortable with my being here."
"I don't know if that is the word I would use, but I definitely approve of my father's decision to ask you to stay."
"Hmm," he murmured thoughtfully, watching her with a measuring look.
For a few moments they sat in companionable silence.
Knowing he wished her to distract him, she said, "It was kind of Miles to go for the surgeon today."
"I agree. Though perhaps shortsighted."
"Oh? How so?"
"Mr. Brown told me something interesting about Mr. Pembrooke while he was tending my wounds. Granted, I was distracted by the pain, but I am fairly certain I heard correctly. Did not Miles say his limp was the result of an old war wound?"
"He mentioned that, yes. Though he might have been jesting to brush it off lightly."
"Or to avoid uncomfortable questions, perhaps."
She frowned, remembering Duncan's doubts on the subject. "Why? What did Mr. Brown tell you?"
"He said he recalled Miles as a lad, when he lived here with his family. He was called in to set his leg—broken, apparently, during a fall down the stairs."
"No . . ." Abigail breathed, her heart twisting at the thought of a young boy falling down those many stairs.
William nodded. "He also intimated that the family did not immediately call him. And by the time they did, he was unable to set the leg as well as he would have liked. Mr. Brown said he suggested they take the boy to the hospital in Bath, but as far as he knows, they never went. He said it disappointed him, seeing Miles limp after all these years, and wished he'd been able to do more for him."
Abigail bit her lip as she considered, then asked, "Don't tell anyone else, all right? I'd like to talk to him myself."
"I won't." He reached across the distance and pressed her hand. "You have a compassionate heart, Abigail Foster."
Or a foolish heart, she thought but did not say so.
Abigail left Mr. Chapman and joined Miles in the drawing room for coffee. She found him staring out the window at the twilight sky, idly rolling the handle of a spoon between his fingers. As usual her father had remained in the dining room to smoke after dinner.
She sat across from him and began, "I understand Mr. Brown was called in to treat you here when you were a boy."
Miles lowered his eyes, his long lashes fanning over his cheek. "Ah . . ." he murmured. He smiled a sad little smile and continued to roll the spoon in his hand. "And I suppose he told you I broke my leg in an accident?"
"Yes. A fall down the stairs. Though perhaps you reinjured it in battle . . . ?"
She waited, watching the curtain of thoughts and emotions shifting across his golden-brown eyes.
He looked at her, then away again. "I did fall, yes. Clumsy Miles. But with so many injured in the war, I find it easier to call it an old war wound. Better to be one of the honorable veterans, injured in a noble cause, than a cripple since boyhood, an object of pity or scorn."
Abigail's heart ached for him, and she wished she had kept her mouth shut.
He shrugged. "It was not a complete fabrication. I did serve in the navy. An attempt to follow in my father's footsteps. To make up for all the other ways I had disappointed him. I bound my leg and hid my limp as best I could. It worked, for a time. I wasn't the strongest sailor, but I was clever, and worked my way up. But in the end, I hadn't the stomach for fighting. My father always told me I was too soft. And he was right." His mouth twisted. "So far."
"I understand, Miles," Abigail said. "And I don't blame you."
He met her gaze. "And will you forgive me for not being completely honest with you?"
"Yes."
He reached out and tapped a finger beneath her chin. "What a dear creature you are, fair cousin. If only everyone were half as understanding as you."
Later that evening, laudanum administered and pain beginning to ease, William and his father sat companionably in the Pembrooke morning room.
Mac looked around him at the fine furnishings and old portraits on the paneled walls. "How strange to be here," he murmured, "to have one of my children sleeping in Pembrooke Park. Never would I have believed it."
William looked at his father's pensive profile and said, "But I am not the first of your children to sleep here, am I?"
Mac looked away without answering.
William asked gently, "Were you ever going to tell me . . . if Miles Pembrooke hadn't returned and forced your hand?"
His father shrugged. "You were so young when it happened. One doesn't entrust important secrets like that to a four-year-old. Later, when the thing seemed to have been largely forgotten, it seemed risky to bring it out again, to open old wounds. Leah seemed to want to forget, to pretend it never happened. I suppose it made it easier to live day to day. And I certainly thought it the wisest, safest course, not to talk about it."
William regarded the older man. Wondering what else he didn't know about his family. About the past. "So many things I want to ask you . . ." he began, then winced his eyes shut, trying in vain to focus his laudanum-dulled thoughts. "Were you here that night?"
"Aye. That I was." Mac slowly shook his head, his gaze straying to the door and the hall beyond.
"Show me where it happened," William urged, pushing aside the bedclothes.
"No," his father protested. "Not after the day you've had. Stay in bed."
"I don't feel too bad, not with the laudanum taking effect." William swung his legs over the side of the sofa and made to stand.
His father stepped quickly to his side and took his arm to steady him. "Oh, very well. But just for a moment."
They went out into the hall. Mac's gaze swung around the soaring room and trailed its way up the grand staircase. "There." With his free hand, he pointed to the front door, then up the stairs. "The valet, Walter Kelly, rushed in with the news that Robert Pembrooke was dead. Murdered. And not long after, Walter himself died right there." He pointed to the bottom of the stairs.
"An accident—a fall—as we've always been told?" William asked. "Or was he pushed?"
Mac grimaced. "He and Clive Pembrooke argued at the top of the stairs. I believe Clive struck him a mortal blow, perhaps with the butt of his gun or some other object, then pushed him down the stairs to make it appear an accident."
"You didn't actually see it happen?" William asked.
Mac shook his head. "No. But I heard it."
William watched him, unsettled by the eerie glint in his father's eyes. Then he looked around the open two-story hall for possible places of concealment. Seeing only a hall cupboard, he asked, "Where were you?"
For a moment, Mac didn't answer, his expression distant in memory. Then he whispered, "In the secret room."
Abigail was about to blow out her bedside candle when she heard someone pounding on the front door below. She tied on her dressing gown over her nightdress and left her room, pushing her long hair back over her shoulder. Who would be calling at this late hour? She hoped Mr. Chapman was all right.
She descended the stairs and reached the hall in time to see Mac standing at the open front door, talking in a low voice to an adolescent male caller. Mac nodded and shut the door.
Concerned, Abigail asked, "Is everything all right?"
He turned, wearing a grimace. "Nothing to alarm you, Miss Foster. It's only that Mr. Morgan's favorite hound has gone missing. Like a second son to the man he is. And as I am his land agent . . ."
Abigail shook her head. "Don't tell me you've been asked to go out and find the man's dog . . . at this hour?"
"I'm afraid so. William is sound asleep or I wouldn't go. I think he'll sleep through the night, especially after the hefty dose of laudanum Dr. Brown sent over. Still I hate to leave him, should he waken . . ."
"I will ask my father to look in on him. Or Duncan."
"Thank you, Miss Foster. Don't disturb your father, but if Duncan will check on him, I think it will be all right to leave for an hour or two." He retrieved his overcoat from the hall cupboard.
Abigail hesitated. "I'm curious, Mac. Why did you hire Duncan? No offense, but he clearly isn't fond of working here. If he didn't treat my father so well, I likely would have dismissed him before now."
Mac bit his lip, then said, "I was afraid of that. It's a bitter pill to find himself a house servant. He'd hoped for more. Please be patient with him, lass."
Abigail studied his earnest face. "Very well."
"Thank you." He picked up his hat and turned to the door. "Well, I'm off. Hopefully, the dog will have shown up at Hunts Hall by now."
"I agree. But don't worry, we shall look after William until you return."
"Much obliged, Miss Foster."
Abigail went belowstairs to talk to Duncan but discovered his room empty. Where was he at this hour? Out drinking at the public house? Meeting Eliza?
Drawn by Abigail's knocking, Mrs. Walsh peeped out of her own room across the passage, her hair in paper wrappers. Abigail asked if she knew where Duncan was, but the housekeeper said she thought he'd gone to bed and was surprised to learn his room was empty.
Abigail borrowed paper and ink from Mrs. Walsh and left a note for Duncan, asking him to check on Mr. Chapman when he returned, and to take him fresh water in the morning. The note would also serve to let the man know she was aware of—and not pleased with—his late-night absence.
She sighed, resigned to go upstairs and ask her father to look in on William. Remembering Miles's comment about reputations, she doubted it would be proper for her to do so. Crossing the hall, she paused outside the morning room door, to assure herself William Chapman slept on, undisturbed. If so, she would let her father sleep awhile longer. Perhaps Duncan would return soon and she wouldn't have to wake her father. His "lord of the manor" condescension might not extend to middle-of-the-night visits to his houseguest's sickbed.
She pressed her ear to the closed door, but a groan broke the silence she'd hoped for. Her heart banged against her ribs, and her stomach plummeted. All thoughts of propriety fled.
She inched open the door and peered in. Mac had left a candle lamp glowing on a side table, which illuminated William's form on the makeshift bed. Seeing he was dressed in nightshirt and covered by bedclothes, she opened the door wider and tiptoed inside. Again she heard a pitiful groan.
She cautiously approached. His eyes were closed, but his face was bunched up in a grimace of pain, or anxiety.
"Noooo," he moaned. "Leah . . ."
She was startled to hear him calling for his sister. He must be having a nightmare.
Abigail bent near. "Mr. Chapman?" she whispered. "William?" When he didn't respond, she gently touched his arm. "You're all right. Just a dream."
She had heard laudanum could give people horrid nightmares, sometimes even hallucinations. She hoped the surgeon hadn't prescribed too great a dose.
"You're all right," she repeated, gently shaking his arm.
Slowly, groggily, he opened his eyes. He looked at her with a bleary gaze.
"You were having a nightmare," she said quietly, kneeling on the footstool. "I only came in to wake you. Are you all right?"
"Leah?" He looked past her, toward the door.
"She is at home in bed. Sound asleep, no doubt. You are here in Pembrooke Park—do you remember?"
"Leah was here too," he murmured. His expression tightened in alarm. "Hiding in the secret room. He was coming for her."
Leah, in the secret room? Abigail thought. Someone coming for her? What a dream for him to have.
"Only a nightmare," she repeated.
"Was it? It seemed so real." He sighed. "What a relief."
His expression relaxed, and he took a slow, deep breath.
"Are you all right now?" she asked. "Are you in pain?"
He lifted one corner of his mouth in a lopsided grin. "The pain is a distant thing—off shore. I feel . . . good." His gaze roamed her face. "Abigail Foster is at my bedside . . ." His eyes twinkled. "How can I not feel good? In fact, I feel very . . . warm."
His hand found hers, and he entwined his long fingers around her shorter ones. "Like . . . warm jelly that hasn't set. My bones are soft. Your skin is soft. So soft . . ." He looked down at her pale wrist as though it were an awe-inspiring sight, and ran a thumb over it.
It sent a thrill of pleasure up her arm.
She supposed she now knew how William Chapman would behave were he ever foxed. And considering he stayed away from liquor, this was likely as close as he would ever come. She hoped he wouldn't feel the worse for it when the laudanum wore off. She wondered if he would even remember this conversation in the morning.
His voice thick, he said, "I've never seen you with your hair down." He reached out and captured the end of a dark curl and caressed it between his thumb and fingers.
She bowed her head, embarrassed and self-conscious, yet at the same time supremely aware of her femininity, her long dark hair falling on either side of her face and over her shoulders like a veil.
"Sorry. I had already dressed for bed."
"Don't be sorry. It's beautiful. You're beautiful."
"Thank you," she whispered, unable to meet his earnest gaze.
He continued to hold her hand, and she continued to let him. His eyes took on that dazed quality once more. He said languidly, "Abigail Foster in my bedchamber at night. I must be dreaming . . ."
He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a slow kiss to one fingertip after another. "Mulberries . . ." he murmured. "I find I like them after all."
He gave her a roguish grin.
"You are feeling very pleased with yourself," she observed.
"Of course I am. You are with me, so I am on top of the world . . . yet strangely numb to the world at the same time."
She gently extracted her hand from his. "I think you are quite well enough for me to leave you. In fact, far too well for me to stay." She rose.
His head snapped toward the door, and his brows furrowed. "Who's that?"
Startled, she turned toward the door she had left open, but saw nothing. "Where?"
"Who's there?" he called.
"I don't see anyone. Probably only a trick of the shadows." And the laudanum, she added to herself.
He shook his head. "I saw someone—someone in a hooded cloak."
Abigail walked to the door, her heart beating a little too hard, first from William's touch and now this scare. If anyone was there, it was likely only Duncan, coming to heed her summons at last. Or perhaps her father. Or even Miles Pembrooke. She hoped not the latter. He would certainly not like finding her in William Chapman's bedchamber, sickroom or not.
But she saw no one in the hall, even though the moonlight leaking in through the windows left plenty of shadows and dark corners.
She returned to his bedside. "I didn't see anyone."
But William had already nodded back to sleep.
Had there been someone there? Abigail wondered. Someone in a hooded cloak? A shiver snaked up her neck at the thought.
Sometime later, Abigail jerked awake to find Mac bent over her, gently shaking her shoulder.
"Hm?" She had fallen asleep in the armchair. Her gaze flew to William. "Is he all right?" Relieved, she saw him sleeping peacefully.
Mac said, "I'm here now. Go to bed, Miss Foster."
She rose, her neck stiff from sleeping in an awkward position. Massaging it, she murmured, "Find the dog?"
"Eventually. In the last place I looked, of course. Snake Ravine. Still don't know what he was doing down there." Mac sighed and unbuttoned his Carrick coat.
Her cue to depart. "Well. Good night," she whispered, stepping to the door.
"Thanks for sitting with him," he said. "You didn't have to, you know."
"I didn't mind."
"I thought you were going to ask Duncan . . . ?"
"I couldn't find him. He was out, apparently."
"Out? Out where?"
"I don't know. But I shall ask him in the morning. It's late. Get some sleep."
He ran a weary hand over his face. "I'm halfway there already."
The following morning, when Polly came in to help her dress, Abigail asked her, "Do you happen to know if Duncan saw my note?"
"Aye, miss. He saw it."
Something in the maid's tone of voice told Abigail that Duncan had been none too pleased about it either.
When Abigail went downstairs for breakfast, she first diverted to the morning room. She knocked, assuming William would be fully dressed by then, thanks to Duncan's begrudging help, if not Mac's.
She expected Mac to answer the door, but instead she heard a muffled "Come in" from inside and tentatively inched open the door.
William Chapman sat on a stool near the desk-turned-washstand, breathing hard and catching his breath. He was dressed—thankfully—in trousers and shirt, one arm in his coat sleeve, struggling to wriggle his injured arm into the other.
"Where is your father?" she asked.
"He left just after Duncan came in with water. Went home to change—he had an early meeting at Hunts Hall. I suppose he assumed Duncan would help me."
"So did I. I asked him to do so."
Mr. Chapman gave up his struggle. "He did bring water and helped me shave, but he has many other duties, so I assured him I could finish dressing on my own."
She gave him a wry look. "As I see." Yes, she thought. No doubt Duncan enumerated his many pressing duties with long-suffering martyrdom.
"I don't blame him," William said. "To tell you the truth, I was surprised he did that much. He isn't exactly fond of me, remember."
"So I've noticed. Are you ever going to tell me why?"
"Let's just say he once admired Leah, but Father and I discouraged his interest."
"Ah. Then I am surprised your father recommended him for the position here."
"Oh, Papa isn't the type to hold a grudge."
Abigail gave him a pointed look, and William quickly recanted.
"You're right, he is the type. But in this case, Duncan's wrongdoing was of the sort men understand. Pursuing a beautiful woman beyond his reach."
His eyes flashed with pain or longing. She hoped he was not thinking of Andrew Morgan's sister again.
"I see." She turned away, toward the small bed, neatly made. "Your poor father. It looks as though he barely slept. Did he tell you he was summoned to go out and find Mr. Morgan's hound after you fell asleep?"
"No, he didn't mention it."
"Yes, I spoke to him before he left." Abigail explained, "I looked in on you in his absence, since I couldn't find Duncan anywhere." She tilted her head to one side in thought. "Perhaps it's a good thing I did."
"Did you?" He winced in thought. "I had the strangest dreams last night. . . ."
"Yes, I know you did," she drawled.
He looked up at her, mildly alarmed. "Oh dear."
Abigail stepped forward. "Here, let me help you." She pulled the frock coat around him and helped him angle his arm into the sleeve, gently tugging the lining over the bandages.
"Thank you." He asked, "Did I . . . talk in my sleep? I sometimes do, Jacob tells me."
"I'm not sure how much was sleep and how much was the effect of the laudanum."
"That bad, eh? Not sure I want to ask what I said."
She playfully narrowed her eyes. "It wasn't so much what you said, as what you did."
His eyes widened, then sparked with humor. "You are enjoying teasing me, I see. Or perhaps tormenting is the better word." He added, "I do hope I didn't embarrass myself, or you."
"Nothing to worry about. Shall I help you tie your cravat? I've often helped my father."
"If you like. I'm not sure I can manage with only one good arm, but I can do without or wait for my father, if you prefer."
"I don't mind, if you don't." She lifted the long swath of linen cloth from the back of the chair and circled it around his neck once, then again, pulling it snug, but not too tight.
"Do you plan to strangle me?"
"Probably not." She grinned and began tying a simple barrel knot. With him seated, and her standing near his knees, his head reached her about shoulder level. She felt self-conscious performing the little domestic chore, yet the light of admiration shining in his eyes boosted her confidence.
He smiled up at her and said, "You know, as sorry as I am that the parsonage was burned, I cannot be truly sorry that I have ended up here, in your company. Something good from the bad, I suppose. God excels at that."
His words, his nearness, made her feel strangely warm, and her stomach tingled. As she straightened the cravat around his neck, her fingertips brushed his chin. The same fingertips he had kissed last night. She wondered what he would do if she leaned down and planted a kiss on his freshly shaven cheek, or if she dared, his lips. Her heart beat a little faster at the thought. And what would she do if he pulled her onto his lap, wrapped his good arm around her, and soundly kissed her? Would she slap his face? Reprove him there and then, or send her father in to do so? She doubted she would do any of those things. Not when a part of her wished he would do just that.
Feeling nervous, she changed the subject. "Do you remember your nightmare last night? You groaned in your sleep. I had to wake you."
He squinted in concentration. "I don't think so."
"You called for Leah. You were clearly frightened for her."
Eyes distant in recollection, he murmured, "Oh yes . . ."
"You said something about her hiding in the secret room and that someone was coming for her."
He stilled, then his mouth formed an O. "Did I?"
She nodded, watching his face.
He chuckled rather lamely. "That is a strange thing to dream . . . or to say."
"Is it?" she asked.
For a moment their gazes met and held. He opened his mouth as if to reply, but at that moment, footsteps sounded behind them.
She stepped back abruptly and said a bit too brightly, "There. That should do it."
She looked guiltily over her shoulder. Her stomach sank.
Miles stood there, eyes alight. "Who is hiding in the secret room?"
Abigail said quickly, "Mr. Chapman had a nightmare. That's all it was."
"A nightmare?" Miles echoed, shaking his head. "Sounds like a dream come true to me."
The following day, William left behind his invalid status and joined the Fosters in the dining room for the evening meal. This ought to be interesting, he thought. And perhaps a test of his forbearance as well as his tact, what with Miles Pembrooke seated across from him and Duncan serving at table, along with two housemaids. He hoped the maids would keep the resentful man from spitting in his soup. Or worse.
Pushing such thoughts from his mind, William asked Mr. Foster questions about his boyhood. While he was at it, he asked what Miss Foster had been like as a young girl, and her father obliged with tales of how, by the age of six, she had started organizing the nursery and arranging her pinafores by days of the week, and keeping the rest of the family in line.
Miss Foster ducked her head, a becoming blush on her cheeks. "Papa . . ." she gently protested.
But William could tell she enjoyed the fondness and pride in her father's eyes and in his tone of voice. Who wouldn't?
He found his gaze drawn across the table to Miles Pembrooke. Had his father ever praised or fondly teased him? Somehow he doubted the man had ever known a father's love or approval. William's heart twisted at the thought, and he determined to make more of an effort with him.
He asked Miles about his travels and politely avoided the sore subject of his family. Miles obliged with tales of his time in Gibraltar, all of them determinedly ignoring Duncan's snort heard from the servery.
Then William decided he would attempt to pique Miles's interest in God—the true source of unconditional love every human heart longed for—by first encouraging him to attend church.
"You ought to join us on Sunday, Mr. Pembrooke," William said. "My sermon is about your favorite topic."
"My favorite topic?" Miles raised his eyebrows. "Oh my, what could it be? Miss Foster, perhaps?" He tsked. "I don't think your parishioners would approve."
"No."
"Then what are you suggesting is my favorite topic?"
William met the man's challenging gaze with a warm smile. "Treasure."
# Chapter 18
On Sunday William dressed in his black forms, his newest bandage less bulky than the first and his arm more mobile now that the pain, without the aid of laudanum, had dulled somewhat. His father came to Pembrooke Park, wearing his customary black coat and grey waistcoat, which he thought befitted his position as parish clerk. Mac had returned to his own bed after the first two nights, once assured that William was doing well on his own.
"Ready?" his father asked.
"I think so, yes."
"Don't worry, lad. Folks won't expect much of you this morning. They'll understand you've been in no fit state for writing sermons."
"Some believe that to be my perpetual state," William quipped.
"Well. Can't please everyone."
"Don't I know it." He grinned at his father. "I would likely hear more complaints were most people not in awe of my fierce Scots father."
Mac grinned. "If only Mrs. Peterman were of that same persuasion."
When the church bells rang, people crowded into the boxes and pews, more than had attended in some time. William was surprised to see Miles Pembrooke in church, sitting with Miss Foster and her father, and his spirit quickened at the sight of him. At the opportunity. Around the nave, people stared at Miles and spoke in whispers and hushed grumbles and supposition.
Mac called the service to order, perhaps more sharply than usual, and everyone quieted.
Standing near a communion table swathed in white linen, William prayed the Lord's Prayer and then continued on to the Collect and readings. He said, "And now let us proclaim our faith together. . . ."
Everyone stood to say aloud the Nicene Creed, words shared with fellow believers across the centuries and around the world. "I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible: and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God . . ."
When it came time for William to give a personal greeting and announcements before his sermon, he slowly looked around the nave, smiling at one and all.
"It is good to see so many in attendance this morning, though I know curiosity to view the damage done to the parsonage—and to the parson—may have drawn more of you than my fine oratory skills."
A few quiet chuckles rumbled across the nave. Mrs. Peterman, however, sat ramrod straight, her mouth its usual stern line.
"Whatever the case, you are all welcome and I am glad to see you." He glanced at Miles Pembrooke as he said it. "And again, my deepest thanks to those of you who came to help. My mother invites you all to our house after the service for tea or cider and her famous biscuits as a small token of our gratitude."
This announcement was met with murmurs of approval.
When the crowd had quieted, William said, "It is good to draw together as a community after such an event. When problems strike, it is also a good time to draw close to God personally, to take stock of your own heart, your own life." He looked again at Miles. "With this in mind, I am going to deviate from the planned text for the morning and hope you will indulge me."
Mrs. Peterman, he saw, rolled her eyes.
William sent up a silent prayer, asking God to help him choose his words wisely and well. He began, "What would you do if your house burned to the ground? Perhaps it has. Which of us can forget the Wilsons' fire of five years ago? So much loss. What if you were to lose all your worldly possessions because of fire, or theft, or financial tragedy?"
Mr. Foster, he noticed, shifted uncomfortably.
"Are your dearest possessions fireproof? Your valuables safe forever? Do you spend your time in the constant quest of attaining more?"
His father read from the sixth chapter of Matthew. "'Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal.'"
William looked out at the congregation. "And, I might add, where fire destroys."
Again his gaze snagged on Miles Pembrooke. William hoped he was not using his sermon as a chance to bludgeon the man indirectly. For Mr. Pembrooke was a treasure seeker, whether or not he'd had anything to do with the fire. Lord, guard my mind and tongue.
"Some of us go through life spending a great deal of effort accumulating possessions or wealth, saving for a rainy day or an uncertain future. And if our means are modest, we spend our energies thinking about where our next meal will come from.
"Don't misunderstand me. Those of you who are husbands and fathers are right to think ahead, and take care of your families. And I commend you for it. But there is a difference between providing for our families and laying up treasures. Longing after riches. Or searching for some mythical treasure "out there" somewhere to try and make ourselves happy. But we all know that earthly treasure will never satisfy the deepest longings of our souls, don't we? I can hear Mr. Matthews say, 'No, Parson, but it sure would help feed my five strapping sons.'"
A few chuckled, including the blacksmith himself.
William continued, "And yes, adequate means make life easier. Or so I hear." He grinned at that. "Though often need draws us close to God like plenty never can."
At this point, William hesitated. Should he? Dare he confront the issue directly? Taking a deep breath, he plunged ahead. "Throughout history, stories and myths have included the lure of treasure—whether chests of pirate gold or the goose that laid the golden egg. And local lore whispers about hidden treasure much nearer at hand."
Miss Foster blinked up at him. Mr. Pembrooke's eyes shone with amused irritation. Around the nave, people exchanged uneasy glances.
"Can you imagine the waste of a life spent searching for a treasure that doesn't exist? Or of hiding a treasure, only to have thieves break in and steal it? Or to finally unearth the long-sought treasure, only to find it rusted and destroyed? Worthless?"
Miles Pembrooke frowned.
"Where are you investing your time, attention, love, and talents?" William asked. "In earthly matters or eternal ones? Where do your affections lie? What does your heart seek above all else?"
He nodded to his father, who read, "'But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.'"
When he finished, William said, "When I discovered the parsonage was in flames—my bed, my belongings, my books—of course I tried to put out the fire. And because the parsonage belongs not only to me but to the entire parish, I perhaps tried even harder than I would have done, were it mine alone. But I can honestly say, that my thoughts during those tense moments were not for my belongings. I was thinking of those dearest to me. Of the safety of those helping me. Of what it would do to my family were I injured or killed. And the loss to all of you, should the fire spread to the church itself.
"No, I am not happy that my favorite green coat was burned or my university gown ruined. You shall grow tired of seeing me in my black forms, no doubt." Again he smiled. "But I am not devastated. The parsonage does not hold my real treasure. My faith, my soul, my greatest treasure lies not within four walls, or my purse, nor any possession. My hope is in God alone." Again he let his gaze travel slowly over his parishioners. "And I pray the same for each of you."
Abigail released a long breath and unclenched her hands, relieved the uncomfortable sermon had ended. Mr. Chapman turned next to the offertory, and Mac collected the alms for the poor. Holy Communion followed, but Miles, she noticed, did not go forward to receive the bread and wine. Did he see himself as unworthy? Weren't they all?
When the service concluded, people didn't linger as long as usual, eager to walk over to the Chapmans' to be first in line for tea, cider, and biscuits.
"You two go ahead," Miles said. "I'm going back to the house. I've caused enough stir for one day, I think. My work here is done." He winked. "And on the Sabbath no less."
Her father said, "You know, my dear, I am not sure I am eager for a community-wide chat just now either."
"Then no need," Abigail said. "We'll all go home. We may have to wait for our dinner, however, for I wouldn't dream of asking Mrs. Walsh and the others to forgo the pleasure."
Mr. Morgan senior stopped to talk to her father, so Miles and Abigail waited on the edges of the exiting crowd. Several people, she noticed, stopped to thank Mr. Chapman for the sermon, warmly shaking his hand. She was happy for him. True to form, Mrs. Peterman stopped to give her opinion as well, and from the look on her face, it was not favorable. Poor William.
Miles said, "I think our friend Mr. Chapman has missed his calling. He ought to have been one of Wesley's itinerant preachers. You don't suppose that sermon was directed at anyone in particular—do you, Miss Foster?"
She noticed the twinkle in his eye, and said, "Perhaps. But I think it had something to say to all of us."
"Not you, Miss Foster. Surely you have not been tempted after treasure?"
She sent a guarded glance toward her father, and seeing him still engrossed in conversation, quietly admitted, "It has crossed my mind."
His brows rose. "Delightful! Nothing like a little healthy competition."
She shrugged. "No point for me to search, really. The treasure wouldn't be mine to claim. I would no doubt have to surrender anything I found to the estate."
"Ah. Then you don't know about the reward?"
She looked at him, not believing they were having this conversation right after Mr. Chapman's sermon.
Miles explained, "My father was so convinced there was a significant treasure, possibly an entire room full of treasure, that he put up a portion of his own prize money and offered it as a reward, hoping some reluctant servant would suddenly recall the location of the supposed treasure. The reward has never been retracted; it is still held in trust by the solicitor, ready to be claimed."
Abigail took it in. If true, it put a different perspective on things. There might be hope for the Foster finances—and her dowry—yet.
He leaned near and whispered a sum. The reward was sizeable. It would not replace all the money her father had lost, but it would allow her to make some recompense. And yes, she could replace her dowry. Not enough to draw fortune hunters, but if a man already held her in high regard, might a tidy sum sweeten her charms and win over any reluctant parents?
Leaning on his stick and staring at the house across the drive, Miles Pembrooke murmured on a sigh, "Sometimes I can't believe I am really back here. . . ."
Realizing the man had grown weary standing there, Abigail said, "Come, Mr. Pembrooke. You and I can head back. Father will catch up when he's ready."
Miles drew himself up. "Whatever you like, dear cousin." He offered his arm, and thinking he might need the support more than she did, she linked her arm with his.
As they slowly made their way to the house, Miles began, "The treasure and the reward would be enough for me. If I find it, you are welcome to keep the house, as far as I am concerned. Truth be told, I would probably only sell it if it were mine. But if I came into a fortune, it would be within my largesse to allow you to remain in the house at such ridiculously generous terms."
He squeezed her arm and sent her a sidelong glance. "Don't misunderstand me. Harriet explained why she chose to funnel the income from the estate back into its coffers—paying for the servants and repairs and upkeep—so you wouldn't have to. She assures me it was a sound investment, that otherwise the house would have continued to disintegrate past the point of redemption, becoming worthless to either inherit or to sell."
They let themselves in and retired to the drawing room to wait for her father and their dinner. Settling into a cushioned armchair, Miles smiled at her as she straightened her skirts on the chair next to his.
"So you see, I am quite happy to let you remain here, Miss Foster. Perhaps I might visit now and again. Or perhaps you would like to come with me when I leave . . . ?" He watched her with an expectant lift of his brow.
"Mr. Pembrooke!"
"I realize I am older than you are, but I am young at heart. You cannot deny it."
"No, I certainly cannot."
"And you are old for your age."
Abigail huffed in offense.
He laid a cool hand on her shoulder. "Now, now. I don't mean you look old. Of course not. You look charming, as you well know. But I do think you are an old soul. At the very least, mature for your age."
"I cannot deny it has always been said of me."
"There, you see? We are perfect for each other."
He was teasing her, surely. Or was he? Abigail slowly shook her head, regarding the man with amusement, begrudging fondness, and . . . distrust.
William returned to Pembrooke Park after a long day of sermon-making, too much tea, and too much talking, followed by a Sunday school full of children who'd eaten too many sweets. All he wanted was to lie down and sleep. For all his belief in the Scriptures and God's command to rest on the Sabbath, for William, Sunday was the most tiring day of the week.
Miss Foster and her father had not come to his parents' house after church, but neither had Miles Pembrooke, so he wouldn't complain. Instead, he had enjoyed a long talk with his friend Andrew Morgan, who insisted he looked worn out and needed a holiday—as if he'd ever have the time to indulge that whim. Still, it had been pleasant to contemplate.
He pulled off his cravat and slumped onto the sofa in the morning room. He'd barely closed his eyes when Kitty stopped by, ostensibly to visit him, but he guessed she hoped to visit Miss Foster and the dolls' house as well. After looking around his temporary bedchamber, she said, "Dick Peabody and Tommy Matthews got into fisticuffs after Sunday school today."
"Did they?" he asked in concern. "Why?"
"Dick said you were picking on Mr. Pembrooke in your sermon. That you two are sworn enemies. But Tommy scoffed at him and said he didn't know anything. He said you and Mr. Pembrooke are friends."
"Did he?" That was more surprising than the fight. "Based on what, pray?"
"Said you and he play chess together. Things like that."
"Chess? Mr. Pembrooke and I have never played chess."
Kitty's face puckered. "That's odd. Tommy said he saw Mr. Pembrooke knocking on your door, carrying a box. And when he asked Mr. Pembrooke what was in the box, he said it was a chess set, that he'd come to see if you were ready for a rematch. Something like that at any rate."
William frowned in thought. "I must not have been at home, for Mr. Pembrooke has never been inside the parsonage." Or has he? There it was—the suspicion was back.
He asked, "When was this? Do you know?"
Kitty shrugged. "Tommy didn't say. He's about the place quite a lot with that fishing pole of his. Could have been any day."
But William guessed he knew very well which day it had been. Then he remembered that Miles and Mr. Foster had played chess that day, so Miles might have been in earnest. God forgive me, he thought, ashamed of his uncharitable thoughts. Perhaps Miles had come to the parsonage seeking him out as an opponent in a friendly game. But somehow he didn't believe chess was the rematch the man had in mind. Although if Miles had been occupied with Mr. Foster for quite some time, how could he have set the fire? William hoped his dislike and distrust of the man wasn't coloring his judgment.
What had really been in that box?
William rubbed his hand over his eyes. He needed a break from Pembrooke Park and its inhabitants—both those he disliked and the one he liked too much for his own good. He decided then that he would take Andrew up on his offer to be his guest in London for a few days.
On Monday, Abigail went down to the lamp room herself, irritated that Duncan had yet to replace the faulty lamp in the first-floor passage as she had repeatedly asked him to do. Striding down the dim corridor belowstairs, she saw the lamp room door slightly ajar and heard scraping and the ting of brass on brass within. Good, Duncan was getting to the trimming at last.
She pushed open the door, the manservant's name already on her lips. "Duncan . . . ?"
Miles turned from the rear counter, his expression quickly transforming from sheepish to wide-eyed innocence.
"Oh . . . Mr. Pembrooke!" Abigail exclaimed. "I didn't expect to find you here."
He smiled. "I imagine not. Sorry to startle you. I am not Duncan, but I am your servant, madam, to command." He gave her a pert little bow, then wiped his sooty hands on a cloth. "At the moment I even look the part. If there is something you need help with, you need only ask."
"Oh, I . . . Thank you. I was only looking for a lamp."
"As was I. I was thinking of going up into the attic and wanted a nice stout lamp to light my way."
Her expression must have communicated surprise as well as disapproval.
He pressed a hand to his heart. "My dear Miss Foster, I was under the impression from several things you and your excellent father have said, that I was free to look about as I pleased while here. To 'make myself at home,' as it were—temporarily, of course. But if I have erred, you need only tell me and I shall keep to my room from now on."
"No, of course you need not keep to your room, Mr. Pembrooke."
He said, "Perhaps you would come up to the attic with me, Miss Foster. Unless . . . Are you afraid of ghosts? Perhaps you might tremble in fear and I shall be there to offer a steadying arm?" He grinned.
"I am not afraid of ghosts, Mr. Pembrooke."
"Pity. So inconvenient when ladies are brave and practical. Robs us poor gents of our chance to rescue you from billowing draperies and figures shrouded in bedsheets." He repositioned his stick. "Then perhaps you might lend me your courage, Miss Foster. I shall have to act brave with you there to see me."
"Why the attic?" she asked.
"When we were children, my siblings and I often played up there. Especially on rainy days, when we were trapped indoors. We acted out little pantomimes and played hide-and-seek. In my memory, it is a huge looming space with piles of valises, bandboxes, and trunks of every size and description. But my memory is no doubt colored by being young and small at the time. Perhaps I shall be disappointed."
"You don't need me to chaperone you, Mr. Pembrooke."
"I would enjoy your company, truly. And it's Miles, remember?"
She cocked her head to one side. "Tell me, Miles. Have you some reason to think the mythical treasure might be hidden in the attic?"
"Not especially, no."
"I am curious. If you didn't find it when you lived here for two years, why do you think you will find it now?"
"But I was only a boy then and lacked the proper motivation. Besides, I might ask the same of you, Miss Foster. If you have looked these several weeks before my arrival without success, why do you hesitate to admit that I might be of assistance? Surely my history with the house offers some advantages? You are clever—I can see that—but I have history on my side. What say you, why do we not work together? Join forces as it were? Would we not make excellent partners?"
"I don't know about that. . . ."
"I'll tell you what. If we are successful, I will keep the treasure and you may have the reward. Is that not fair? For Pembrooke Park and its treasures will never come to you or your father. Surely you know that?"
Abigail wondered if Miles had the right to any valuables found in the house either. Might he take what he found unlawfully if she "condoned" his search?
She said, "It is my understanding that the courts are still debating the rightful heir, due to your father's disappearance. What if you find the treasure but they rule in someone else's favor? Will you promise not to abscond with whatever valuables we might find?"
"Yes. I agree," he said, a little too quickly to reassure Abigail.
He added, "Though one might ask, then, what is in it for me?" He looked toward the ceiling in thought and then snapped his fingers. "Tell you what. If we find a treasure and it belongs to someone else, then I will share the reward with you."
She considered this. "Equally?"
"Of course. Then . . . have we a bargain?" He held out his hand, like a businessman might, but Abigail hesitated. What would it hurt? Fifty percent of nothing was still nothing and was likely all they'd ever see for their efforts. But if they were successful . . . ?
She was tempted to agree, but a catch in her spirit stopped her. For all the logic of his proposal, why did she feel to agree would be making a bargain with the devil?
"You know what, Mr. Pembrooke. Maybe this isn't a good idea after all."
He raised a brow, eyes glinting in challenge. "Feeling greedy, Miss Foster?"
"Not at all. Feeling foolish for even considering entering into an agreement with a man I barely know over a treasure that most likely doesn't even exist."
He dropped his hand. "Practical Miss Foster. You do steal a man's fun." He sighed dramatically. "And here I thought we were going to be good friends."
On Tuesday another letter arrived, but this one bore no postal markings and had been delivered by hand. Kitty Chapman brought it to her, saying a woman in the churchyard had asked her to give it to Miss Foster.
"Did this woman wear a veil?" Abigail asked.
"Yes! How did you know?"
She is near, then, Abigail thought. Did this confirm that the veiled woman in the churchyard was Harriet Pembrooke? She unfolded the old journal page and read it there in the hall.
I finally found it. The secret room. It was there all along, so close. And just in time. His rages are growing worse. And during the worst of them, I slip inside to hide and wait for the storm to pass. But now I'm wracked with guilt. I should have let my brothers in on the secret. But I did not, selfish creature that I am. And now he's hurt. And it's my fault, at least in part. I should have protected him. I can still hear my father's growl and my brother's sickening cry. The clunk and tumble down the stairs. My mother's scream.
I thought my heart would burst when I saw him, a tangle of limbs on the marble floor. One leg bent at such an unnatural angle.
Papa refused to send for the surgeon until we all agreed to say it was only an accident. My brother moaned all night until I thought I would go mad hearing it. The following day, in desperation, Mamma agreed and asked us all to lie, which she hated to do. Hated him, for asking it of her. Finally he sent for the surgeon, and the man came, astounded at the damage. He asked when and how it had happened.
Papa looked at Mamma and challenged, "Yes, how did it happen, my dear?"
"He fell down the stairs," she gritted out, pale and sullen. "A terrible accident."
Mr. Brown asked, "Why did you not send for me immediately?"
This time Mamma refused to answer and stared defiantly at her husband.
"Oh," he said casually, "we weren't sure the injury was serious enough to require a surgeon's attention."
Mr. Brown looked from the twisted leg to my father as though he were a madman. And perhaps he is.
The surgeon set the leg as best he could, but suggested my father take his son to a hospital. Papa wouldn't hear of it. I think he's afraid of what we might do in his absence. Or that none of us would be here when he returned.
Abigail's stomach lurched. She thought of what the surgeon had recently told Mr. Chapman, his own similar account of the "accident." Poor Miles. Had his father really pushed him?
Miles came hobbling across the hall, dressed in riding clothes and leaning heavily on his stick. Her heart twisted anew to think how it had become injured in the first place.
"Miles, may I ask about your . . . ?" She hesitated. Dare she ask about his father?
"About what, Miss Foster? You may ask me anything."
Her courage failed her. "About your sister, Harriet?"
He pursed his lip. "There isn't much more I can tell you. As I said, I have only seen her twice in the last dozen years. I left the country when quite young, remember, and she moved elsewhere, both of us eager to leave the past behind."
"Did she ever marry?"
Miles hesitated. "She wouldn't want me talking about her private affairs, Miss Foster. You must forgive me. Even though she and I are not close, I am duty bound to be loyal to her as her brother."
"Of course."
"But I will say she has been unlucky in love . . . and leave it at that."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"I have not been lucky in love either, in the past. But I hope my fortunes are changing in that regard?"
Was that a statement or a question? Abigail wondered uncomfortably. "I hope so, for your sake."
Abigail thought again of the veiled woman. "Does your sister ever visit this area?"
Again he hesitated. "I . . . think so, yes. But not often. Again, I don't keep track of her comings and goings."
"I suppose she has had to inspect the place over the years—as executor, I mean?"
He shrugged. "I think she has left most of that to her solicitor."
Abigail nodded vaguely, and Miles continued across the hall. She wondered again what drew the woman to the churchyard—and to write her letters, if indeed they were one and the same person.
"Miles," she called after him, then waited until he had turned before asking, "You didn't fall down the stairs, did you?"
He smiled easily. "Oh, but I did. I told you."
"I mean . . . it wasn't an accident, was it. You were pushed."
His smile fell. He looked at her, nostrils flared, fist clenched on the handle of his stick. But his voice when he spoke was incongruously gentle. "Who . . . told you that?"
Abigail swallowed, not wanting to reveal her source. She said quietly, "You were not the only person your father pushed."
"Ha." A cracked little laugh escaped him. "Only the youngest."
She felt tears sting her eyes. "I am sorry, Miles. Truly."
His mouth, his entire face, twisted in displeasure. "I don't want your pity, Miss Foster. That is the last thing I wanted you to feel for me."
The next day, Abigail sat in the window seat in her bedchamber, looking idly out over the back lawn and gardens beyond. She was bored and lonely. William Chapman had gone off to London for a few days with Andrew Morgan, and the house, the neighborhood, seemed empty without him.
Suddenly she saw something through the window, and her heart banged against her ribs. She bolted up and pressed her nose nearer the glass. There was the veiled woman again. What was she doing in the garden, behind the potting shed? As if sensing she was being watched, the woman began walking away.
Abigail's nerves tingled to life. This was her chance to test her theory of the woman's identity. She rushed around, finding her slippers, tripping in her haste on the woven carpet and nearly falling. She dashed out into the corridor and toward the stairway. Duncan came carrying two huge cans of water up the stairs—her father must have requested a bath—so she had to wait at the top of the stairs. When the manservant and his heavy load finally passed by, she skimmed down the stairs and across the hall, hoping the woman had not already disappeared.
She eagerly threw open the front door, and it banged loudly against the wall.
In the drive, two women stood in conversation. The veiled woman and . . . Leah Chapman?
Both whirled at the sound. The veiled woman turned away and stalked toward the barouche waiting just outside the gate.
Abigail jogged across the drive, but Leah grasped her arm and hissed, "Abigail, don't."
The woman called something to the coachman—Abigail heard only her last word, "Quickly!"—and then let herself inside without waiting for help. The coachman cracked his whip and urged his horses to "Get up."
"Who was that?" Abigail asked.
Leah appeared shaken. "I'm not sure. I saw her as I was leaving the churchyard." She shivered. "I found it eerie, talking to that woman, her face covered in that heavy veil."
Abigail watched the barouche pull away and rumble over the bridge. If she ran fast enough, she might be able to overtake it before the horses picked up speed, but what would she do then? Leap up on the footboard and demand admission? She was no highwayman. "You didn't recognize her?"
Leah shrugged. "I don't think so . . . I could only see her eyes, and her mouth when she spoke. But it was her voice that struck me. Strange and yet familiar all at once. She asked me who put flowers on Robert Pembrooke's grave."
"What did you tell her?"
"I . . . didn't. I wasn't sure I should. Eliza Smith leaves them now and again."
"Yes . . ." Abigail remembered seeing her near his grave that day. "Do you know, I think Eliza believes Robert Pembrooke might have been her father."
Leah frowned. "She told you that?"
"Not directly, but her aunt hinted at it. Eliza as well."
Leah winced. "Papa told me Mrs. Hayes has become confused in her old age, and talks about a connection that doesn't exist. He thought Eliza knew better than to listen, but apparently not." She sighed. "Leave it with me, Miss Foster. I'll speak to Papa. He'll know what to do."
"And the veiled woman . . . Any idea who she might be?"
Leah shook her head. "She reminded me of someone, but no, I could not place her."
But Abigail had a definite idea of who she might be.
After talking with Leah a few minutes longer, Abigail returned to the house. On an impractical impulse, she decided to write an anonymous letter of her own. Going into the library, she sat at the desk, pulled forth a small sheet of note paper, and paused to think.
She dipped a quill in ink and, remembering Harriet Pembrooke had not used her real name, wrote:
Dear Jane,
I would like to talk to you. Will you meet me here in person?
Abigail did not sign it.
Nor did she suggest a specific meeting time. She left the note behind the loose brick in the garden wall, not knowing when, or if, it would be found.
# Chapter 19
The following week, Abigail again sat in the library, large drawing pad and pencil in hand, architecture books spread around her, as well as the renovation plans of Pembrooke Park for inspiration.
"Good day, Miss Foster."
Startled, Abigail looked up. There stood William. She hadn't heard him enter. "Mr. Chapman, you're back!" She quickly rose to her feet. "How was your time away?"
"London made for a nice change of pace for a few days, but I am glad to be home."
"Me too. That is, uh . . . Mr. Morris's sermon was twice as long as yours."
He grinned, then glanced over her shoulder. "What is it you're working on?"
She quickly turned over the drawing pad. "Oh. Nothing. Just sketching."
"Looked like a building of some sort—what I saw of it. Glad to see you haven't given up your interest in architecture."
She smiled vaguely.
"Is it a plan for a house?" he asked. "Or . . . ?"
"Yes. That's it. Just playing around." She cleared her throat and asked, "How did the repairs progress in your absence?"
"Well enough, I suppose, though Papa thinks the entire front wall should be torn out and replaced. The old window is warped anyway and does little against a fierce wind, and it leaks whenever the rain comes from the south. His opinion is that we ought to take advantage of the damage to do some other repairs as well."
"I agree with him," Abigail said eagerly. "How would you feel about an entry porch or small conservatory to shield the sitting room from the worst of the weather whenever the front door is opened? Or you might even add a study, with an extra bedchamber above. . . ."
He raised a quizzical brow. "Is that what you've been drawing? The parsonage?"
She ducked her head, hoping to hide her blush. "I was only playing around, as I said."
He held out his hand. "Let me see."
"No, it's nowhere near ready for anyone to see. Merely rough sketches for my amusement."
He looked at her with a fond smile overtaking his face. "I am touched by your interest, Miss Foster. And if it were my personal home, I would trust your judgment implicitly and eagerly discuss your every idea. But as it is, I would have to get the rector's approval, who in turn would likely have to get the approval of the estate executor or trustees. I doubt they'd approve or finance any more than rudimentary repairs."
He tilted his head and looked at her, eyes warm as they lingered on her face. "I must say, I quite like the idea of adding rooms to the parsonage. If I had someone to share it with me."
Abigail felt her cheeks heat, pleasure and embarrassment warring within her. She found she could not hold his intense gaze.
He stepped nearer. "Miss Foster . . . Abigail . . . May I call you Abigail?"
"I . . ."
"Abby!" her father called, rushing into the library, waving an open letter in the air. He drew up short at seeing William. "Oh, sorry, Mr. Chapman. I did not know you were here."
"That's all right, sir," William said, stepping back.
"We were just discussing repairs to the parsonage," Abigail said. "What is it?"
"A letter from your mother. She and Louisa will be joining us early next week. Is that not good news?"
Louisa is coming already? Abigail's stomach sank. She said, "But that is sooner than we expected. Is everything all right?"
"Yes, yes. But I gather they are weary of the constant rounds of balls and callers. And your mother may have hinted that too much of dear Aunt Bess can be tiring as well." He grinned.
Abigail nodded. "She is a dear, but yes, I can imagine it must be difficult to be a houseguest for so long. . . ." She looked at William. "I don't refer to you, of course, Mr. Chapman. You have only been here a short while."
"And I shan't be in your way much longer."
"No hurry at all." She looked back at her father. "What day do they plan to arrive?"
"Monday, if they can hire a decent coach. If not, Tuesday."
Time to start shielding her heart. She squared her shoulders. "Well, I have a great deal to prepare. Thank you for letting me know so promptly, Papa. Now, if you will excuse me, Mr. Chapman . . ."
"Of course." William's eyes narrowed in concern as he studied her face. "Are you . . . Is everything all right?"
"Of course." She smiled brightly but could not leave the room fast enough.
William felt restless. His first night sleeping in the parsonage again after his few days in London and his nights at Pembrooke Park. Living under the same roof as Miss Foster, he'd been ever aware of her movements. Where she might be at various times of the day, looking for her to come down the stairs in the morning, and anticipating shared meals with pleasure. Yes, he'd had to put up with Miles Pembrooke at those meals, but it had been worth it to be in her company.
Now he was back living on his own. The roof and walls temporarily patched. He felt the emptiness, the solitude of the place, as he never had before. He'd missed her in London and he missed her now. Which was ridiculous, he told himself, because she was right across the drive. Even so, he missed being near her.
He paced his small sitting room for a time and then, giving up, peeled off his coat, shirt, shoes, and stockings. He would go for a nighttime swim. He used to swim often in the river in summertime. But with people living in the manor, he'd been less willing to do so. Why not? It was late and still warm, and the moon was full. Mr. Brown had removed his restrictions on bathing during his last visit. His arm was healed and his shoulder well on its way to recovery.
He took a threadbare towel with him and quietly slipped from the parsonage. Pembrooke Park was quiet. No lights shone in the windows. He was safe from discovery.
He found his old spot where the bank gradually sloped to the water and waded in, then dove beneath the gently moving current. Ahh . . . The cool water felt good on his skin, on his shoulder, on his every part. Peace enveloped him. He was able to forget, for a little while, his troubles, his suspicions, and a certain female neighbor.
Abigail stopped in her tracks and stared. Was she hallucinating? There beneath a tree along the riverbank hovered a ghostly white figure. Heart lodged in her throat, Abigail could not scream. The pale figure did not look like a mortal man. No dark coat or boots marred the unbroken white of his being.
There is no such thing as ghosts, she told herself.
Even so, she stood there, unable to run, every muscle tense, waiting for the specter to fly at her, to pounce, to—
"Miss Foster . . . ?" a voice asked. It was not a ghostly voice but rather an earthly one she easily recognized. Relief was quickly replaced with . . . shocking awareness.
"Are you na—dressed?" she squeaked. The word naked refused to come.
"Uhhmm . . . not really, no. I didn't expect to encounter anyone. I am wearing breeches, never fear."
"Oh. Well. That's all right, then." A lame chuckle bubbled from her lips. As if those snug breeches, low on his hips and as pale as his skin, were all the clothing required for this season's well-dressed man.
He stepped out from under the tree, and moonlight shone on him more fully. She tried not to stare but couldn't help herself. She had no brothers. She had never seen a shirtless, half-naked man before. And she might never again, once Louisa arrived.
He slowly walked toward her, and her mouth went dry. His shoulders were broader than she would have guessed, even without the aid of a well-cut and padded frock coat. They curved in a smooth bulge of muscle above equally taut and strong-looking arms. His shoulders angled deeply to a narrower waist, his chest defined, his abdomen flat and masculine. She was glad the darkness hid her blush.
She had noticed his lean but defined legs before—fitted pantaloons regularly revealed all. But she had never seen the shape and contours of his upper body. He must help his father around the grounds, or row, or ride a great deal. Or perhaps he chopped great piles of wood and played ball with his friends for hours on end.
Moonlight glistened on his damp bare skin. She swallowed and dragged her gaze to his face. His wet hair hung in dark tendrils across his brow. He lifted his arms, and she realized he held a small towel in his hands. He rubbed it over his hair and face. Lifting his arms like that caused his biceps to swell, his chest to rise, his abdomen to elongate. So impossibly fair. Were all redheads so pale?
"Perhaps you could . . . em, wrap that towel around yourself."
He tilted his head to one side, amusement and moonlight glimmered in his eyes. "I am afraid this towel is barely bigger than a facecloth. Sorry." He grinned, not looking sorry at all. "What brings you out at this hour, Miss Foster?"
"I couldn't sleep," she said, thinking, And now I never shall. . . .
"Nor could I." He raked a hand through his hair, and it remained sculpted off his forehead. He looked different with his hair waving back instead of falling forward. He had such a handsome face.
He stepped closer, and Abigail drew in a shallow breath, pulse quickening. Her flush moved from her face, down her neck.
"Do you often swim late at night?" she asked, to dispel the tension between them.
"When I was younger, yes. But it has been some time. I thought I ought to get in one last swim before more ladies move in and increase my chances of discovery. I promise you I had no intention of shocking maidenly sensibilities."
He looked at her. "Are you shocked?"
She pressed dry lips together and lied. "No."
"Well, thank goodness I wore breeches."
"Yes. Thank goodness. How is your shoulder?"
"Much better." He twisted his shoulder forward and craned his neck to look at it. "See?"
Her glance skittered over the scarred skin, to his chest and arms once again. He was standing so close now that she could have reached out and touched him.
"How does it look?" he asked, eyes on his wound.
"It looks . . . good," she murmured, eyes on the rest of him.
"That reminds me . . ." he began, looking back at her.
She guiltily snatched her gaze away from his torso, struggling to meet his eyes. Had he noticed her staring? Even her ears heated at the thought.
"It is because of your quick actions that my burns were not worse. I never thanked you properly for dousing me with water."
Nervously, she said, "Tell me you don't plan to douse me in return. . . ."
"A few years ago, I might have done just that. Or picked you up and pretended I was going to toss you in the river. But when I look at you now, those are not the first impulses that come to me."
"No?" she said breathlessly. "Well. Good."
"I wouldn't be so sure if I were you. . . ."
Her gaze flew to his. He was looking at her with such intensity, such warmth, that her heart ached to see it.
His hand touched hers, and she felt a jolt of surprise. Long fingers encircled her wrist like a pliable bracelet, tickling the delicate skin of her inner wrist with feathery pleasure. Then he bent his head as if in prayer and pressed a warm kiss to the back of her hand. "Thank you, Abigail Foster."
Her heart raced. Her knees felt soft and unsteady. He had kissed her hand before, but this time no laudanum influenced his actions.
Keeping hold of her hand, he lifted his head and studied her. Then, as if gauging her reaction, he slowly, slowly moved his face toward hers.
Her breathing came shallow and fast as he neared.
His breath tickled the hairs at her temple as he whispered, "I am in your debt forever."
She stood perfectly still, all of her focus on that spot where his mouth hovered. He pressed a kiss—warm, delicious—on her cheekbone, and she closed her eyes to savor it. When her eyelids fluttered open, he had moved slightly, his eyes on hers and then lowering to her mouth. She looked at his. What would it be like to be kissed on the mouth—by that mouth? Kissed by a man? She nibbled her lower lip at the thought.
He stared, riveted. Then he drew in a long shaky breath and took a half step back. She breathed deeply as well and returned her gaze to his injured shoulder. Safe territory.
Her hand reached out, following her gaze. William watched her movements, eyes uncertain.
She touched his shoulder lightly. "Does that hurt?"
Voice thick, he murmured, "Not . . . exactly."
"I am so glad it's going to heal."
She retracted her hand, but he captured it in his, holding it to his heart.
He held her gaze and whispered, "Yes. I believe it will."
Abigail returned to the house in a warm, weak-kneed daze. But in the morning, in the light of day, without the magic of moonlight and water and a half-naked man, her better judgment returned. What had she been thinking? How was touching William Chapman—allowing him to touch her, to take her hand and kiss her cheek—going to help her? She was supposed to be shielding her heart, preparing for disappointment.
She groaned, sighed, and determined to do better.
# Chapter 20
Miles left to visit his sister for a few days. And, Abigail guessed, to give the Fosters time to settle in as a family without a guest to worry about. Abigail thought it kind of him to do so but didn't doubt he would soon return.
On Monday, she stood beside her father as the hired post chaise rattled up the drive. The postilion expertly reined in the horses and brought the coach to a smooth halt before the manor. Abigail fidgeted, unaccountably nervous. Her father stood beside her, hands behind his back and rocking on his heels in anticipation, standing with pride before his manor house, awaiting their impressed reactions. She hoped he would not be disappointed.
The groom opened the door, let down the step, and held up a hand to assist first her mother, then Louisa. Both ladies were dressed in the height of fashion in smart new carriage dresses and matching bonnets. Even the lady's maid, the last to descend, was smartly dressed. Abigail suddenly felt shabby in her printed muslin day dress.
"My dears!" Mamma held wide her arms and walked toward them.
Her father broke his pose long enough to step from the arched doorway to kiss his wife's upturned cheek. Then she turned a sweet smile Abigail's way and enfolded her in a warm embrace. Instantly, Abigail repented of every resentful thought she'd ever had about her mother favoring Louisa. In fact she felt tears prick her eyes. She hadn't realized until that moment just how much she had missed her mother these last few months.
Louisa walked forward more slowly, and Abigail was reminded anew of how beautiful she was. Her sister's dark hair was similar to hers, but her eyes were blue compared to Abigail's ordinary brown ones. Her cheeks were rounder, her lips and bosom fuller.
Louisa tipped her head back to take in the stately façade of the house. "It's certainly big enough," she said.
"It is, isn't it." Her father beamed proudly. "And just wait until you see the rooms, and all the grand furniture. And how Abigail and I have been longing to hear you play the fine old pianoforte."
Louisa accepted her father's kiss, and then turned to her. "Abby. I am happy to see you. I've missed you."
"Have you? I'm surprised you've had time to miss me."
"True. But on Sundays, or rainy days when we were trapped indoors with Aunt Bess, then I definitely missed you. What a whirlwind it's been." Louisa took her arm, and together they followed their parents toward the house.
"I can only imagine," Abigail said. "But you enjoyed yourself, I gather—from Mamma's letters?"
"Oh yes. It was glorious. A huge success."
She did not, however, mention an offer of marriage, thought by many to be the crowning achievement of a truly successful season, but Abigail didn't ask. There would be plenty of time to hear all the details—and boasting—later.
Their father smiled over his shoulder at them. "No dawdling, girls. The staff are eager to meet you."
"I'm surprised you didn't have them all lined up outside to greet us, Papa," Louisa said.
His smile dimmed fractionally. "We wanted to greet you ourselves first. And have a moment alone as a family. But they have been busy preparing for your arrival."
"Do curtail your expectations a little," Abigail added nervously. "It is a very old house after all and was neglected for many years."
"But Abigail and the servants have worked hard to put it to rights," her father insisted. "Come in and see." He held the door, ushering them inside.
Both Mother and Louisa looked up in pleasure at the soaring great hall with its grand staircase, the chandeliers and many formal portraits. Father led them through the ground-floor rooms with many sweepings of arm and barely contained smiles, his chest puffed out with pride, as though he had designed and built the place himself—or as if he really were lord of the manor.
Abigail, on the other hand, suddenly noticed minor flaws she'd missed when she'd walked through these rooms alone. They now leapt out at her in high relief. The loopy threads of a cobweb hanging from the candelabra in the dining room, and another in the corner of the crown molding. The shabby upholstery of the sofa in the drawing room. The dingy windows and musty smell of old books and dry leather in the library. Why had she or the maids not noticed these things before?
Molly, likely the appointed sentry, alerted Mrs. Walsh, and when the Fosters returned to the hall, the servants had assembled—Mrs. Walsh in austere black dress, the housemaids and kitchen maid in their best frocks and aprons, while Duncan wore a black coat and a crisp neckcloth, his hair for once combed smooth.
Introductions made, Mr. Foster led the way upstairs, leaving the unloading of trunks, bandboxes, and valises to the care of the lady's maid and Pembrooke Park staff.
Louisa asked in a loud whisper, "Those can't be all of the servants? Not for a place this size?"
"Yes," Abigail answered in lower tones. "Though now you're here, we shall have Marcel as well."
"But we had more servants in London, and our house there wasn't nearly as large."
"Yes, well, we are making do. And you will too."
As they walked along the upper gallery her father said, "Abigail has selected a room for each of you, so I shall let her do the honors."
She hoped they would approve her choices. "Mamma, this is the mistress's bedchamber, the match to Father's room on the opposite side of the stairway. Your dressing room is through there. . . ."
Her mother entered and gazed appreciatively around the room—the fresh flowers on the polished side table and lace-covered dressing table, the sunlight spilling through the oriel window onto the floral bed-curtains and brightly woven plush carpet. "It's lovely, Abigail. Thank you."
Then Abigail briefly showed them the guest room where Miles had been staying, and explained he would return in a few days. They already knew about their guest through Abigail's and Mr. Foster's letters and were eager to meet him. Louisa especially.
Then Abigail led the way into the room she'd chosen for Louisa. "I thought you would like this room, Louisa. It's in the newer part of the house, over the drawing room, with a lovely view of the rear courtyard and ponds beyond."
Louisa glanced about the room and out its windows.
"I believe it's one of the largest bedchambers," her father added helpfully.
"Bigger than yours, Abby?" Louisa asked, one brow high.
"Yes. I chose one of the older, smaller bedchambers."
"Why?"
"I like it. It was clearly the former daughter's room, and still contains her old books and dolls' house. Come, I'll show you."
She led the way back through the central gallery to her own room. She certainly hoped Louisa wouldn't ask to switch. For she definitely saw it as her room now.
As they entered, Mrs. Foster enthused, "Look at this baby house! It's lovely and very like Pembrooke Park, is it not?"
"Yes," Abigail agreed. She eyed her sister surreptitiously as she surveyed the small four-poster bed and girlish furnishings and draperies.
If she expected any thanks for selecting this room and giving Louisa the far larger and brighter one, she would have been disappointed. Louisa said little, seeming to take the best room as her due. And in this instance, Abigail was only too glad of it, relieved by her sister's vague smile and faint attempt at praising the window seat and garden view.
"Well," Abigail said, "shall we go down for tea? You are both no doubt tired and hungry after your journey."
Everyone agreed. As they went downstairs, Abigail was surprised to see William Chapman stepping out of the morning room, books in hand. Oh no. Not already . . .
He turned and hesitated at seeing them. "Forgive the intrusion, but I realized I'd left two books behind."
"No intrusion at all," Mr. Foster said with a smile. "You are just in time to be the first to meet my wife and younger daughter." He turned to them. "My dear Mrs. Foster, may I introduce Mr. William Chapman, our curate."
Mrs. Foster dipped her head. "How do you do, Mr. Chapman."
William bowed. "A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Foster. I think I speak for the entire parish when I say you are very welcome here. We have all looked forward to meeting you."
"You are very kind. Thank you." Mother stepped aside, revealing Louisa, who'd come down the stairs behind her. "And this is our younger daughter, Miss Louisa Foster."
Louisa dipped a dainty curtsy and smiled sweetly up at the man.
Abigail held her breath, every muscle tight, and forced herself to look at William, to watch his expression like a person watching two carriages about to collide.
His broad mouth, the lips so often quirked in irony, drooped as if dumbfounded. His eyes widened, his brows rose high. He darted a glance toward Abigail and her parents, blinked, and then faltered, "Miss . . . Louisa. How . . . good to meet you. At last."
Abigail's heart sank. Her stomach twisted until she felt she might be sick there and then.
Louisa's smile widened, and her eyes twinkled knowingly, on familiar territory with a stunned-speechless admirer.
"Have we met before, Mr. Chapman?" she asked.
"I . . . no. I have not had that pleasure."
"Ah. You look vaguely familiar, so I thought . . . but my mistake."
Abigail pressed her eyes closed and whispered a silent prayer for composure. And that the man would leave quickly.
Instead her father said, "We were just about to have tea, Mr. Chapman. Would you care to join us?"
He hesitated, clearly conflicted. "I . . . thank you, but no. I am afraid pressing parish business calls. Perhaps another time?"
"Of course."
Relieved, Abigail said, "Yes, I'm sure you are very busy. Don't let us keep you."
He looked at her, verses of confusion and apology passing behind his blue eyes. Though perhaps she was only imagining it, and he was simply smitten and perhaps embarrassed at his reaction. And perhaps already regretting the warm words and caresses he'd bestowed on the pretty girl's older, plainer sister.
# Chapter 21
How was it that with her mother and sister in residence, the house felt emptier than before? And Abigail felt lonelier as well, what with William and Miles gone, and having to share her father with two others. He kept busy showing his wife and younger daughter the grounds and village, listening to Louisa play the pianoforte and to his wife's endless accounts of invitations received, gentlemen they'd met, balls and concerts and routs they'd attended.
Abigail had planned to wait at least a week before checking the note she'd left behind the loose brick in the garden wall. But two days after her mother and sister's arrival, restless and needing a reprieve from all the talk of London, she could resist no longer and walked out to take a look. She strolled, hoping to appear at her leisure, taking a turn around the grounds and not bent on any specific purpose. She told herself she was foolish to feel self-conscious, as though watchful eyes followed her movements. But even so, the hairs at the back of her neck prickled. Just the cool breeze, she told herself. No one knows or cares what I'm doing.
She rounded the potting shed, feigning interest in a blooming vine. She ought to have brought a basket and shears to aid her ruse. Next time she would. She looked at the pallets and planks and bricks, but all seemed as she had left it. She checked behind the loose brick. Her letter was still there. Giving up, she returned to the house, steeling herself for more Mozart and more tales of Louisa's conquests.
Abigail went back out to the garden the next day, and the next, but her letter remained. Miles returned and was at his charming best, flattering both Louisa and their mother in equal turns, and easily winning their affections. Even now the three of them were ensconced in Mamma's bedchamber, rehashing the season, and laughing together over some of the dreadful new fashions in the new edition of The Lady's Monthly Museum Miles had given them.
Dressed in spencer, bonnet, and gloves, Abigail decided to head out for a walk alone. But as she strolled along the drive, she saw Gilbert Scott crossing the bridge on foot.
Heart lifting, she raised a hand in greeting. "Gilbert!"
"Abby!" He returned her wave with a smile and hurried through the gate and across the drive to join her.
She said, "I didn't know you had returned."
"I've come down for a few days to oversee the construction at Hunts Hall. The workmen will begin digging the foundation the day after tomorrow. My design, my drawings, and I get to see them implemented right before my eyes. This won't be like in school, winning awards for conceptual drawings. Something I designed will actually be built and stand forever. Or at least, for many years—if I've done my job right."
"It is very exciting. I am so happy for you, Gilbert."
"Isn't this what we always talked about when we were children? Dreamed of?"
She nodded, and their gazes caught and held in a long, fond look.
He grasped her hand. "Come and watch us break ground, Abby. I want you to be there. Mrs. Morgan has even planned a picnic."
Pleasure warmed Abigail's heart. She dipped her head to hide her flush of pleasure. "I would love to be there. But before I accept I should tell you that—"
"Gilbert!"
He turned his head, and Abigail followed suit. There in the open window of her mother's bedchamber stood Louisa, waving vigorously, her wide smile evident even from a distance.
". . . that Louisa is here," Abigail finished with a lame little laugh. Did he know? Is that why he'd come?
"So I see," Gilbert murmured, his expression difficult to discern. If he was delighted, he hid it well. "I didn't realize she and your mother were coming so soon. I thought they intended to remain in London through the end of the month."
"So did we. Apparently their plans changed. Or Aunt Bess grew tiresome."
"Ah." He nodded his understanding, having met their aunt on a few occasions.
Abigail said gently, "So I will understand perfectly if you wish to invite Louisa instead. I won't mind."
He grimaced. "You know Louisa has never shown any interest in architecture."
Did he sincerely prefer her company—in this instance, at least—or was he simply too polite to retract his invitation?
"True," Abigail allowed. "But she has shown interest in a certain architect."
He ducked his head, chuckling awkwardly. "Touché."
Louisa bounded out through the front door, and they both turned toward her. Abigail said to him in a private aside, "Shall I leave you?"
"No, stay. Please."
Louisa reached them, smile still in place. "Good day to you, Mr. Scott," she said, in mock formality. "What a happy coincidence to see you here." Her eyes twinkled gaily, as though he'd paid her a great compliment, or as though there was a secret between them.
Abigail hoped Gilbert hadn't prevaricated when he'd feigned surprise in discovering Louisa in residence.
"No coincidence about it," he said. "My firm is handling a project nearby. I am here to oversee the work."
"All the way out here?" Her eyebrows rose, and a playful grin lit her face. "What are you building—a hen house? A stable?"
"Very funny. No, a new wing to an ancestral home by the name of Hunts Hall."
"Hunts Hall?" Louisa echoed, her teasing smile fading. "I have heard of it. . . ."
"Yes, I imagine you have," Gilbert said dryly. "It's where Andrew Morgan and his family live."
Abigail felt compelled to add, "Gilbert has just invited me to watch the workmen break ground. But if you would like to join us . . ."
"I'm sure Louisa won't wish to miss an opportunity to see Andrew Morgan. And the home to which he will someday be heir."
Louisa lifted her chin. "You are quite wrong. I have no interest in seeing the place or the man." She effected a casual smile and added, "But you two go ahead."
Leah Chapman came through the gate on her way toward the church, a basket of flowers in her hands. Abigail waved her over and introduced her.
Louisa warmly thanked Miss Chapman for the welcome gifts she had sent over for her and Mamma, while Leah brushed off her praise and shifted credit to her mother. When she excused herself to continue on to the church with flowers for the altar, Louisa asked if she might accompany her. She probably hoped for a chance to see William Chapman again, Abigail realized, feeling queasy at the thought.
When the two had walked off together, Abigail returned her attention to Gilbert. "Can you stay and visit?" she asked. "My parents will wish to see you."
"And I them. I would say that's why I'm here, but the truth is, I came to see you."
Abigail gave him a searching look. Was this more of his Italy-inspired flattery, or was he sincere?
His eyes held hers earnestly. "Abby, look. I did call on Louisa once or twice when I first returned to London. She's a beautiful girl—I don't deny it. But beyond that, she is . . . Well, she is not you, Abby. You are beautiful inside and out. Louisa is young and doesn't know who she is or what she wants. I had already decided not to call on her again before I saw you at Hunts Hall. And now that I have seen you again, I know that I was right not to."
Abigail felt her heart warm, and her stomach tingled as if she'd swallowed a caterpillar. Her practical mind whispered, But what about Louisa? And what about William Chapman? How torn she might have felt had she not seen the look on Mr. Chapman's face when he laid eyes on her beautiful sister.
Later that evening, Leah Chapman sought out Abigail's company, asking her to take a turn with her and talk. It was a lovely, mild summer evening. Frogs chirped along the riverbank and a dove called in the distance. The smell of roses perfumed the warm air. They walked across the bridge and down the tree-lined lane, arm in arm.
Leah began, "So tell me, Miss Foster. Gilbert Scott—is there something between you? I saw you dance together at the ball, and now he's back. I saw how he looks at you."
Abigail waved away the thought as though it were a hovering bee, afraid to let it land and sting her. "He's here to build on to Hunts Hall, not merely to see me. Gilbert and I are old friends. We grew up next door to each another."
"Only friends?"
Rare irritation prickled through Abigail. "Forgive me, Miss Chapman. But I am surprised you wish me to share all of my history with you when you have shared so little with me. You have been secretive about Duncan and your past and your fears and almost everything, and yet you expect me to share my most personal stories in embarrassing detail?"
"You're right, Miss Foster. Please forgive me." Miss Chapman turned away, but Abigail caught her arm.
"Don't go. I only meant . . . if I am going to divulge all my secrets, could you not tell me just one of yours?" Abigail grinned, hoping to lighten the moment.
"My secrets are mine, yes, but they affect my entire family. My father would be upset if he knew I'd been talking about the past."
Leah must have some awful secrets, Abigail thought, or a tendency to be overly dramatic.
She said, "I want you to know you can trust me, Leah. So I will go first." Abigail sighed. "Yes, I have long hoped Gilbert and I would marry someday. I admired him and saw his potential long before he won awards at school or obtained a good position with a noted architect. And I thought he saw something of worth in me. I know I'm not especially beautiful, but in Gilbert's eyes I saw genuine admiration and affection. My own London seasons were not successful, partly because I'm no great beauty, but I suppose the truth was I didn't try very hard because I preferred Gilbert to any man I met."
She took a deep breath, and continued, "I don't think I was alone in my feelings. We never spoke of marriage directly, but we spoke of the future and of each other in it. We even . . . You will think me very foolish, but over the years Gilbert and I sketched many houses, sparring over which design, which style was best. We even designed what we called our ideal home." Abigail felt her neck heat, but continued, "We debated the size and layout of rooms, and how to make the guest chamber commodious and yet not so comfortable that our families would be tempted to stay too long."
Leah chuckled.
"We discussed how many bedchambers we would need for our children," Abigail went on, her face heating again. "You see, even when Gilbert was an awkward adolescent, even when I thought he was proud and hardheaded because he failed to see the superiority of my ideas, even then I admired him. Long before he turned anybody else's head he had turned mine, and I thought the feeling mutual."
Again she sighed. "But before he left for Italy last year, he told me he didn't think we ought to shackle ourselves with promises. Shackle. That's the word he used."
Leah winced, then said, "Perhaps he thought it wouldn't be fair to you to enter into an official engagement before he left the country. In case he should become ill or . . . something."
Abigail nodded. "He said something along those lines to me, and I wanted to believe him. But later that same evening, I came upon him and my sister in a private tête-à-tête. She gave him something—a lock of her hair I found out later—and he accepted it."
"That doesn't necessarily mean anything," Leah said as they turned and headed back through the wood. "You don't know that he asked her for the lock of hair or wore it in a ring."
"That's true."
"Then perhaps he was simply too polite to refuse it."
"That's what I tried to tell myself. But if you had seen how he looked at her . . ." Abigail shook her head. "Before then, I thought he still saw her as a pesky little sister. That he was blind to the fact that she had grown more and more beautiful with each passing year. But finally even Gilbert couldn't keep his eyes off of her."
Leah pressed her hand. "Miss Foster, I am very sorry."
Abigail continued, "But that isn't the worst of it. When Gilbert returned to London, suddenly fashionable and invited to some of the same routs and balls Louisa attended, he apparently sought her out. Mamma mentioned it to me in her letters, that he had turned Louisa's head. Even called on her several times."
"Ohhh . . ." Leah had no rebuttal for that one, Abigail noticed.
Abigail shook her head again. "But now I don't know what to think. Today he told me he was here to see me, specifically. That he had decided not to call on Louisa again. He certainly seems interested in me. But I wonder if he is only angry with her."
"Why would he be angry?"
"Louisa met several gentlemen during the season—men of wealth and connection. My mother has certainly encouraged her to consider her options and not to settle too quickly on any one man. Gilbert has felt the sting of this. I gather Louisa views him as her if-all-else-fails plan, if a better match does not materialize."
"Surely you don't think he's only interested in you because your sister snubbed him—not with your long history."
"I hope not. But I know Louisa is far more beautiful and charming. Men always think so. Even—" She bit back the words "Even your brother is not immune." It was too painful to say it aloud, especially to his sister. Instead she said, "Even so, I had always been content in the knowledge that Gilbert Scott admired me."
"Poor William," Leah murmured.
Abigail sent her a quick glance. Leah did not know that William was following in Gilbert's footsteps, already dazzled by the beautiful Louisa.
"And now"—Abigail drew herself up—"enough about me. Your turn."
"Very well," Leah said. "There isn't much to tell about Duncan, but I will tell you about someone far more important from my past." She gathered her thoughts and began. "When I returned from a year away at school, I found a place I liked to go on the very edge of the Pembrooke property. A place in the garden, behind the potting shed. Hidden by trees on one side, and the garden wall on the other." She gestured into the clearing ahead. "Come, I'll show you."
Ah . . . Abigail thought, realization dawning.
Together they walked past the old gamekeeper's lodge and onto the nearby grounds. They paused behind the potting shed and surveyed the jumble of pallets and planks.
"In those days, there were also a few sticks of cast-off furniture, even an old mirror," Leah said. "A mother cat had a litter of kittens beneath a lean-to I built of old boards, and throughout that summer I tamed them one by one. I came here every afternoon when the weather was fine and Mamma didn't need me at home. I played here for hours. One day this was a house, the next a ship sailing the high seas with me at the helm and the kittens as my crew. I played church and school and house and pirate. It was diverting for a lonely, imaginative girl.
"But one day," Leah went on, "when I came to what I considered my play area, I was surprised to find that someone had left fresh flowers in my favorite green jar. I knew little William had not done so, and feared one of the Pembrooke boys had found my hiding place. But the flowers were neatly cut and arranged. I looked around and noticed a few other changes as well. Someone had fashioned a table out of a plank and two large blocks. And set the flowers upon them. It had to be another girl. I was irritated and yet secretly hopeful. I had become accustomed to the company of girls when I'd been away at school, and I longed for a friend.
"Then I found a letter left for me, signed by Your secret friend, asking to play with me here. Suddenly I felt self-conscious to play where I had played without second thought only the day before.
"The next day I came again . . . and so did she. She said I should call her Jane. I gather she assumed that I would have nothing to do with her if I knew she was indeed Harriet Pembrooke."
Abigail said, "But you told me you didn't know her—"
"No. I told you I'd never officially met Harriet Pembrooke, and I did not. But I spent many a fond hour with a girl named Jane. I never told her my real name either. For I did not want word to get back to Papa that I had spent time with Clive Pembrooke's daughter when he had forbidden me to do so."
"Do you think she knew who you really were?"
"Who I really was? No, I don't believe she did."
Abigail shook her head in secret wonder. She had found the village girl. Now, where was "Jane"?
Leah continued, "Later we began leaving secret notes to each other behind a loose brick in that wall there." She pointed to the spot. A curious light came on in Leah's eyes, and she walked toward the wall.
Abigail's stomach clenched in alarm. Her pulse began to pound. How would Leah react to finding Abigail's letter to "Jane" there? Would she be unhappy to learn Abigail already knew of her from another source, and feel betrayed?
Abigail blurted, "I don't think you ought . . . Let me first tell you, that I—"
Leah bent and pulled the brick from its place, revealing the hiding place of Abigail's letter.
But the letter was gone.
Leah replaced the brick. "It was silly to think . . . But still. For old times' sake."
Abigail released the breath she'd been holding. Her heart continued to beat fast, however, though now for a different reason.
Before they parted ways, Abigail said, "I am planning to watch the workmen break ground at Hunts Hall the day after tomorrow. Will you go with me?"
Leah gave her a shrewd look. "Trying to play matchmaker again, Abigail?"
"Guilty," Abigail apologized, but she was unable to stop the smile from widening across her face to hear Leah Chapman call her by her given name.
# Chapter 22
The next day, Abigail returned alone to the hidden spot in the garden. All seemed undisturbed as before. But then she sucked in a breath. That glass bottle, sitting on a plank, held a single black-eyed Susan. Her heart began to pound, and she stepped to the garden wall. Hands damp within her gloves, she removed the brick, hoping to find a letter of reply. Instead, the space remained empty. Her heart fell. Foolish girl.
She heard a footstep and whirled. There stood the veiled woman at the corner of the potting shed. Abigail's pulse raced. Was this Harriet Pembrooke at last?
The woman reached up gloved hands and slowly lifted her veil, revealing not a stranger's face but the face of Mrs. Webb, Andrew Morgan's widowed aunt.
Abigail pressed a hand to her chest. "You startled me."
One thin eyebrow arched. "Not who you were expecting?"
"No."
The woman frowned. "Well, you are not who I was expecting either, so we're even on that score. Though it did cross my mind that you might have written the note. After all, I had sent you several unsigned letters, and turnabout is fair play."
Abigail sputtered, "You wrote the letters?"
"Yes. Who were you expecting . . . Jane?"
"I was expecting Harriet Pembrooke."
"And here I am, in the flesh." Mrs. Webb spread her hands, an ironic quirk to her thin lips. "I thought you, being the clever girl you are, would have figured that out long ago. And no doubt you can guess who I was expecting—or at least, hoping—to find here."
Abigail nodded. "I am sorry to disappoint you. I haven't told her about the letters you have written to me. Or this meeting. I wanted to meet you first myself." Confusion pinched Abigail's thoughts. "But I still don't understand. Someone would have mentioned if your maiden name had been Pembrooke."
Harriet glanced back toward the house and began, "When we left here, my mother thought it wisest not to use the Pembrooke name. She feared Father would pursue us to the ends of the earth. So she reverted to using her very common maiden name of Thomas, and I followed suit."
She gestured toward the walled garden. "Come. Let's take a turn."
The two women strolled through the relative privacy of the secluded garden, Abigail not really seeing any of the flowers they passed, her mind whirling with thoughts and questions.
Harriet continued, "When I was twenty, I married Nicholas Webb and was quite happy to leave all ties to Pembrooke buried in the past."
She regarded Abigail. "That is the unsung benefit of marriage, Miss Foster. It gives you a new name, a fresh start in life, a way to leave behind the person you once were."
"I hope your marriage gave you more than that."
Again that thin dark brow rose. "Do you mean love? No. But I didn't expect love. I did receive a new identity, however. People no longer know me as Harriet Pembrooke. No longer judge me by what I did or what my father did. That Harriet is gone. Thank God and thank Mr. Webb. No one sees me and thinks of that desperate, clutching, awkward girl. The daughter of a murderer. Except for Miles."
She shrugged. "And though Nicholas was much older than I, he was good to me. He gave me financial security, the means to leave Pembrooke Park behind forever. It was finished, or so I thought." She exhaled a heavy sigh. "You would think I would be happy with that."
"But you're not," Abigail said gently. It was not a question. The answer was clear on the woman's long pale face.
She shook her head. "Nicholas died and I felt lost, untethered. My identity shaken all over again. I began having nightmares of the old days. Of my years here. Guilt over what my father did . . ."
Again, she looked at the old house over her shoulder and shuddered. "I cannot find peace. I thought, if only I could somehow make restitution for my father's wrongdoing. Pay the price somehow—as he never did, at least as far as I know. Otherwise, I fear I shall be held accountable, pay for 'the sins of the father' because I've never confessed what I knew, because I kept his secret all these years. Oh, there were rumors. Suspicions. But they never amounted to more than that. We were all too afraid to say a word."
"So, he did . . . kill . . . Robert Pembrooke?" Abigail hesitated to say the words to his distraught daughter.
"Of course he did." Her eyes flashed. "Don't tell me you are surprised or I shall think I misplaced my trust in you. And my journal as well."
"I didn't wish to believe the rumors. To . . . presume."
"Why not? Everyone else did, and rightly so. And no matter what Miles might have told you, neither he nor I have any right to the estate. Not after that. I always thought—or at least wished—there might be a more deserving relative to give the place to.
"Once I found the family Bible, I thought perhaps that rumor had been true as well. But I failed to find any close relations of Robert Pembrooke, so I sought out more distant relatives—and found your father. I also wanted to see the house occupied for another reason. I thought it would lessen the temptation for Miles. I know he told you he only wanted to see the old place again. He told me the same. I hoped rather than believed him sincere. Tell me honestly, has he been searching the house?"
"Yes."
Harriet winced. "It is as I feared. And the parsonage?"
Abigail stared. "The parsonage? What has he to do with that?" The air left her. "Oh . . ."
"I hope I am wrong," Harriet said grimly. She pulled a sealed letter from her reticule. "I was going to post this when I returned to Bristol, but I suppose there is no more need for anonymous letters. Still, you might as well read this one."
She held forth the letter, and Abigail reached for it. For a moment, both women held the sealed paper.
Abigail said, "May I ask . . . why did you begin writing to me in the first place?"
Harriet shrugged and said coolly, "Why does anyone write anything? To make known and to be known. It was time to open the door, to let all the dark secrets escape into the light at last." She turned and walked away.
Abigail called after her. "But what about the secret room? Won't you tell me where it is?"
Harriet turned back. "Now, what would be the joy of that? You're a clever girl. You'll find it so much more satisfying, dare I say rewarding, when you find it on your own."
Abigail thought about following after her to argue the matter, but curiosity about this latest—and perhaps last—letter kept her where she was. She unsealed it, unfolded it, and read.
Have you noticed the black stain up the kitchen wall in the dolls' house? Perhaps you thought it intentional, painted that way purposely by the builder, an effect for realism's sake. But no.
I came into my bedchamber one afternoon to find smoke hanging heavy in the air over the dolls' house. I shrieked, as you can imagine, and ran to it, stunned to find a very real fire burning in the miniature kitchen hearth. I knew right away who'd done it and confronted him as soon as I'd put it out with water from my washing stand. He said he only did it to see if the chimney actually worked. But I knew better. He did it to be cruel. To be like Father.
Mother took him to task over it, but in her presence he denied it, blaming his brother. And she believed the favored boy's weeping protestations of innocence. So Harold took the blame, as usual, earning a wallop and an early bedtime without supper. I shudder to think what would have befallen him had Father been home. He was away in London at the time. At some gentlemen's club that had accepted him as a member based on the Pembrooke name. I don't know if he would have laughed it off, or beat Harold. We could never be sure how he would react.
Considering the light penalty, I abandoned the argument when I realized Mother had made up her mind. But perhaps I shouldn't have. Miles has learnt to get away with things, to manipulate his way out of consequences for most of his life. Only once did he experience our father's full wrath. And I admit, I never did. He never once struck me. And I feel guilty for that as well. To have suffered so little, when everyone else in my family suffered so much.
Shaking off a chill at the words, Abigail folded the letter and left the garden. Did a boyish act of mischief—dangerous though it was—mean Miles had anything to do with the parsonage fire? Unlikely. Even so, Abigail thought she might stop by the parsonage and talk to Mr. Chapman.
But as she rounded the corner of the manor house, she saw that very man standing near Louisa in the churchyard, talking earnestly. Heart sinking, Abigail halted on the drive, but her foot scuffed a stone and sent it skittering across the gravel.
He looked up at the sound and stopped speaking midsentence, his fair face reddening. Abigail's stomach clenched, and she turned toward the house in retreat.
Suddenly, the thought of seeing Gilbert again seemed more appealing than ever.
William Chapman jogged after her. "Miss Foster? Did you need something?"
She paused at the door, feeling embarrassed and self-conscious. "I . . . no."
"Oh. I thought you might be coming over to speak to me."
"I . . ." She hesitated, her thoughts a muddled blur. "It's nothing. Never mind."
He touched her arm. "Tell me."
She decided not to betray Harriet's confidence about Miles. Instead she said, "I . . . only wished to ask what you would say to someone who said she wanted to redeem the wrongdoings of her family. To pay for the sins of her father?"
His brows furrowed in surprise, and he looked at her in sober concern. Did he think she was asking for herself?
Was she?
He inhaled deeply and looked up in thought. "I would say . . . while I agree it is good to make what restitution we can, we can never pay for the sins of others, let alone our own. That has already been done. God's Son has already paid the price for your sin, your father's, and mine, once and for all. If you will only ask him and trust him with your life, He will redeem the past, your future, and give you peace for today."
Abigail's heart ached at his words. If she longed for assurance that she was forgiven for her part in her father's fall, how much more must Harriet Pembrooke long for forgiveness and peace?
She looked at him in reluctant admiration. "You said that very well."
He shrugged. "Thank you. But remember no one is perfect. I have my own sins and mistakes to ask forgiveness for."
Louisa approached them with a brittle smile. "Mr. Chapman, here are your gloves. You left them on the churchyard wall during our little . . . tête-à-tête."
Her sister's eyes glinted with what—flirtation, or irritation? Irritated at her, Abigail guessed, for interrupting their private talk.
Was the time Mr. Chapman spent with Louisa one of the mistakes he regretted? Abigail wondered. Or his time spent with her?
Since both Louisa and Leah declined to accompany her, Abigail planned to go to Hunts Hall on her own. She would have a long walk ahead of her, so she left the house early the next morning, glad the day had dawned warm and sunny. But she had barely crossed the drive when Mac Chapman clattered through the gate in his gig.
"Leah told me you were going out to the hall this morning."
"That's right."
"Hop on, if you like."
"Thank you."
He shrugged and said, "I was going anyway."
Maybe so, she thought, but she knew very well he would have ridden his horse and not bothered with the gig just for himself. She was touched but knew he didn't want her to make a fuss.
They rode in relative silence for several minutes, and then he asked one terse question: "Miles Pembrooke back?"
"Yes."
He set his jaw but said no more.
She asked, "What do you remember about him and his siblings?"
Mac sat silent for several moments, staring straight ahead. She'd decided he was not going to reply, when he surprised her.
"The eldest boy, Harold, was hot-tempered and rash, like his father," Mac began. "Though he did what he could to protect his ma—I'll give him that. Miles was harder to judge. A real charmer, yet manipulative as well. Knew when to sulk and when to smile to get his way." He shook his head. "'Course, he was young and his character not fully developed. Perhaps he has improved since then. Or gone bad." He shrugged. "Wish I knew . . ."
"And the girl?"
He nodded thoughtfully. "Harriet." Mac chewed his lip as he considered how best to reply. "She was a quiet girl, and no doubt lonely. Difficult enough to be the daughter of the manor when all the others in the parish are daughters of farmers or shopkeepers. But folks round here took against the entire family. When Leah came home from school, I forbade her to have anything to do with the girl. You will think me harsh. But I knew very well no good could come from such a friendship, and plenty of harm."
Poor Harriet, Abigail thought. At least Leah had her family and a loving father.
She thought again about Eliza, but could not bring up the delicate subject of her father's identity with Mac. Hopefully Leah had remembered to do so.
As they rumbled up the drive to Hunts Hall, Abigail saw Harriet Webb in the distance, strolling with a parasol across the front lawn. Seeing her arrive with Mac, Mrs. Webb turned abruptly and walked in the opposite direction. To avoid her . . . or Mac?
When Mac had gone off with the men, Abigail sought her out alone.
"Good morning, Mrs. Webb."
She inclined her head. "Miss Foster." She hesitated. "I thought you might bring Miss Chapman along."
"I invited her, but she declined."
"Ah."
"She did, however, confide in me a closely held secret. She led me out to the walled garden and told me about a secret friend she used to meet there."
Harriet's eyes sparked with tentative hope. "Did she indeed?"
"I think she would consider meeting you again. But I have not suggested it. She has already chastised me for trying to play matchmaker with gentlemen, so I doubt my attempt to reunite old friends would meet with better success."
Harriet nodded and asked, "And the letter I gave you?"
The sunny day suddenly seemed less fair. A ragged cloud passed over, marring the otherwise blue sky. "I read it, of course," Abigail said. "But I hope it doesn't mean what you seem to think it means."
"I hope so too."
Abigail looked across the roped-off building site and saw Gilbert shaking Mr. Morgan's hand and handing him a shovel to scoop the first token of earth. She waved to him, and he beamed across the distance at her. For a moment their gazes held, and much passed between them in that long look. Past disappointments. Dreams. Apologies. Hopes for the future.
Abigail said, "Let's not talk about the past any longer. New beginnings are always exciting, are they not? So full of promise."
"If you say so."
On the opposite side of the site, a group of onlookers cheered politely. Then the group drifted over to the blankets and makeshift plank tables covered with fine linens, where a picnic feast awaited them.
Harriet and Abigail remained where they were, isolated by the noise of the laborers—the clank of pickaxes, the sharp cut of shovels, and the jingling tack of mules, hauling away loads of dirt.
She felt Mrs. Webb's gaze on her profile and glanced over.
Disapproval tightened the woman's lips, and she said tartly, "That little hat of yours may look smart, but it offers very little protection from the sun. Here." She sidestepped closer and repositioned the lacy parasol over Abigail's head as well.
Her brusque concern reminded Abigail of Mac's cranky thoughtfulness and pierced her heart. Standing there shaded by Harriet's parasol, Abigail was momentarily transported back to the idyllic moments she had shared under William Chapman's umbrella. . . . She then recalled their more recent conversation.
She began, "I have been thinking about what you said about marriage. How it gave you a fresh start. That people no longer judged you by what your father did, because you had a new identity."
"Yes . . . ?" Harriet agreed warily.
"But you also admitted it wasn't enough. That you are still unhappy—guilty over the past . . . and frightened for the future."
"What of it?"
Abigail's heart burned within her. She had never spoken like this to anyone but felt compelled to do so now. "You long to redeem the wrongdoings of your family. But Mr. Chapman says we can never pay for the sins of others, let alone our own. That has already been done, once and for all."
How Abigail wished William were there. He would have said it so much better than she could.
"God is merciful and ready to forgive," she continued. "He gives us a new identity in Christ. That is the real second chance you long for."
Abigail shook her head. "I am sorry. I am saying this very poorly, I know. And I don't mean to give the impression I am a perfect Christian, for I am not. Far from it. But I see how unhappy you are. How much you long for peace. And that's the one treasure I know how to find." Steeling herself for rejection, she reached out and pressed the woman's hand.
Harriet Pembrooke blinked in surprise. For a moment she allowed Abigail to hold her hand, as stiff and cool as marble, and then she gently extracted it.
"Thank you, Miss Foster," she said flatly. "I know you mean well. I am not one for church myself, but I do know that some things are too big for religious niceties to overcome."
Abigail inwardly groaned. Oh, she had made a muddle of it! "I am not talking about religion," she insisted. "And there is nothing 'nice' about God's Son dying a cruel death to pay for our sins. I am talking about forgiveness and freedom. True new life, whether you ever enter a church building or not."
"Again, I thank you for your concern. And now, if you will excuse me."
Mrs. Webb lifted the parasol and turned and walked away, disappearing into the house—not even joining the rest of the party or partaking of the picnic. Guilt swamped Abigail, and she heaved a dejected sigh.
Andrew Morgan waved Abigail over to join them, and she obliged, though with a heavy heart. She felt terrible for spoiling the day for Harriet. She had done herself no favors either, for the few bites she nibbled were like wood shavings in her mouth, though she smiled encouragement to Gilbert whenever he looked her way.
When the party began to break up later, Abigail was surprised to find Mrs. Webb standing beside her once again. "Will you do me a favor and give this note to Miss Chapman for me?"
Abigail hesitated. "Whom shall I say it's from?"
"I sign it as Jane, but you may tell her who it's really from—though it may mean she won't accept my request to meet, especially if her father finds out. You are welcome to read it first and proceed as you think best."
With that, Harriet turned and retreated into the house once more.
Abigail tucked the letter into her pelisse pocket to read later, just as Mac came and asked her if she was ready to head home.
Entering the hall of Pembrooke Park a short while later, Abigail distractedly laid aside her hat and gloves and pulled out the folded, unsealed note. The outside was blank but inside it was addressed to Lizzie:
Dear "Lizzie,"
You may well be shocked to receive a letter from me after all these years, but I hope it is not an unhappy surprise.
I have thought of you so often, always hoping you were well and happy. I imagined you with children of your own, perhaps even playing in our secret place. Having now visited Easton on a few recent occasions, I must say I was disquieted to discover you were still unmarried and, if I may say so, looking ill at ease and even afraid of your own shadow. Or perhaps . . . of someone else's shadow?
When we met as girls, you likely knew my real name and where I lived. But I wanted to thank you for overlooking it back then, when no one else would. Those hours we shared between the potting shed and garden wall were the happiest I spent in Pembrooke Park. Nay, they were the only happy memories I have of those years.
I did not like seeing you looking troubled. Or to hear Mrs. Morgan speak to you in such a horrid manner. You have a good heart, and deserve better than that. If there is anything I can ever do for you, please don't hesitate to let me know. Miss Foster will know how to contact me.
Fondly,
"Jane"
Abigail called on Leah after dinner and asked to speak to her alone. The two women sat outside on the garden bench in the fading sunlight. Abigail handed her the letter and waited quietly while she read it.
Leah looked up at her with tear-bright eyes. "Please don't tell my parents. Especially Papa. He forbade me to have anything to do with her."
"But certainly now, after all these years . . . What can it matter?"
"It can. It does. You'll have to take my word for it."
"Very well. Do you want to see her again?"
"I'm not sure. You have talked with her, I take it? What is she like now?"
"You spoke with her as well. The woman in the veil?"
Leah's brows rose. "That was her? I thought her voice was familiar."
"You may have met her too. I know William has. She is Mrs. Webb now, Andrew Morgan's aunt by marriage."
"That's who she was!" Leah stared off thoughtfully. "Andrew's aunt . . . I only saw her from a distance. I told William she looked familiar at the ball, but it never crossed my mind she could be my Jane."
"Yes. She married Nicholas Webb when she was quite young. By then, she and her mother had begun going by her mother's maiden name."
"Which explains why we never heard of a marriage with anyone of the Pembrooke family."
"Yes. She was eager to cut all ties to this place and to the Pembrooke name."
Leah's face dimmed. "How sad. To lose all ties to one's family. To her home. Her name . . ." Pain shone in her eyes.
"Harriet said she was glad to take a new name. It was like a second chance at life for her. A new beginning."
"Born again . . ." Leah murmured. Her gaze remained distant, and her thoughts seemed very far away.
Abigail sat quietly, not wanting to hurry Leah or pressure her. She felt comfortable in the companionable silence between them, glad their friendship seemed on better ground at last.
Finally, Leah said, "I will meet her. But only if you will go with me."
# Chapter 23
Abigail's parents invited Gilbert to Pembrooke Park for dinner to celebrate his first major building project. They decided to limit the party to family and old friends: themselves, Miles, and Gilbert. But Louisa took it upon herself to invite William Chapman to join them.
She justified, "After all, he is our nearest neighbor and our parson and all alone in that forlorn, damaged parsonage just across the drive."
"Very neighborly gesture," their father said approvingly.
Their mother looked less convinced, perhaps concerned her pretty daughter might form an ill-advised attachment with a poor curate. Abigail had mixed feelings about him being there as well.
At the last minute, Miles bowed out—to even their numbers, he said. Father tried to convince him to stay. "Don't leave on that account. We don't care about that—not at an informal family dinner."
Miles thanked him but said he was going to again see his sister, who was visiting the area. Abigail wondered if Harriet would tell him about their meetings, but somehow she doubted it.
The dinner passed pleasantly, with much teasing and laughter and toasts to Gilbert's success, and to friends old and new.
After dinner, Mr. Foster lit his pipe and the others strolled toward the drawing room for coffee.
Gilbert said, "Abby, I've been thinking about those renovation plans you showed me. May I see them again?"
She looked at him quickly, and knew he had something else in mind. "Very well."
Abigail glanced over her shoulder as they walked away. Louisa barely seemed to notice their departure, but William hesitated at the door of the drawing room, watching them go with apparent resignation. Louisa linked her arm through his and led him into the room. No doubt she would soon put a smile on his melancholy face.
Inside the library, Abigail walked over to the map table and pulled out a random drawer. Even if he really had no interest in seeing the plans, they would provide an excuse if someone looked in the open library door and saw them alone together. The act also gave her nervous hands something to do.
Coming up behind her, he touched her arm. His voice was low and warm and somehow made her hands tremble all the more.
"Abby, dear girl, I . . . wanted to talk to you. I—"
"Which did you want to see?" she blurted, pulling out a set of plans without really seeing them.
"Abby, I don't really . . ." He hesitated beside her. "What's this?" Gilbert picked up a drawing that had lain beneath the plans. With a start she recognized the drawing he was looking at. Her ideas for the parsonage.
His brow furrowed. "Have you shown these to Mr. Chapman?"
"No . . . not really. He saw me working on them, but I told him they were not for anyone else's eyes."
Expression cautious, he asked slowly, "Why . . . are you drawing plans for Mr. Chapman's parsonage?"
"Because the old one was damaged, of course. And you know me. I couldn't resist the challenge."
He looked away as he considered, biting his lip. Then he turned to face her, and said soberly, "Do you know what I would think, if you drew a plan for my future house?"
So apparently he had forgotten the plans they had drawn together. To conceal the hurt, she jested, "That it was amateurish, no doubt." She self-consciously tried to tug the drawing from his grasp, but he held tight.
"No. I would think you wished to live there with me. That you were designing those four snug bedchambers—one to share with me, perhaps, and the other three for our future children. At least, I hope you are the sort of woman who looks forward to sharing a bedroom with her husband, instead of insisting upon having a room of her own."
Abigail felt herself flush, and mumbled, "I don't think he would jump to that conclusion."
He looked at her earnestly. "I even tried to find the house plans you and I drew up years ago, but I could not find them anywhere. I don't know if Mamma cleaned out my things while I was gone, or if I misplaced them, or—"
"I have them. Upstairs in my room."
He paused, expression brightening. "I should have known." He dropped the drawing and grasped her hand. "I don't want you to plan his house, Abby. I want you to share mine. I know I was a fool where you are concerned. And Louisa. A blind fool. Susan was right. But I am seeing clearly now, and what I see is the woman I want to share my life with."
She stared at him, her heart beating like a fluttering bird, unsure whether to nest or to fly away. "Gilbert, I . . ." Words failed her. Her mind swam, struggling to navigate foreign waters, the waves too high, the undertow strong.
He grasped her other hand as well and squeezed both. "You must see it, Abby. Our growing up side by side as we did. Our common interests. We have always understood each another and been the best of friends. It can't be for nothing. It must be for a reason."
Releasing her hands, he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her close. "I know we should wait for a while before I begin courting you—allow time to pass since my calls on Louisa. But tell me it is not too late for us. Tell me I have not spoiled things between us forever. . . ."
Abigail hesitated in his embrace. Torn between relaxing into the arms of a friend, throwing her arms around him like a long-lost lover, or pulling away.
Over Gilbert's shoulder, movement caught her eye. She glanced up and saw William Chapman stop abruptly in the library doorway. His dark expression sent her heart plummeting. Before she could react, he turned and left without a word.
With numb fatalism, William turned on his heel and stalked away. He'd been stunned to find Abigail in Mr. Scott's embrace. But why should he be surprised? He knew Scott was the man she'd loved for years. It had only been a matter of time. Any man would have to be a blind fool not to realize Abigail Foster's worth, her character, her heart, her beauty. And apparently Mr. Scott had at last done so, as William had feared he would.
He returned to the drawing room, heavy resignation descending over him. He suddenly felt exhausted, as though he'd not slept in days. What could he do? With Mr. Morris planning to do all in his power to assure the living of the parish went to his nephew when he retired or died, William might never be able to support a wife—not as long as he remained in Easton, near his family. At least, not a wife like Abigail Foster, who would expect—who deserved—a certain standard of living. There was no point in persisting and no point in staying.
He made his way to Mrs. Foster's side and quietly thanked her and excused himself early. He didn't want to be there if that embrace was soon to be followed by an engagement announcement. He wasn't ready to see Abigail walk into the room on Gilbert Scott's arm, her face aglow with love for another man. He was not comfortable in flirty Louisa's company either. Even the thought of Rebekah's renewed interest provided no comfort.
He would be happy for Abigail someday—he would, with God's help—but it wouldn't be today.
The look on William Chapman's face when he'd stood in the library doorway stayed with Abigail for the rest of the night. What had she seen in his expression? Disapproval of their indiscreet embrace? Disappointment? Resignation? How could she guess his feelings, when she struggled to understand her own?
Gilbert had asked if he might court her, but she'd put him off, telling him she'd have to think about it. How would William Chapman react if she agreed? And how would Gilbert react when she confessed she had no dowry? She hadn't been brave enough to tell him. Afraid he would withdraw his offer. Afraid he wouldn't . . .
Though her mind and heart were still unsettled the next day, she went with Leah as promised to see Harriet Webb. Leah had suggested her grandmother's cottage as a neutral and discreet meeting place, since it was currently unoccupied while the older woman recovered at the Chapmans'. And Abigail had sent a note with place and time to Mrs. Webb at Hunts Hall.
Half an hour ahead of schedule, Abigail walked with Leah to her grandmother's cottage and waited.
Nervous, Leah tidied the sitting room, and straightened a knitted blanket folded over the back of the sofa. Glancing around the small cottage, she said, "I'll never forget the first night I came here. Never liked the place since . . ."
"Really?" Abigail asked in surprise. "I think it's charming. And your grandmother seems so kind."
Leah sat down at last. "Oh, she is. She's a perfect dear. The only grandparent I've ever known, really." She grimaced. "I just . . . don't like her cottage."
Mrs. Webb appeared alone and on foot at the appointed hour. Abigail opened the door for her.
Leah rose stiffly and clasped her hands nervously over her stomach. "You wished to see me, Mrs. Webb?"
Harriet regarded her in surprise. "So formal. And how strange to hear my married name on your lips. Do you not remember me—your old friend of the potting shed?"
"Yes, I remember you . . . Jane."
A flash of a smile transformed Harriet's weary face, and for a moment she was young and beautiful again.
"That's better. Thank you, Lizzie." She smiled wryly. "You and I have gone by several names in our lives."
Leah's head snapped up, and she looked at Harriet warily. "What do you mean?"
Harriet pursed her lips. "Only that you have gone by Leah Chapman and Lizzie, and I have gone by even more names: Harriet Pembrooke, Jane, Miss Thomas, and Mrs. Webb."
Leah stared at the woman through narrowed eyes a few seconds longer, as though searching her expression for sincerity or hidden meaning.
"Why?" Harriet asked, brows high. "What did you think I meant?"
But Leah replied with a question of her own. "May I ask, Mrs. Webb, if you have sought me out of your own volition? Or is it at the behest of your father? And why now, after all these years?"
It was quite an onslaught of questions, Abigail thought, but she remained silent.
Harriet tilted her head to one side and studied Leah's face. She asked quietly, "I know your father resents mine, but what are you so afraid of?"
Leah lifted her chin. "You haven't answered my questions."
"I have not seen my father in eighteen years, Miss Chapman," Harriet said, reverting to formal names as Leah had done. "And I would certainly never act as his puppet in this, or anything else for that matter. We assume he is dead. I would even say we hope that is the case."
Leah asked, "Why do you assume he is dead?"
Harriet's eyes narrowed as Leah's had. "Why do you wish to know?"
"I want to know for certain that he is gone—that he will not return someday and . . ."
"And what?" Harriet prompted. "Yes, I believe he probably killed his brother as well as the valet to get his hands on Pembrooke Park. But even if he were still alive, what harm would he do you?"
Leah again answered the question with one of her own. "If your father went to such lengths to get Pembrooke Park, why abandon it so abruptly? And why would he stay away all these years?"
Harriet's eyes hardened. "That is why we believe he is likely dead, though no report of his death has ever reached us. Or perhaps he is alive but fears some evidence of his crimes exists and has fled the country to avoid hanging, never to return."
"If only we could be sure he was well and truly dead!" Leah's voice rose on a plaintive high note. Then she seemed to realize what she had said to the man's daughter and sheepishly ducked her head. "Forgive me. That was an unfeeling thing to say."
Both Abigail and Mrs. Webb stared at Leah's tortured expression. Why did she feel this so personally?
Leah swallowed and said, "I was sorry to hear that your mother and brother are gone."
"Yes. There is only Miles and me now. And you know I don't mean you any harm."
"And Miles?" Leah asked.
"Why would he?"
Leah feigned a casual shrug. "Do you not find it . . . suspicious, his coming here as he has, so soon after the house was opened and occupied again?"
"Yes, I do," Harriet allowed. "I worry about that as well, but only because I fear he will follow in our father's footsteps and carry on his mad pursuit of the supposed treasure. Why would you think Miles means you any harm? He barely remembered you from the old days, is that not right? In fact, he mentioned to me he had no idea why you found him so repugnant."
Leah looked away sheepishly once more. "I don't find his person repugnant. I am sorry if I gave that impression. But Papa and I did find his return suspicious and feared he might be here on his father's behalf."
"You give Miles too much credit. If Miles is here, it is because Miles wants to be here, because he believes there is something in it for him."
Abigail frowned. "Did he say as much when he came to see you last night?"
Harriet's thin eyebrows rose again. "Me? I have not seen Miles in a week or more."
Abigail felt her brow furrow. "Well, apparently his plans changed. In any case, he's told me quite emphatically that neither of you had any wish to claim Pembrooke Park or to live in it again."
Harriet nodded. "I don't think Miles wants to live there. But I do think he'd like to find whatever treasure he can, and take it with him if he could."
"But you know where the secret room is," Abigail said. "You found it—is that not right?"
"You know where it is?" Leah asked the woman in surprise.
Harriet nodded. "Yes."
"And Miles?"
Harriet shook her head. "I never told anyone. It was my own secret." She lifted one shoulder. "Though I was not the only person who knew about it. It seemed clear to me at the time I found it that someone else had been inside recently."
"What do you mean?" Leah asked.
"You have to remember that I found the room nearly twenty years ago, so I don't recall every detail. But when I first entered, I remember I didn't find thick dust and heavy cobwebs. The room was neat—a little storeroom or hiding place."
"What's inside?" Abigail asked.
Harriet flicked her a wry glance. "Don't tell me you share my brother's fascination?"
"Naturally I am curious."
"I remember shelves and a jumble of boxes. A small chair, and several portraits. One of a beautiful woman, I recall, though I cannot see her face in my mind's eye any longer. I do remember wondering if she was my Aunt Pembrooke who died."
The missing portrait . . . Abigail thought, then asked, "But no treasure?"
Harriet gave her a sardonic look. "I don't know that it would be wise to further fuel your interest, Miss Foster. I don't need two Mileses on my hands. Mostly papers, if I recall correctly. Boxes of old baby clothes and things. But I will say there were a few pieces of jewelry. Family heirlooms, I believe."
"Still there?" Leah breathed. "Like what?"
"I recall a necklace and earrings . . ." She squinted in memory. "Some other jewelry, though I forget what. In any event, I was careful to only enter the secret room when no one was about, so I would not give away its location. I didn't want my father, or even Mac Chapman, to—"
"You didn't want Mac Chapman to what?" That very man appeared in the doorway, scowling down at Harriet. His gaze flicked to Abigail, then to sheepish Leah, before returning to the former Miss Pembrooke.
"Harriet Pembrooke . . ." he breathed, his dark red eyebrows like lobster claws, drawn low.
For a moment, no one said a word, and the tension in the room thickened.
"You might have knocked, sir," Harriet rebuked.
"Why? What have you got to hide? Besides, 'tis my mother-in-law's house you're making yourself at home in. But your lot excels at that."
"Papa, stop," Leah said, rising. "I invited Mrs. Webb here."
"Mrs. Webb, is it?" His eyes shifted to Leah. "And why would you do that?"
"Because I wanted to ask her about her father."
"And what did she tell you?"
"She assumes he's dead but doesn't know. But she does know where the secret room is."
"Does she indeed?" Now his eyebrows rose like a redbird's wings. "Did you take anything from there?"
Harriet met his suspicious green glare with a cool blue gaze. "Anything like, say, personal letters, or jewels, or the Pembrooke family Bible? No, I did not."
Abigail asked eagerly, "Won't you tell us where it is? Or show us?"
Harriet shook her head. "I already told you. You can find it on your own, Miss Foster—I know you can—and collect that reward for yourself."
Harriet sent Mac a knowing glance and wagged a finger. In a singsong voice, she urged, "No helping her, now."
# Chapter 24
Motivated by Harriet's smug challenge, and her mention of the outstanding reward, Abigail went to the library to retrieve the old building plans again. As she flipped through them, something on the back of one drawing caught her eye. Someone had traced the tower section from the reverse side and sketched in something . . . a ladder? It looked like steep narrow stairs had been penciled in. Perhaps someone had proposed adding a staircase in the unused tower—a set of servants' stairs to reach the bedchambers directly. From the look of the quick sketch, it had only been an idea, likely never implemented.
She carried the plans up to her room and spread them on the floor, orienting the drawing with the room. Gilbert had concluded the water tower had been converted into a closet above and kitchen hoist below. She shook her head. The water tower would have been near her closet. But exactly? She wasn't convinced.
Once again she knelt before the dolls' house. Kitty had found a doll inside the small wardrobe. Might something else be hidden inside as well—something they had both missed? She opened one of the wardrobe's small doors. But with the fading daylight casting shadows it was difficult to see inside. She tried pulling the wardrobe out of the dolls' house, but it was anchored to the wall. That gave her pause. She tried the bed and then the dressing chest, but those pieces moved easily. Had the wardrobe been purposely glued to the wall, or had it been placed there while the paint was still wet, creating a seal?
She glanced up at the full-size wardrobe against her bedchamber wall, then rose and peered behind it. It was difficult to see behind the tall cabinet, but in the crack of space she saw no obvious straps or anchoring bolts.
She stood back and considered the wall the wardrobe stood against. A four-foot section of wall between a tall window and the closet door, trimmed in oak like the wardrobe itself and covered in rosebud wallpaper. If the drawing was accurate, the water tower would have been on the other side of this very wall.
Stepping to the window, she opened it and stuck her head out—a wall of about eight feet jutted out at a ninety-degree angle. If it was a shaft used to collect rainwater in former days, it was unlikely there would be an access point from her room.
Was there something behind that wardrobe worth hiding? A young girl like Harriet could not have moved the wardrobe herself. Had she asked Mac for help? Or some servant long gone? Then left this clue, if clue it was, in the dolls' house? There was one way to find out.
Who could Abigail get to help her move the wardrobe?
Duncan? When she believed he may have been searching the house at night before Miles even arrived? No.
What about Miles, who had suggested they join forces? No. Harriet would never forgive her if she did anything to inflame his interest.
Gilbert was still in the area, overseeing the construction at Hunts Hall. He would be willing, though he would likely tease her for her overactive imagination, or perhaps even be offended to learn she questioned his opinion of the placement of the old water tower. Besides, she wasn't ready to give him her answer.
Her own father was not exactly a strapping man, but Mac Chapman was. What had Mrs. Webb meant when she'd told him, "No helping her, now." Even if the former steward knew where the secret room was, it didn't mean he would be eager to assist her.
Or . . . Jacob Chapman was only fifteen. But he was already nearly as tall as his brother and strong from helping William chop wood for the family. He and William together would certainly be able to move it. But would she need to confide in them the reason she wished it moved? And then be embarrassed if she was wrong?
Would she need to share the reward with whoever helped her find the "treasure"? She wouldn't mind sharing the reward with William Chapman, if it came to that. He could certainly use the money, and a more deserving man she could not imagine.
She sought him out the next day and found him in the church, checking the water level in the baptismal font. "Mr. Chapman, might I ask you and Jacob to help me with something?"
He turned, auburn eyebrows lifting in surprise. "Of course." In his wary uncertainty, she thought she saw the question "Why not ask Mr. Scott?" flicker there. But she was likely flattering herself.
"I'm afraid it's not a very glamorous favor," she said. "I need two strong men to move something for me."
Another question flickered, and she answered his unspoken thought before he could voice it. "I hope you aren't offended. But I don't want to ask Duncan. I don't trust him—not fully."
"Very well. What is it?"
"Could you and your brother come by the manor this afternoon—whenever it's convenient for you? I'll tell you then."
He thought. "I have a christening shortly, but I could come this afternoon. I'll bring Jacob with me."
"Thank you. And I shall ask Mrs. Walsh to prepare a cake for your efforts."
He lifted one corner of his mouth in a grin. "Or you could make us a cake."
She shook her head, mirroring his grin. "Oh no, you wouldn't want that, I promise you."
The door opened, and Mrs. Garwood, Andrew Morgan's widowed sister, entered, child in arms. She hesitated at seeing Abigail there but greeted her politely. She shifted the child, apparently trying to open her reticule for the christening fee, and William quickly offered to hold the infant for her.
Seeing William comfortably and naturally hold that child in his arms caused Abigail physical pain. Here was the woman he once loved and her fatherless child . . . Would he offer to fulfill that role in the child's life? Would he marry Rebekah as he'd once wished to, and maybe still did?
Suddenly that seemed more probable than a union between him and Louisa. Despite her flirtation and his stammering admiration, her sister was unlikely to marry a poor curate. But Rebekah Garwood, a wealthy widow? The thought hurt to contemplate.
But why should it? she berated herself. Gilbert wants to court me, as I've long hoped. What is wrong with me? Lord, tell me this is not a case of only wanting what I cannot have. I am not such a fool, surely.
Before the men arrived that afternoon, Abigail moved the dressing table herself, lifting first two legs, then the other two atop a thin rag rug. This allowed her to slide the dressing table over the wooden floor with relative ease—and quiet. She placed it on the other side of the fireplace, freeing up a space for the Chapmans to move the wardrobe into. Did she need to reveal why she wanted it moved? She hated to lie, especially to a clergyman, but could she trust his adolescent brother with her secret—whether successful or mortified?
She wasn't sure.
At least she didn't have to tell her family. Papa had taken Louisa and Mamma out for a drive to see the progress of the new wing at Hunts Hall as well as its grounds, but Abigail had begged off. And Miles had ridden away that morning and had yet to return. She wondered again where he'd gone the night he said he was going to visit his sister. But whatever his destination, with him absent, the timing seemed perfect.
Polly knocked and popped her head in. "Mr. Chapman and his brother and sister are here to see you."
"Oh? Which sister?" she asked.
"The younger girl—Kitty. I've showed them into the drawing room, miss."
"Thank you, Polly." Kitty coming along was a blessing in disguise. Otherwise, would the maid not have wondered why Abigail had invited two young men into her bedchamber? "And, Polly . . . ?" she called and waited until the maid turned back. "Don't be surprised if we all come up here for a while. No doubt Kitty will want to amuse herself with the dolls' house again, and Mr. Chapman and I can as easily discuss our business here and keep her company."
"Oh . . ." A furrow appeared between the girl's brow. "I see. As you like, miss. Shall I . . . ?"
"You go on and have a rest, Polly. Perhaps take some tea. I shall go down and greet the Chapmans myself."
"Very good, miss. Thank you."
When she had gone, Abigail checked her reflection in the mirror, then hurried downstairs to the drawing room.
William, standing at the window, turned when she entered. "Kitty heard where we were going and begged to come along," he explained. "I hope you don't mind."
"Not at all. I imagine Kitty is eager to see the dolls' house again. In fact, why do we not all go upstairs together."
"We needn't . . ." he began, then stopped. After studying her face for a moment, he said, "If you wish."
"I hope you didn't ask me here to play with a dolls' house, Miss Foster," red-haired Jacob said. "If the other chaps found out, I'd never hear the end of it."
"Don't worry, Jacob. I have something else in mind for you. But when you see what it is, you might wish for something as easy as rearranging dolls' furniture."
She led the way upstairs, feeling unaccountably nervous. Would they tell their father? Mac might be angry to learn she had disrupted rooms he saw as a sort of shrine to Robert Pembrooke and his family. Would they all laugh at her gullibility in believing tales of a secret room and treasure? But it isn't just a story, she reminded herself. Harriet Pembrooke has been inside the secret room. And perhaps Mac has as well.
She opened her bedchamber door for them, and Kitty eagerly entered first, pulling Jacob along by the sleeve behind her. "Come and see, Jacob. You'll be impressed. Even if you are a boy."
William hesitated just inside the doorway, his eyebrows arched question marks.
Abigail glanced back into the corridor to make sure they were alone, then said, "Please don't scoff. But I would like you and Jacob to move the wardrobe to that wall there."
He lifted a shrug, his lower lip puckering. "No problem. Doing a little . . . redecorating?" His eyes glinted with interest.
"Something like that," she replied vaguely.
He regarded the large piece of furniture, then looked back at her. "That is a two-man job. I see why you asked me to bring Jacob along."
Relieved he did not press her for reasons, she added quietly, "Do you think you can manage it?"
He looked at her in mock offense. "You injure my male pride, Miss Foster. We Chapmans are a strong lot."
"I know you are. That is why I asked you."
"Is it?"
She looked down, then up at him again. "Not the only reason. But may I tell you the rest later"—she leaned closer and lowered her voice—"when we are alone?"
Something sparked in his eyes at her intimate tone. He lowered his own voice and replied, "I shall look forward to it."
Perhaps he wasn't enamored with Louisa—or Rebekah Garwood—after all.
He crossed the room and gestured to his brother. "Jacob, Miss Foster would like us to move this wardrobe to that wall there. Doing a little rearranging. It's what females do. Come on, show off your muscles. . . ."
Abigail quietly closed the bedchamber door behind her.
But after they had moved the wardrobe, nothing about the exposed wall looked either suspicious or promising. A coating of grey dust clung to it where the wardrobe had stood, out of reach of the housemaid's duster. But otherwise, it looked like any other wall in the room. No inset door panel, no cutout opening, no "X marks the spot."
Disappointment sank deep. But she pasted on a false smile and thanked the Chapmans warmly. "I knew you two strong men were the very ones to ask. Now if you wouldn't mind not mentioning it? I wouldn't want anyone to think that I am making myself too much at home here or . . . anything else either."
William's eyes searched hers, but he didn't pry.
Jacob shrugged and said, "Where's this cake I was promised?"
"Jacob . . ." William gently reprimanded.
"No, no," Abigail soothed. "Jacob is quite right. I promised cake, and cake you shall have. Mrs. Walsh didn't allow me to help her bake it, but she did allow me to ice it. My first time, so be kind."
They returned to the drawing room, where tea and a somewhat streaky-looking iced cake were waiting. Fortunately, it tasted much better than it looked.
Jacob forked down large bites, as if sending pitchforks full of hay into a barn. Then he looked up at the long-case clock. "Is that the right time?"
"I believe so, yes."
"Will you excuse me?" He rose. "That is, if you don't need my help with anything else?"
"Of course. You're all through."
He turned to his brother. "I promised Fred and Colin I'd join them for a match at four." Jacob looked back at Abigail. "William was the best football player in the county before he went and became a parson."
William demurred, "I don't know about that."
"You were," Kitty insisted, then set down her fork as well. "May I go along?"
Jacob scowled. "Only if you promise not to go all moony over Colin. We all know you like him."
Kitty shrugged. "So?"
William nodded. "Very well, but behave yourselves. Jacob, look out for your sister. And be home by five."
Jacob grabbed his cap from the sideboard and let himself from the room. Kitty thanked Abigail politely and dashed after her brother. A moment later the large front door banged shut in the distance.
William set down his cup and saucer and looked at her expectantly.
Abigail sipped her tea and avoided his eyes.
"Well? You do trust me, I hope, Miss Foster?"
"I do, but . . . now I feel so foolish." She glanced toward the door and, seeing no one about, said, "I studied the old plans, and had reason to think the secret room might lie behind that wardrobe."
"I thought it might be something like that," he said gently. "I am sorry, Miss Foster. Life is full of disappointments sometimes." He looked as if he knew that fact from firsthand experience.
"Miss Foster, I—"
Suddenly Miles Pembrooke appeared in the open doorway, his eyes darting around the room. He looked expectantly from one to the other, his smile faltering somewhat on finding the two of them alone together. "Hello."
"Hello, Miles." Abigail smiled brightly, hoping to dispel the awkward moment. "You have just missed Kitty and Jacob Chapman. They left only moments ago. Do come in and join us for cake."
Miles set aside his hat and gloves and approached the tea table. "And where is the rest of your good family?"
"Gone for a drive. Father wanted to show Mamma and Louisa the progress at Hunts Hall and its grounds, which I have already seen."
"Ah. I see. What lucky timing then that Mr. Chapman should call when you were otherwise alone, and keep you company."
"Yes. And what have you been up to today, if I may ask?"
His eyes glinted. "I shall tell if you do."
Beside her William stiffened.
Choosing to ignore the implication of impropriety, Abigail prompted, "Have a good ride?"
"Yes, I went to pay another call on our former housekeeper."
Ah! Is that whom Miles had visited instead of his sister? Abigail said, "That must have been pleasant."
"Yes. It was very . . . interesting. Mrs. Hayes said it would be 'poetic justice' if I married my cousin." Miles gave her a sly smile. "I wonder what she meant, cousin dear?"
Or whom, Abigail mused, thinking of Eliza. Glancing at William, she saw his jaw clench and quickly said, "You mustn't take anything Mrs. Hayes says to heart, Mr. Pembrooke. I am afraid her mind isn't what it once was."
Miles nodded. "Ah. Well. Happens to the best of us."
William rose. "Thank you for tea and the delicious cake, Miss Foster. Lovely icing. Perhaps we might talk about this further another time?"
"Yes, of course."
"Talk about what, pray?" Miles asked. "Don't let me interrupt."
"Not at all, Mr. Pembrooke," William said. "I was just leaving."
At dinner that night, Abigail listened distractedly while her mother and sister told her everything they had seen and everyone they had met during their afternoon drive and tour of Hunts Hall. Afterward, Abigail took herself to bed early, while the rest of her family lingered over coffee in the drawing room. Polly helped her undress, and when she went to return Abigail's pelisse to the closet, suddenly drew up short at the sight of the relocated wardrobe.
"When did you go and do that?" she asked, brow puckered.
"This afternoon. Just wanted to try a different arrangement. The Chapman brothers helped me while Kitty played with the dolls' house. I'll move it back before we leave."
"Don't fret. You can move the furniture where you like. It's your house now—for the time being anyway. Come tomorrow, I shall give the floor and wall there a good cleaning. Likely hasn't seen the light of day—or a mop—in years."
"Thank you, Polly. But I can do it. I don't want to cause you more work."
"No bother. Now, anything else before I go?"
"No, thank you. That's all."
"You're turning in early tonight. Are you feeling all right?"
"Yes. Fine. A little tired is all."
Polly closed the shutters and turned to go. "See you in the morning, then, miss."
"Good night." After Polly had gone, Abigail lay in bed, listening to her retreating footfalls and staring across the room at the newly exposed wall. The very ordinary-looking wall.
Even as she told herself she was becoming worse than Miles and Duncan combined, she rose, lifted her bedside candle lamp, placed it on the nearby dressing table, and regarded the wall again.
She pressed her palm against the four-foot panel, then tapped it, the sound startlingly loud in the quiet room. How odd to feel self-conscious in her own bedchamber! Did it sound hollow? She tapped again, then tapped against another section of wall to compare. The two did sound different. But a difference in the structure of an interior versus exterior wall, or one with windows versus without, could account for it. She felt along the seams, coming away with dusty fingers. Then she lifted her candle lamp and held it nearer the wooden trim. Was that the narrowest slit—a simple seam where the wallpaper met the trim, or something else?
Her heart rate began to accelerate. She knew that sometimes servant doors—doors that led onto the back stairs, allowing servants to silently slip in and out of bedchambers—existed in many old manors. And often these doors were hidden to keep from marring the décor of the room—wallpapered to look exactly like the walls until they were opened. She pushed against the seam hidden along the slat of wooden trim . . . and felt it bounce back, as though she'd triggered a spring latch. She sucked in a breath, looked behind her to make sure her door was still closed, then pushed again. The four-foot section of wall popped ajar, opening toward her. A waft of cool, musty air met her nose.
She had found it! Found . . . something, at least.
Once again she looked over her shoulder, and then, on second thought, crossed to her door and turned the key in the lock.
Pausing to slip on her shoes and tie on her dressing gown with shaky hands, she returned to the hidden door. What would she find inside? Was there really treasure worth the lives it had cost and ruined?
As her fingers came to rest on the hidden door again, someone rapped soundly on her bedchamber door, causing her to gasp, jump back, and press a hand to her heart.
"Who is it?" she called, voice high, shutting the door and making sure the wall panel appeared undisturbed.
A muffled male voice responded. It didn't sound like her father's voice, but surely Miles would not come to her bedchamber at night. Or would he?
On impulse, she set a ladder-back chair in front of the hidden door as quietly as she could, wincing as it scraped the floor. Yes, the chair helped the wall look less noticeably bare.
"Coming! Just tying on my dressing gown . . ." She hurried over and unlocked the door. Since she already wore her dressing gown over her nightdress, she silently asked forgiveness for the lie.
She opened the door several inches. Miles stood there, waiting expectantly.
"What is it, Mr. Pembrooke?"
His gaze swept her nightclothes, and his brows rose. "Forgive me. I didn't think you'd be dressed for bed already. It is still quite early."
He was right. So perhaps his call wasn't so audacious after all.
"I hope you aren't ill," he added.
"I was just . . . tired."
"You look positively flushed." He reached out and pressed a hand to her forehead. "Are you sure you've no fever?" The act pushed the door open farther, and she noticed his gaze dart about the room.
"No, I'm fine. Thank you." She took a half step back from his hand. "Was there something you wanted?"
His gaze hovered on the wardrobe. "Done some rearranging, I see."
Abigail hesitated, then asked, "And how would you know that? I don't recall your being in my room before."
"Your father gave me a tour that first evening, when you were at the ball."
"Ah. What a keen memory you have. I've only moved a few things about. Making the room more comfortable. I hope you are not offended?"
"Not at all. Why should I be?" His eyes swept the exposed wall. "Find anything interesting?"
"Excuse me?"
"Sometimes long-lost treasures show up when one moves things that haven't been touched for decades."
"A great deal of dust, Mr. Pembrooke. That is all I have found."
That was true. So far at least.
"Tut, tut, Miss Abigail. I have asked you to call me Miles. We are family, after all."
That again. "I shall endeavor to remember, Miles."
"That's better." He reached out again and tweaked her nose, a fond smile curving his lips and revealing the space between his front teeth.
"I suppose I shouldn't ask to come in?" he pouted. "Though I hear a whole tribe of Chapmans spent time in here earlier today."
"Oh, and who told you that?"
He shrugged. "I forget which of the servants mentioned it. Duncan . . . or Polly, perhaps."
"Kitty is quite taken with the dolls' house. Her brothers kept us company."
"And helped move furniture?"
"While they were here, yes." Wonderful, Abigail thought sarcastically. Word had reached Duncan and Miles already. "But that was during the daylight hours," she added. "It would be quite a different matter for you to come in now. Alone."
"Because I am a man, you mean?"
"Well . . . yes, I suppose."
Another thin smile curved his lips. "I am glad you are aware of that fact. We are not so closely related, after all."
Footsteps paused outside her room, and Louisa appeared. "Oh. Mr. Pembrooke."
Miles stepped back from the door. "Another fair cousin. How delightful. I was only checking on your dear sister. When she retired so early I feared she might be ill."
"I wondered the same." Louisa looked at her, something sparking in her eyes that Abigail hadn't seen in years—that old conspiratorial gleam when they had teamed up as sisters, covering for each other with their parents. She feared Louisa would suspect a liaison, finding their houseguest at her door at night, Abigail in her nightclothes, no less. But that wasn't what that look said. It told her she understood.
Louisa said, "Excuse me, Mr. Pembrooke. But I simply must speak to my sister alone. Girl talk. You understand."
He nodded amiably. "Oh yes, yes, perfectly. Well, no, not at all, really. But I shall go just the same and bid you both good night." He bowed and swept down the passage.
With a relieved sigh, Abigail ushered her sister inside and closed the door behind her.
"Thank you."
"Are you quite all right, Abby? You were thoroughly distracted at dinner. I doubt you heard half of what we said. And barely reacted at all when I told you we met the Morgans and saw Gilbert when we stopped at Hunts Hall."
"Sorry. I've been . . . preoccupied."
"Not with our dear cousin, I hope."
"No."
Louisa patted the bed. "Good. Well, I saved you from that man, so now you need to repay me by listening."
"Very well." Abigail climbed back in bed, and Louisa sat beside her.
"I wasn't eager to visit Hunts Hall when Papa suggested it," Louisa began, "for I met Andrew Morgan in London you see, a few weeks ago. And I . . . Well, he was quite rude to me, truth be told. I hate to say something so unneighborly, but there it is."
"Really? I am surprised," Abigail said. "I have only met him a few times, but he was quite kind and perfectly polite. And a friend of Mr. Chapman's."
"Yes, well. I am ready to forgive him everything, now I've seen his house." Louisa winked. "Don't look so scandalized. I am only teasing. I will say that once Papa formally introduced me as his daughter and your sister, his demeanor changed toward me. So perhaps things in London were all a simple . . . misunderstanding. Or he feels quite mortified by his treatment of me, now he knows who I am. That we are to be neighbors, I mean."
"What do you mean by 'his treatment' of you? What did he do?"
Louisa shrugged. "Since he seems determined to put it behind us, I shall endeavor to do the same. Give him the benefit of the doubt."
Abigail narrowed her eyes, studying her sister's averted face. Wondering what she wasn't telling her. She must own a share in the wrong, if wrong it was, to be so reticent to repeat it.
Louisa added, "I will say Gilbert was more polite as well. I was quite shocked at how cold he was the first time I saw him here."
Abigail asked gently, "What happened between the two of you?"
"Oh . . . well. I think he felt snubbed when he returned from Italy. But what was I to do? So many gentlemen wishing to dance with me and pay calls . . . I couldn't spend all my time with Gilbert. Even if he is a family friend."
"Family friend?" Abigail asked. "Are you sure he wasn't more than that?" Her sister's memory seemed to be shifting to suit her own purposes.
Louisa looked down, pulling at a loose thread of her frock. "I thought he might be before he left for Italy. That's why I gave him a lock of my hair. But apparently I was wrong."
"If you gave him a lock of your hair but then couldn't be bothered to give him a dance or the time of day, is it any wonder if he is cool toward you now?"
"Oh, he'll forgive me. Men always do. Just look at Andrew Morgan."
Wariness pinched Abigail's stomach. She said gently, "Louisa, I think you should know. Mr. Morgan admires someone else."
"Does he? Who?"
Abigail thought it wiser not to mention Miss Chapman. She knew too well how much her sister liked a challenge. And she didn't want to give Louisa any reason to dislike Mr. Chapman's dear sister.
"Just . . . be careful, Louisa. Men aren't playthings, you know."
She smiled coyly. "No? Then why do I so enjoy playing with them?"
"Louisa! Do you know how wanton that sounds?"
Her sister nudged her. "Don't be such a prude. I am only teasing my sister. Not talking to a man—or your clergyman." Louisa's eyes sparkled with interest. "Is he your clergyman?" she asked.
Had her little sister not noticed the clergyman's reaction to her?
Abigail's cheeks heated. "No. He is no such thing." Did she even want him to be? After the way he had reacted to the sight of her sister? And especially now that Gilbert was in the neighborhood, and seeking her out, and declaring how blind he'd been?
They talked for a long time, and Abigail felt her heart begin to thaw toward her younger sister. When Louisa finally yawned and rose to go to her own bed, it was late, and Abigail was tired. She decided not to open the door again that night and risk someone hearing her rummaging about and becoming suspicious. She could imagine Miles at the door, or loitering in the passage, listening to her every move.
She blew out her candle and settled in, darkness and weariness descending quickly. She would fall asleep any second, she was sure. But then she heard something.
The house made many sounds and groans, but this was one she had not heard before. A low moaning creeeeak . . . Her gaze flew to the hidden door and her heart thumped painfully hard. The door was opening. . . .
She stared, unable to move, unable even to cry out. A ghostly white hand appeared, gripping the edge. The door inched open, creak by creak, and there in the cavernous black cave beyond stood a man in a long hooded cape, his face shadowed and invisible.
Her mouth fell open, in a silent scream.
Then he stepped forward and a shaft of moonlight revealed what lay beneath that hood. A skull with sightless eyes.
"Huhhhn . . . !" She awoke with a start, gasping and eyes flying wide. Scrambling, she sat up, retreating back against her headboard, staring wildly at the crypt-like door, only to see the feminine rosebud-papered wall. Quiet. Undisturbed. Modest in its newly exposed state.
With a heavy sigh of relief and disgust at herself, she slumped back against her pillows. But it was quite some time before sleep claimed her once again.
# Chapter 25
In the morning Abigail awoke, for a moment forgetting. Then her eyes fell on the newly bared wall, and her heart thumped in anticipation. She eagerly climbed from bed, opened her own shutters, and began washing for the day.
Polly came in to help her dress, her face oddly alight. "Thought you should know, miss. The parson is in the morning room, waiting to see you. He told me not to disturb you until you were quite ready to come down—didn't want to rush you." She shook her head. "Never known a gentleman to call so early."
Abigail's pulse rate accelerated. He was there already? Had he read her mind? "I'm glad you told me. Here, let's do the rose day dress instead. Far fewer fastenings."
"Very well, miss. Though he did say not to hurry."
"That's all right. I hate to keep the parson waiting."
"And your hair, miss?"
She was tempted to leave it down, recalling his fingers touching her hair that first night in the sickroom, but she blinked away the memory. "Just a simple coil, if you please."
As soon as she was ready, Abigail hurried downstairs, slowing her steps as she neared the morning room. When she entered, he looked up from a newspaper and stood, setting the paper aside.
"Good morning, Mr. Chapman. I hope you have not been waiting long."
"Not at all. Please forgive the early hour of my call. I have a full day of appointments and commitments ahead of me, so this was the only time I could stop by. I am afraid my curiosity has been nipping at me all night. I keep thinking we may have missed something. I slept very poorly, I don't mind telling you."
"As did I." She lowered her voice. "I dreamt the door opened and someone came out. A . . . skeleton." She shivered.
"Door?" His eyebrows rose.
She looked behind her, then stepped nearer. "Yes. I found a seam along the trim and a spring latch before I went to bed."
His eyes widened. "Have you been inside?"
She shook her head. "I haven't even looked inside yet. I kept getting interrupted, and then I lost my courage. And I . . . didn't really want to go in alone."
She forced herself to meet his gaze, and for a moment neither said anything. Then she looked over her shoulder into the empty hall. "None of my family are up and about yet."
He added helpfully, "I saw Mr. Pembrooke from the parsonage window, leaving on his morning ride."
She pulled a face. "Too bad we don't have Kitty here as an excuse."
He nodded. "Or as chaperone."
"So . . . it wouldn't be a good idea for you to come upstairs with me now."
Again he nodded. "You are quite right."
He looked so solemn, so parson-like, that she felt a grin quiver on her lips. Seeing it, his eyes sparkled, and an answering grin lifted his mouth.
Two minutes later, Abigail led the way upstairs and across the gallery on tiptoe. William Chapman followed behind, all stealth. A bubble of mirth tickled her stomach. They were like two naughty children, sneaking around on some mischievous errand. She thought briefly of Gilbert and their childhood together and felt a pang of guilt.
She quickly shook it off, picked up the candle lamp still burning in the dim corridor, and let him into her room, quietly shutting the door behind them.
She trusted William Chapman fully. And so, she believed, did her father. But that didn't mean he would approve of finding the two of them alone in her bedchamber. And to lock her door when a man was with her? She could not bring herself to do it. Instead she lugged her dressing stool in front of her door. It would at least give them a little warning if someone entered.
Crossing the room, Abigail's heart beat a little too fast, but she didn't feel nearly as anxious as she had the night before, about to open the hidden door for the first time by herself. William's presence was comforting. Even if he had disappointed her with his reaction to Louisa, she was glad he was with her at this moment.
She handed him the candle lamp and placed her hand on the seam. Glancing at William for reassurance, she took a deep breath and pushed the same spot along the trim, triggering the spring latch.
Again that waft of stale, musty air met Abigail's nose. The door creaked open, reminding her of her dream. Seeing no skeleton, she released the breath she'd been holding.
"Good heavens . . ." Mr. Chapman murmured beside her.
She'd expected a completely dark room but was surprised to find a shaft of sunlight filtering in through a small window. She had thought the windows on the tower had been covered over, but here was one that had been left intact. Through the murky glass she could see why—the window looked out onto another exterior wall a few feet away and was therefore not visible from the ground—nothing to be noted by the window-tax man, or by someone searching for a secret room.
Stepping inside and pulling the door closed behind them, Abigail surveyed the square chamber. Thick pipes ran along one wall, draped in cobwebs. The other two walls held floor-to-waist-high shelves stacked with dusty boxes and crates and bundled papers. An old square of carpet covered the floor. No stairway, as in the sketch, but she hadn't really expected one, as she'd never found formal plans for stairs in the former water tower.
In one corner, several framed portraits leaned against the wall. Turning, she saw another large portrait had been hung on the back of the door. Sunlight illuminated the image, and Abigail gasped.
Beside her William turned to see what had caught her attention and sucked in a breath as well.
The formal portrait was of a woman in attire from decades past, a ruby necklace at her throat. Her hair was golden brown, her eyes large and gentle, her face serene, lovely, and startlingly familiar.
It was the face of Leah Chapman.
"What in the world . . . ?" Abigail breathed.
"Merciful God . . ." William murmured beside her. "It's Leah."
She gaped at him. "How can that be? The painting has clearly been here for years. But yes"—she returned her gaze to the portrait—"the woman looks just like her."
"It's understandable," he whispered. "It's her mother."
Again she turned to gape at him. "What?"
He nodded, his eyes full of awe and riveted to the portrait. "That's Elizabeth Pembrooke—Leah's real mother."
Abigail stared at him. Her mind was too busy to form a reply, whirling with impressions and snippets of things Mac and William and even Leah herself had told her in passing about Robert Pembrooke and his family, supposedly all now deceased.
She thought of the portrait of Robert Pembrooke in the mistress's bedchamber. This was definitely its mate, painted at the same general time period, in the same style, and likely by the same artist. Had it been hidden away by Robert Pembrooke as a painful reminder of his losses, or by someone after his death?
She thought of the graves in the churchyard, recalled seeing flowers on the one marked Eleanor Pembrooke, Beloved Daughter. And in one of the old journal pages she'd sent, Harriet had mentioned putting flowers on Eleanor's grave. "But . . . you all told me Robert Pembrooke's daughter was dead."
"I believed she was. I was too young to be fully aware of all that happened in those days following Robert Pembrooke's death. I only recently found out the truth about Leah myself."
"But . . . Why? How?"
"Before I say anything more, I must ask you to keep this to yourself for now. As much as I loathe the deception, it is not my right to reveal the truth to the world. Especially not until we can be perfectly certain all danger to her is past."
Suddenly from somewhere nearby came the sound of a slamming door. Abigail jumped and grabbed William's arm. William quickly lay a calming hand on her shoulder. "Shh . . ."
Then came the even nearer sound of someone knocking on her bedchamber door. Her gaze flew to William's. What should they do? Should they remain hidden inside? Abigail was tempted to do just that, but what if Miles or Duncan or whoever it was came inside and searched the room? She hated the thought of the two of them being caught like cornered rats. But neither did she want to open her bedchamber door while William Chapman was there in plain sight.
"You stay here," she whispered. "I'll see who it is."
He nodded, and she slipped from the secret room, carefully closing the door behind her.
Taking a deep breath, she crossed the room, pressing damp palms to her skirt. She moved aside the stool, put on a smile, and opened the door.
Miles Pembrooke stood there in his riding clothes. Gloves and stick in hand.
"I thought you left for your ride," she said. "You're back early."
"I spied dark clouds on the horizon and suspected a storm brewing. So I hurried home."
Abigail glanced out her window at the clear day, a gentle breeze swaying the tree branches and sunshine shimmering through the leaves. "Looks very pleasant to me."
"Looks can be deceiving, Miss Foster. In fact, I thought I saw Mr. Chapman walking over as I rode out . . ." His gaze swept the room over her shoulder. "He is not with you?"
She glanced around her bedchamber. "Just me, as you see. Though he was here earlier."
"Ah. I am sorry to have missed him."
"Are you? I am sure he will be happy to receive you if you stop by the parsonage later. Though he did mention he'd be away on appointments most of the day." Appointments! For which he was likely already late. . . . She had to get rid of Miles Pembrooke and sneak Mr. Chapman out of the house without anyone noticing.
Louisa appeared in the corridor at that moment, looking pretty and fresh in one of her new day dresses. "Good morning."
Miles turned, bowed, and then beamed at her. "Miss Louisa, how lovely you look this morning."
"Thank you." She looked from one to the other, her smile thin. "Back at my sister's door already, Mr. Pembrooke? I can't say I like that."
"Yes, well . . . Abigail's room is very . . . popular."
Louisa's brow puckered at that, but she said pleasantly, "I was just on my way down to breakfast. Have you two already eaten, or will you join me?"
Miles smiled. "I would love to join you, Miss Louisa. May I call you Louisa . . . ?"
Thank goodness for her sister and her ability to manage men, Abigail thought, sending Louisa a secret smile over Miles's shoulder. Shutting her door behind her, Abigail followed them down the passage and out into the gallery. When they began descending the stairs, Abigail remained at the railing. "You two go ahead," Abigail called down to them. "I remembered something I need to . . . finish first."
When the two had disappeared down the stairs, Abigail returned to her room. Nerves jangling, her mind whirled through possible ways to sneak Mr. Chapman out of her bedchamber now that her family was beginning to rise. Especially when she'd deceived Mr. Pembrooke, carefully wording her reply to suggest Mr. Chapman had already left.
She quietly opened the door to the secret room, eager to ask what he might suggest.
But the room was empty.
Befuddled and feeling foolish, Abigail looked inside her wardrobe and under her bed just to be sure, but no. He was definitely gone.
Thank heavens, Abigail sighed in relief. The parson was faster than she would have given him credit for. He must have slipped from her room as soon as she left with Miles and Louisa and gone down the back stairs without her noticing. She hoped he knew his way belowstairs and out the servants' entrance. She also hoped he didn't give Polly a fright or earn himself a tongue lashing from Mrs. Walsh for daring to enter her domain. But no, the housekeeper doted on him and no doubt happily aided—or at least overlooked—his escape.
# Chapter 26
To avoid making Miles even more suspicious, Abigail joined him and Louisa for breakfast as promised. During the meal, she felt Miles's gaze on her often and did her best to enter into the conversation as though nothing unusual were going on. Father joined them, and the two men chatted a long while. Finally Abigail was able to excuse herself.
She returned to the secret room and closed its hidden door behind her. Stepping to the nearest shelf, she tripped over an upturned corner of carpet. She bent to straighten it, then began looking more closely at the things left piled on the shelves. The bandboxes, which she very much hoped did not contain hats. Stacks of paper and what looked like a jeweler's box. She felt like an intruder. Nearly like a thief. Tenant or not, these things were not meant for her eyes.
As she stood there hesitating, the hidden door behind her creaked open. Heart leaping, she gasped and whirled.
There stood Leah Chapman.
Abigail sputtered, "Leah! You frightened me. Come in and shut the door. Did William tell you we found it?"
Leah nodded, avoiding her eyes.
Abigail studied her expression. She said tentatively, "But you . . . already knew where it was, didn't you."
Leah's chest rose and fell in a deep breath, then she looked directly at her. "Yes. I played here as a child. My first father showed it to me, and helped me transform this forgotten storeroom into a secret hideaway. He and I were the only two who knew about it, as far as I know."
"And Mac?"
Leah's gaze flitted around the room. "Not until I showed him where it was. We hid here that night when . . ."
When her words trailed away, Abigail prompted, "The night the valet returned to report that your . . . Robert Pembrooke had been killed?"
Leah nodded again and turned, her focus landing on the portrait on the back of the door. She stilled, arrested, mouth falling slack. Then she stepped nearer to look at it more closely.
Seen together now, Abigail could see differences in the two faces. But even so, the resemblance was remarkable.
"Mamma . . ." Leah breathed. And Abigail for the first time fully grasped that the living, breathing woman before her, whom she knew as Leah Chapman—Mac and Kate's daughter and William's sister—was in fact Eleanor Pembrooke.
She tried the name on her tongue. "Eleanor . . ."
Leah turned sharply, her eyes meeting Abigail's, then softening into vague focus somewhere beyond her. "No one has called me that in years. It barely seems like my name anymore."
She looked at the shelves, the small window, then pointed to the child-size chair and cushions on the floor. "Oh, the hours I spent here, reading and playing dolls . . ." She pressed her eyes closed. "If only all of my moments here had been as pleasant . . ."
Abigail asked, "Can you tell me what happened that night?"
Leah shrugged. "I can try. I was only eight years old at the time, but the scenes are still very real in my mind. And now and again over the years, I have begged Papa to fill in the missing blanks for me, which he has done very reluctantly. Even so, he could tell it better."
"But Mac won't tell me, will he?"
Again Leah shrugged. "Probably not." She gazed toward the ceiling, apparently gathering her thoughts, then began, "My father was away in Town. With Mamma passed away, he'd decided to sell the London house, and took several servants along to help him pack up the place. He'd planned to close up the manor here for a few weeks and had given the other servants time off. I was supposed to go with him, but at the last moment, I came down with a cold.
"Father sent Mac for the physician, who proclaimed me in no danger but said a quiet time at home would be wise. I begged Father to let me go with him, but since he had recently lost Mamma and the baby to illness, he insisted he would take no chances with my health and I would remain at home. I had outgrown a nurse, and my governess had only recently left us, so I was left in the care of our steward and housekeeper.
"My illness was God's merciful providence, Pa . . . Mac declared later, for had I been with my father, I might have met with the same fate. The official report was that he had been killed by thieves, but by the time the authorities brought the news of his death, we already knew the truth."
She paused for breath, then continued, "Mrs. Hayes's sister had fallen ill, so Mac and I were alone in the manor—me in my bed, and him downstairs somewhere—when Father's valet came home unexpectedly in the wee hours of the morning. . . ."
As Leah described the scene, it came to life in Abigail's mind, like a play in a theatre.
The front door banged open like a gunshot. Hearing it, young Eleanor left her bed and crept out of her room, standing at the stair rail to see what the matter was. Her father's valet crossed the hall below, his face ill-white, nearly green. His cravat and waistcoat were stained, his usually pristine boots muddied. Had he galloped all the way from Town?
From between the spindles she saw their steward rush into the hall, frowning thunderously. "Good heavens, Walter. What is the matter? Where is the master?"
"He's coming!" Walter cried. "He's coming!"
"Who's coming—the master?"
"No! His brother. The master's dead!" Walter's voice cracked. "Here . . . read this. He wrote this before he . . ." The valet's words trailed away. He handed over a note, and the steward read it.
Grim-faced, Mac tucked it inside an inner pocket. "I'll gather her things directly."
"No, there isn't time. We mustn't be here when he arrives. None of us. But especially her."
"I just need a few minutes. . . ." Mac started up the stairs.
Not wishing to be found eavesdropping, Eleanor retreated into her bedchamber.
"Do what you must, but hurry!" the valet called after him.
Mac entered her bedchamber and knelt before her. "Your father is dead, lass," he said. "I'm sorry—and sorry to say it so bluntly, but there's no time to waste."
Pain lanced her chest and tears filled her eyes. "Not Papa too."
"I'm afraid so."
Breathing hard, the valet scurried into the room, arms spread like a hen's wings to shepherd her chicks to safety. "Hurry. Gather a few things and let's go."
But no sooner had Mac risen to his feet than the front door downstairs banged open once more.
The valet's face stretched into a mask of terror. "No. He's here." He slowly backed from the room. "You hide her. I shall do what I can to distract him." He swallowed, his Adam's apple convulsing up and down his long thin neck.
The steward nodded gravely. "You're a good man, Walter." Then Mac turned to her. "We need to hide, lass."
"From whom?" she asked, eyes wide.
He grimaced. "Your uncle, I'm afraid. You are the last person to stand between him and Pembrooke Park. If he finds us, he will not hesitate to kill us both."
Her heart lurched. Her family . . . all dead. Would she be next? She feared she would be sick. But she composed herself and lifted her chin, determined to behave as her parents would wish her to. Like the little lady of the manor her father declared her, after her mother passed on.
A voice she didn't recognize called from downstairs. "Hello! Anybody home?" Eleanor shuddered. Was it really the uncle she had never met—a man who would not hesitate to kill her?
She knew of only one place to hide. But did her uncle know about it as well? He might, she feared, having grown up at Pembrooke Park.
Taking the steward's large damp hand in her smaller one, she stepped to the wall and, pressing the invisible latch, opened the hidden door. Beside her, the man sucked in a sharp breath of surprise. She led him inside and closed the door most of the way behind them. They stood there together, listening at the crack. She smelled dust, sweat, and fear and hoped she would not sneeze and give away their hiding place. For a moment, the only sound she heard was Mac's breathing in the darkness.
Through the narrow crack, she could see across her bedchamber and out into the corridor beyond, lit with wall sconces. But she didn't see anyone.
Her uncle's voice sounded again from downstairs. "Ah . . . there you are."
"I didn't see . . . anything, sir," Walter said, his voice strained, its pitch higher than usual. She guessed he stood at the top of the stairs.
"I think you did," the other man said, his voice low and menacing.
She heard a heavy tread mount the wooden stairs.
"Who have you told?" the man asked.
The valet's voice rose in protest. "There is no one here, sir. No one to tell. What with the mistress and daughter passed on and the house all but closed up."
"They're all dead?"
"Yes. Died in the typhus epidemic last year."
"How convenient. But then . . . upon what errand did you race, hell-bent, back here?" It sounded as if the man now stood with Walter at the top of the stairs.
"I . . ."
"What did my brother tell you to do—what was his last request? Tell me. If you value your life."
Silence, followed by the echoing snap of a gun being cocked.
"Last chance . . ."
Panicked, Walter said, "He . . . he wanted us to . . . to hide his treasure."
"Ah! And where is it?"
"Upon my life, sir, I do not know. He wasn't able to tell me."
"Unfortunately, I believe you."
"No!" Walter screamed. An awful scream. Then came a sickening fwank of metal on bone. Then a thud, followed by a series of thuds, like a branch caught in the spokes of a wagon wheel: thum-thump-thum-thump. Walter falling down the stairs, she guessed. She wanted to run out and help—at the same time she wanted to hide forever. Mac grasped her hand, hard, likely feeling the same.
The heavy footsteps didn't descend the stairs; instead they proceeded up the corridor. One door was thrown open across the gallery, then another, then the door to the room next to hers. She jumped at the sounds, louder and louder, nearer and nearer. With trembling fingers, she pulled the hidden door closed all the way, praying, God, please don't let him know about this room. . . .
Would he really kill her? Kill them both? The man beside her obviously believed it. Fear, anger, disbelief gripped her—there was only one thing to do. Our Father in heaven, help us, she prayed. Deliver us from evil!
She had never been afraid of the dark, but she was afraid of being alone. And if she survived that night, that was exactly what she would be.
Leah sighed and sat down on the cushions on the floor.
The lights went out on the stage in Abigail's mind, but she knew she would imagine the horrific scene for a long time to come.
Leah continued more lightly, "At all events, my uncle didn't find us. After he left, we slipped back into my room. Mac gathered a few things and took me to Grandmamma's cottage and hid me there until he could decide what to do. He met with the housekeeper. Apparently she and the other servants agreed to say I had died with my mother, to keep my identity secret from my uncle. To save me."
She expelled a breath. "All my life, my adoptive parents have warned me over and over again to stay away from Pembrooke Park. Not to reveal my true name or identity to anyone. Not even to William. Even after Pembrooke Park was abandoned, I could not feel safe. After all, Papa would remind me, we never knew when my uncle or his offspring might return. . . ."
Leah shook her head. "William tells me that I must trust God will protect me eternally, even if not on this earth. But I have to say, it's this earth I most worry about." She managed a weak chuckle.
Abigail's mind whirled with questions. She snatched one from the air and asked, "Where did 'Leah' come from?"
"Oh, who can say how family pet names evolve. . . ." Leah considered, then explained, "My father, my first father, called me Ellie—short for Eleanor. When I came to live with the Chapmans, little William took to calling me by the second syllable of Ellie: Lee, which became Leah." She shrugged. "Papa thought it best for me to go by another name to help keep me hidden until the danger had passed. Papa . . . that is how I think of Mac now."
"Understandable, after so many years."
"Yes. Mac Chapman has filled the role of father far longer, and in many ways better, than Robert Pembrooke ever did, no matter how high a pedestal Papa insists on placing him on. Don't misunderstand me, I loved my father and mother, and was devastated by their deaths. But my father, like many men, was often absent—gone to Town for business or pleasure, or off riding or hunting. I simply didn't spend much time with him.
"Mac is the best of men, and has been an excellent father to me, if a bit overprotective. And in all truth, I don't remember my first father very well." She glanced again at the portrait. "And less so my mother. Though she and I were very close, she died about a year before my father. This is the first time I've seen her likeness in twenty years."
"William mentioned he only recently found out, and I haven't told a soul—don't worry."
She nodded. "William was so young when it all happened. Too young to be trusted with such an important secret. Mac and Kate made arrangements to send me away to school just before my uncle and his family took up residence in the house, to foster the ruse that Eleanor had died in the same epidemic that killed my mother."
Abigail said, "But the grave in the churchyard has your name on it. . . ."
She nodded. "My infant sister died a few days before my mother. But headstones take a long time to quarry and carve. Especially that year, with so many dead in the epidemic and such a long list of headstones to prepare. . . .
"Mac allowed people to believe the infant had been buried in the same casket with my mother, as was often done in the case of newborns. Mamma—Kate—argued against it, I recall, but Papa insisted on having the headstone carved with my name. We could always replace it, he said. Rectify the mistake if and when the danger was passed and I could reclaim my rightful name and rightful place as Robert Pembrooke's daughter and heir."
Abigail shook her head. "How you must have detested our coming and moving in to your home. . . ."
"Not at all! You mistake me, Abigail. It has saddened me to see my family home sitting empty and slowly decaying all these years, despite Papa's efforts to keep the roof sound and vandals away. I am glad you are here. And I am glad you've lifted the lid on this long stewing pot. It was only a matter of time before it all boiled over, or scorched and burned. . . ."
She shook her head as though to dispel the notion. "I have been content with my lot, Abigail. Truly. There are times I wish I might lighten Mamma's load or see the Chapmans living here in Pembrooke Park in style and ease, compared to that crowded old cottage. But they would never want to live here. And I'm not certain I would either, even if it were mine free and clear and safe. Don't feel sorry for me, I beg of you. I don't." She smiled bravely, charming dimples framing her gentle mouth. "Well, not often, at any rate."
"But surely some people knew, or guessed, who you really were?"
"Of course. After all, Mac and Kate Chapman had announced the birth of their firstborn son four years before. But when I returned from school after a year away, they told anyone who asked that I was an orphan of relatives in the north that they were raising as their own. William grew up believing that story, more or less. I don't think he was ever lied to directly—though many lies of omission, yes. Papa felt no remorse about lying to outsiders, though. He would have done anything to protect me. Some of our neighbors knew or recognized me as a Pembrooke. But with the man we all believed guilty of killing my father living right here in Pembrooke Park—all were willing to keep our secret, apparently.
"How Mac worried over the years, coddling this neighbor or that with loose lips or a tendency to drink too much, or growing old and forgetful. . . . But, thankfully, his worst fears have never come to pass. At least . . . so far."
Abigail thought of Mrs. Hayes. Did this explain Mac's visits and gifts?
Leah glanced at the hidden door behind them. "Papa won't be happy when he hears you know about me. But William and I agree we must tell him. He has every right to know."
Abigail nodded, a tremor of dread pinching her gut at the thought of Mac's anger.
"William has ridden to Hunts Hall to tell him, if he can find him around the estate. I think I shall wait to look through the rest of these things until he's with me. Or at least, until he knows that I'm in here with you." Leah expelled a breath of amazement at the thought.
"I understand." Abigail led the way back into the bedchamber, carefully closing the hidden door behind them. She looked around the room with new eyes. "How strange to think this is your room . . ."
"Was my room. Twenty years ago."
"That's why you cried—when you watched Kitty play with the dolls' house. It's yours."
"I don't know why I cried, exactly."
Abigail shook her head in bemusement and said gently, "You have many valid reasons to choose from."
"Perhaps. But I choose not to dwell on them. Now, would you mind terribly if I returned later, after I have talked to Papa?"
"Not at all. You are welcome any time. More than welcome. This is your home. Your room."
"Shh . . . Enough of that."
"Very well. For now." Abigail went to the bedside table and opened the drawer. "But in the meantime, you might wish to read these." She handed Leah the ribbon-tied bundle of letters and journal pages she'd received from Harriet Pembrooke.
Leah glanced at them, saw Abigail's own name written on the letters, and lifted questioning eyes to her face.
"Your friend 'Jane' has been writing to me these many weeks. And I think she'd want you to see them."
Early the next morning, Duncan knocked on her door and announced that Miss Chapman had come to call. Opening the door a crack, Abigail asked the manservant to send up her guest, as she was not yet fully dressed.
A few minutes later, she opened the door for Leah and shut it softly behind her. "I thought Mac would be coming with you."
"He is. He'll be here any moment, I imagine. He let himself in through the servants' entrance but insisted I go to the front door as a proper lady. He's probably helping himself to one of Mrs. Walsh's sausages as we speak."
"I thought you might return last night."
"We considered it. But he thought it would be more difficult to explain to your family."
"Ah."
"I hope we're not too early."
"No. Just give me one minute . . ."
Abigail sat at the dressing table and began gathering her long hair. She had shooed Polly away earlier, saying she would take care of her own hair that morning. In case the Chapmans made an early morning call, she wanted to be alone as soon as possible. Now she hurriedly twisted the hair into a coil atop her head. Holding it in place with one hand, she reached for the pins with the other.
Leah came and stood behind her. "Let me help you."
Leah picked up the pins and made quick work of securing Abigail's hair.
A soft scratching at the door alerted them, and Leah walked over and opened it, gesturing for Mac to enter. She returned to the dressing table and pushed in the last pin.
His voice low and regretful, Mac said, "You were meant to be a lady, my dear, not a lady's maid."
"Papa . . . I offered to help. And how many times have I told you I don't mind a little work."
Abigail rose, ran a self-conscious hand over her hair, and forced herself to meet Mac's gaze. She was relieved not to see anger there, only caution and concern.
"How many of Mrs. Walsh's sausages did you eat?" Leah asked him wryly.
"Only two."
"Ah. Cutting back, I see."
"I told her Miss Foster mentioned having trouble with her door and I'd said I'd take a look at it. I ran into Duncan on the way up and told him the same."
Abigail nodded. "Good thinking."
She hoped Duncan wouldn't become suspicious with all these visitors to her room, as Miles had.
This time, Abigail locked her bedchamber door and then gestured for the two of them to enter the secret room whenever they were ready. They left the door partway open for her, but she hung back, not wanting to intrude on their private moment, yet undeniably curious.
For several moments a heavy silence hung in the air of the secret room. Then she heard Mac's voice, throaty and rough, "You look so much like her. Much more so now than when I hung this here. Turns out I was right to do so."
Abigail stood just to the side of the door, watching the scene through the opening, knowing she probably shouldn't but unable to look away.
Leah asked, "You took it down from Father's room and hung it here?"
Mac nodded. "I feared the resemblance would eventually give you away."
"It's good to see her again."
He glanced at Leah. "I'm sorry the painting's been kept from you. Sorry so many things rightfully yours have been kept from you. I hope you know everything I did, I did to protect you."
"I do know, Papa." She pressed his hand.
Reassured, Mac looked again at the painting. "I didn't know if Clive had been acquainted with Elizabeth Pembrooke. The brothers had been estranged for years, but I feared if he'd met her, he would remember, being as beautiful as she was. It was the main reason we sent you to school for that year. To give time for his memory to fade. His and our neighbors' as well."
The words were out of Abigail's mouth before she could stop them. "It was a courageous thing to do—to hide Robert Pembrooke's daughter right under his brother's nose."
Mac opened the door wider. "Courageous? To hide?" He shook his head, lip curled. "I don't think so. And I can't take credit for the idea. I never would have presumed to remove her from the house, to send her away, and then to raise her as my own in our wee cottage, had Robert Pembrooke not asked it of me."
Abigail felt her brow furrow and joined them inside. "What do you mean?"
Mac turned to one of the shelves. "I left it hidden here. The note he sent with his valet. God rest their souls. . . ."
He picked up a cigar tin from the lowest shelf, blew the dust off the cover, and carried it to the window ledge. There he opened the lid and from the bottom of a stack of invoices and receipts pulled forth a small notebook entitled Household Accounts. "I folded it within this, knowing it would not appeal to a man like Clive Pembrooke, even if he ever found this room."
From within the account book, he extracted a piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to Leah. "Written by your father, right before he died."
Hands trembling, Leah read the letter, her eyes filling with tears as she did so. Then she handed it to Abigail to read.
Abigail hesitated. "Are you certain?"
Leah nodded, and pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve.
Abigail read the note written in a hurried, erratic hand. And guessed the dark brown stain on one corner might be Robert Pembrooke's own blood.
Mac,
Protect Eleanor or he will kill her.
Let him have the house, anything he wants,
but hide my treasure.
—R. Pembrooke
Ellie,
I love you more than life. Never forget.
—Papa
"How I wished that Mr. Pembrooke had identified his attacker," Mac said. "Given me something I could take to the magistrates to use against Clive. Solid evidence. But considering he was near death, it's a miracle he was able to write this much. And a testament of his love for you, my dear, that you were foremost in his mind. His last, most precious, thought."
Mac looked at Abigail. "Leah told you about that night . . . ?"
Abigail nodded solemnly.
Leah explained, "Only up until the part where Uncle Pembrooke left and you took me to Grandmamma's cottage."
He nodded thoughtfully and filled in some of the details. "Eventually, we heard the front door slam closed, and for a time, all was quiet. Assuming Clive had fled the scene of the crime, I tiptoed back through Ellie's room and went down to check on poor Walter, but as I feared, he was dead. I took advantage of the empty house, gathered a few things for Ellie, and then left the manor, taking her to my mother-in-law's cottage. Thinking she would be safer there than in my own, in case Clive came looking.
"Then I waited and watched the manor from a distance, just in case. Soon a gig approached with Mr. Brown at the reins and Clive Pembrooke riding that big black of his alongside. I admit I was surprised.
"A few minutes later, I entered the house, claiming to have heard a carriage and that I was coming to check on the place. I found Mr. Brown and Clive Pembrooke standing over Walter Kelly's body. Clive Pembrooke was all cool civility, all concern and grief over Walter's fate, theorizing the young man had fallen down the stairs in his hurry to answer the door. Of course there was nothing Mr. Brown could do for him. He was already dead—had died honorably, protecting his young mistress.
"The surgeon left to summon the undertaker. While Clive and I waited for him to come and remove the poor man's body, Clive told me he had come to Pembrooke Park with the news he'd heard in London, that Robert Pembrooke was dead—killed by thieves who broke into the London house."
Here, Mac looked at Abigail and interjected, "Lies, all of it."
Then he continued, "Clive said he'd seen the valet's horse out front, lathered and exhausted, and assumed he'd come on the same mission. He asked me why the man would ride so far in such a hurry. Whom had he meant to tell if the house was empty?
"I told him, 'The housekeeper and me, I suppose. He wouldn't know that she had gone to sit at her sister's sickbed. And of course the rector and all the parish would want to know the news—the most significant news to grieve our parish since the death of Mrs. Pembrooke.'"
"Clive said, 'His wife and daughter died, I believe I heard.'"
"'Yes,' I said. 'Taken in the typhus epidemic that claimed so many.'"
"Then Clive said, all casual-like, 'The poor man muttered something before I went for the surgeon. Perhaps it will make more sense to you than it did to me. He said his master had sent him home to hide his treasure.'"
Mac gave Abigail another sidelong glance. "That part of his story was true. Clive looked at me then with his snakelike eyes. Genial and venomous all at once. He asked me, 'What did he mean by that? Had my brother some treasure I don't know about?'"
"I shrugged and answered as casually as I could, 'I suppose there must be some family jewels or something of that sort, though I don't know the particulars. But I hardly think this is the time to worry about such things. Not when two men are dead.'
"I suppose it was a risk, speaking to him like that. But it was how I would have spoken to him under other circumstances. And I feared he would guess that I knew what he'd done if I acted servile or timid."
"It seemed to convince him, for he continued on with his act of innocence in full confidence that the only witness against him—or so he thought—was dead."
Mac turned to Leah. "Had it not been for you, my dear, or your father's plea that I act quickly to hide and protect you, I shudder to think what I might have done, likely confronting him then and there—accusing him of killing both men, and likely ending up a third victim." He shook his head. "Even so, how guilty I've felt. Perhaps I should have confronted him, called in the law, and tried to avenge Robert Pembrooke, to obtain justice, weak evidence or not."
"No, Papa." Leah laid a hand on his arm. "As Mamma and I have always tried to tell you—you did what Robert Pembrooke asked of you. You protected me. And likely saved your own life and perhaps even the lives of your wife and son in the bargain."
He nodded. "I know. But I can't help think I could have done things differently. Handled it more wisely. Found some way to guarantee your future and not merely your safety."
"Do you think I care about the house? About the money?" She shook her head. "No, I would not have chosen to go through all I have, but you did not steal my life. You gave me a new one. You gave me the best mother, the best father, the best brothers and sister I could hope for. A loving, loyal family far better than I deserve."
"But you are Robert Pembrooke's daughter. You deserve better." Mac paused, glanced at Abigail as if just then remembering she was there, and continued his story.
"When the other servants came back from London or from holiday, what news awaited them. Their master and his daughter were both believed dead. The new master had gone to collect his family and would be returning at some point to take over Pembrooke Park. That's when I moved the portrait and hid the letter and family Bible and some of the jewels. Fortunately, his absence also gave Mrs. Hayes and me time to warn and coach the servants we thought we could trust, and to replace those we weren't sure of.
"The old rector was reticent to lie, until I showed him the note in Robert Pembrooke's own hand. He suggested we go to the law, but I knew, without the testimony of Walter, we had insufficient evidence. I would obey my master. I would let Clive have Pembrooke Park but not let on that Eleanor was still alive. Eventually, the rector agreed and noted her earlier 'death' in the parish record, in case Mr. Pembrooke came to check. And he did, eventually. Clive waited a 'respectable' fortnight before returning with his family to claim his brother's house as his own, Robert barely in his grave.
"By then, we had sent Ellie to school for a year in the north near my sister—far away and safe, in case he came searching or threatened someone until they gave up the information. Later, when he asked me, I told Clive that my wife and I had two children, one who was away at school at the time.
"Of course, many of the servants and our neighbors knew that the girl was not really ours. But they were ready to keep our secret in unspoken bond against the usurper, Robert Pembrooke's killer. When the need arose, we said she was the daughter of relatives in the north, recently orphaned." He shrugged. "We are a small community. Far from city laws and legalities. There were few to question except the one we were most determined not to tell. Her own uncle.
"So yes, while younger people or those new to the parish don't know, some of the older folks knew or at least suspected who Leah really was. The servants may have whispered among themselves about Miss Eleanor's fate but never said anything to Mr. Pembrooke, as far as I know. Though he did check the parish records, as I said, so perhaps he'd heard some rumor she still lived."
He shook his head. "The rumor may even have fostered Eliza Smith's mistaken belief that she was that daughter."
Abigail wondered if the same rumor had fueled Harriet's hope that a closer heir of Robert Pembrooke's still lived.
"You may wonder why I continued to work for the man," Mac went on. "I feared to leave would be to risk Clive's wrath and his suspicions. But I detested him—detested working for him. How relieved I was when he and his family abandoned the house two years later."
Mac glanced around the room once more. "I don't think Clive had ever heard of a secret room—just went all over the house and grounds searching for a hiding place. He helped himself to some gold and silver in the family safe, having found the key in his brother's desk. He dressed his wife in Elizabeth Pembrooke's jewelry, and took to wearing Robert Pembrooke's signet ring, once it had been returned to the estate after his funeral. I made no effort to stop him. But even that didn't quench his desire for more, his certainty that there must be a treasure worth far more—a pearl of great price—hidden elsewhere. And in a sense, he was right." He looked at Leah fondly. "Thank God he never found you. And he never shall, as long as it is in my power to prevent it."
Abigail said, "But surely after all this time . . . If he meant to come back for Pembrooke Park, or for Eleanor, he would have done so by now."
Mac's eyes glinted cold and hard, like glass. "He might have been transported or imprisoned and unable to return as yet. Or sent his son Miles to continue his quest." He shook his head. "Until I find solid evidence that Clive Pembrooke is well and truly dead, I shall never feel our Leah is safe to resume her rightful name and place."
Mac went to the jeweler's box on another shelf. "I also hid away a few of your mother's things for you, Leah." He ducked his head. "Sorry—it's how I think of you now."
"Never be sorry, Papa. It is how I think of myself as well. I like the name, truly."
"I hoped it would only be temporary—that I could give these to you long before now. I wanted you to have a few family heirlooms once you were able to reclaim your home." He opened the box, swirling a work-worn finger through dainty gold chains and pearls before handing it to her. "There are also several pieces of jewelry still in your mother's room. And a fine gold snuffbox and ruby cravat pin left in the master bedroom after Clive Pembrooke and his family left. Never understood why they didn't take more with them. But I had secreted away these few things for you, for when you grew to womanhood."
"I am nearly nine and twenty, Papa," she said, amber eyes sparkling. "I think that moment has come and gone."
"But there's something else I really wanted you to have." Lifting the lid from a bandbox, he pulled forth a hat ornamented with flaccid, dusty feathers, a tiny stuffed bird that had lost its beak, and a spray of silk hydrangeas. In truth, Abigail thought it the ugliest hat she had ever seen. She glanced awkwardly at Leah, to gauge her reaction.
Leah pasted on a smile. "It is quite . . . something."
"Don't be polite, lass. Even I can see it's hideous. It was awful twenty years ago, and time and dust have not improved it."
He turned the hat over and reached inside. "That's why I chose it." He pulled from it a small hinged box, set the hat aside, and opened the lid, exposing a velvet-lined jewel case. Inside glistened a ruby necklace and matching earrings. The jewels Elizabeth Pembrooke wore in the portrait.
"I wanted you to have these, especially. Another reason to hide the portrait."
"They're beautiful," Leah breathed, lightly fingering the deep-red gems. She looked up at Mac, eyes shimmering with tears. "Thank you, Papa."
He ducked his head again and sent a self-conscious glance at Abigail before saying almost shyly to Leah, "I like hearing you call me by that name, though I suppose I should give you leave to call me Mac now, as everyone else does."
Leah shook her head, the motion causing one fat tear to escape her eye and roll down her cheek. "I am not everyone else. I am your daughter. One of your four children. And I always shall be."
Abigail's heart twisted to see answering tears brighten Mac Chapman's eyes, and his stern chin tremble.
# Chapter 27
On Sunday, Abigail, Louisa, and their parents attended church together. On the way over, Abigail noticed Mamma wrap both hands around Papa's arm as they walked side by side. He bent his head near hers, and she chuckled at something he said. Abigail's heart lightened. Maybe her family's change of circumstance and the move to Pembrooke Park was having some benefit after all.
Ahead she saw Leah entering the church, the greengrocer's little girl hanging on one hand, the blacksmith's youngest tugging on the other. Abigail thought of Leah's gift baskets and her teaching, and her quiet, humble service, and felt tears prick her eyes. She wondered what Leah—Eleanor—would be like now had she grown up at Pembrooke Park in privilege her whole life. Would she have done so much, served so many regardless of her upbringing? Maybe, but somehow Abigail doubted it. Another benefit—another good thing from a bad situation. "Good from bad," William had once said. "God excels at that."
Yes, Abigail silently agreed. He does.
As usual, Louisa enjoyed all the attention that came her way, especially sitting in the front box. Gilbert sat with the Morgans across the aisle, as did Rebekah Garwood. The rector, Mr. Morris, was in church that morning as well, and assisted in officiating the service. He was accompanied by his nephew, who had just matriculated from Christ Church College. The rector introduced the young man with obvious fondness and pride.
After church Louisa made a beeline for Mr. Chapman, thanking him for his sermon. He smiled in reply, and Abigail's stomach soured. He was perfectly polite to Abigail and her parents as they thanked him and passed through the door, but Abigail noticed he did not quite meet her gaze. She wondered why. Was he distancing himself because of Gilbert, or because he now preferred another woman? Did he fear he had given her the wrong impression during their foray into the secret room—worry she might think he was romantically interested in her again, assuming he ever had been?
In the churchyard, Abigail waited while Louisa spoke sweetly with two adolescent girls who gaped in awe at her beauty and fashionable attire. Behind them the Morgans exited, Andrew and his father talking earnestly to William, while Mrs. Morgan gave him a brittle smile and remained aloof. Beside her, Rebekah Garwood looked striking in her fitted morning gown and smart black hat, her figure already remarkably good for having recently borne a child. She smiled up into Mr. Chapman's face, asking him about some verse he had quoted. He answered, and she thanked him, briefly laying her gloved hand on his sleeve. Abigail was probably the only person who noticed.
Or was she? Mrs. Peterman sidled up to Abigail, her disapproving gaze on the pair. "First you, then your sister, and now a recent widow." She sniffed and shook her head. "I shall be glad when Mr. Morris's nephew comes into possession of his uncle's living. He'll put an end to such ungodly flirtations."
"Oh, and what makes you think that?"
"Look at him!" She gestured toward the gangly young man. "No girls will be fawning over him. And he, I daresay, will remain too busy writing good long sermons to have time for females for a year or two. And by then, the women of the parish will have found him a plain, practical wife."
"Yes," Abigail murmured in wry wistfulness. "The practical ones are usually plain."
When the last of his parishioners had exited, William disappeared from the doorway. A few minutes later, he exited as well, having removed his vestments. He paused to help a fallen toddler who had scratched his knee, and reunited the scamp with his mother. Then, seeing her watching him, William raised a hand and walked her way.
Abigail steeled herself, unsure what to expect.
"Hello, Miss Foster."
She nodded. "Mr. Chapman."
"Mamma was just saying you haven't been to our house in some time. I tried to tell her you've been busy, what with your family here now and . . . all. Even so, she has charged me with inviting you over again. Might you and your sister come over for tea this afternoon? Perhaps you might sing for Grandmamma and Miss Louisa might play. I understand she is very accomplished."
It was Louisa he wished to see most of all, she guessed. "Yes, well. Louisa might, but I don't know that I will have the time."
He winced and asked tentatively, "Are you angry with me about something, Miss Foster?"
"No."
"Have I done something to offend you or disappoint you?"
Abigail didn't want to lie, but nor did she want to tell him the truth. Besides, the truth was he'd done nothing wrong. It was her problem, not his.
When she hesitated, he asked, "Is this about . . . your sister?"
Taken aback, she darted a glance at him, then looked away, feeling her neck heat. How had he divined the answer? Were her feelings, her petty jealousy, so transparent?
He added, "Or because of Mr. Scott?"
She blinked in confusion. She would have thought he'd be relieved that Gilbert was showing interest in her. That it might assuage his guilt and give him the freedom to pursue Louisa or Rebekah Garwood, as he probably wanted to.
Gilbert appeared at her elbow. "Hello, Abby." He smiled at her and took her hand, tucking it under his arm. "I'll walk you home."
Belatedly, he acknowledged Mr. Chapman. "Good sermon, Parson. Nice and short."
"Thank you. By the way, I saw the new wing at Hunts Hall. Well done. Nice and short."
Gilbert's face colored. "They only wanted the one level—there's to be a conservatory. But we are also adding a two-story addition to the rear and—"
Abigail interrupted, "Mr. Chapman is only teasing you, Gilbert."
"Oh," Gilbert said dully.
She said in consolatory tones, "He isn't used to your teasing yet, as I am."
Mr. Chapman pulled a face. "Sorry. It's one of my persistent weaknesses, I'm afraid." He looked at her. "But not the only one."
That night, Abigail sat on a large rock, a natural step down from the riverbank, and dangled her feet in the water, idly peeling the bark from a stick in her hands. The moon shone bright, glistening on the lazy current. The air was still, without a breath of wind. And only the chirring of frogs and the occasional flying insect kept her company. The summer night was warm. Too warm. She'd been unable to sleep in her stifling room, with her stifling thoughts and doubts about both Gilbert and William. Must every man she admired prefer her sister? Perhaps she should accept it, and be grateful any man would be interested in her at all, once Louisa made it clear she did not return his attentions. But the thought made her feel ill. Would she wonder at every family gathering for the rest of her life if her husband was eyeing Louisa wistfully, wishing he had married her instead?
She tossed the stick upriver, with a satisfying plunk, wishing she could toss away her doubts as easily. But sure enough, the current brought it back to her.
"Hello?"
She sucked in a breath at the unexpected call, then turned her head and saw William approaching. "Oh, Mr. Chapman, you startled me."
"And who else would you expect to find in my spot?"
"Your spot? I didn't know it was anyone's spot. I shall leave you." She scrambled to her feet and up the bank.
He forestalled her, saying, "Miss Foster. I was only teasing. I am glad to find you here."
He was dressed in breeches and untucked shirt, she noticed. A towel in hand.
"I did not come here with the design of meeting you," she said, feeling defensive. "I was simply warm and thought the water would cool me."
"As did I."
"I only met you at the river once after all, and that was weeks ago. And not here but there under that tree . . ." She nodded vaguely a few yards ahead, then searched the ground. "Now, where did I put my shoes?"
He laid a hand on her arm, stilling her. "Miss Foster . . . are you still angry with me?"
"I am not angry."
He tucked his chin, and raised his eyebrows, giving her a doubtful look.
"I am not angry," she repeated. "But . . ."
"But what? I realize that with Mr. Scott back in your life, you may wish to spend less time with me, but I don't think there's call for animosity."
"No, of course not."
"Here," he said, spreading his towel on the bank, fortunately larger than the last one he'd brought. "Sit, and let's talk."
"But your swim . . ."
"Can wait."
They sat on the bank, sharing the towel but not quite touching.
He began, "You can't deny you have changed toward me. I don't know if it has something to do with your sister being here now. Or more likely, I suppose, Mr. Scott . . ."
Abigail again recalled William Chapman's dumbfounded expression when he'd first seen Louisa. And then seeing them together that day in the churchyard . . .
"No," she whispered. "Not Gilbert." She shook her head, not able to meet his eyes. The moonlight would reveal too much. Her insecurity. Her jealousy.
"Then . . . ?"
She swallowed and quietly admitted, "I saw how you looked at Louisa when Mamma introduced her."
She felt his gaze on her profile. Then he sighed. "I am sorry. Truly. I tried to be as polite as possible to her then and since. Not to show anything else in my expression or in my words, to reveal what I knew, and how I felt."
How he felt? Lord, have mercy. Help me through this! He had fallen for Louisa. It was more than passing desire or admiration. He had feelings for her.
"It was obvious," Abigail said. "To me, at least."
"Hopefully not to her. I haven't wanted to say anything. Even though I wondered if I should. For her sake. And yours. But I was afraid to offend you. You are her sister, after all."
"As I am very much aware."
"You must wonder how it began, how I even discovered who she was. . . ."
No, not really, she thought. It likely began the way it always did. Men making complete cakes of themselves over Louisa.
He went on, "You might remember Louisa asking if we had met before. Saying I looked familiar to her . . . ?"
Abigail nodded, vaguely recalling the exchange.
William continued, "I said we had not met, and that was true—we had not been introduced. But I had seen her before."
This was news to Abigail. "Oh? When?"
"You remember that I spent several days with Andrew Morgan in London?"
Yes, Abigail did remember. And what long, lonely, tiresome days they had been.
She nodded, and he continued.
"Andrew insisted I needed a rest after the fire, so I went with him to Town, as I had done once or twice while we were at school together. Mr. Morris agreed to take my services for me while I was away, eager to show his nephew his future living, I imagine.
"In London, Andrew dragged me to the most crowded, noisiest rout I had ever attended, held at some wealthy acquaintance's home. While we were there, one of his highborn friends said something very cutting about a certain young woman in attendance. I did not hear her name over all the noise and music, but I did see her quite clearly, laughing loudly and flirting with an officer and a dandy at once. This man pointed her out and said, 'Careful, gents, the minx may look an angel, but she is the biggest flirt in London, so determined to net a titled man that she is willing to do anything to trap him.' The insinuation was perfectly clear."
Was he talking about Louisa? Surely not! Even so, Abigail's stomach sickened as he spoke and her cheeks heated. Oh, the mortification! What a crude and cruel thing to say, if unsubstantiated. If true, well, heaven help them all.
"I left soon after, much to Andrew's disappointment. I confess I thought very little about it, or about the girl, not praying for her or her family as I should have done. But when I saw her here, I recognized her instantly. And to learn she is your sister . . . Well, I was stunned speechless.
"I still don't know what I said at the time, hopefully something polite and coherent. And I hope you will forgive me for repeating the scurrilous accusations now, to you. But if Louisa has acted in a manner to expose herself to such talk, it could very well damage her reputation and yours, so perhaps it is better that you know.
"She did seek me out in the churchyard once, and I tried to offer a word of counsel, but I don't think I got through to her. I suppose I should have gone right to your father with the report and offered a gentle warning. But I would hate to rouse his wrath against Louisa or the men in question if it might be addressed another way, with less damage to . . . everyone."
For several moments, Abigail said nothing, her mind struggling to reconfigure what she thought she had seen, with this new information. She was relieved and upset all at once. Her heart felt sick and exalted in turns. Oh, Louisa! Foolish, foolish girl. Abigail could very well believe her sister capable of such flirtatious behavior, thinking her beauty and charm made her immune to the normal rules of propriety.
William looked at her in concern, and grimaced. "Apparently I judged wrong in telling you. Please believe my motives good even if my decision poor."
She turned to face him. "No. You were right to tell me. It explains several things . . . things she has said about Andrew Morgan and her reluctance to visit Hunts Hall, so apparently some unpleasantness along these lines passed between them. I will speak to her. Perhaps she is unaware of the extent of her breach of propriety. Hopefully her reputation is not damaged beyond repair."
"Likely she didn't realize," William agreed kindly. "She is very young, after all."
"Yes. She did write in one of her letters that all the attention from gentlemen had gone quite to her head."
"Understandable. And you were not there to guide her. Along with your mother, of course."
"I don't know that I would have been an effective guide, even had I been there. I am no great expert in deflecting the admiration of multiple suitors."
He lifted one auburn eyebrow. "Are you not? For I can count at least three admirers at present. And that is only here in tiny Easton."
Abigail ducked her head, her cheeks now heating for a far different reason. "Careful, Parson, you don't want all that flattery to go to my head."
"I don't fear that for a moment, Abigail Foster. You are far too modest for that, sensible, lovely girl."
Pleasure and relief washed over her.
Even as concern for her sister nipped at her breastbone, Abigail's thoughts whirled now on a far happier axis. William Chapman did not admire Louisa. And even if he thought her sister pretty, which was undeniable, he was not smitten with her. In fact he saw her as a wayward young girl to be set upon the right course, not as a woman to court or love or marry. Thank you, God! Abigail thought, not bothering to stifle the smile that curved her lips.
"What's made you smile, Miss Foster? I am relieved you are not angry with me, but what have I said to so amuse you?"
Dare she tell him the truth? Would his respect for her dim if she revealed her insecurity? Besides, it didn't change the fact that she had no dowry and didn't deserve an educated, devoted, handsome clergyman paid far less than he was worth.
He sat up straight and looked at her in bewilderment. "Wait a minute . . . Don't tell me you feared I'd fallen under her spell?"
Abigail shrugged. "It had crossed my mind. You should have seen your face when you saw her! Gaping like a hooked fish, all wide-eyed and tongue-tied."
He shook his head. "And here I thought you'd guessed the truth of my dismay, or had somehow wrongly heard that I had been among those speaking ill of her."
Abigail was embarrassed to recall her earlier words about how obvious his reaction had been when he'd laid eyes on Louisa. She had been completely wrong! She had seen what she'd feared—no, what she'd expected to see.
"So that's why you've been, shall we say, chilly of late," he said. "I was afraid it had something to do with Mr. Scott. I saw him embrace you in the library and assumed, well . . ." His sentence trailed away on a shrug.
Mr. Scott. Odd that she had barely thought of him during their entire conversation. No wonder Gilbert had been irritated with and cold toward Louisa—if she had acted the wanton flirt with multiple gentlemen at every event of the season.
"And here all along you assumed I admired your sister." He tsked and took her hand in his. "My dear Abigail, I thought you knew me better than that."
She managed a wobbly smile and said quietly, "I once thought I knew Gilbert Scott better than that as well."
He looked at her, suddenly serious. "I thought the scales had fallen from his eyes at last where you and Louisa were concerned. That he had become disillusioned with Louisa and . . . enamored with you."
Yes, Gilbert had certainly changed toward her. But would his feelings for her last once his disillusionment and anger with Louisa faded? She said, "He's asked to court me, but I'm not certain how I feel."
William squeezed her hand. "Well, I am quite certain how I feel about—"
She met his gaze, hope rising in her breast, but William winced and looked away. "But unfortunately, I am not in a position to do anything about those feelings." He expelled a ragged breath. "You are so appealing, Miss Foster, every bit as beautiful as your sister—more so, to me—that I almost lost my head. I want nothing more than to let this romantic current sweep us along. This chance meeting. This moonlit night. Your tantalizing bare toes . . ."
He managed a grin, but it fell away nearly as soon as it formed. He shook his head. "But that would be unfair to you. Dishonest even. For the truth is, my current income barely supports me. And with Mr. Morris's nephew waiting in the wings, I cannot realistically hope my situation will improve anytime soon. If ever. It would be wrong of me to ask you to wait without a clear hope of a future. Especially with Mr. Scott in your life once again—waiting in the wings as well."
Her hope plummeted. Yes. How much better for him to marry a wealthy widow like Rebekah Garwood. And she could marry Gilbert. That should make everyone happy. Then why did she feel like crying instead?
His eyes widened as he watched her. "You look so sad."
"Do I? That's . . . silly. I'm fine." She forced a smile, which only served to push a hot tear from each eye.
"I'm fine too," he whispered. He leaned near and touched a finger to her cheekbone, tracing the tear. Then he leaned nearer yet and brushed his lips against her cheek.
Abigail's heart pounded. Her chest tightened until she found it painful to breathe. Every particle of her being longed to reach for him. To lift her face. To press her mouth to his. Dare she? Was this her last chance? Would she regret not doing so for the rest of her life?
She turned toward him. He stilled, inches away. She slowly raised her eyes to his, willing him to see all she felt but could not say aloud.
"Abigail . . ." he breathed, his eyes lowering to her mouth.
She reached up a shaky hand and laid her palm against his face, her finger brushing his earlobe. The skin smooth above his cheekbone and beginning to bristle near his jaw. She lifted her thumb, caressing the groove along his mouth, then traced his upper lip.
He half sighed, half groaned.
"William," she whispered, liking the feel of his given name on her tongue.
He stared at her. "Say it again," he whispered back, voice tight.
"Wi—" But she had no more puckered her lips to form the W than his mouth pressed to hers. Firmly, warmly, deliciously. She tentatively returned the pressure, and he angled his head to kiss her more deeply.
Her pulse raced, every nerve quivering to life. Her first kiss. Not with Gilbert Scott, as she'd always dreamed and hoped. But with William Chapman, a man who had just said he could not marry her.
He broke the kiss as if reading her thoughts, and rested his forehead against hers, catching his breath.
"Miss Foster, forgive me. I—"
"Shh . . . I know."
She heard distant footsteps crunching on gravel and sucked in a breath, afraid to be discovered alone with a man at night. She looked past his shoulder, and what she saw frightened her even more.
A figure in a long hooded cloak furtively crossed the drive carrying a lantern, its flame turned down low.
William turned to follow her gaze and instantly stiffened. He began to rise, but Abigail grasped his arm. She didn't want him to go rushing headlong into danger, to confront whomever it was without a weapon, not to mention without shoes or coat.
He looked at her in question, seeming torn, but allowed her to stop him. "You're right. I would never want to expose you to scandal."
That wasn't what she was most worried about. But she did not correct him, glad he was safe.
They watched the figure disappear around the side of the manor. Headed where? Finally, he could restrain himself no longer and rose, pulling her easily to her feet. "You slip back inside through the front. I'm going to follow him around back—make sure he isn't on his way to the cottage."
"William, be careful."
He gave her one last regretful look and said very gently, "Perhaps you ought to call me Mr. Chapman from now on."
He didn't say it to hurt her, she knew. But it hurt, just the same.
Pausing long enough to make sure Miss Foster entered the manor safely, William then ran around the corner. Brutus started barking in the distance, increasing William's alarm. He ran all the way to his parents' cottage and found his father already at the front door, lantern in hand, hollering at the dog.
Seeing him, Mac asked, "What is it, Will?"
"The man in the hooded cloak . . ." William panted to catch his breath. "I saw him coming this way."
His father's jaw clenched. "Here. You take the lantern. I'm getting a gun."
Thus armed, the two men searched the area, the cottage itself, and the outbuildings. They found the door to the old gamekeeper's lodge ajar but no evidence of anyone lurking about. Eventually, they ended their search and called it a night, Mac taking extra ammunition into the cottage with him, and double bolting the woodshed, where he kept his rifle and fowling pieces. He offered a gun to William as well, but he declined. However, then and there, William decided that the next time Miss Foster was out, he would pay a quiet visit to Pembrooke Park. Just to be safe.
Finally, father and son parted ways, though William doubted either of them would get much sleep that night.
The disturbance did have one benefit—it distracted William from his regret over Miss Foster. At least for a time. Before tonight, he had all but decided to bow out of Miss Foster's life. But after that kiss . . . heaven help him, it would take every ounce of strength he had to do so. Thy will be done. But please, God, have mercy on your besotted servant. . . .
# Chapter 28
The following day, Eliza Smith came to call, face pale, eyes damp and red. Without preamble, she began unfastening the E pin from her fichu. "I should never have accepted this."
"Did Duncan give it to you?" Abigail asked.
Eliza nodded. "He didn't see it as stealing. He thought I was entitled to some memento—some . . . recompense." The latch snagged on the muslin, and she worked to free it. "He believed me, you see, about who my father was. He said there were two pins and one wouldn't be missed. Robert Pembrooke must have had the matching pins made for his wife and daughter. I thought that's why Mamma had given me an E name. That perhaps it had been his suggestion, like Eleanor and baby Emma. His quiet way of acknowledging me privately if not publicly. But no. I was fooling myself." She yanked the pin free, taking several threads with it.
Her chin trembled. "But now . . . Mac's told me the truth. I didn't want to believe him, but I know him to be an honest man. It's just that . . . Auntie told me several times that my father lived in Pembrooke Park. That's where Mamma met him. And that much was true. But the man wasn't Robert Pembrooke, it was the butler. It's his mother's house we live in now. He signed it over to Mamma before he left town. Left us." Tears filled her eyes.
Abigail said gently, "I'm sorry you grew up without a father, Eliza. But it's your life now, to do with as you will."
Eliza shook her head. "I've struggled for so long to make something of myself, to have something to show for my supposed heritage . . . and for what?" She thrust the pin toward Abigail. "Here, take it."
Abigail accepted the pin. "But look at the good that's come of that striving," she soothed. "You've pushed yourself to succeed. You singlehandedly support yourself and your aunt. That is an accomplishment to feel proud of—one few women can boast of."
"Proud is the last thing I feel."
"Well then, I am proud of you. Proud to know you. You are quite a good writer, Miss E. P. Brooks, if I do say so myself."
Eliza looked up at her in wary surprise.
"You are someone, Eliza. Someone valuable—just as you are. God has blessed you with gifts, and talents, and abilities." Abigail squeezed her hand. "Make the most of them."
Mr. Chapman stopped by the house later that afternoon. Abigail's heart rose to see him at her door, but her happiness was quickly dampened by the look on his face.
"Good afternoon, Miss Foster." His dull eyes belied his fleeting smile.
"What happened last night?" she whispered. "Did you find that man?"
He shook his head. "No. No sign of him. But that's not why I'm here. You haven't seen my father, have you?"
"No. Not since yesterday. Why?"
He rubbed the back of his neck. "He has gone out to look for Mr. Morgan's hound again. Mamma expected him back by now." He sighed. "No doubt checking fences or something, to make the best use of his time while he's out."
"Sounds like your father. Never one to idle."
"Exactly." He gave a little chuckle, but it sounded flat to Abigail's ears.
"I'm sure he'll be back soon," Abigail assured him.
"No doubt you're right, and I shall feel a fool for worrying."
She smiled gently and said, "Our parson is very fond of quoting the verse 'Fear thou not; for I am with thee. . . .'"
"Sounds a wise man, your parson." He managed a grin, then pressed a hand to his midriff. "Just can't shake this feeling that something is wrong." Again he tried to joke it off. "That's what I get for eating my own cooking again today."
An hour later, after dinner with her family, Abigail walked over to the Chapman cottage to see if Mac had returned and found William saddling the carriage horse. Nearby, the dog kennel was empty and silent.
"No sign of him?"
He shook his head, all joking and laughter gone from his eyes. "No. And there's a storm brewing in the west. Not like him to be gone so long, not without sending word to Mamma. He knows she'll worry. The rest of us too."
"What can I do? Give me someplace to look."
He looked at her skeptically. "On foot?"
"I am a good walker. Or I could ask Miles to ride out with you."
He tossed back the stirrup leather and tightened the cinch. "No need to involve Mr. Pembrooke, Miss Foster. No offense. But perhaps you might walk through the village and ask at the inn and shops if anyone has seen him, or knows where he was headed."
"Of course I will. What about Hunts Hall? Would someone there know which direction he went?"
"I hope so. I plan to ride there first. And if they don't know, God help me."
A gust of wind jerked the bonnet from Abigail's head. Clutching at the ribbons, she frowned up at the churning grey sky. "Are you sure you should ride out in this alone?"
"If Andrew is willing, I'll take him along. But either way, I'm going. I think Papa found the dog somewhere in Black's Wood last time. But it's a huge area to cover, and I—"
"Wait!" Abigail grabbed his arm as the memory struck her. "That night I sat with you while Mac was out late searching. I think he said something about a ravine. . . ."
William stilled. "Snake Ravine?"
"Yes! That's it."
He grasped her by both shoulders and pressed a sound kiss to her cheek. "God bless you, Abigail."
He already has. . . . She cupped her cheek as though to capture a butterfly, and watched him canter away.
The rain began to fall. Of course it did. William tried not to grumble, but the cold rain matched his mood and dragged it lower. It would not make his search any easier. Was his father all right? William's spirit remained troubled. Was his own conscience smiting him for some reason? Or was the Holy Spirit actually nudging him to hurry?
In reply, he urged the horse into a gallop across the field. He had to stop at two gates to let the horse through—this old boy was no jumper. And neither was he.
He reached the southern tip of Black's Wood and followed the road through the scrubby forest, bordered on one side by a winding stream. As he rode farther, the stream narrowed and deepened into a ravine, the current now a mere trickle at the bottom of a steep rocky cut, the thirsty roots of pine and black oaks fingering through the soil of the bank, clawing for water.
William rode carefully along the rim, looking this way and that, but saw no sign of his father or his telltale tartan hat.
"Papa!" he called out. "Mac!" He paused to listen but heard nothing save the wind whistling and the pine trees swaying in reply. Overhead a hawk shrieked and circled. At least it wasn't a vulture.
Deep in the wood, the sky, already grey on the rainy evening, darkened even more, the faint daylight blocked now by the canopy of trees. As the wood grew more dense, riding on horseback became increasingly difficult.
He was about to dismount and continue on foot, when he saw his father's horse ahead, its rein tied to a branch. Pulse racing, William urged his horse faster.
Suddenly a dog barked, and his horse lurched in a violent sidestep. Caught unawares, William slid from the saddle, losing his toehold in the stirrups and his grip on the rain-slick reins. He fell, hit angled ground, and rolled, down, down, into the ravine.
Branches scratched his face, and his knee and shoulders banged against rock before he came to a stop against a mound of leaves and dirt, which thankfully stopped his fall before he reached the muddy stream. For a moment he lay there, stunned breathless, then began a mental inventory of his limbs. Nothing seemed broken. He reached out and laid his hand on the mound to push himself into a sitting position. His hand rested on something hard, a rock or stout branch. He glanced down and recoiled instantly, snatching his hand back—it had been resting on a skeletal bone.
Another bark startled him, and suddenly Brutus bounded over, wagging his tail and licking William's cheek. Meanwhile Toby, the Morgans' hound, sniffed the mound, then lay down and began gnawing on something. A leg bone, perhaps? William shuddered at the thought, relieved that most of the skeleton was covered by silt and leaves.
"Stop that, boy," he commanded and gingerly rose. His knee throbbed, as did his shoulder, but he thanked God he was otherwise unhurt.
"William . . . ?" came a reedy call. His father's voice.
"Papa!" William shouted, wheeling about. A muddy hand lifted from the underbrush on the other side of the water. William leapt across the narrow stream and bounded over, heart hammering.
Please let him be all right. . . .
His father lay on the ground, hat missing, coat askew and mud streaked. His hair, normally neatly combed back, fell in damp disarray around his pale face.
"Am I glad to see you, lad."
"What happened?" William crouched beside his father. "Where are you hurt?"
Mac raised himself on one elbow with a grimace. "Fell down the blasted ravine chasing after that hound. I sprained my ankle, I'm afraid. I might have hobbled home with a stick, if that's all it was, but I think I may have cracked a rib or two in the bargain."
"Thank God I found you."
"I do indeed." He looked beyond William at the sniffing dogs pawing at the mound across the ravine.
"Intended to come down and investigate what has that dog all worked up. I called and called but he wouldn't leave his find, whatever it is. Now Brutus has the scent as well. Some animal, I take it?"
William grimaced. "I'm afraid not. It's a human skeleton."
His father gaped at him. "Human?"
"Yes. I, um, met him when I fell."
"Sorry, lad. That can't have been pleasant. Help me over there, so I can have a look."
"But, Papa, we need to get you home. It's getting dark. Perhaps I should go straightaway for Mr. Brown."
A strange light sparked in his father's green eyes. "First let me see it."
"I'm afraid I'll hurt you worse, trying to move you."
"Come on now. I've lain here too long as it is. Damp through from lying on the ground."
"Oh, very well." William half pulled, half levered him to his feet and maneuvered his arm around his shoulder. His father bit his lip to stifle a cry, his fair complexion paling all the more.
"Lean on me, Papa."
Mac managed a terse nod, and William noticed the sweat breaking out on his forehead and his rigid countenance. The pain was evidently bad indeed. William tried to be gentle as he helped him across the stream, bearing as much of the man's weight as he could, apologizing when he stumbled over a rock.
"There." William nodded toward the mound of dirt. A bony hand protruded from one end and a leg bone from the other.
"Let me down here. I'll rest a minute," Mac said, panting.
William complied, and his father sat on a fallen log.
"No wonder the dog returned," William said. "Poor soul, whoever it is. We shall have to see that he gets a decent burial."
Mac solemnly nodded, but then his eyes narrowed and he leaned forward in his sitting position, focusing on something. Suddenly heedless of his pain or injuries, he lurched forward into a crouch and crawled the few feet between him and the skeleton.
"Look at this. . . ." Mac brushed away leaves and pine needles from the area around the hand. "What do you see?" he asked, his voice hushed in breathless anticipation, as though afraid to believe his eyes.
William crouched beside his father, looking to see what had captured his attention.
"Good heavens," he breathed.
For the skeletal hand held a rusted pistol.
"And this . . ." Mac picked up a stick and pried up the finger bones.
"Papa, I don't think you should touch it."
"Look. Do you not see what this is? Tell me I am not imagining it, that I am not crazy."
William looked at the finger bones. "It's a ring."
"Yes. By God, it is. And not just any ring. This is Robert Pembrooke's signet ring. Do you know what this means?"
Before William could fashion a reply, his father looked up at him, eyes glinting. "It means we've finally found Clive Pembrooke."
As darkness fell, William managed to get his father up on his horse for the slow, painful ride home. Brutus bounded alongside, with Toby tethered behind, less willing to leave the ravine.
Hours later, after Mr. Brown had treated and bound Mac's injuries and reassured the family, William sat alone at his father's bedside.
"You did it, lad. You found Clive Pembrooke, when no one else could. Can you imagine?" Mac slowly shook his head. "All these years, right there in Snake Ravine. While we worried he'd return any day."
William bit back the urge to say "Didn't I tell you so?" That after all this time, it was foolish to live in fear, to keep Leah living in its shadow. But he asked God to help him control his tongue. Now wasn't the time to gloat over being right.
"Ask your sister to join us. No, wait." His father chewed his lip, eyes troubled. "She may resent me. Forcing her to keep her identity secret all this time, while her house, her inheritance, her future prospects deteriorated more and more each day. But I did it for her good. Her safety."
William sighed. "I know you did, Papa. And Leah knows it too."
"To think—there all along. All the wasted years . . ."
"Will you tell Miles Pembrooke?"
Mac looked up, eyes pensive. "Perhaps it would be better coming from a clergyman. You might offer comfort, though I doubt the lad has any reason to mourn the news of his father's death."
"He was still his father, whatever else he might have been. Or done."
"Perhaps you're right. Mr. Brown would tell him, I am sure. Or the constable . . ."
"I shall do it, Papa." William rose. "And Leah?"
Mac sat up straighter in bed, wincing at the pain of his wrapped ribs. "I shan't shirk my duty. Ask her to come in."
A thought struck William. "Papa . . ."
"Yes?"
William hesitated to even mention it, not when his father was finally ready to give up his choke hold on Leah's life, to let her live at last, to be who she was meant to be. But still the thought niggled at him. He winced, then said, "If Clive Pembrooke has been dead all these years, then who did I see in the hooded green cloak?"
After sending Leah in to speak with their father, William walked over to Pembrooke Park, knowing Miss Foster would be awake, worried and wondering. And he was determined to fulfill his duty to Miles Pembrooke as kindly as he could.
Duncan sullenly showed him into the drawing room, where Miles and Miss Foster sat.
"I come bearing news," William began, hat in hand.
She said, "My family has gone up to bed. But Miles kindly waited up with me."
Miles rose. "But now I shall leave you—"
"No, stay, Mr. Pembrooke," William said. "The news affects you even more than it does Miss Foster."
Miles paused and waited where he was, but did not reclaim his seat.
"Your father—is he all right?" Miss Foster asked, face strained.
"Yes. He will be. He took a bad fall while walking along a ravine and sprained his ankle and bruised a few ribs. Painful, but it could have been far worse."
She expelled a ragged breath. "Thank God. I've been so worried."
William explained to Miles, "Thankfully Miss Foster remembered my father mention Snake Ravine, so I knew where to look and found him before he had suffered overlong from exposure.
"Mr. Brown assures us of a complete recovery, provided we keep him from taking a chill. Mother has him under a mountain of bedclothes and in woolens, as you can imagine. He was grumbling about all the fuss before I left, so I know he'll be well."
William looked at Abigail again, hoping his expression communicated the deep gratitude he felt but could not adequately express with Miles Pembrooke standing there.
Then he solemnly faced Miles. "In looking for my father, Mr. Pembrooke, I'm afraid I also found yours. . . . That is, his remains."
"What?" Miles roared.
William winced. Why could he not have thought of a more graceful way to say it? "At the bottom of the ravine. I hate to be indelicate, but it is clear he has been there for many years. Mr. Brown and the constable have removed the . . . uh, bones with the utmost care, I assure you."
"Then how did you identify him?" Miles asked, face contorted. "You must be mistaken. You cannot know it was him."
William held his challenging gaze. "He was wearing the Pembrooke signet ring."
Miles flopped down on the chair, face pale. He swallowed, then sputtered, "Can you tell how . . . how he . . . died?"
"The constable assumes he fell from his horse, much as I did today when looking for my father along that steep ravine."
"Oh, Mr. Chapman," Miss Foster exclaimed. "Are you all right?"
"I am. A little sore of body and pride, but otherwise perfectly well."
Miles protested, "How is it you escaped unhurt, but my father supposedly died from such a fall?"
William said gently, "Brown guesses he either broke his neck or hit his head on a rock when he fell from his horse."
"But my father was an excellent rider."
"Perhaps he was pursuing someone at breakneck speed and wasn't heedful of the danger," William said. "Especially if he rode after dark, or during a rainstorm, as I did today."
"How can you know that? It's only supposition. Perhaps someone stole that ring from my father and fell to his death while fleeing the crime."
"I suppose it's possible. But we found something else besides the ring."
"Oh?" Miles seemed to hold his breath.
William nodded. "A double-barrel flintlock pistol. My father recalls Clive Pembrooke having such a gun. He liked that he could take two shots before reloading, though yes, such guns are common enough."
Miles shook his head. "I want to see him with my own eyes. Or I shall never believe it."
"You and my father, sir, had that in common."
Miles rose. "Where have they taken him?"
"The undertaker's in Caldwell."
"I will go there directly."
William offered, "Shall I go with you, Mr. Pembrooke?"
Miles turned, hesitated, and then surprised them all by saying, "Yes. Please. If you would, Parson."
"I will stay here," Miss Foster said awkwardly. "And inform my family."
"No, of course you must not go," Miles said. "A lady like yourself. To see such a gruesome thing." He shuddered.
"Will you tell your sister yourself?" she asked. "Will she wish to see him as well?"
"I don't know. I doubt it. But then, I doubt she'll believe it either, otherwise."
"She is staying at Hunts Hall this week," Miss Foster said. "If you like, I shall—"
"Is she?" Miles interrupted, eyes narrowing. "I did not realize you two had become acquainted." He turned to William. "Might we stop there on the way? I'd like her to hear it from me."
"Of course," William agreed.
Miles said, "If you will give me a few minutes, I shall go and fetch my hat and gloves."
William nodded.
Miles bowed to Miss Foster, turned, and left the room.
When they were alone, William said to Abigail, "I am sorry to bring such a report to your door."
"You were right to do so. It was kind of you to tell Miles yourself and offer to accompany him on such an unpleasant errand."
He lowered his eyes a moment. "I cannot claim purely selfless motives in coming to tell him. I admit I wanted to see his reaction firsthand. To know whether he was grieved or relieved. And whether the news came as a surprise."
She cocked her head to one side. "He certainly seemed surprised. How could he have known?"
William shrugged. "If he killed his father or saw it done. Or if he was among those Clive Pembrooke was pursuing with those double barrels."
Miss Foster shook her head. "He couldn't have killed him. He was only a boy at the time. Besides, I thought you said the constable and Mr. Brown guess the death was caused by the fall."
"A guess is all it is. But something tells me Miles knows more about it than he lets on."
# Chapter 29
The next day Molly found Abigail in the library and told her a Mrs. Webb was waiting for her in the hall but refused to be shown into the drawing room.
"Thank you, Molly."
Abigail returned the quill to its holder and hurried out. In the hall, she found Harriet Webb standing, hands clasped, looking around and slowly shaking her head. "I told myself I would never set foot in this place again." She spread her arms, disbelief and self-deprecation in her expression. "Yet here I am. . . ."
"Come into the drawing room and sit down," Abigail said warmly.
"The morning room is far enough, if you don't mind."
"Of course not." Abigail led the way and opened the door for her. "How are you? Did Miles come to see you?"
"Yes. I still haven't slept."
"Did you go with him to . . . Caldwell?"
"I did. I didn't want to but knew I must . . . to finish the story. I thought of writing to you again. But instead, I decided I would come and see you in person."
"I'm glad you did. Here. Sit down. Shall I ring for tea?"
"No. Nothing for me." She pulled a grim smile. "Other than a listening ear."
Abigail sat across from her. "Gladly."
Harriet swallowed and lifted her eyes as though searching her memory. "About a week before we left here, Mother told us to quietly begin gathering our possessions—just a few special things that meant a great deal to us, and only three or four changes of clothing. Nothing obvious, that our father would notice until after we were gone. After Father and the gamekeeper left for a hunting trip, Mother met with the housekeeper. I don't know exactly what she said to her, but I gather she told her to let all the servants go. She was probably afraid what my father might do to anyone foolish enough to be in arm's reach when he returned and discovered us gone."
"She also told Mrs. Hayes to lock up the place after we left. To lock it up exactly as she found it—not to linger and risk being here when Father returned."
So, Abigail realized, that's why she had found the rooms left as though they had been abruptly abandoned.
Pain glittered in Harriet's eyes as she continued. "We were planning to leave the next day. Mac and the servants had left already. Only Mrs. Hayes remained to lock up after us. Father wasn't expected home for two days. We thought we had plenty of time. But we were wrong. He came home earlier than expected. . . ."
Harriet shivered and slowly shook her head. "The boys and I were already in our beds, though I knew I wouldn't sleep a wink. Mamma was still downstairs, packing a few last-minute things and drinking tea to calm her nerves. What happened next is something of a blur . . . a nightmare. The door slamming. My father shouting. My mother crying . . ."
Harriet bit her lip. "I heard a blow, heard Mamma shriek and fall, and knew he had struck her. My brother Harold shoved Miles into my room and told me to lock the door. I thought about hiding in the secret room but instead remained glued to the door, listening. Harold ran downstairs to try to protect Mamma, I knew. What a coward I felt standing there, doing nothing to help. I remember thinking Father would kill Mamma and Harold, and then come upstairs for Miles and me. I tried to pray but felt so hopeless, I couldn't. Finally, I tiptoed out of my room, telling Miles to wait inside. I had to see what was happening, even as I dreaded it. From the stair rail, I looked down and saw Harold and Father struggling in the hall below. Father had a stranglehold on Harold's neck, and Harold was turning red, suffocating . . . Mother lay sprawled on the floor nearby, pleading and sobbing. Harold began to turn blue. I wanted to do something—to at least shout at Father, tell him to stop—but I was frozen in terror. Useless.
"Suddenly a gunshot rent the air, and Father and Harold fell as one. I turned in stupefied shock and stared, unable to believe what I was seeing. There stood my little brother, a pistol in his outstretched hands—a weapon Father kept under his bed in case of intruders. The gun was not large, but it looked huge in Miles's hands. He was only twelve years old at the time. He stood there, pistol still leveled, smoking, until his arms began to shake, and then his whole body.
"Mother crawled over and rolled Father's body away to get to her son. Only then did we see the awful truth. Miles had meant to shoot our father. But the bullet had gone through him and into Harold."
"Oh no!" Abigail exclaimed. "Poor Miles!"
"Poor Miles, yes. He'd meant to save his brother. But poor Harold. The bullet lodged in his abdomen after passing through Father's side. Both were alive but were losing blood fast. Harold looked very bad indeed. Father was stunned out of his senses for a time, and Mamma sprang into action. She ran out to the stable to find the gamekeeper, who'd gone hunting with Father. She found him unsaddling the horses and asked him to ready the traveling coach. She returned to the house and commanded Miles and me to bring down our things, Harold's valise as well. We did so, terrified though we were.
"The gamekeeper came into the house. He took one look at Harold, then at my mother's bruised face, and offered to help us get away. I wasn't sure if we should trust him. He was in Father's employ, after all. But Mother must have felt we had little choice and gratefully accepted. The man helped her carry Harold out to the coach and even offered to drive. We had planned to hire horses and a postilion, but there was no time to make such arrangements. We left Father there, on the floor, not knowing if he would live or die. But Mother was determined to take Harold to a surgeon as soon as we were safely away."
Harriet slowly shook her head, eyes distant in memory. "The first few miles were sheer torture, poor Harold crying out at every jarring bump and turn." Her voice cracked. "But then he grew quiet, and that was even worse."
Tears filled Abigail's eyes to hear the pain in Harriet's voice, though the woman's eyes remained stoically dry.
"Suddenly the gamekeeper yelled down to us from the coachman's bench. 'A rider! Galloping fast!'"
Mother cried and braced Harold as the driver urged the horses to speed, cracking his whip and shouting. I reminded myself that Father's horse would be tired having just returned from a distant hunt. At least I hoped so. I remember praying then, as I'd failed to do before. "Please let us get away. Don't let him catch us."
"But the gamekeeper shouted that he was gaining on us. So much for prayer, I thought. I strained my ears and heard the beating of hooves. But then a minute later, I heard them no more. Perhaps in my fear, I only imagined him that close. Perhaps it had only been the rumble of thunder."
Abigail suggested, "Or perhaps God answered your prayer after all."
Harriet shrugged. "If so, then why didn't he answer my prayer to spare Harold?"
"I don't know. He . . . died in the carriage?"
Harriet nodded. "He breathed his last as we were crossing the bridge into Bristol. We stopped to bury him there. I was afraid it would give Father time to change horses and catch up with us. To kill us all. But the gamekeeper escorted Mother into a disreputable-looking public house, and she came out a quarter of an hour later—her hand no longer bearing a wedding ring but instead a gun.
"'Let him come,' she said grimly. And I knew she would not hesitate to use that gun if need be."
Harriet paused to gather her thoughts. "Miles sat silent and stone-faced throughout the entire journey. Mamma, in her grief, all but ignored him. Perhaps by her silence, her neglect in absolving Miles from guilt, he felt she held him responsible for his brother's death. I tried to tell him it wasn't his fault, but I don't think he really heard me. Later, when Miles's odd demeanor continued, Mamma did try to talk to him, but by then the impression was set, and it didn't seem to do any good." Harriet's brow furrowed, then she visibly shook off her troubled thoughts.
"The gamekeeper had a wife and child in Ham Green, not far from Caldwell—therefore he couldn't be gone for long. So we left him at a coaching inn with enough money to see him home. We hoped my father would not learn of his absence before he could safely rejoin his family. But if asked, he could honestly say we'd gone on without him and he didn't know where we were headed. Of course, I don't think Mamma knew either. Before he left, he taught Miles how to handle the reins, and Miles himself drove until we reached the next village and found a postilion to hire.
"We kept moving for days. Staying only one night in any one place, until the money Mamma had been squirreling away began to run low. Every day she read all the newspapers she could find, in coffee houses or from refuse bins, or buying them if she couldn't procure them another way. But we never saw a word in print about my father. We knew that if he died, the news would be reported. So we assumed he still lived, probably at Pembrooke Park.
"After some time had passed, Mamma finally wrote a letter to the gamekeeper using the name Thomas, asking for news of 'his employer' and directing him to write back in care of a Welsh inn.
"I still have his reply," Harriet said, tugging open her cinched reticule. "I thought about sending it to you earlier, but doubted it would make any sense to you." She extracted a letter from the bag. "Here."
The yellowed paper was addressed cryptically to H. J. Thomas, in care of the Bell, Newport, Wales.
To whom it may concern,
I am in receipt of your inquiry. My employment is, at present, of an uncertain nature.
The estate where I have been serving is currently closed and shuttered. Abandoned, by all appearances. I've had no word from my employer. Nor has anyone of my acquaintance seen or heard from any of the family. It is assumed that they have gone off together for some reason. The carriage is gone, as was my master's horse. However, the horse returned riderless a few days later, and I have taken the liberty of selling it in payment of wages owing. I trust the mistress would approve.
Even so, I judge it premature to consider a return to a previous situation at present. It might be wise for all parties to remain where they are for now.
I hope this satisfies your inquiry.
Sincerely,
JD, Ham Green, Caldwell
Abigail looked up. "It's written in a bit of a code, isn't it? In case the letter was intercepted?"
"Yes. The gamekeeper was more clever than I would have given him credit for. He knew what my father was capable of, after all, and had his wife and child to think of. And as my father's fate was uncertain, he wrote to tell us basically, to stay where we were."
Harriet sighed. "I confess I thought, even hoped, my father was dead. But Mamma . . ." She shook her head. "She was unwilling to risk it. Afraid he was biding his time somewhere, plotting his revenge. So we stayed in Wales, using the name Thomas, hoping to avoid being found. Only Miles kept the Pembrooke surname. But he left us to join the navy when he was still very young. We didn't see him for years."
"And what do you think now?" Abigail asked gently. "Do you believe it is your father Mr. Chapman found at the bottom of the ravine?"
Harriet nodded. "I do think it's him. The ring. The pistol. Where they found him . . . But remember, I have wanted to believe him dead for a long, long time."
"And Miles?"
Harriet hesitated. "He didn't react with the relief I expected. He was . . . strange about it. He had tears in his eyes, even as he muttered something quite disrespectful to the dead. . . . Not that I blame him, but still I found his reaction unsettling, I admit."
"Is it such a surprise that he should feel torn?" Abigail asked. "He was a boy who shot his father, and probably still wishes his father would forgive him, and love him, and value him. . . ." Abigail swallowed, realizing she was prattling on. "After all, he cannot know whether his shot ended his life, or the exhausted horse, or the ravine itself, or all of the above. . . ."
"I told Miles again and again he has no need to feel guilty."
"Saying the words and believing oneself forgiven are very different things." Abigail knew this from firsthand experience.
"Yes, you're right. That's why I've felt I needed to do something, to make restitution."
"And you have, but remember that God is merciful. You are not responsible for your father's wrongdoing."
She managed a humorless smile. "The Old Testament contradicts you, Miss Foster. Perhaps you ought to read the Book of Numbers. . . ."
"Numbers 14, perhaps?" Abigail said, naming one of the verses referenced in the miniature book.
"Ah! You found one of my clues! You cannot know how satisfying that is. Did you find the one about Cain and Abel as well?"
Abigail nodded.
"I wrote them down while we were packing to leave. My small attempt to hint at the truth—and how I felt about it." Harriet smiled, then sobered. "I have thought about what you told me, Miss Foster. And I will continue to consider your words."
Abigail thought for a moment. Hadn't Duncan mentioned something about the gamekeeper—that he had died? She asked, "Did you ever hear from the gamekeeper again?"
Harriet shook her head. "No. But I recently asked Mr. Morgan's man if he knew anything about the old Pembrooke gamekeeper. He told me the man died only last year but is survived by his wife and son."
A sense of foreboding prickling her skin, Abigail asked, "What was his name?"
For a moment, Harriet met her gaze, then said evenly, "James Duncan."
After Harriet left, Abigail went to find Duncan, looking in his usual haunts. He wasn't in his room or in the servants' hall. Entering the lamp room, she found it empty as well.
From the corner of her eye, she saw something and turned back. A hefty wad of faded green material lay bunched on a stool in the corner. Frowning, she stepped closer and picked up one edge of the moth-eaten, musty wool with two pincher fingers. She stilled, nerves prickling. Was this the hooded cloak she had seen someone lurking around in? She felt something hard through the material. Laying down the cloak, she patted until she found an inner pocket. Inside was an old copper lamp base.
Footsteps echoed in the passage and Abigail dropped her find and whirled, feeling illogically guilty.
In the threshold, Mrs. Walsh drew up short at the sight of her. "Oh. Hello, miss. Where's Duncan?"
"That's what I want to know."
Abigail asked Polly and Molly as well, but no one had seen him all day.
She went to find Miles instead, but he wasn't in his room either, nor in the library or drawing room. Finally she wandered out to the stables, and there found Miles sitting in the straw of an empty stall—sleeves rolled up, forearms on his knees, hair rumpled and specked with straw. He looked twelve years old all over again.
"Miles . . ." she said, relieved to find him but concerned at his state.
He looked up at her with haunted eyes, reminding her of Harriet's description of the little girl staring up at her window with haunted eyes. A girl whose father had also met a violent end.
"What are you doing out here all alone?" she asked gently. "I was worried about you."
"Were you? Dear Cousin Abigail . . ." He patted the straw beside him.
Pushing aside concerns for her skirt, she sat. "Harriet was just here."
"Did she tell you?" he asked softly, not meeting her eyes. "About . . . everything?"
"I think so, yes."
He nodded, appearing relieved.
He stared at the stall wall and said, "Harold was good. You wouldn't know it to look at him—foul-tempered and sullen most of the time. But he stood up to Father, put himself between him and Mother, or me, time and time again. And ended up black and blue for his trouble. And I . . . killed him." His chin trembled. "A good man. Barely more than a boy himself. And I killed him. Unforgivable."
"It wasn't your fault, Miles. You were trying to save him. You were only an innocent boy."
He shook his head. "Don't make me out to be innocent, Miss Foster. I know myself too well. I am no innocent. I meant to kill my father." His voice shook. "And I came here fully intending to take all I could . . . until I became acquainted with you and your kind father." Again he shook his head. "No. Don't try to make me an innocent."
Abigail's heart burned within her. "I couldn't, Miles. Only Christ can make an innocent out of a guilty man. That's what He did when He died a criminal's death on the cross." She took his hand in hers. "God loves you, Miles. Ask Him to forgive you, and He will, once and for all."
Miles stared blindly ahead and nodded vaguely. They sat in silence for several minutes, his hand in hers.
Then Miles pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his eyes and dabbed his nose. "Well, at least finding his remains should finally settle things with the courts."
Abigail hesitated. "Actually . . ."
He looked at her. "What?"
She bit her lip. It wasn't her secret to tell. And who knew how distraught Miles might become at the news that neither he nor his sister was rightful heir to Pembrooke Park and its treasures?
Instead she squeezed his hand once more. "I'm just glad you're all right."
Abigail and Leah walked through the grove between the Chapmans' cottage and Pembrooke Park. Abigail had told her what she learned from Harriet, and how both she and Miles had reacted to the news that their father's remains had been found. Leah for her part, reacted calmly to the news—relieved but in no hurry to proclaim her identity to the world. In fact, she had decided to leave the ruby necklace and most of the mementoes in the secret room for the time being—and leave everything else the way it was too.
"Let's give Harriet and Miles time to come to terms with their father's fate," she said, "before springing this on them too."
Abigail spied someone in the distance, through the trees, and drew up short. Duncan sat just inside the doorway of the old gamekeeper's lodge. "There's Duncan. I want to ask him about his father."
Leah held back, and whispered, "I don't want to face him right now. I know I've hurt him, but he refuses to stop trying to make me feel guilty for breaking things off."
Abigail looked at her in understanding. "You wait here, then."
Leah nodded, looking relieved.
Abigail walked toward the open lodge door. Duncan sat on a wooden chair, tipped back on two legs, idly smoking a cigar and sipping from a bottle of brandy—her father's brandy, she guessed.
"I didn't know anyone came here," she began casually, hoping to put him off his guard. "It's the old gamekeeper's lodge, is it not?"
He nodded. "I come here now and again to think."
"Ah." She said, "Your father was gamekeeper to Clive Pembrooke, I understand."
"That's right, and to his brother before him." He glanced around the dusty room with its low, beamed ceiling. "My father lived in this hovel as a young man, before he married my mother and had me."
"You grew up in Ham Green?"
"That's right," he said with pride. "In a far better house than this. My father made a good living as gamekeeper, and I was to have his place one day, but life, I've learnt, is not fair."
She said, "And I learnt recently of a great service your father performed for Mrs. Pembrooke and her children."
"Helping them get away from her husband, you mean? Not sure Mr. Pembrooke would have agreed with you."
"What did your father tell you about Clive Pembrooke?"
Duncan set down the bottle and crossed his arms over his chest. "Not much."
"Did he tell you about his determination to find a treasure he believed hidden in the house?"
He shrugged. "Everyone knows that."
"Is that why you're here? A little lifting and polishing your small price to pay for access to Pembrooke Park?"
"I'm the one getting paid." He gave her a cheeky grin.
"Getting paid to treasure hunt. Not bad work, if you can get it."
"There is more than one way to pursue treasure," he said philosophically, taking a puff on his cigar and watching the smoke rise. "If one door gets slammed in your face, you try another."
Ah, Abigail thought. He liked to talk in riddles like his gamekeeper father. She interpreted, "Like the door Mac Chapman slammed in your face?"
Anger glinted in his eyes. "Perhaps."
She asked, "Did you ever even admire Leah Chapman? Or were you courting Eliza all along?"
He lifted his chin. "Yes, I did admire her. But she wouldn't have me. Laid me low for weeks, I don't mind telling you. It's why Pa finally told me . . . who she really was. Thought it might take the sting out. I hadn't been rejected by Leah Chapman, humble steward's daughter. I'd been rejected by Eleanor Pembrooke, heiress of Pembrooke Park." He sneered. "But somehow, that did not make me feel better. In fact, it had the opposite effect. I admired her before I knew, but I don't see any shame in admitting it added to her appeal. In fact, I wanted her more than ever. And the life I could have had, had she not been blinded by prejudice. Mac influenced her, I know. She might have accepted me, if not for him. Always devilish proud of his Pembrooke connection, Mac was." He shook his head, a bitter twist to his lips. "So he sent me on my way. And the young parson took his side against me."
"And so you thought you'd pursue another Pembrooke 'connection' in Eliza—is that it?"
He pulled a face. "Eliza has nothing to do with it. Even if Robert Pembrooke was her father, an illegitimate chit gets nothing, unless he recognized her in his will. Which of course he didn't."
"So you decided to work here instead."
He shrugged. "Why not? I had planned to work here since boyhood, though as independent gamekeeper with my own lodgings, not a house-bound drudge. Those plans were spoiled when Pembrooke Park closed, so I've had to make the best of it. It's up to me to support my mother now my father's gone. He worked close with Clive Pembrooke, see. Told me how sure the man was that there was a sizeable treasure hidden away. My father half believed him. And so did I."
"And what have you found so far in your late-night searches? Beyond that pin you gave Eliza?"
"Now, don't look daggers at me like that," Duncan said. "It was only a trifle. And it's not as though you weren't conducting your own search, ey, miss? I'm not blind, ya know."
When she made no reply, he smirked and puffed again on his cigar.
"So, yes. I felt ill used by the Chapmans," he went on. "Robbed for the second time of what might have been my destiny. How it chafed—toting and carrying for your lot, when I might have been lord of the manor myself, with Eleanor as my bride. . . ."
His eyes grew fondly distant for a moment, then hardened once more. "So I figured, if I found the treasure in the course of my work, well, I had it coming, hadn't I? A little recompense for my heartache."
Leah appeared in the doorway beside her, and Duncan's chair tipped forward onto all four legs with a bang.
Leah said, "My father recommended you for this post as all the recompense he felt he ever owed you, even though he had concerns about your character and engaging you went against his better judgment. He felt bad for disappointing you where I'm concerned, but he also did so out of respect for your father, whom he greatly esteemed. He hoped in time, you would follow in his footsteps. Become the honorable, hardworking man Jim Duncan was."
Duncan's nostrils flared, but Leah continued resolutely, "I didn't reject you because you were beneath my station. I rejected you because you are lazy and meanspirited and greedy."
His lip curled. "And that's supposed to make me feel better?"
Leah shook her head. "No. It's the truth. It's supposed to make you want to become a better man."
After that, Abigail walked Leah home, leaving Duncan stewing in the lodge. She returned to Pembrooke Park and went belowstairs again, wanting to have the cloak in hand when she next confronted Duncan. She considered giving it to Mac instead and allow him to ask the questions after he recovered from his injuries. . . .
But when she reached the lamp room, the cloak was gone.
The following week, Abigail sat with her family in the drawing room. She and Louisa played a halfhearted game of draughts while their mother embroidered a cushion and their father read his mail.
Abruptly, Papa muttered an oath and tossed down the letter he had received from Uncle Vincent.
"Not again."
"Now what, my dear?" Concern etched lines across Mamma's pretty face.
"Your brother asks that I come to London again, as soon as possible. Something about another investment. So help me, if he tries to—"
"There, there, my dear. I am certain he's learnt his lesson."
"Are you? That makes one of us. I pray this isn't to do with more backlash from the last debacle. . . ."
Abigail's stomach knotted at the thought.
He rubbed an agitated hand over his face. "I suppose I must go. He says it's important."
"Why don't we all go?" Mamma said. "It would only be for a few days, would it not?"
"Yes, let's do!" Louisa interjected. "I long for London and to see all my friends."
Abigail spoke up. "I'll stay, if you don't mind. There is a lot going on, and I want to be here."
"A lot going on?" Louisa echoed. "Here? You have been in the rustics too long, Abigail."
Her parents soon agreed, however, realizing it would be rude to abandon their houseguest, and perhaps unwise to abandon the house.
That night, Louisa took her aside. "Are you certain you should stay here alone? With Miles, I mean?"
"Thank you for worrying about me, but I shall be fine," Abigail said. She hoped she would be, at any rate. After all, she had nothing he wanted—no treasure.
Two days later, Abigail again bid farewell to her parents and Louisa.
Not long after they had left, she saw Mac riding his horse across the bridge, Brutus bounding alongside. He was on his way home from Hunts Hall, she guessed, surprised he had returned to his duties so quickly after his recent injuries. She waved and hurried across the drive to him. "May I talk with you a moment," she asked.
He halted and, ignoring her protests, dismounted. "Aye. Do you mind if we walk while we do? I need to stretch my stiff legs."
"I don't mind at all," she said. "But are you sure you should be walking on that ankle?"
"Only a sprain," he insisted. "It's bound tight." He pulled down the stout branch tied to his saddle and used it for support as he walked toward his cottage, leading the horse by its reins.
She walked alongside. She wanted to talk to him about Duncan, but first she apprised him of her family's departure and her decision to remain behind while they visited London for a few days.
He sent her a glinting glance. "Perhaps it's time you learnt to shoot a gun, Miss Foster. I could teach you, if you like."
She was surprised by the offer, and what it implied.
They reached the clearing, and Abigail glanced up at the cottage. Beside her, Mac sucked in a sharp breath and tensed. Miles sat on the bench in the little front garden, rubbing a cloth over a gun. One of Mac's guns, she supposed, as she had seen Mac oiling his collection in the nearby woodshed on previous occasions.
Mac called, "I am not in the habit of finding strangers at my door, helping themselves to my guns."
Miles replied casually, "Then you ought not leave them lying about for strangers to find."
Was his manner as friendly as it outwardly appeared, Abigail wondered. Or subtly threatening? It was difficult to tell.
Releasing his horse, Mac pushed through the gate. "I was called away whilst cleaning it," he said defensively, "and left it in harmless pieces."
"So I guessed. But it was the work of a moment to put it back together. Not for a novice, perhaps. But the navy did teach me something useful, in the end." Miles tilted his head, observing Mac's crude cane with interest. "Apparently I've started a fashion here." He smirked. "Fine stick."
Mac squared his shoulders. "To what do I owe the honor of your visit to my humble cottage, Mr. Pembrooke?"
"That's right." Miles looked around. "This is my first visit. I have been remiss . . . Oh no, that's right—I've never been invited."
"Is this a social call, then?"
"If you like."
Irritation flashed over Mac's face. "What do you want, Miles?"
Miles looked at him closely and said, "Mac, I know Robert Pembrooke confided in you."
"That's right," Mac said, eyeing him warily. "He did. And proud I am of that fact. He was the best of men, Robert Pembrooke was."
"I shall have to take your word for it." Miles smiled thinly. "Though my father did best him in the end."
Mac frowned. "What are you getting at? If you dare make light of what your father did to him, to us all, I'll—"
Miles held up his palm in consolation. "Now, now. No need to get riled. Are you sure you're Scottish and not Irish, Red?"
Miles grinned as though he'd made a great joke, but Abigail saw Mac fist his hands.
"So if Robert Pembrooke confided so much in you, his trusted steward," Miles continued, "then you must know where it is." He added cheerfully, "You can tell me, now that we know my father is dead. He can't take anything else from your revered Robert Pembrooke. Can no longer get his bony hands on his house or his riches."
Mac looked at Miles as he might size up an unfamiliar dog. Friendly . . . or dangerous? "True," he allowed.
"So, where is it?" Miles urged. "Where is Robert Pembrooke's treasure?"
"Here I am," Leah said, stepping outside.
Miles turned to her in surprise. "Miss Chapman . . . ?"
"No."
His brows rose. "No?"
She shook her head. "My name is Eleanor Pembrooke, daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Pembrooke. Your first cousin."
Miles scowled. "I don't believe you. You're dead. That is . . . she's dead."
"No. I am very much alive. Mac hid me from your father. Protected me all these years."
His eyes narrowed. "Prove it."
"Very well."
"Leah . . ." Mac warned. "You don't have to do this."
"It's all right, Papa. I want to. It's time." She looked at Miles. "Give me one moment." She retreated into the house and came back out a minute later.
She said, "Here's the letter my father sent home with his valet after your father stabbed him. He wrote it with his last breath, his last bit of strength."
Miles snatched it from her.
As he read it, his eyes widened. "Yes! You see . . . It's right here! Give him the house, anything he wants, but hide my treasure. This proves it! My father was right all along—there is a treasure. Show me where it is."
When no one moved, Miles glared at Mac. "I know how you idealized the man, so I am certain you obeyed this command, as you did in everything."
"That's right. I did."
"So where is it? Where is Robert Pembrooke's treasure?"
Leah slowly shook her head. "There is no treasure. Not really. It was my father's pet name for me. He called me 'my treasure.'"
"I don't believe you." His eyes narrowed. "If you're Eleanor Pembrooke, then who's buried in her grave in the churchyard?"
"My baby sister, who died of the same fever that took my mother."
"But my father checked the parish records when he heard some rumor one of Robert's children was still alive."
Mac nodded. "The old rector agreed to change the records. To protect Eleanor."
Miles looked at Leah. "We did wonder when you came home from school. Harriet said you looked nothing like Mac or William, though a bit like Kate Chapman, perhaps. But we never guessed . . ."
Returning his gaze to her adoptive father, Miles laid the gun on his knee and clapped lazily. "Bravo, Mac. That is quite a feat. And what do you get out of it? Fifty percent of the treasure?"
"Nothing of the kind."
"You're wrong, Miles," Leah said. "It isn't like that."
"Does Harri know of your claim?"
"Not yet," Leah said. "Though I plan to tell her."
He rose, taking up his ebony stick. "Don't bother. I shall ride over to Hunts Hall right now and tell her myself. I want to see her face when she hears. She told me she had a feeling we'd find another heir—even wished the rumor was true and one of Robert Pembrooke's children still lived."
He looked at Abigail, eyes glinting. "Apparently all this time I've been wooing the wrong cousin. . . ."
Miles turned his smile on Leah like a weapon. "And you, Le—Eleanor. Do you know where the secret room is?"
"Leah . . ." Mac warned under his breath.
"I do," Leah acknowledged, chin high.
His eyes widened. "Where is it?"
"I shall be happy to show it to you . . . tomorrow. You want to go and speak to your sister first, and I . . . shall collect a few personal keepsakes."
"Nothing too valuable, I trust?" His eyes glittered suspiciously.
"As you will see, there is not a great deal of value in there. Mostly family papers. A few portraits. Things that will mean more to me than to you."
"If you say so."
Abigail thought he might demand to go in immediately, or to extract a promise that she remove no valuables until he'd had the chance to search the room. But he did not.
Instead he drew himself up, handing Mac his gun at last. "Well." He consulted his pocket watch. "I had better hurry over to Hunts Hall if I hope to beg a dinner invitation." He wagged his eyebrows comically, but after the tense scene, no one smiled.
Leah and Abigail waited until he had disappeared into the stables and ridden off before making haste to Pembrooke Park.
# Chapter 30
Leah wanted time to cull personal letters, her mother's portrait, and the ruby necklace before giving over the rest to Miles's frantic search. Abigail offered to help her, briefly wondering if there was still hope of claiming that reward, now that the jewels had been reunited with their rightful owner. Harriet had hinted as much, but somehow she doubted it.
They donned bibbed aprons and set to work inside the secret room—closing the door in case any servants entered the bedchamber. Leah gathered the family Bible, necklace, and a few other things and set them in a pile on one shelf. Then they carefully took down the portrait of Elizabeth Pembrooke from the back of the door and set it nearby. The nail the portrait had hung on clinked to the floor.
Abigail glanced up and was surprised to see the tiniest pinprick of light. "Look! It's left a hole." She stood on tiptoe and put her eye to it. "You can see into the bedchamber—a little."
But Leah's focus remained on the contents of the shelves in the hidden room.
"How can I help?" Abigail asked, joining her.
"I don't want to miss anything personal. Letters between my parents, or to me."
"I understand."
Each took a stack and began reading through the correspondence. Leah spread a lap rug on the cushions and reclined back on them with a handful of letters. Abigail could easily imagine little Ellie snug in her private hideaway, reading a favorite book.
Abigail sat less comfortably on the child-size chair.
"Are you sure you don't want to trade?" Leah offered.
"No, I'm fine."
"Good." Leah grinned. "I doubt my backside would fit in that chair nowadays."
They continued to read, the silence broken by the occasional rustle of paper or birdcall outside the window.
Abigail then heard something else, from the other side of the door.
Leah must have sensed her unnatural stillness, for she glanced up at her. "What?"
"Shh . . . Someone's out there. In my . . . our . . . bedchamber."
"Who?" Leah asked.
Abigail rose and started to crack open the door but then remembered the nail hole. She raised herself on tiptoe and looked through it once more. At first she didn't see anyone. She could see only a narrow shaft of the room—her side table and the edge of the bed. But then a figure walked past and opened the drawer of her side table.
"It's Miles," she whispered, perplexed. There hadn't been time for him to ride out to Hunts Hall and back, let alone to talk with Harriet. Had he come back hoping to catch them entering the secret room—catch them in the act of extracting all the "treasure"?
Miles sat on the edge of her bed and lifted a stack of letters onto his lap—the letters Harriet had sent her anonymously. Letters about the past, about coming to Pembrooke Park, about the girl with the haunted eyes, about her increasingly violent father, her troubled brother, and the secret room . . .
Oh no. How would Miles react? Should she bolt from the room and snatch them away? She certainly couldn't overpower the man if he refused to hand over the letters. And in so doing, she would reveal their hiding place. And Eleanor's treasures. And they weren't ready to do that yet. Besides, the letters were written by his own sister. They were his business, in some ways, more than hers.
Would Harriet wish Miles to read them? Probably not. But at the moment Abigail could think of no way to forestall him without revealing the secret room to him.
"What is he doing?" Leah whispered anxiously.
"Reading the letters you returned."
Leah's mouth formed a silent O as she, too, thought through the implications.
There was little in the letters Miles didn't already know or hadn't lived through himself. If he read through them all—and found the one in which Harriet mentioned finding the secret room at last, even then the letter did not specify where it was. There was no great risk to them. If anything, reading them would likely spur him to seek out his sister, as he'd claimed he'd do earlier. Abigail did not like the thought of driving a wedge between brother and sister. To cause problems for Harriet. But better for Harriet, than for vulnerable Leah . . .
As Abigail watched, Miles lifted the glass off her bedside lamp, set it aside, and then fed the corner of one of the letters into its flame. Abigail gasped. "He's burning one of them. . . ." She wondered which. Maybe the one in which Harriet had accused him of lighting a fire in the dolls' house and blaming their brother.
Miles carried the letter toward the hearth, then returned empty-handed to read another.
Abigail watched for a few moments longer, then stepped away from the peephole and tiptoed back to her chair.
"Let's see how long he stays," she whispered. They would wait him out and keep their secret to themselves for a little while longer.
She sat down and picked up another box to sort through. Then she lifted the family Bible onto her lap and looked at the names written in the front leaves, tracing her fingers down the long list of births and deaths until she reached Eleanor's birth date. Eight years later came the birth of Baby Emma. Her birth and death dates a poignantly brief span, followed by the death of her mother, Elizabeth. Abigail traced the entries but found no notice of Eleanor's fictional death. Nor of Robert Pembrooke's death, which had been all too real.
Leah glanced over Abigail's shoulder and said, "No wonder Mac hid the Bible in here." She picked up another letter from her stack and resumed her reading.
Abigail read for a while longer as well, and then leaned her head back against the wall. Her thoughts drifted to William as she idly glanced around the room. How strange to find herself there with Eleanor, Robert Pembrooke's "treasure." Her gaze rested on the rusted water pipes against the far wall. What was that verse William had quoted? "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt. . . ."
Sometime later, Abigail looked up and wondered what time it was. From the small window, she saw fading daylight in orangey twilight hues. She'd lost track of time as she'd read a series of love letters between Leah's great-grandparents—distant relatives of Abigail as well. Even so, she wouldn't have expected to see the sunset from this east-facing window.
She glanced at the cushions beside her and noticed Leah had fallen asleep, a letter lying on her chest. Abigail closed her eyes and listened for movement in the next room. Was Miles still there? She heard a low roar but couldn't identify the sound. She took a long breath and suddenly stilled. What was that smell? She sniffed the air again. Smoke.
She frowned. Was Miles still burning letters? Or had Polly come in to lay a fire for the evening? Abigail's neck ached from bending over letters for so long. She rose on stiff legs and tiptoed to the peephole. She didn't see Miles. But she couldn't see the whole room from her vantage point.
She laid her palm on the panel and gingerly opened it a slit. Suddenly heat penetrated her skin, and she snatched it back. The door was hot. What on earth . . . ? Then through the crack she saw . . . Her heart banged against her ribs. The dolls' house engulfed in flames. As she stared, disbelieving, fire seemed to leap from the carpet before the hearth to the nearby window curtain. Then orange-red flames whipped up her bed-curtains.
Panic gripped her.
Miles. Had the letters he'd burnt fallen to the floor by accident? Or had he set the fire intentionally—somehow knowing Leah was there and meaning to snuff out her life, to follow in his father's footsteps and do away with the rightful owner of Pembrooke Park? Please, God, no . . .
Nerves zinging to high alert, she whirled to her companion.
"Leah? Leah, wake up!"
Leah groggily turned her face away. Was the smoke affecting her already? Abigail crouched beside her and shook her shoulder. "Leah! Get up. The room is on fire."
Leah's eyes opened, and Abigail's words penetrated, chasing the dazed look away.
"Fire? Where?" Panicked, Leah lumbered to her feet, and Abigail gripped her arm to help steady her.
"In the bedchamber. We have to get out. Now."
She yanked the lap robe from the cushion and told Leah to cover her nose and mouth. Lifting her foot, she pushed open the hot door with her shoe. The room beyond was now nearly engulfed in flames. Their way to the door blocked—the carpet runner between them and the door burned like a pathway of hot coals, and fire licked its way hungrily up the doorframe.
Pulse pounding, Abigail whirled to look at the nearest window. Though high above the ground, they would likely survive the fall, far better than remaining trapped as they were.
She glanced back at the window inside the secret room, but it was so small, and let out only to the steep roof, not to safety. Hardly an appealing escape route, even if they could squeeze through. Was the whole house on fire? Or just her room?
Oh, God, help us! Abigail prayed.
Flames leapt toward the bedchamber window, consuming the frilly curtains and cutting off that final way of escape. The fire billowed and roared closer. Abigail leapt back, the fumes slamming the hidden door and barely missing her face. Abigail turned and met Leah's wide eyes.
"What now?" Leah breathed.
Abigail thought a moment, then prised open the small window, a welcome breeze rushing in to cool the stifling air within. If she yelled from it, would anyone hear her? What could they do about it, even if they heard her calls? Abigail's mind whirled, searching desperately for a way out. To hatch an escape plan.
To hatch . . . The word echoed in her mind, and she pictured the old building plans for the water tower. She and Leah now stood in one level of that tower, finished into a storeroom at some later date after the water tower had been abandoned. She recalled the rough sketch of stairs. Her assumption that the sketch represented a possible set of servants' stairs, never completed. But what if they were never meant to be permanent stairs. While workmen were building the tower they had likely used a series of ladders to ascend and descend from one level to the next. Might they still be there?
Clutching the desperate thread of hope, Abigail threw back one end of the square carpet covering the floor.
"What are you doing?" Leah asked.
Abigail studied the wood. No obvious hole or hatch cover—but wait . . . there. A seam. She fell to her knees and tried to tug it up, but even her small fingers were too big.
"Find something I can prise this up with."
Leah searched the room, then snatched up the nail that had hung the portrait. "Try this."
Abigail slid it into the seam and tried to prise up the hatch, if hatch it was. Nothing. She came at it along the opposite seam, but it didn't give. "Find something longer, to use as a lever."
From the bedchamber beyond came the sound of breaking glass—windows shattering from the heat. Would the sound draw help in time? Or would it allow in wind that would fuel the fire into a frenzy?
William saw Miles Pembrooke leaving the manor, walking in the direction of his family's cottage. Unease instantly nipped at him.
"Mr. Pembrooke!" He strode over to meet the man.
"Ah, Mr. Chapman. Perhaps you know. I have been looking for Miss Foster and your sister without success. The servants tell me they saw the two ladies enter the manor an hour ago but haven't seen them since. And I can't find them anywhere. Have you seen them?"
"No," William answered in mild surprise, having seen the girls enter the house from his own window.
Suddenly the front door banged open and Polly ran out, waving her arms. "Fire! The house is on fire!"
"Where?" William called, hoping for a simple kitchen fire.
"Upstairs! I saw it from the landing!"
William's heart lurched. Panic gripped him and in turn he gripped Miles's arm. "Did you check Miss Foster's room?"
"I did, yes. But no one was there."
"But what about . . . the secret room?"
Miles stared at him. "How could I check that, when I don't know where it is?"
William's stomach clenched. Were Leah and Abigail even aware of the fire? He said, "I wager that's where they are."
Miles paled. "Is the secret room anywhere near Miss Foster's bedchamber?"
"Yes—opens right into it."
"God, no . . . The room was empty. I made sure, before I . . ."
"Before you . . . what? Good lord, Miles. What did you do?"
Abigail forced that nail, then a tin lid, then any other object she could find into that seam until her fingernails had broken to the quick and her hands bled. Desperate, she pounded the boards with her fists and let out a frustrated cry.
Leah grabbed one bloodied hand, staying her futile beating. Abigail's eyes snapped to hers and saw the calm, tear-filled eyes of her friend, the brave resignation as she slowly shook her head.
"It's no good, Abigail."
"We can't give up."
"We must be ready to meet our Maker. I am not afraid to die—if it is our time to go."
"It's not our time." Abigail beat the boards with her free hand once more.
Leah grasped that hand as well. "I pray not. But if it is, we need to be ready."
For a moment, Abigail paused in her frenetic efforts and held Leah's clear, resolute gaze. Then she closed her eyes and prayed, "Lord, please save us. Please pluck us from the fire or protect us from the fiery furnace. I know you can do anything. But if you will otherwise, please let us wake up with you in heaven. I know I don't deserve it. But in your Son's name, I ask you to save us both. Here on earth, if at all possible. And if not, for eternity. We—"
A pounding interrupted her prayer, hammering the air and shaking the floor beneath them. Was the tower about to collapse? Would they be buried alive before smoke or fire did them in? Abigail braced herself and squeezed Leah's hand. Any fate seemed better than that wicked scorching fire.
Over the roar of the encroaching flames, Abigail heard a muffled voice. Was she imagining it?
Leah said, "Shh. Listen."
Abigail, already on her hands and knees, bent forward and laid her ear on the floor.
"Abigail! Leah!" she heard faintly.
"We're here!" she shouted, mouth close to the wood. "We're here!"
"Back away from the hatch!" came the shout—William's voice. Tense and harsh and, oh, so welcome.
"All right. We're clear!" Abigail called.
Bang, came the first blow. Then another. A sledgehammer? An axe?
Crack! A flash of silvery metal sliced through one of the planks. Then again. Two bent nails went pinging across the floor and landed near their feet.
Behind them, the door of the secret room wavered, then burst into flames, and a wave of heat rushed into the small room.
"William, hurry!" Leah cried. "The fire is getting closer!"
More grunts and blows, more splintered wood. The cadence changed, as did the pace. Two men wielding tools at once, Abigail guessed.
She dared another glance over her shoulder. The fire had entered the secret room like an evil intruder. It lapped at the shelves and seared the walls, moving toward Elizabeth Pembrooke's portrait among Leah's gathered things.
Leah stared at it, eyes filling with tears, but she made no protest.
Abigail's back felt so hot she feared her frock would burst into flames. The portrait was too big to carry, but she swiped up the ruby necklace and tucked it into her apron pocket. Then she grasped Leah's hand and pulled her to the far wall, on the other side of the hatch. As far as they could go.
With a final crack, the hatch whined from its hinges and fell downward. Below someone grunted and called a warning, followed by the clatter of falling planks. Through the ragged hole, Abigail saw the sweaty, sooty, anxious faces of William and Mac Chapman.
"Leah!" Mac called. "Are you all right?"
Leah glanced fearfully at the flames whipping toward them. "The fire is almost upon us!"
"Come down." William braced the rickety ladder-steps from the level below. "Hurry."
"But, Abigail . . ."
"I'm right behind you," Abigail insisted. "Go!"
Leah sat on the floor and hung down her legs. William reached up and guided her feet to the top rungs while Mac steadied the ladder.
Abigail glanced behind her. The fire consumed a bandbox of family papers and began licking the frame of Mrs. Pembrooke's portrait.
Suddenly a figure appeared through the flames—a figure in a hooded cloak. Was this the grim reaper come for her? Dear Jesus, no! The coat smoked, sputtered, and sparked as its wearer ran through the inferno and launched itself through the burning door as though through a circus ring of fire. The figure dove toward her, arms outstretched. Abigail shrieked in horror and jumped back. The figure landed face-first on the floor of the secret room with a shuddering thud. The cloak was dripping wet—doused against the flames.
The head lifted and the hood fell back, revealing a black-streaked face, awful, yet familiar.
"Miles?"
"Abigail!" he cried. "I never meant to . . . I didn't know you were in here. Honest, I didn't!"
"Miles, we have to get out now!"
He looked up, near his outstretched hands. His focus caught on the ruby necklace spilling from her pocket onto the floor like a red snake.
"I came to rescue you . . ." he said, then his eyes landed on the sparkling rubies once more.
The flames lashed closer and closer, the heat nearly overwhelming her senses. But even before the flames reached her, the smoke did. Abigail coughed and placed her handkerchief over her nose and mouth.
"Abigail, hurry!" William called from below. "Cover your mouth. Stay low!"
Inside the secret room, Miles began digging through the boxes.
"Miles, come on! Let's go—it's not worth your life." She stretched out her hand to him, beseeching him. "Come with me, Miles. Now."
He looked briefly at her hand, but then he reached for the rubies instead.
The fire flared, catching his cloak on fire and scalding her ankle. Her petticoat hem burst into flames.
"William!" she cried, whirling back to the hatch.
He stood at the base of the ladder, face fierce and set.
"Jump, Abigail. Quick."
She dropped to her haunches at the edge of the hatch, smacking her petticoat with her hand, hoping to smother the fire before her whole dress went up in flames and her with it.
She propped her hand on the floor to brace herself, only to snatch back her burning hand, and half-fell half-dropped onto the ladder. She flailed for a handhold as the rotted rungs collapsed and she fell onto William. The force of the collision drove him backward, to the edge of the open hatch below, but he caught himself before momentum sent them both tumbling down it.
She looked up through the hatch above in time to see Elizabeth Pembrooke begin to burn and curl and melt.
"I'll go up for it," Mac said, starting to shimmy back up the ladder brace.
Leah caught his arm. "Papa, don't! I'd rather have you alive than an oil painting of someone I barely remember."
Abigail sucked in a breath and cried, "Miles is up there!"
William gaped in shock. "No . . ."
Abigail grabbed the axe and raised it high—slamming it against the old water pipe. Seeing her intention, William took the axe from her and sliced into the pipe, knocking off the valve with one blow. Water burst forth like a high-pressure fountain, murky, smelly, and wonderful. The rank water flooded the floor and cascaded through the hatch below. It wouldn't save the secret room, but it might buy them time to escape.
The floor above wavered and orange-red flames leeched through the wood.
Over the roar, Mac called, "We've got to get out of here before the whole place goes."
Abigail frantically searched the hatch opening once more, willing Miles to appear there. "Miles!" she cried.
Nothing.
William grabbed the ladder brace. "I'll go."
The floor above them began to collapse, peeling away like bark.
Mac grabbed his arm tight. "No, son. It's too late."
William winced and breathed, "God have mercy on his soul. . . ."
They escaped through the next hatch, just as the burning floor above crashed down over it.
Rung by rung, they descended each angled ladder of the tower until they reached the bottom. In the dim cellar-like space stood a door and a low archway. From a distance came the faint sound of the church bell ringing.
Mac reached for the door. "Let's go."
"No," William said sharply. "That leads into the old wine cellar. We want to get out of the house, not back into it. This way." He pointed to the low half circle that looked like the arched entrance to a cave.
"What is it?" Leah asked.
"A drain tunnel. Watch your heads."
Ducking low, and trying not to scrape their heads on spider webs, bat dung, and who knew what else, they plodded, bent over, through the murky tunnel. After what seemed like hundreds of yards, though probably far less, Abigail glanced up and saw a crescent of light ahead. William explained in choppy breaths that this was where the excess rainwater from the cistern once flowed out into the garden and fishpond.
They emerged from the tunnel in a tiled drainage area at the back of the garden behind the house.
Mac embraced Leah, stroking her hair and murmuring over and over again, "It's all right, lass. You're safe now."
Leah panted, "I never even knew there was a hatch. I suppose Father covered it to keep me from falling when I was little."
"No doubt you're right," Mac said. "He only wanted to protect you. And so did I. . . ."
Abigail glanced up at William. Saw that he was looking not at his sister but at her, with concern and something else glimmering in his eyes.
"Thank God you're safe." He wrapped his arms around her and held her close. Abigail closed her eyes and leaned into his solid chest. He murmured against her hair, "I don't know what I would have done had anything happened to you and Leah. I treasure you both."
From the other side of the manor, the calls of neighbors and the clank of buckets and water cans reached them. The sounds of people nearing made Abigail aware that she stood in William Chapman's embrace. He seemed to realize it at the same moment and pulled back.
His eyes searched her face. "Are you certain you're all right?"
"Yes. I am well, thanks to you."
He managed a sad, weary smile. "Did I not tell you, back when you suspected me of being a treasure hunter, that had I really wanted to get inside Pembrooke Park, I could have done so at any time?"
She nodded and gestured toward the tunnel. "But . . . how did you know?"
"I grew up not one hundred yards from this spot. I know every acre of this estate and the woods between it and our cottage."
"And I am very glad of it." Her smile faltered. "Is that how you so quickly disappeared from the secret room when Miles interrupted us?" When he nodded she asked, "But who nailed the hatch shut?"
William pulled a regretful face. "I did. Last week. I didn't want any man in a hooded cloak slipping into your room as easily as I slipped out of it. Forgive me. I never dreamed—"
"Of course you didn't. It's not your fault, William. You didn't start the fire. . . ."
Abigail looked back at the house, cringing at the billowing black smoke and angry flames lashing out her bedchamber window. "Poor Miles . . ."
"Yes." William grimaced and slowly shook his head.
As the shock began to fade, her hand began to throb. She held it up to look at it, murmuring, "I've burnt my hand."
He took it gently in his, both of them studying the red puckered flesh, mottled white. Concern quickly filled his eyes. "We had better get you to Mr. Brown directly."
As they walked toward the front of the house, a traveling chaise and horses rumbled through the gate, and William saw with mixed emotions that the vehicle conveyed his friend Andrew Morgan, his sister Rebekah, as well as Mr. Scott. He didn't recognize the chaise but had heard Mr. Scott had been given the use of his employer's fine carriage for his regular trips from London to Hunts Hall.
"Word reached us about the fire," Andrew called. "We've come to help."
"And to make sure you were all right," Rebekah added, eyes wide in concern as she laid a hand on William's sleeve.
Mr. Scott hurried to Abigail's side, embraced her tightly, and inspected her hand.
William stepped forward. "I was just about to take her to the local surgeon."
Mr. Scott shook his head, an angry twist to his mouth. "No, I will. And then I'll take her to our family physician in London."
He led her to the carriage. There she paused in its doorway, looking over her shoulder at William, her expression weary and regretful and resigned. He didn't blame her. After all, nothing had changed. He was in no position to protest her departure. No position to make her an offer, to ask for her hand, her poor burnt hand. . . .
She was far better off with Mr. Scott, he told himself, even as the thought lanced his soul. From the corner of his eye, he felt his father's and sister's concerned looks but dared not meet them.
Through the gate came a gig and wagons overflowing with servants and tenants from Hunts Hall, arriving to help.
William thanked Andrew and joined the line. But a part of his heart left in a fine carriage, as it carried away the woman he loved.
Thunder rumbled and rain began to fall, and around him friends and neighbors thanked God. The rain would help their efforts to fight the fire. The rain would cool the hot, weary workers of the fire brigade and wash away sweat and even tears as it did so.
# Chapter 31
A month later, Abigail stood in the window of Aunt Bess's townhouse, looking out at the damp cobblestones below, busy with passing carriages, carts, and well-dressed pedestrians. How strange to be back in London, she reflected, when she had planned to remain in Pembrooke Park for a twelvemonth at least. At one time Abigail had privately hoped to renew the lease indefinitely, assuming Mr. Arbeau and Harriet Pembrooke were in agreement, for she had grown fond of the house and countryside, the village and her neighbors. Especially a certain neighbor and his family. Of course, that was before she'd learned Leah's true identity, and before the fire.
The searchers had found Miles Pembrooke's body among the rubble of the ruined tower, rubies still clutched in his hand—reminiscent of the way his father had been found, a pistol clutched in his. Harriet had Miles buried in the Bristol churchyard, next to their beloved mother and brother. For though damaged by the experiences of his childhood, he was her brother, and she had loved him. Abigail had as well.
The fire destroyed most of the west wing, rendering Pembrooke Park even less habitable than when she and her father had first arrived. So Abigail had little choice but to remain in London with her family, sharing the cramped quarters and uneasy hospitality of Aunt Bess's townhouse.
But her family's unexpected change in situation had not ended there. To the surprise of everyone, Uncle Vincent's last remaining investment had actually been a great success, paying out a good deal of money. And with it, he repaid his brother-in-law a large portion of what he had lost in the failed banking venture. Their former home was not for sale, which wasn't surprising, having only recently been purchased. And Abigail, her practical nature reasserting itself, managed to convince her father not to buy or let a house in one of the most elite and expensive squares as before, but a fashionable, though more modest home in Cavendish Square. They would move in next week.
They had seen little of Gilbert since their return, as he'd been assigned to a new project in Greenwich. His sister, Susan Lloyd, however, invited Abigail over for tea, wanting to hear all about her experiences in Easton and about the fire. Her old friend's astute, well-informed questions demonstrated a surprising familiarity with the area and the players involved. Abigail grew suspicious. She asked Susan how she knew so much about it, and Susan confessed the writer from Caldwell, E. P. Brooks, had sent a story based on what she claimed were true events. Could Abigail corroborate the account before they printed it? Unfortunately, Abigail could.
Abigail's mother and sister had decided Miles was too distant a relation to publicly mourn. But Abigail and her father dressed in mourning for several weeks. She was glad she was wearing black when Harriet paid a call soon after she returned to London, dressed in full mourning for her brother. She delivered the long-promised reward in person, pressing Abigail to accept it, when she would have refused. Then Harriet asked Abigail to tell her everything that had happened the day of the fire—insisting she not spare her feelings.
Abigail swallowed and told Harriet about Miles reading the letters, seeing him carry the letter he'd burnt toward the hearth, and being convinced the fire had been accidental, emphasizing his heroic return when William told him she and Leah were likely trapped in the house, his quick thinking in wearing the soaked hooded cloak to reach them. His words, "I didn't know you were in here. Honest I didn't! I came to rescue you. . . ."
"He tried to rescue us, Harriet," Abigail repeated earnestly. "He risked his own life to reach us. He made mistakes, but I honestly believe he intended us no harm. He tried to save us, but in the end he could not. I am so sorry we were not able to get him out of there with us."
Harriet slowly nodded, her mouth trembling. "You have no doubt portrayed my brother in a more heroic light than he deserved." Tears shone in her eyes at last. "But I thank you for it, just the same."
Once the Fosters moved into their new house, their old neighbors, the Scotts, decided to host a party to celebrate their return to London and their return to fortune. Thrilled at the prospect, Louisa pored over fashion prints in search of a new gown and hairstyle and went out with Mamma to visit their favorite modiste. Everyone hoped Gilbert would return from Greenwich in time for the party.
Abigail soon found herself relegated to the task of organizing their new home—interviewing and hiring staff, and meeting with the new housekeeper and cook to review menus and approve orders for the larder, linens, etc. Abigail had offered Mrs. Walsh, Polly, and Molly positions with them in London, but all decided to remain in Easton, with its family ties and the hope of future employment if and when Pembrooke Park was repaired. She had no idea of Duncan's plans, nor did she care.
Mamma and Louisa happened to meet Gilbert's mother and sister while they were out, and came home with the news that Andrew Morgan was in town and would join their party. Mamma said, "An invitation has also been extended to the rector—I gather Mr. Morgan is acquainted with him from Caldwell. We met him one Sunday, did we not?"
"Yes, briefly." Abigail wondered if Mr. Morris had come to Town with his nephew or on his own. She was relieved to hear his health had improved enough to allow him to travel. Or perhaps he came to Town seeking a second opinion from a London physician.
The day of the party arrived, and Louisa spent nearly the entire afternoon bathing and getting ready. Abigail had a new dress for the occasion as well. To her credit, Mamma had insisted both girls should have new gowns.
But late that afternoon Abigail was called into the housekeeper's parlor to witness a disciplinary lecture between the older woman and a young maid caught flirting with a footman from next door.
"Shall I give her the sack, miss?" the housekeeper asked.
After everything Abigail had experienced in Pembrooke Park, with Miles and even disrespectful Duncan, this seemed to her a petty offense, but she hesitated to undermine their new housekeeper—especially in front of one of the woman's subordinates. She said with gentle respect, "I . . . don't think that's necessary, Mrs. Wilkins. Not on her first infraction. We all make mistakes, don't we? Especially when we are in a new situation."
"That's it, miss," the girl said eagerly, reminding her of Molly. "I didn't know what I was doin' was so wrong. Honest I didn't."
Which led the housekeeper to coolly request that Miss Foster write all the house rules and post them in the servants' hall as soon as may be, to avoid future excuses of ignorance.
Abigail forced a smile and said she would get to it straightaway.
By the time she was able to extricate herself from the goings-on belowstairs, it was well past six. Her mother and father were already dressed, talking companionably in the vestibule while they awaited their daughters and the hired carriage.
Abigail entered the hall in time to see Louisa descend the stairs, looking stunning as usual in a gown of peach satin. Mamma stopped talking, watching with maternal pride as her beautiful daughter came down the stairs.
"I'm sorry the jeweler wasn't able to repair the necklace in time, my dear."
Louisa lifted her chin. "So am I."
"But the coral looks very well on you, all the same," Mamma soothed.
Abigail had originally thought the emerald necklace would look well with her own new gown but had given way when Louisa begged to wear it, trying on the gems with her new gown and enthusing over how elegant she looked, and somehow breaking the clasp in the bargain.
"The emeralds would have looked well on Abigail too," her father put in. And Abigail was touched by his loyalty.
Her mother noticed her then.
"Abigail! You're not even dressed."
"Sorry. Mrs. Wilkins needed me. Some crisis belowstairs."
"I do hope everything is all right," her father said.
"Oh yes. Nothing to worry about. But I am sorry to hold you up."
"We shall go and then send the carriage back for you," he suggested. "You can come over when you're ready, all right?"
"It won't take Abigail long to slip into a dress and repin her hair," Louisa said. "But . . . I suppose it would be rude if we were all late. You don't mind, Abigail, do you?"
Abigail hesitated, feeling herself snapping back into the old pattern like a missing mosaic tile from the floor. "No, of course not. You three go ahead."
"Thank you, Abigail." Her mother's smile shone with genuine gratitude.
You see, Abigail told herself, you are appreciated. Useful . . . in your way. That was something.
As her family left, Abigail took herself upstairs, passing Mary, the upper housemaid who usually helped her dress and pinned her hair.
"I was just going down to my supper, miss," she said. "But if you want me to do your hair, I can wait."
Abigail hesitated, torn. She forced a smile and said, "That's all right. You go on. Don't miss your supper on my account, I can repin my own hair. No need for anything special."
"Thank you, miss." The girl smiled, bobbed a little curtsy, and hurried down the stairs.
Abigail could arrange her own hair, but she could not get into her new gown on her own. Not with all the fastenings and seed-pearl buttons at the back of the bodice. She sighed. Perhaps she would just make do with her old ivory dress. She might even return the new gown, as she'd never worn it. Madame LeClair would have no trouble selling the beautiful thing, and they could put the credit toward Louisa's large balance.
Abigail went to her closet and regarded the ivory dress. Nothing special. Nothing wrong with it either.
Leaving the gown where it was, Abigail walked to her dressing stool and sat down heavily upon it. Maybe she would simply claim fatigue and stay home. She was tired from all the tasks and supervision of the last few weeks. No one would blame her, and her family would make her excuses. . . .
Then words William Chapman had said whispered on the edges of her mind. "You are every bit as beautiful as your sister. More so, to me. I treasure you. . . ."
Oh, William . . . she thought fondly. How she missed him. Even if he exaggerated her charms. She had thought he might write to her, but he had apparently seen her move to London as an opportunity for a clean break. Leah had written a few times—at least their friendship would continue, even if her relationship with William would not. After all, nothing had changed between them.
Marcel, her mother's lady's maid, scratched at the door and entered, her often stern face bright and a parcel in her hands. "Mademoiselle! Zee jeweler has returned your necklace just in time! You must wear eet tonight!"
Abigail shook her head. "Louisa wanted to wear it, but . . . In any case, I'm thinking of staying home."
"No, mademoiselle. You should go."
"Oh. I don't know."
Abigail opened the hinged case and looked at the sparkling emeralds within, winking at her.
"I treasure you. . . ."
Suddenly, Abigail stood. "You know what, Marcel. I will go. But I must ask you to help me. I know I have refused in the past, but Mary has gone to her dinner, and I shall make it worth your while."
"No, no, mademoiselle. No need. It will be my pleasure, I promise you. How long I have wished to get my hands on zat beautiful hair of yours! Sit, sit!"
Dressed in uncomfortable evening clothes of his least favorite color, black, William Chapman surveyed the people mingling in the drawing room with sinking disappointment. Miss Foster was not among them. Perhaps he ought not to have come with Andrew. Maybe he could still bow out.
Charles Foster saw him from across the room, and a sincere smile lit the older man's handsome face as he made his way over. "Mr. Chapman! What a pleasure to see you again. I didn't realize you were in Town."
"Yes. Staying with Mr. Morgan for a few days. The Scotts were kind enough to extend their invitation to me as well."
"We heard Mr. Morris was coming, but not you."
"Mr. Morris? No, sir, he is not—"
Mr. Foster interrupted, brow puckered. "But I am quite certain Mrs. Scott mentioned the rector of our former parish would be attending. . . ."
"Ah, yes. You see, I have recently been granted the living. Mr. Morris, you may not have heard, passed on a fortnight ago."
"Oh, no. I had not heard. I'm sorry. But I thought his nephew was angling for the living."
"He was. But the owner of Pembrooke Park—in whose benefice the living lies—grants it to the man of her choosing. And Eleanor Pembrooke chose me." He gave a self-deprecating grin. "I suppose you think it terribly unfair."
"Not at all—you mistake me. I think your sister an excellent woman and an excellent judge of character. She chose wisely and well. Allow me to offer my sincerest and heartiest congratulations."
Charles Foster offered his hand, and William shook it.
"Thank you, sir. I plan to hire young Mr. Morris as my curate, to help conduct services in outlying churches of the parish and in visiting the sick."
"Well again, congratulations. The rest of my family will be happy to hear the news as well. Though I am afraid Abigail may not be joining us."
"Oh?" William hoped his disappointment wasn't too obvious, especially with Gilbert Scott in attendance. Had she entered into an understanding with Mr. Scott during the intervening weeks? He'd not had leave to write to her but thought she would have mentioned it in one of her letters to his sister. He prayed he wasn't too late.
"Yes, I'm afraid we've kept her quite busy arranging the housekeeping and things for the new place. Quite worn off her feet. Louisa wagers she will be too tired to come."
"I am sorry to hear it. I had hoped to see her before I left Town." There was something he very much wished to say to her.
Mr. Foster excused himself to go and find his wife.
A few moments later Louisa Foster and Gilbert Scott approached.
"Mr. Chapman!" Louisa beamed. "What a pleasant surprise to see you here."
William bowed. "Miss Louisa. Mr. Scott."
"I've been talking to Andrew Morgan and hear congratulations are in order," Gilbert said.
"Thank you, yes. I am very grateful for the opportunity."
Louisa said, "Too bad Abigail isn't here—she will be so sorry to have missed you."
"Yes, I am sorry to have missed her as well." More sorry than you know.
The door opened behind them, and a butler announced in an affected voice, "Miss Foster."
Heart leaping, William turned. The smile instantly lifting his mouth fell away. He blinked and stared again, his heart beating erratically. Here she was, Miss Abigail Foster. The girl of his fondest memories and fonder dreams, yet somehow altered. Head high, posture erect as she entered the room, her gaze slowly sweeping the assembled company. She met the varyingly pleased and surprised looks with a gentle smile and stopped to greet her host and hostess.
She wore a luminous green-and-white gown with a beguiling neckline and a ribbon sash under her bosom which accentuated the fullness above and slenderness below. Her hair was piled in a high mound of soft curls, flattering her delicate features and making her eyes seem larger. Twin spirals danced along each cheek, emphasizing her fine cheekbones and the heart shape of her face. Her dark eyes shone like chocolate, her small lips pleasingly pink. He drew in a ragged breath. Had he actually kissed those lips once upon a time? His chest tightened at the memory.
At her neck sparkled an emerald necklace which drew his attention to her long pale neck, the fine delicate collarbones he'd give anything to kiss . . .
Stop it, he told himself. But his thoughts refused to yield. This was the woman he loved. The woman he wished to marry. To be one with. Such feelings were not wrong; they were a gift. But did she feel the same? He glanced at Gilbert Scott standing to his right. He, too, had stopped and stared, not dragging his gaze from Abigail for all her sister's tugging on his arm.
Did Abigail still nurture feelings for the man? William's happiness dimmed at the thought.
Unaccustomed to having so many people looking at her, Abigail took a deep breath and reminded herself she was among friends. She glimpsed Louisa leaving Gilbert's side to talk with Andrew Morgan. And there were her parents, and Susan and Edward Lloyd. She did not yet see Mr. Morris but, then, wasn't all that eager to do so.
Her mother and father walked forward to welcome her.
He took her hands. "My dear, you look beautiful."
Abigail smiled, self-conscious but pleased at his praise. "Thank you, Papa."
"I am glad you decided to come," her mother said. "I began to fear you had worn yourself out and would stay home. I am sorry I left all of that to you. It is only that you are so capable. But I shall endeavor not to shift my responsibilities to you in future. It isn't fair to you."
"Thank you, Mamma."
Her mother's eyes fastened on the gemstones. "I see the jeweler delivered the necklace at last."
"Yes, Marcel brought it up to me not long after you left."
"Louisa will be disappointed."
Abigail met her mother's look with a gentle one of her own but made no offer to remove the necklace. And no apology.
Her sister would have many other chances to wear it, Abigail knew. Tonight was her turn.
Louisa approached, gaze riveted on the necklace. "You are wearing it?"
"Yes. The jeweler delivered it after you left. Marcel brought it up to me."
"And did your hair as well, I see."
"Yes," Abigail acknowledged, calmly holding her sister's gaze and ignoring the slight irritation glittering in her fair eyes.
"Well . . ." Louisa seemed torn between vexation and reluctant admiration. "It looks very well with your new dress, I own."
"Thank you, Louisa."
"In fact, I don't mind saying you look very pretty tonight, Abigail."
"Thank you. That means a great deal, coming from the most beautiful girl in the room."
The two sisters shared a tentative smile, and then Louisa pressed her hand. "I'd best not keep Mr. Morgan waiting. He says he has news to share."
Yes, Abigail thought. But not the news her sister probably hoped for.
When Louisa walked away, William took a deep breath and approached Abigail. How elegant the well-dressed creature looked. It made him miss the bedraggled girl in mud-spattered wool cape with damp hair falling from its pins. But he couldn't deny she looked beautiful.
"Miss Foster. How pleased I am to see you. I began to fear I'd begged an invitation in vain."
Her eyes widened in surprise. "Mr. Chapman. William. I am pleased to see you as well. I'd heard someone from Easton was attending, but I dared not hope it was you." She gave him a soft smile. "Had I known, I would have come sooner."
His heart warmed. "Then I am very glad indeed I begged that invitation."
Her smile widened. "Andrew Morgan is here as well, I see."
"Yes. I am in Town as his guest. He is here purchasing wedding clothes."
"Wedding clothes?"
"Yes. He and Leah—excuse me, I shall never grow accustomed to calling her Eleanor—are recently engaged and soon to be married. I thought you knew."
"I hoped, but I had not yet heard the news."
"No doubt my sister has written to you and I have stolen her surprise. She shall box my ears when I get home."
"I think she would forgive you anything." She added, "Have his parents come round to the idea, now that they know who Leah is?"
"Yes. Though, after Leah's brush with death, I don't think anything would have stopped Andrew from making his feelings known—and making up for lost time."
"I am glad to hear it."
"Miss Foster, speaking of making up for lost time, I wonder if I might have a private word . . . ?"
Her dark brows rose. "Of . . . course."
Gilbert Scott suddenly appeared between them. "Abby, how beautiful you look. I almost didn't recognize you when you came in."
"Thank you, Gilbert."
"And Mr. Chapman. When Miss Pembrooke is ready to discuss refurbishments for Pembrooke Park, tell her I would be honored to offer my services."
"Thank you, Mr. Scott. But I believe my sister hopes to gather Miss Foster's ideas first, before proceeding and hiring a builder. We also plan to implement her scheme for the parsonage."
William noticed her quick look of surprise and pleasure.
"Ah. Well. Of course." Scott conceded, "Abby has always had an excellent eye."
"Not always," Abigail allowed. "But I think I recognize excellence now when I see it." She looked at William with shining eyes.
Mr. Scott looked from one to the other. "Abby, Louisa insists we have dancing after dinner. Do say you'll dance with me. For old times' sake."
She smiled at her old friend, but then she lifted her gaze to William, her dark eyes meeting, melding with his.
"Actually, I fear I may be engaged," she said. "Is that not right, Mr. Chapman?"
William felt his chest expand with hope and pleasure. "You are engaged for the entire evening," he said earnestly. "And for every evening after that, if I have my way."
At his words, Abigail's whole body thrummed in anticipation. She tucked her hand under his arm. "Then indeed you shall."
Without removing his gaze from hers, William Chapman said, "If you will excuse us, Mr. Scott?"
Not waiting to hear Gilbert's reply, William led her out of the drawing room and into the quiet vestibule, her heart beating hard with each step. She fleetingly recalled coming upon Louisa and Gilbert in this very vestibule last year. And now it was her turn to stand there in a private tête-à-tête.
William turned and solemnly faced her. "Miss Foster. Abigail. I know I said I was in no position to marry. That it would be wrong to ask you to wait until my situation improved—"
"I've thought about that," Abigail interrupted. "But I don't care about the living. I care about you."
He stepped nearer. "You don't know how happy that makes me." His blue eyes shone. "But then I gather you haven't heard . . ."
"Heard what?"
"Mr. Morris has passed on."
She felt her smile falter. "I am sorry to hear it. And his nephew?"
"Leah—Eleanor—has granted the living to me."
"Ohhh . . ." Abigail breathed, thoughts whirling. Perhaps she should have foreseen that possibility, but she had not.
He took her hand in his. "Will you marry me, dearest loveliest Abigail?"
The question sent a thrill of pleasure through Abigail, and she gazed at him in wonder. "Of course I shall. Nothing would make me happier. For I love you with all my heart."
Flushed with happiness, she wished she had some token of her love to give him. A miniature, a lover's eye, a lock of hair set in a ring. She had none of these things, so she took his face in her hands and drew his head down, pressing her mouth to his in a passionate kiss.
And judging from his reaction, the gift was very much appreciated.
A short while later, they caught their breaths and rejoined the others for dinner. Abigail barely tasted her food, but she enjoyed the company, and the warm congratulations that flowed around them. That evening, she danced every dance and, if her future husband could be believed, outshone every woman there.
She had said yes to William Chapman even before she learned he had a valuable living. She had said yes to a life of working alongside the man she loved. A life different than the one she'd once imagined—but oh so right. Together they would serve the parish, and God, and each other. Together they would build a practical, happy life.
Abigail realized anew she had never needed a treasure to make herself worthy. How thankful she was to be treasured by God, and the man who loved her.
# Epilogue
William and I stood, hand in hand, watching as the foundation was laid for a large addition to the parsonage. The rebuilding has also begun on Pembrooke Park. True to her word, Leah asked for my opinion on what should be done to the manor house during the refurbishment. She had thought about pulling the place down and being done with it. Washing her hands forever of her childhood home. But she decided in the end that to truly make peace with her past, she had to first embrace it, embrace her role as heiress of Pembrooke Park and lady of the manor. I think she will do credit to the role and be a wonderful patroness of the village and church.
She and Andrew talked at length about what was best to do. He is to have Hunts Hall one day, after all, and the two could reside there instead. But as his parents are sure to remain there as long as they live, Andrew and Leah have decided they will rebuild Pembrooke Park and live in it together as husband and wife for the time being.
Even though Mrs. Morgan seems to approve of "dear Eleanor" now that her true origins are known, Leah prefers to live nearer her family. She says the Chapmans will always be the family of her heart—Mac, Kate, Kitty, and Jacob. And William of course. Her family feeling and affection now extend to me as well, I'm pleased to say. And I treasure our friendship. It is such a joy to see her well and truly happy. The fears of the past gone. The secrets and hiding with it.
She is free to be who she really is and loved for who she really is. And really, isn't that what we all want?
Gilbert remains a dear friend, though relations between us are not what they once were. How could they be, when the piece of my heart I'd long ago given him is now fully, soundly in William's possession? Even so, we are cordial, and I wish him every success in his future. He has yet to marry. For his sake, I wish he would.
Louisa, I think, has learnt the error of her flirtatious ways—praise be to God. She was disappointed that Andrew Morgan married Leah, and that Gilbert has not renewed his addresses. She's had no offers—well, no offers of marriage from honorable gentlemen, that is, though all sorts of other offers abound. Realizing this, she has become more circumspect in her behavior—quieter and more modest. And I think it suits her well. She is still quite the most beautiful woman of my acquaintance, and now, day by day, her heart begins to match her outward appearance. Blessed will be the man who wins that heart at last.
And Harriet Pembrooke Webb? My breath still catches a little when I think of her and all she has lost. Her parents. Her elder brother. And more recently, her younger brother—her last remaining relative . . . Or so she thought.
I received one last letter from her shortly before I moved back to Easton as William's wife.
Dear Abigail,
Thank you for your recent letter and your continuing condolences regarding Miles. That you remember him fondly means more to me than you know. I still grieve my brother—all my family, really—even as I rejoice over the wondrous fact that my secret friend is back in my life. And more wonderful yet, that she is, indeed, more than a friend—my own first cousin. Have I not long wished that Pembrooke Park had a deserving heir? And I cannot conceive of a more deserving heir than Eleanor.
It gave me great satisfaction to relinquish my role as executor, and hand the reins of stewardship to Robert Pembrooke's daughter. I find solace in the knowledge that I have made some sort of restitution for the sins of my father. Despite the fact that you and the Reverend Mr. William Chapman have assured me I need not do so.
"Christ has made the ultimate restitution beyond what you or I or any person could do," he often reminds me.
I humbly agree, and I thank God for it every day. But now that Pembrooke Park is in Eleanor's hands, I sleep better every night.
I have sold my London house and taken a place in Caldwell. Many is the afternoon my cousin and I meet in the sunny spot between the potting shed and walled garden. We have carried away the old rubbish, trimmed the grass, and placed a small wrought-iron table and chairs there, graced by that same colorful glass jar, filled with a fresh bouquet of flowers every week or so.
Now and again, if one of us can't make it, we leave each other notes in the old hiding place behind the loose brick, rearranging the time, or simply letting the other know we were thinking of her.
And so you see, our private, mismatched friendship continues. We meet nearly every week when the weather is fine. We take tea, talk about our homes and families, the books we are reading. We no longer need to escape into a world of make-believe. But even so, how pleasant to escape for an hour or two into the company of a treasured friend.
When we are in that secret place, we sometimes slip and call each other by our old nicknames, Lizzie and Jane.
Once you have taken up residence here, you must join us sometime, Abigail. No one else would we invite into our special place. But you, dear girl, are always welcome, for it is thanks to you that we have found each other again. For that, you have my eternal gratitude and affectionate friendship. And I know I speak for, em, Lizzie as well.
I look forward to joining them there soon.
Ah, the weary wonder of this life. Of faith. And family. And friends. The truest treasures we can ever know or possess.
# Author's Note
Pembrooke Park is a fictional estate inspired by Great Chalfield Manor in Wiltshire, England, a fifteenth-century country house surrounded by extensive gardens and a moat. For many months, I kept photos of the manor and the adjacent church on my bulletin board and grew quite attached to the place. My friend Sara and I had the pleasure of visiting Great Chalfield in person while this book was being edited, and how lovely it is, with its great hall, oriel windows, and topiary houses. We met several gracious, helpful people there and enjoyed a history-rich tour of the manor, which is often used as a film location. The exterior and grounds were much as I'd imagined them, though the interior is quite a bit different than my depiction of Pembrooke Park.
Sara and I also attended an Evensong service at the Church of All Saints there, where the Reverend Andrew Evans delivered a beautiful sermon that touched us both. (Though it was perhaps a shade longer than those William Chapman delivered.) If you have the opportunity to travel to England, I hope you will visit Great Chalfield Manor. In the meantime, stop by my website or the National Trust site to see photos of this historical manor and church.
The Secret of Pembrooke Park is my longest book to date, written in less time than usual. I would not have been able to accomplish this without help from several people:
Authors Susan May Warren and Michelle Lim, who helped me brainstorm and plot the book during a weekend retreat with our local chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers.
My husband and sons, who had to make do—and frozen pizza and taco runs—while I was racing toward deadlines.
My sister-friend and first reader, Cari Weber, who provided valuable feedback and a listening ear.
Fellow author Michelle Griep, who provided laser-sharp and encouraging feedback as well.
Amy Boucher Pye—London vicar's wife, editor, author, and speaker—who read the book to help me avoid errors in describing Church of England services as well as other British gaffes. And her husband, the Reverend Nicholas Pye, who answered her questions as needed. Any remaining errors are mine.
Pastor Ken Lewis, for helping me refine Mr. Chapman's sermons.
Sara Ring, for serving as brave driver, photographer, and fun fellow traveler.
My agent, Wendy Lawton, whose love of antique dollhouses surpasses my own. Thanks for cheering me on.
My editorial team at Bethany House Publishers, especially Charlene Patterson, Karen Schurrer, and Raela Schoenherr. I appreciate your editorial support and friendship.
And you, my readers. Thank you for your enthusiasm about my books and for sharing them with your friends and book clubs.
What a blessing this writing career has been. I'm thankful for each and every one of you!
# Discussion Questions
1. What secrets in the book did you figure out early on? Anything you guessed wrong? What happening or plot twist took you most by surprise?
2. Did your first impression of any character turn out to be wrong? Have you had a similar experience in real life (realizing your first impression of someone—good or bad—was not at all accurate)?
3. When Abigail, and later William, saw the figure in the hooded green cloak, who do you think it was? The same person who wore it in the climactic scene, or someone else?
4. Did you ever think you were meant to marry one person, only to discover in hindsight he wasn't the person God intended for you after all? What would you tell a young person pining for someone who doesn't return his or her affections?
5. Did you grow up feeling like a favored child, or an overlooked child, or did your parents make a point of treating their offspring equally? What is your view of Mr. and Mrs. Foster's parenting style in this regard? What would you say to someone who feels he or she is living in a sibling's shadow?
6. Do you think Abigail chose the right man? Did you vacillate or feel torn about which man she should end up with?
7. Did you feel any sympathy for Miles? Like him at all? Wish the author had given him a different ending—or do you think he got the ending he deserved?
8. What about Harriet? What did you think about her desire to make restitution for the wrongdoings of her father? What is your view of the verse: "The Lord is longsuffering, and of great mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression, and by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" (Numbers 14:18)?
9. Abigail is tempted to believe she needs a large dowry—a treasure—to make herself valuable, and worthy of a man's love. Have you ever struggled with a similar feeling of insecurity? In the end, Abigail learns ". . . she had never needed a treasure to make herself worthy. How thankful she was to be treasured by God, and the man who loved her." Can you relate?
10. Do you agree or disagree with this concluding line? "Ah, the weary wonder of this life. Of faith. And family. And friends. The truest treasures we can ever know or possess." Is there anything you would omit or add?
Julie Klassen loves all things Jane—Jane Eyre and Jane Austen. A graduate of the University of Illinois, Julie worked in publishing for sixteen years and now writes full time. Three of her books, The Silent Governess, The Girl in the Gatehouse, and The Maid of Fairbourne Hall, have won the Christy Award for Historical Romance. She has also won the Midwest Book Award and Christian Retailing's BEST Award, and has been a finalist in the Romance Writers of America's RITA Awards, Minnesota Book Awards, and ACFW's Carol Awards. Julie and her husband have two sons and live in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota.
For more information, visit www.julieklassen.com.
# Books by Julie Klassen
* * *
Lady of Milkweed Manor
The Apothecary's Daughter
The Silent Governess
The Girl in the Gatehouse
The Maid of Fairbourne Hall
The Tutor's Daughter
The Dancing Master
The Secret of Pembrooke Park
To learn more about Julie and her books, visit julieklassen.com.
Resources: bethanyhouse.com/AnOpenBook
Website: www.bethanyhouse.com
Facebook: Bethany House
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 1,864 |
// Copyright (c) 2015 Augie R. Maddox, Guavaman Enterprises. All rights reserved.
#pragma warning disable 0219
#pragma warning disable 0618
#pragma warning disable 0649
namespace Rewired.UI.ControlMapper {
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.UI;
using UnityEngine.EventSystems;
using UnityEngine.Events;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections;
using Rewired;
/// <summary>
/// Overrides auto-navigation in Selectable because it's inadequate for selectables inside a scroll rect
/// Also enables selection of disabled controls for better navigation experience.
/// </summary>
[AddComponentMenu("")]
public class CustomSlider : Slider, ICustomSelectable {
[SerializeField]
private Sprite _disabledHighlightedSprite;
[SerializeField]
private Color _disabledHighlightedColor;
[SerializeField]
private string _disabledHighlightedTrigger;
[SerializeField]
private bool _autoNavUp = true;
[SerializeField]
private bool _autoNavDown = true;
[SerializeField]
private bool _autoNavLeft = true;
[SerializeField]
private bool _autoNavRight = true;
public Sprite disabledHighlightedSprite { get { return _disabledHighlightedSprite; } set { _disabledHighlightedSprite = value; } }
public Color disabledHighlightedColor { get { return _disabledHighlightedColor; } set { _disabledHighlightedColor = value; } }
public string disabledHighlightedTrigger { get { return _disabledHighlightedTrigger; } set { _disabledHighlightedTrigger = value; } }
public bool autoNavUp { get { return _autoNavUp; } set { _autoNavUp = value; } }
public bool autoNavDown { get { return _autoNavDown; } set { _autoNavDown = value; } }
public bool autoNavLeft { get { return _autoNavLeft; } set { _autoNavLeft = value; } }
public bool autoNavRight { get { return _autoNavRight; } set { _autoNavRight = value; } }
private bool isDisabled { get { return !IsInteractable(); } }
private bool isHighlightDisabled;
// Events
private event UnityAction _CancelEvent;
public event UnityAction CancelEvent { add { _CancelEvent += value; } remove { _CancelEvent -= value; } }
#region Selectable Overrides
public override Selectable FindSelectableOnLeft() {
if((navigation.mode & Navigation.Mode.Horizontal) != 0 || _autoNavLeft) {
return UISelectionUtility.FindNextSelectable(this, transform, Selectable.allSelectables, transform.rotation * Vector3.left);
}
return base.FindSelectableOnLeft();
}
public override Selectable FindSelectableOnRight() {
if((navigation.mode & Navigation.Mode.Horizontal) != 0 || _autoNavRight) {
return UISelectionUtility.FindNextSelectable(this, transform, Selectable.allSelectables, transform.rotation * Vector3.right);
}
return base.FindSelectableOnRight();
}
public override Selectable FindSelectableOnUp() {
if((navigation.mode & Navigation.Mode.Vertical) != 0 || _autoNavUp) {
return UISelectionUtility.FindNextSelectable(this, transform, Selectable.allSelectables, transform.rotation * Vector3.up);
}
return base.FindSelectableOnUp();
}
public override Selectable FindSelectableOnDown() {
if((navigation.mode & Navigation.Mode.Vertical) != 0 || _autoNavDown) {
return UISelectionUtility.FindNextSelectable(this, transform, Selectable.allSelectables, transform.rotation * Vector3.down);
}
return base.FindSelectableOnDown();
}
protected override void OnCanvasGroupChanged() {
base.OnCanvasGroupChanged();
if(EventSystem.current == null) return;
// Handle highlight-disabled state transition
EvaluateHightlightDisabled(EventSystem.current.currentSelectedGameObject == gameObject);
}
protected override void DoStateTransition(SelectionState state, bool instant) {
if(isHighlightDisabled) {
Color tintColor = _disabledHighlightedColor;
Sprite transitionSprite = _disabledHighlightedSprite;
string triggerName = _disabledHighlightedTrigger;
if(gameObject.activeInHierarchy) {
switch(this.transition) {
case Transition.ColorTint:
StartColorTween(tintColor * colors.colorMultiplier, instant);
break;
case Transition.SpriteSwap:
DoSpriteSwap(transitionSprite);
break;
case Transition.Animation:
TriggerAnimation(triggerName);
break;
}
}
} else {
base.DoStateTransition(state, instant);
}
}
void StartColorTween(Color targetColor, bool instant) {
if(targetGraphic == null)
return;
targetGraphic.CrossFadeColor(targetColor, instant ? 0f : colors.fadeDuration, true, true);
}
void DoSpriteSwap(Sprite newSprite) {
if(image == null)
return;
image.overrideSprite = newSprite;
}
void TriggerAnimation(string triggername) {
#if UNITY_4_6 && (UNITY_4_6_0 || UNITY_4_6_1 || UNITY_4_6_2)
if(animator == null || !animator.enabled || animator.runtimeAnimatorController == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(triggername))
return;
#else
if(animator == null || !animator.enabled || !animator.isActiveAndEnabled || animator.runtimeAnimatorController == null || string.IsNullOrEmpty(triggername))
return;
#endif
animator.ResetTrigger(_disabledHighlightedTrigger);
animator.SetTrigger(triggername);
}
public override void OnSelect(BaseEventData eventData) {
base.OnSelect(eventData);
// Handle highlight-disabled state transition
EvaluateHightlightDisabled(true);
}
public override void OnDeselect(BaseEventData eventData) {
base.OnDeselect(eventData);
// Handle highlight-disabled state transition
EvaluateHightlightDisabled(false);
}
#endregion
private void EvaluateHightlightDisabled(bool isSelected) {
if(!isSelected) { // Deselection
if(isHighlightDisabled) {
isHighlightDisabled = false;
SelectionState state = isDisabled ? SelectionState.Disabled : currentSelectionState;
DoStateTransition(state, false);
}
} else { // Selection
if(!isDisabled) return;
isHighlightDisabled = true;
DoStateTransition(SelectionState.Disabled, false);
}
}
#region ICancelHandler Implementation
public void OnCancel(BaseEventData eventData) {
if(_CancelEvent != null) _CancelEvent();
}
#endregion
}
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,265 |
The Baume & Mercier man is here played by a dandy. The color code that gives a graphic unit to all films is composed of gray levels (black and white) and a bright electric blue that brings a touch of modernity. This blue is a kind of leitmotif that punctuates all the films.
The dandy is our guide in this set of 5 films whose structure is identical. It aims to humanize technical innovation.
Each of the films present a specific feature of the Baumatic movement.
Each film begins with presentation of objects symbolically evoking the 4 features: Antimagnetic, Autonomy, Accuracy and Durability.
The man is staged in a sleek decor evoking a modern laboratory / loft.
Dressed with a suit, he interacts with objects that express very simply the benefits of each feature. The films end with a small offbeat scene to bring a fun / hedonistic touch to each piece of information and minimize the technical aspect of the message to make it more accessible. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 3,299 |
package org.accela.bm.collections.map.impl.hashMap;
import java.io.DataInput;
import java.io.DataOutput;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.NoSuchElementException;
import java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock;
import java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantLock;
import org.accela.bm.collections.array.SegmentArray;
import org.accela.bm.collections.common.ElementEqualityComparator;
import org.accela.bm.collections.common.ElementHasher;
import org.accela.bm.collections.common.ElementViewer;
import org.accela.bm.collections.map.MapContainer;
import org.accela.bm.common.Common;
import org.accela.bm.common.DataFormatException;
import org.accela.bm.common.Persistancer;
import org.accela.bm.pool.BytePool;
import org.accela.bm.pool.TolerantBytePool;
import org.accela.util.ResourceLocker;
public class RawTable implements Persistancer, MapContainer
{
private TolerantBytePool pool = null;
private ElementEqualityComparator comparator = null;
private ElementHasher hasher = null;
private long segmentSize = 0;
private int keyLength = 0;
private long valueLength = 0;
private Lock createTableLock = new ReentrantLock();
private SegmentArray table = null;
private SyncSize size = null;
private ResourceLocker<Long> locker = new ResourceLocker<Long>();
public RawTable(BytePool pool,
ElementEqualityComparator comparator,
ElementHasher hasher,
long segmentSize,
int keyLength,
long valueLength)
{
if (null == pool)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null pool");
}
if (null == comparator)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null comparator");
}
if (null == hasher)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null hasher");
}
if (segmentSize < 2)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("illegal segmentSize: "
+ segmentSize);
}
if (keyLength < 1)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("illegal keyLength: "
+ keyLength);
}
if (valueLength < 1)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("illegal valueLength: "
+ valueLength);
}
this.pool = new TolerantBytePool(pool);
this.comparator = comparator;
this.hasher = hasher;
this.segmentSize = Common.valueToExpValue(segmentSize);
this.keyLength = keyLength;
this.valueLength = valueLength;
}
public BytePool getPool()
{
return this.pool.getPool();
}
public ElementEqualityComparator getComparator()
{
return this.comparator;
}
public ElementHasher getHasher()
{
return this.hasher;
}
public long getSegmentSize()
{
return this.segmentSize;
}
@Override
public int getKeyLength()
{
return this.keyLength;
}
@Override
public long getValueLength()
{
return this.valueLength;
}
@Override
public long size()
{
return this.size.get();
}
public long tableSize() throws IOException
{
return this.getTable().size();
}
private void createTable(int initSegNum) throws IOException
{
assert (null == table);
long segNum = initSegNum;
segNum = Math.max(2, segNum);
segNum = Common.valueToExpValue(segNum);
segNum = Math.min(segNum, Common.MAX_INT_FROM_EXP);
assert (segNum < Integer.MAX_VALUE);
assert (Common.valueToExpValue(segNum) == segNum);
this.table = new SegmentArray(pool.getPool(), Common.LONG_SIZE,
this.segmentSize);
this.table.create((int) segNum);
assert (this.table.size() >= 4);
assert (this.table.size() == segNum * this.segmentSize);
this.size.set(0);
// TODO£º ÕâÀïÒÀÀµÓÚBytePool.NULL==-1
this.table.fill((byte) BytePool.NULL);
}
private boolean tryCreateTable(int initSegNum) throws IOException
{
if (null == this.table)
{
this.createTableLock.lock();
try
{
if (null == this.table)
{
createTable(initSegNum);
return true;
}
}
finally
{
this.createTableLock.unlock();
}
}
return false;
}
private void deleteTable() throws IOException
{
this.table.clear();
this.table = null;
this.size.set(0);
}
private SegmentArray getTable() throws IOException
{
tryCreateTable(2);
return this.table;
}
// TODO clear·½·¨ÐèҪȫ¾Ö¶ÁдËøµÄдËøµÄ±£»¤
@Override
public void clear() throws IOException
{
for (long idx = 0; idx < tableSize(); idx++)
{
SlotIterator itr = this.slotIterator(idx);
while (itr.hasNext())
{
itr.next();
itr.remove();
}
}
this.deleteTable();
}
@Override
public void create(Object... args) throws IOException
{
this.size = new SyncSize(0);
this.createTable((args != null && args[0] instanceof Integer) ? (Integer) args[0]
: 2);
}
@Override
public void read(DataInput in) throws IOException, DataFormatException
{
this.table = new SegmentArray(pool.getPool(), Common.LONG_SIZE,
this.segmentSize);
this.table.read(in);
assert (Common.valueToExpValue(this.table.getSegmentSize()) == this.table
.getSegmentSize());
while (Common.valueToExpValue(this.table.getSegmentNum()) != this.table
.getSegmentNum())
{
// TODO ²âÊÔºóɾȥ
System.err
.println("RawTable.write(): table segment lost, repairing now...");
this.table.addSegment();
}
long size = in.readLong();
size = Math.max(0, size);
this.size = new SyncSize(size);
}
// TODO write·½·¨ÐèҪȫ¾ÖдËøµÄ±£»¤
@Override
public void write(DataOutput out) throws IOException
{
getTable().write(out);
out.writeLong(size.get());
}
private long getSlot(long idx) throws IOException
{
assert (getTable().getElementLength() == Common.LONG_SIZE);
byte[] buf = new byte[Common.LONG_SIZE];
getTable().getElement(idx, buf, 0, 0, Common.LONG_SIZE);
return Common.byteToLong(buf, 0);
}
private void setSlot(long idx, long value) throws IOException
{
assert (getTable().getElementLength() == Common.LONG_SIZE);
byte[] buf = new byte[Common.LONG_SIZE];
Common.longToByte(buf, 0, value);
getTable().setElement(idx, buf, 0, 0, Common.LONG_SIZE);
}
public void expandTo(int segNum) throws IOException
{
if (segNum < 0
|| segNum > Common.MAX_INT_FROM_EXP
|| Common.valueToExpValue(segNum) != segNum)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("illegal segNum");
}
while (getTable().getSegmentNum() < segNum)
{
getTable().addSegment();
}
assert (getTable().getSegmentNum() == segNum);
}
// TODO: ·Âjava.util.HashMapµÄ¹þÏ£º¯Êý£¬²»ÖªµÀ·ÂµÄ¶Ô²»¶Ô£¬ÐèÒª²âÊÔ¡£
// Õâ¸ö¹þÏ£Ëã·¨µÄÄ¿µÄÔÚÓÚ»ìºÏ¸ßλºÍµÍλµÄ±ÈÌØ£¬Õë¶Ô´óСΪ2µÄÃÝ´ÎµÄ±í£¬
// ½µµÍ¹þÏ£ÖµÒòµÍλÏàͬ¶ø±»·ÖÅäµ½±íµÄͬһ¸ñÖеĸÅÂÊ
// ²âÊÔÁ´±í³¤¶È¡¢ÔªËØ·Ö²¼
private long hash(long h)
{
h ^= (h >>> 49) ^ (h >>> 32);
h ^= (h >>> 20) ^ (h >>> 12);
return h ^ (h >>> 7) ^ (h >>> 4);
}
public ElementViewer keyToViewer(final byte[] keyBuf, final int keyBufOffset)
{
if (null == keyBuf)
{
throw new NullPointerException("keyBuf is null");
}
if (keyBufOffset < 0
|| keyBufOffset + this.getKeyLength() > keyBuf.length)
{
throw new IndexOutOfBoundsException("keyBufOffset illegal");
}
return new ElementViewer()
{
@Override
public void get(byte[] buf,
int bufOffset,
long idxInElement,
int length) throws IOException
{
if (idxInElement < 0
|| length < 0
|| idxInElement + length > getKeyLength())
{
throw new IndexOutOfBoundsException(
"idxInElement or length is out of bounds");
}
System.arraycopy(keyBuf,
keyBufOffset + (int) idxInElement,
buf,
bufOffset,
length);
}
};
}
public long keyToHash(ElementViewer keyViewer) throws IOException
{
if (null == keyViewer)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null keyViewer");
}
return hash(this.hasher.hash(keyViewer));
}
// TODO ¼ì²éÊÇ·ñÏÈÓÃhashÏàµÈ×ö¶Ì·Åжϣ¬ÔÙÓÃkeyÏàµÈ±È½Ï
public boolean keyEquals(ElementViewer keyViewerA, ElementViewer keyViewerB)
throws IOException
{
if (null == keyViewerA || null == keyViewerB)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null keyViewer");
}
return this.comparator.equals(keyViewerA, keyViewerB);
}
public Node createNode(byte[] keyBuf,
int keyBufOffset,
byte[] valueBuf,
int valueBufOffset,
long valueIdxInElement,
int valueLength,
long hash) throws IOException
{
Node node = new Node(pool.alloc(getNodeLength()));
try
{
node.setHash(hash);
node.setKey(keyBuf, keyBufOffset);
node.setValue(valueBuf,
valueBufOffset,
valueIdxInElement,
valueLength);
return node;
}
catch (RuntimeException ex)
{
this.deleteNode(node);
throw ex;
}
catch (IOException ex)
{
this.deleteNode(node);
throw ex;
}
}
public boolean deleteNode(Node node) throws IOException
{
if (null == node)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null node");
}
return this.pool.free(node.getKey());
}
public long indexForHash(long hash, long tableSize)
{
// Node Õâ¸ö¼ì²é¿ÉÄÜ»áµÖÏûµôÏÂÃæʹÓÃλÔËËã¼ÆËãindex¶øÈ¡µÃµÄÐÔÄÜÓÅÊÆ
if (Common.valueToExpValue(tableSize) != tableSize)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("tableSize illegal");
}
return hash & (tableSize - 1);
}
// TODO ʹÓÃÇ°Ó¦¸Ãlock¸ÃidxµÄslot
// TODO ÖÆÔ쳡¾°£¬Ìرð¼ì²éÉ¢Áе½Í¬Ò»¸öslotµÄ¶à¸öÔªËØ£¬¿ÉÄÜ·¢Éú¶ªÊ§¡¢´íÎóµÈ
public void add(long idx, Node node) throws IOException
{
if (idx < 0 || idx >= tableSize())
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("illegal idx");
}
if (null == node)
{
throw new NullPointerException("null node");
}
boolean succ = node.setNext(this.getSlot(idx));
if (!succ)
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("node does not exist");
}
this.setSlot(idx, node.getKey());
size.incr();
}
// ¼ì²éÍâ½çÔÚʹÓÃʱ£¬ÊÇ·ñ©µôÁËlock slot
public void lockSlot(long idx)
{
this.locker.lock(idx);
}
public void unlockSlot(long idx)
{
this.locker.unlock(idx);
}
// TODO ʹÓÃÇ°Ó¦¸Ãlock¸ÃidxµÄslot
public SlotIterator slotIterator(long slotIdx) throws IOException
{
return new SlotIterator(slotIdx);
}
private long getNodeLength()
{
return Common.LONG_SIZE
* 2
+ this.getKeyLength()
+ this.getValueLength();
}
public class Node
{
private long key = BytePool.NULL;
public Node(long key)
{
this.key = key;
}
public long getKey()
{
return key;
}
public boolean getNext(long[] next) throws IOException
{
byte[] buf = new byte[Common.LONG_SIZE];
boolean succ = pool.get(key, buf, 0);
if (succ)
{
next[0] = Common.byteToLong(buf, 0);
}
return succ;
}
public boolean setNext(long next) throws IOException
{
byte[] buf = new byte[Common.LONG_SIZE];
Common.longToByte(buf, 0, next);
return pool.set(key, buf, 0);
}
public boolean getHash(long[] hash) throws IOException
{
byte[] buf = new byte[Common.LONG_SIZE];
boolean succ = pool.get(key, buf, Common.LONG_SIZE);
if (succ)
{
hash[0] = Common.byteToLong(buf, 0);
}
return succ;
}
public boolean setHash(long hash) throws IOException
{
byte[] buf = new byte[Common.LONG_SIZE];
Common.longToByte(buf, 0, hash);
return pool.set(key, buf, Common.LONG_SIZE);
}
public boolean getKey(byte[] buf,
int bufOffset,
long idxInElement,
int length) throws IOException
{
if (idxInElement < 0
|| length < 0
|| length + idxInElement > getKeyLength())
{
throw new IndexOutOfBoundsException(
"idxInElement or length illegal"
+ idxInElement
+ ", "
+ length);
}
return pool.get(key, buf, bufOffset, 2
* Common.LONG_SIZE
+ idxInElement, length);
}
public boolean setKey(byte[] buf, int bufOffset) throws IOException
{
return pool.set(key,
buf,
bufOffset,
2 * Common.LONG_SIZE,
getKeyLength());
}
public boolean getValue(byte[] buf,
int bufOffset,
long idxInElement,
int length) throws IOException
{
if (idxInElement < 0
|| length < 0
|| length + idxInElement > getValueLength())
{
throw new IndexOutOfBoundsException(
"idxInElement or length illegal"
+ idxInElement
+ ", "
+ length);
}
return pool.get(key, buf, bufOffset, 2
* Common.LONG_SIZE
+ getKeyLength()
+ idxInElement, length);
}
public boolean setValue(byte[] buf,
int bufOffset,
long idxInElement,
int length) throws IOException
{
if (idxInElement < 0
|| length < 0
|| length + idxInElement > getValueLength())
{
throw new IndexOutOfBoundsException(
"idxInElement or length illegal"
+ idxInElement
+ ", "
+ length);
}
return pool.set(key, buf, bufOffset, 2
* Common.LONG_SIZE
+ getKeyLength()
+ idxInElement, length);
}
public boolean exists() throws IOException
{
return this.key >= 0
&& this.getValue(new byte[1], 0, getValueLength() - 1, 1);
}
}
//TODO ÓëCommon.IteratorµÄ½Ó¿Ú²»·û
public class SlotIterator
{
private long slotIdx = 0;
private Node next = null;
private Node prev = null;
private Node prevPrev = null;
public SlotIterator(long idx) throws IOException
{
if (idx < 0 || idx >= tableSize())
{
throw new IllegalArgumentException("illegal idx");
}
this.slotIdx = idx;
this.next = new Node(RawTable.this.getSlot(idx));
this.prev = null;
this.prevPrev = null;
}
public boolean hasNext() throws IOException
{
return this.next.exists();
}
public Node next() throws IOException
{
Node ret = next;
long[] nextKey = new long[1];
boolean succ = next.getNext(nextKey);
if (!succ)
{
throw new NoSuchElementException();
}
prevPrev = prev != null ? prev : prevPrev;
prev = next;
next = new Node(nextKey[0]);
return ret;
}
// TODO СÐIJâÊÔɾ³ý¹¦ÄÜÔÚ¸÷ÖÖÇé¿öÏ£¨±ÈÈçnextΪÁ´±íµÄµÚÒ»¸öÔªËØ£¬¼°itr»¹Ã»Óж¯£»¿ÕÁ´£»µ¥ÔªËØÁ´µÈµÈ£©ÊÇ·ñÄܹ»Õý³£¹¤×÷
// ²âÊÔÁ¬Ðøɾ³ý¡¢Ò»²½Ò»É¾
public void remove() throws IOException
{
if (null == prev)
{
throw new NoSuchElementException();
}
if (this.prevPrev != null)
{
this.prevPrev.setNext(this.next.getKey());
}
else
{
RawTable.this.setSlot(slotIdx, this.next.getKey());
}
Node tobeRemoved = this.prev;
this.prev = null;
size.decr();
RawTable.this.deleteNode(tobeRemoved);
}
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,369 |
\section{Introduction}
The Quark Meson Coupling Model (QMC), initially proposed by
Guichon\cite{Guichon},
describes nuclear matter as a collection of non-overlapping MIT bags
interacting by the self-consistent exchange
of scalar $\sigma$ and vector $\omega$ mesons in the mean field
approximation\cite{Saito,Jin96,Jin96b}.
It is a simple extension of the Walecka model
\cite{Walecka,SerotA,Furnstahl} except that the meson fields are
coupled directly to the constituent quarks themselves rather
than to the nucleons as in the Walecka model. The QMC model
thus incorporates explicitly the quark degrees of freedom.
This simple model was later refined by including the nucleonic
fermi motion and the center-of-mass correction
\cite{Fleck} to the bag energy
and applied to a variety of problems\cite{SaitoII,CohenW}.
In a modification of the original QMC model it has been suggested
by Jin and Jennings\cite{Jin96,Jin96b} that a reduction of
the bag constant in nuclear matter relative to
its free-space value may be essential for the success of relativistic
nuclear phenomenology and that it may play an important role
in low and medium nuclear physics such as understanding
the EMC effect\cite{EMC}.
The density-dependence of the bag constant is introduced
in the present work by coupling
it to the scalar meson field as suggested in Ref.\cite{Jin96}.
It was found by Jin and Jennings that when
the bag constant
is significantly reduced in nuclear medium with respect to
its free-space value, large cancelling isoscalar Lorentz scalar
and vector potentials for the nucleon in nuclear matter
emerge naturally.
Such potentials are comparable to those suggested by relativistic
nuclear phenomenology and finite density QCD sum rules
\cite{CohenQCD}.
Recently, Panda {\em et al.}\cite{Panda}
have studied nuclear matter at finite
temperature using this modified version of the QMC model.
They determined the scalar mean field by minimizing the grand thermodynamical
potential with respect to the $\sigma$ field and using the self-consistency
condition which relates the vector mean field to the baryon density.
They found that the nucleon properties at finite temperature and/or
nonzero baryon density are appreciably different
from their zero temperature vacuum values.
Our present work is essentially an extension of the work
of Panda {\em et al.}\cite{Panda}.
We intend to use the QMC model at finite temperature
and to take the medium dependence of the bag parameters into account.
We however will attempt to solve the self-consistency condition
for the $\sigma$ field exactly by taking into consideration
the full coupling of the scalar mean field to the internal quark
structure by means of the solution of the point-like
Dirac equation with the required boundary condition of confinement
at the surface of the bag as suggested by Refs.\cite{Saito,Jin96}.
This was not done exactly in the solution of the self-consistency
condition for the $\sigma$ field by Panda et al.
The outline of the paper is as follows. In section II,
we present the QMC model for nuclear matter at finite temperature,
together with the details of the self-consistency condition
for the scalar mean field.
In section III, we discuss our results and present our conclusions.
\section{QMC model for nuclear matter at finite temperature}
The QMC model at finite temperature is described in detail in Ref.\cite{Panda}.
We give here the essential equations necessary for the present
calculations.
The quark field $\psi_{q}(\vec{r},t)$ inside the bag satisfies
the Dirac equation
\begin{eqnarray}
\left[ i\gamma^{\mu}\partial_{\mu}-(m_{q}^{0}-g_{\sigma}^{q}\sigma)
-g_{\omega}^{q}\omega\beta\right]\psi_{q}(\vec{r},t)=0.
\label{Dirac}
\end{eqnarray}
Here the single-particle quark and antiquark energies in units of
$R^{-1}$ are given as
\begin{eqnarray}
\epsilon^{n\kappa}_\pm=\Omega^{n\kappa}\pm g_{\omega}^{q}\omega R
\label{EPN}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\Omega^{n\kappa}=\sqrt{ x^{2}_{n\kappa} + R^{2}{m^{*}}^{2}_{q} }
\label{Omegnk}
\end{eqnarray}
and $m^{*}_{q}=m^{0}_{q}-g^{q}_{\sigma}\sigma$ is the effective
quark mass.
The boundary condition at the bag surface is given by
\begin{eqnarray}
i\gamma\cdot \hat{n} \psi_{q}^{n\kappa}=\psi_{q}^{n\kappa},
\label{roots}
\end{eqnarray}
which determines the quark momentum $x_{n\kappa}$ in the state
characterized by specific values of $n$ and $\kappa$.
For given values of the bag radius $R$ and the scalar field
$\sigma$, the quark momentum $x_{n\kappa}$ is obtained from
Eq.(\ref{roots}).
The quark chemical potential $\mu_{q}$ assuming that there are
three quarks in the nucleon bag is determined through
\begin{eqnarray}
n_{q}&=&3 \nonumber \\
&=&3\sum_{n\kappa}\left[
\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{n\kappa}_{+}/R-\mu_{q})/T}+1}
-\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{n\kappa}_{-}/R+\mu_{q})/T}+1}
\right].
\label{nq}
\end{eqnarray}
The total energy from the quark and antiquark is
\begin{eqnarray}
E_{tot}=3\sum_{n\kappa}
\frac{\Omega^{n\kappa}}{R}\left[
\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{n\kappa}_{+}/R-\mu_{q})/T}+1}
+\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{n\kappa}_{-}/R+\mu_{q})/T}+1}
\right].
\label{Etot}
\end{eqnarray}
The bag energy is given by
\begin{eqnarray}
E_{bag}=E_{tot}-\frac{Z}{R}+\frac{4\pi}{3}R^{3}B(\sigma).
\label{Ebag}
\end{eqnarray}
where $B(\sigma)$ is the bag parameter.
In the simple QMC model, the bag parameter $B$ is taken as
$B_{0}$ corresponding to its value for a free nucleon.
The medium effects are taken into account in the modified
QMC model by the following ansatz for the bag parameter
\cite{Panda,Jin96}
\begin{eqnarray}
B=B_{0}\exp\left(-\frac{4g^{B}_{\sigma}\sigma}{M_{N}}\right)
\label{BB0}
\end{eqnarray}
with $g^{B}_{\sigma}$ as an additional parameter.
The spurious center-of-mass momentum in the bag is subtracted
to obtain the effective nucleon mass\cite{Fleck}
\begin{eqnarray}
M^{*}_{N}=\sqrt{E^{2}_{bag}-<p^{2}_{cm}>}
\label{MNSTAR}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
<p^{2}_{cm}>=\frac{<x^{2}>}{R^{2}}
\label{PCM}
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}
<x^{2}>=3\sum_{n\kappa} x^{2}_{n\kappa}
\left[
\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{n\kappa}_{+}/R-\mu_{q})/T}+1}
+\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{n\kappa}_{-}/R+\mu_{q})/T}+1}
\right].
\label{x2}
\end{eqnarray}
The bag radius $R$ is obtained through the minimization of
the nucleon mass with respect to the bag radius
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\partial M^{*}_{N}}{\partial R}=0.
\label{MNR}
\end{eqnarray}
The total energy density at finite temperature $T$
and at finite baryon density $\rho_{B}$ is
\begin{eqnarray}
\epsilon=
\frac{\gamma}{(2\pi)^{3}}\int
d^{3}k\sqrt{k^{2}+{M_{N}^{*}}^{2}}(f_{B}+\overline{f}_{B})
+\frac{g^{2}_{\omega}}{2m^{2}_{\omega}}\rho^{2}_{B}
+\frac{1}{2}m^{2}_{\sigma}\sigma^{2},
\label{density}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\gamma=4$ is the spin-isospin degeneracy factor and $f_{B}$ and
$\overline{f}_{B}$ are the Fermi-Dirac distribution
functions for the baryons and antibaryons
\begin{eqnarray}
f_{B}=\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{*}-\mu^{*}_{B})/T}+1},
\label{fB}
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}
\overline{f}_{B}=\frac{1}{e^{(\epsilon^{*}+\mu^{*}_{B})/T}+1},
\label{fBAR}
\end{eqnarray}
with $\epsilon^{*}=\sqrt{ k^{2}+{M^{*}_{N}}^{2} }$
the effective nucleon energy and $\mu^{*}_{B}=\mu-g_{\omega}\omega$
the effective baryon chemical potential.
The chemical potential for a given density $\rho_{B}$ is determined by
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho_{B}=\frac{\gamma}{(2\pi)^{3}}\int d^{3}k(f_{B}-\overline{f}_{B})
\label{rhoB}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\omega=\frac{g_{\omega}}{m^{2}_{\omega}}\rho_{B}.
\label{omegrho}
\end{eqnarray}
The pressure is the negative of the grand thermodynamic potential
and is given by
\begin{eqnarray}
P=
\frac{1}{3}\frac{\gamma}{(2\pi)^{3}}\int d^{3} k
\frac{k^{2}}{\epsilon^{*}}(f_{B}+\overline{f}_{B})
+\frac{1}{2}m^{2}_{\omega}\omega^{2}
-\frac{1}{2}m^{2}_{\sigma}\sigma^{2}.
\label{pressure}
\end{eqnarray}
The scalar mean field $\sigma$ is determined through the
minimization of the thermodynamic potential or the maximizing
of the pressure $\frac{\partial P}{\partial \sigma}=0$ \cite{Panda}.
The pressure depends explicitly on the scalar mean field $\sigma$
through the last term in Eq.(\ref{pressure}). It also depends
on the nucleon effective mass $M^{*}_{N}$
which in turn also depends on $\sigma$.
If we write the pressure as a function of $M_{N}^{*}$ and $\sigma$
\cite{Jin96,Saito},
the extremization of $P(M^{*}_{N},\sigma)$
with respect to the scalar mean field $\sigma$ can be written as
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\partial P}{\partial \sigma}=
\left( \frac{\partial P}{\partial M^{*}_{N}} \right)_{\mu_{B},T}
\frac{\partial M^{*}_{N}}{\partial \sigma}
+\left(\frac{\partial P}{\partial \sigma}\right)_{M^{*}_{N}}=0,
\label{preseg}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\left(\frac{\partial P}{\partial \sigma}\right)_{M^{*}_{N}}=
-m^{2}_{\sigma}\sigma,
\label{PSE}
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}
\left( \frac{\partial P}{\partial M^{*}_{N}} \right)_{\mu_{B},T}=
&-&\frac{\gamma}{3}\frac{1}{(2\pi)^{3}}
\int d^{3} k
\frac{k^{2}}{{\epsilon^{*}}^{2}}\frac{M^{*}_{N}}{\epsilon^{*}}
\left[f_{B}+\overline{f}_{B}\right]
\nonumber \\
&-&\frac{\gamma}{3}\frac{1}{(2\pi)^{3}}
\frac{1}{T}\int d^{3} k
\frac{k^{2}}{\epsilon^{*}}\frac{M^{*}_{N}}{\epsilon^{*}}
\left[f_{B}(1-f_{B})+\overline{f}_{B}(1-\overline{f}_{B})\right]
\nonumber \\
&-&\frac{\gamma}{3}\frac{1}{(2\pi)^{3}}
\frac{1}{T}g_{\omega}
\left(\frac{\partial \omega}{\partial M^{*}_{N}}\right)_{\mu_{B},T}
\int d^{3} k
\frac{k^{2}}{\epsilon^{*}}
\left[f_{B}(1-f_{B})-\overline{f}_{B}(1-\overline{f}_{B})\right]
\nonumber \\
&+&m^{2}_{\omega}\omega
\left(\frac{\partial \omega}{\partial M^{*}_{N}}\right)_{\mu_{B},T}.
\label{PME}
\end{eqnarray}
Since the baryon chemical potential $\mu_{B}$ and temperature are
treated as input parameters, the variation of the vector mean field
$\omega$ with respect to the effective nucleon mass $M^{*}_{N}$
at a given value of the baryon density $\rho_{B}$ reads
\begin{eqnarray}
\left(\frac{\partial \omega}{\partial M_{N}^{*}}\right)_{\mu_{B},T}=
-\frac{
\frac{g_{\omega}}{m^{2}_{\omega}}
\frac{\gamma}{(2\pi)^{3}}\int d^{3}k
\frac{M_{N}^{*}}{\epsilon^{*}}
\left[f_{B}(1-f_{B})-\overline{f}_{B}(1-\overline{f}_{B})\right]
}
{1+
\frac{g^{2}_{\omega}}{m^{2}_{\omega}}
\frac{\gamma}{(2\pi)^{3}}
\int d^{3}k
\left[f_{B}(1-f_{B})+\overline{f}_{B}(1-\overline{f}_{B})\right]
}.
\label{OME}
\end{eqnarray}
The coupling of the scalar mean field $\sigma$ with the constituent
quark in the non-overlapping MIT bag through the solution
of the point like Dirac equation should be taken into account
to satisfy the self-consistency condition.
This constraint is essential to obtain the correct solution
of the scalar mean field $\sigma$.
The differentiation of the effective nucleon mass $M_{N}^{*}$
with respect to $\sigma$ gives
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\partial M^{*}_{N}}{\partial \sigma}=
\frac{
E_{bag}\frac{\partial E_{bag}}{\partial \sigma}
-\frac{1}{2}\frac{1}{R^{2}}\frac{\partial <x^{2}>}{\partial \sigma}
}{M^{*}_{N}},
\label{MSE}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\partial E_{bag}}{\partial \sigma}=
\sum_{n\kappa} \frac{\partial E_{bag}}{\partial \Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}}
\frac{\partial \Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}}{\partial \sigma}
+ \left(\frac{\partial E_{bag}}{\partial \sigma}\right)%
_{\{\Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}\}},
\label{ESE}
\end{eqnarray}
and
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\partial <x^{2}>}{\partial \sigma}=
\sum_{n\kappa} \frac{\partial <x^{2}>}{\partial \Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}}
\frac{\partial \Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}}{\partial \sigma}
+\left( \frac{\partial <x^{2}>}{\partial \sigma}\right)%
_{\{\Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}\}}.
\label{XSE}
\end{eqnarray}
The $\frac{\partial \Omega^{*}_{q}}{\partial \sigma}$ depends
on $x_{n\kappa}$. Its evaluation can be obtained from the solutions
of the point like Dirac equation for the constituent quarks
which satisfy the required boundary condition
on the surface of the bag\cite{Saito,Jin96}.
In our case it reads\cite{Saito,Jin96}
\begin{eqnarray}
\left(\frac{\partial \Omega^{n\kappa}_{q}}{\partial \sigma}\right)
=-g^{q}_{\sigma}R
<\overline{\psi}^{n\kappa}|\psi^{n\kappa}>.
\end{eqnarray}
\section{Results and Discussions}
We have studied nuclear matter at finite temperature
using the modified quark meson coupling model
which takes the medium-dependence
of the bag into account.
We choose a direct coupling of the bag constant
to the scalar mean field $\sigma$ in the form given
in Eq.(\ref{BB0}).
The bag parameters are taken as those adopted by
Jin and Jennings\cite{Jin96}
where $B^{1/4}_{0}=188.1$ MeV and $Z_{0}=2.03$
are chosen to reproduce the free nucleon mass
$M_{N}$ at its experimental
value 939 MeV and bag radius $R_{0}=0.60$ fm.
The current quark mass $m_{q}$ is taken equal to zero.
For $g_{\sigma}^{q}=1$, the values of the vector meson coupling
and the parameter $g_{\sigma}^{B}$ as fitted from the saturation
properties of nuclear matter, are given
as $g^{2}_{\omega}/2\pi=5.24$
and ${g^{B}_{\sigma}}^{2}/4\pi$=3.69.
We first solve Eqs.(\ref{rhoB}) and (\ref{omegrho})
for given values of temperature and density $\rho_{B}$
to determine the baryon chemical potential $\mu_{B}$.
This constraint is given in terms of the effective nucleon mass
$M^{*}_{N}$ which depends on the bag radius R,
the quark chemical potential $\mu_{q}$
and the mean field $\sigma$.
For given values of $\sigma$ and $\omega$ the bag radius and the
quark chemical potential $\mu_{q}$ are obtained using the
self-consistency
conditions Eq.(\ref{MNR}) and Eq.(\ref{nq}), respectively.
The pressure is evaluated
for specific values of temperature
and $\mu_{B}$ which now becomes an input parameter.
We then determine the value of $\sigma$ by using
the maximization condition given in Eq.(\ref{preseg}).
This method is analogous to the method used by Saito\cite{Saito}
and Jin\cite{Jin96} for the zero temperature case.
It takes into account the coupling of the constituent quarks
with the scalar mean field in the frame of the solution of
the point like Dirac equation exactly.
It differs from the minimization method used in Ref.\cite{Panda}.
Fig.1, displays various pressure isotherms vs. the baryon density.
The pressure has the usual trend of increasing with temperature
and density.
It is important to note that the pressure attains a nonzero value
at zero baryon density above a critical temperature
$T_{c}\simeq 200$ MeV.
This occurs because the scalar mean field $\sigma$ attains
a nonzero value at zero baryon density $\rho_{B}=0$
[see discussion concerning Fig.2 below] as was also observed
in the Walecka\cite{Furnstahl} model where it leads
to a sharp fall in the effective nucleon mass at $T_{c}$.
This rapid fall of $M_{N}^{*}$ with increasing
temperature resembles a phase transition when the system
becomes a dilute gas of baryons in a sea of mesons and baryon-antibaryon
pairs.
In Fig.2, we display the scalar mean field $\sigma$ as
a function of the baryon density for various temperatures.
Fig.2 (a) indicates that the value of $\sigma$ initially decreases
with increasing temperature for temperatures less than 200 MeV.
However, by the time the temperature reaches 150 MeV there are indications of
an increase in $\sigma$ at very low baryon densities with a nonzero value
at $\rho_{B}=0$.
For still higher temperatures, as can be seen in Fig.2 (b),
the situation is more dramatic with the value of $\sigma$ increasing
with temperature for all values of $\rho_{B}$. This is an indication of
a phase transition to a system of baryon-antibaryon pairs
at very low densities as mentioned above.
The density and temperature dependence of the baryon effective
mass $M_{N}^{*}$ is shown in Fig 3.
For low baryon density $\rho_{B}$, as the temperature is increased, $M_{N}^{*}$
first increases slightly and then decreases rapidly for $T=200$ MeV
for densities less than about 0.2 fm$^{-3}$.
This rapid decrease of $M_{N}^{*}$ with increasing temperature
resembles a phase transition at a high temperature and low density, when
the system becomes a dilute gas of baryons in a sea of
baryon-antibaryon pairs\cite{Furnstahl}.This behavior is consistent with
the Walecka model\cite{Furnstahl} and resolves the
contradiction that appeared in the earlier calculations.
Below the critical temperature the effective mass grows
with temperature. Above the critical temperature, $\sigma$
increases with temperature thus reducing
the nucleon effective mass $M^{*}_{N}$.
Finally, we display the density dependence of the bag constant for different
values of the temperature in Fig. 4.
The bag constant as shown in Fig.4 (a), grows with temperature for temperatures
less than 200 MeV (except at densities smaller than 0.1 fm$^{-3}$ where B starts
to decrease for temperatures greater than 150 MeV).
However, the situation is completely reversed after the phase transition
takes place.
This is displayed in Fig.4 (b), where the bag constant displays a dramatic decrease
with temperature for all densities at temperatures greater than 200 MeV.
This indicates the onset of quark deconfinement above the critical temperature:
at very high temperature and/or density the hadrons will dissolve into
a quark-gluon plasma through what is believed to be a first order phase transition.
Because the QMC model, despite its limitations and shortcomings,
uses the quark degrees of freedom explicitly,
it has made it possible to observe the quark deconfiment phase transition
which would not have been possible if only the nucleonic degrees of freedom are used.
It remains to be seen if these calculations can also be carried out with
more sophisticated nucleonic models and ultimately corroborated by QCD calculations.
\acknowledgments
This work is supported by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinscaft.
The authors dedicate this article to the memory of Prof. J. M. Eisenberg
who was involved with early discussions about this work and whose sudden
death has put an end to a promising collaboration.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,993 |
Do To The Beast é o sétimo álbum de estúdio da banda The Afghan Whigs, o primeiro em 16 anos. Foi lançado em 15 de abril de 2014 pela Sub Pop - a mesma gravadora que lançou os álbuns Up in It e Congregation.
Recepção
O álbum recebeu críticas positivas em sua maioria; de acordo com o site Metacritic, ele possui uma nota de 74%, indicando "críticas geralmente favoráveis". Um crítico do Los Angeles Times conclui que o álbum era "mais suave e temperamental do que o Afghan Whigs no auge". Uma crítica da Rolling Stone escreveu que, no álbum, "a intensidade elegantemente desprezível ainda está lá, no seu primeiro disco desde o excelente 1965, de 1998, apenas com uma paleta mais ampla."
Faixas
Todas as faixas foram compostas por Greg Dulli.
Créditos
Álbuns de The Afghan Whigs
Álbuns de 2014 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 7,322 |
class CloudInteractor
class Domain
def list_records args, output=false
puts "(#{ IDENTITY.capitalize }) Querying #{ args["domain"] } for records..."
specific_fog_object = @classes['auth'].auth_service(RESOURCE).instance_eval('zones').get @main_obj["specific_#{ IDENTITY }"].last['id']
@main_obj['specific_records'] ||= {}
@main_obj['specific_records'][args[IDENTITY.singularize]] ||= []
@main_obj["specific_#{ IDENTITY }"].last['records'] ||= []
specific_fog_object.records.each do |record|
record_obj = JSON.parse(record.to_json)
@main_obj["specific_#{ IDENTITY }"].last['records'] << record_obj
@main_obj['specific_records'][args[IDENTITY.singularize]] << record_obj
end
@main_obj['output']["records_for_#{ @main_obj["specific_#{ IDENTITY }"].last['domain'] }"] = @main_obj["specific_#{ IDENTITY }"].last['records']
ap(@main_obj["specific_#{ IDENTITY }"].last['records']) if output
rescue Excon::Errors::Timeout => e
tries ||= 3
puts "Issue reading records for the domain #{ args['domain'] }! Error: #{e}. Trying #{tries} more times."
tries -= 1
if tries > 0
sleep(15)
retry
else
false
end
end
end
end
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,335 |
Aleksandr Michajlovitsj Ovetsjkin (Russisch: Александр Михайлович Овечкин) (Moskou, 17 september 1985) is een Russische ijshockeyspeler. Hij speelt sinds 2005 voor de Washington Capitals in de NHL. Hij is de zoon van voormalig basketbalspeelster Tatjana Ovetsjkina.
Carrière
Ovetsjkin werd als eerste speler geselecteerd door de Washington Capitals bij de NHL Entry Draft in 2004, maar omdat het seizoen door een staking niet werd gespeeld bleef Ovetsjkin in Rusland. Uiteindelijk maakte Ovetsjkin zijn debuut in de NHL op 5 oktober 2005. Hij scoorde in de wedstrijd tegen de Columbus Blue Jackets meteen twee keer.
Op 22 februari 2020 scoorde Ovetsjkin in verloren uitwedstrijd tegen New Jersey Devils (2-3) zijn 700e doelpunt in de NHL. Hiermee bereikte hij als achtste speler in de NHL geschiedenis de mijlpaal van 700 NHL-doelpunten. Op de topscorerlijst aller tijden gaan alleen nog zeven gestopte ijshockeyers Ovetsjkin voor.
Nationale ploeg
Ovetsjkin werd in 2002 vice-wereldkampioen op het toernooi voor spelers onder 18 jaar. Een jaar later won hij met Rusland de bronzen medaille en had hij eerder dat jaar ook al deelgenomen aan het WK voor spelers onder 20, daar wonnen de Russen goud. Twee jaar later kon de ploeg die titel niet verdedigen, er werd in de finale verloren van Canada.
Ovetsjkin maakte zijn debuut in de Russische A-ploeg al op 17-jarige leeftijd. In 2004, toen Ovetsjkin 19 was, nam hij met Rusland deel aan het wereldbeker. Hij was daarmee de jongste speler op het toernooi. Zijn WK-debuut maakte hij 2005 toen Rusland brons veroverde.
In 2006 maakte Ovetsjkin zijn olympisch debuut. Hij scoorde vijf keer in het toernooi, waaronder het winnende doelpunt dat Canada uitschakelde. Toch ging Rusland zonder prijs naar huis.
In 2008 leidde Ovetsjkin zijn land naar de wereldtitel: Rusland versloeg in de finale thuisland Canada met 5-4.
Statistieken NHL
Persoonlijke prijzen
2005/2006 - Calder Memorial Trophy
2007/2008 - Art Ross Memorial Trophy
2007/2008, 2008/2009, 2012/2013 - Hart Memorial Trophy
2007/2008, 2008/2009, 2012/2013, 2014/2015, 2015/2016, 2017/2018 - Maurice Richard Trophy
2007/2008, 2008/2009, 2009/2010 - Lester B. Pearson Award
2017/2018 - Conn Smythe Trophy
Teamprijzen
2017/2018 - Stanley Cup
2017/2018 - Prince of Wales Trophy
2009/2010, 2015/2016, 2016/2017 - Presidents' Trophy
Russisch ijshockeyer
Russisch olympisch deelnemer | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 76 |
Jay-Z, Bono, The Edge & Rihanna
Jay-Z, Bono, The Edge & Rihanna Song list
Stranded (Haiti Mon Amour) (2010)
Deep In The Heart Of TexasPerry Como
The seemingly inoffensive song, "Deep In The Heart Of Texas," was banned by the BBC when it was released in 1942. They deemed the song too catchy, with authorities in wartime Britain concerned that factory workers would be distracted if they heard it during a shift.
Talkin' Hawkin'Pink Floyd
Pink Floyd's "Talkin' Hawkin'" uses a sample of Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice taken from a speech he made for a 1994 British Telecom commercial.
One WeekBarenaked Ladies
"One Week" by Barenaked Ladies was a #1 hit in America - for exactly one week in 1998.
OutsideStaind
Staind's big moment came in 1999 when lead singer Aaron Lewis played "Outside" on Limp Bizkit's Family Values tour. The live, acoustic version earned lots of radio play.
Somebody That I Used To KnowGotye
45% of the royalties for "Somebody That I Used To Know" go to the estate of the Brazilian classical guitarist Luiz Bonfá, whose song "Seville" Gotye sampled.
Pictures Of YouThe Cure
Robert Smith doesn't license Cure songs for commercials, but he made an exception in 2004 when he let Hewlett-Packard use "Pictures Of You." He needed the money to buy the group's back catalogue.
Subversive Songs Used To SellSong Writing
Songs about drugs, revolution and greed that have been used in commercials for sneakers, jeans, fast food, cruises and cars.
Michelle BranchSongwriter Interviews
Michelle Branch talks about "Everywhere," "The Game Of Love," and her run-in with a Christian broadcasting network.
Gene Simmons of KissSongwriter Interviews
The Kiss rocker covers a lot of ground in this interview, including why there are no Kiss collaborations, and why the Rock Hall has "become a sham."
00s Music Quiz 1Music Quiz
Do you know the girl singer on Eminem's "Stan"? If so, this quiz is for you.
The Punk Photography of Chris SteinSong Writing
Chris Stein of Blondie shares photos and stories from his book about the New York City punk scene.
Ian Anderson of Jethro TullSongwriter Interviews
The flautist frontman talks about touring with Led Zeppelin, his contribution to "Hotel California", and how he may have done the first MTV Unplugged. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 2,771 |
Q: Unpacking a zip object causing ValueError I created a zip object using the following line of code:
k=zip([1,2,3],['a','b','c'])
Converting this into a list gives the output:
[(1,'a'),(2,'b'),(3,'c')]
However, when I use this line of code
x,y=zip(*k)
it gives me this ValueError:
"ValueError: not enough values to unpack (expected 2, got 0)"
I've been trying to find out what the problem is but couldn't figure anything out.
A: Method zip returns a iterator, so when you print it, you consume it so after that k is empty
*
*apply the second zip directly
k = zip([1,2,3],['a','b','c'])
x,y = zip(*k)
print(x, "/", y) # (1, 2, 3) / ('a', 'b', 'c')
*wrap it in a list to use it multiple times
k = list(zip([1,2,3],['a','b','c']))
print(k) # [(1, 'a'), (2, 'b'), (3, 'c')]
x,y = zip(*k)
print(x, "/", y) # (1, 2, 3) / ('a', 'b', 'c')
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,443 |
{"url":"http:\/\/www.math-only-math.com\/numerator-and-denominator.html","text":"# Numerator and Denominator\n\nWhat are the numerator and denominator of a fraction?\n\nWe have already learnt that a fraction is written with two numbers arranged one over the other and separated by a line. The number under the line shows in how many equal parts the whole has been divided into. It is called denominator of the fraction. The number above the line shows how many parts of the whole have been taken. It is called numerator of the fraction. So in 2\/3, 2 is the numerator and 3 is the denominator.\n\nFractional Numbers\n\nConcept of Fractions\n\n2nd Grade Math Practice\n\nFrom Numerator and Denominator to HOME PAGE\n\n### New! Comments\n\nHave your say about what you just read! Leave me a comment in the box below. Ask a Question or Answer a Question.\n\nDidn't find what you were looking for? Or want to know more information about Math Only Math. Use this Google Search to find what you need.","date":"2018-04-21 07:47:11","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8826373219490051, \"perplexity\": 491.92551596879275}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": false}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2018-17\/segments\/1524125945082.84\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20180421071203-20180421091203-00317.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
package cc.factorie.app.nlp.parse
import cc.factorie.app.nlp.load._
import org.junit.{Assert, Before, Test}
class TestTransitionBasedParser {
val testFileName = this.getClass.getResource("/parser-test-input").getPath()
var parser: TransitionBasedParser = _
@Before
def setUp() = {
parser = new TransitionBasedParser()
}
@Test
def testDepToken() = {
val numThreads = 1
/* This file contains just one sentence right now */
val testDoc = LoadOntonotes5.fromFilename(testFileName).head
val testSentences = testDoc.sentences
val parseDecisions = parser.generateDecisions(testSentences, ParserConstants.TRAINING, numThreads)
/* Check that the relations between tokens are correct */
parseDecisions.map(_.last).zip(testSentences).foreach(ds => {
val parseTree = ds._2.attr[ParseTree]
println(s"Sentence: ${ds._2.tokens.map(_.string).mkString(" ")}")
val state = ds._1.state
val sentence = state.sentence
val tokens = state.sentence._tokens
val heads = state.headIndices
val labels = state.arcLabels
tokens.zip(1 until tokens.length).foreach { case (tok, idx) => {
val parseTreeIdx = idx - 1
val thisHead = if (heads(idx) != -1) sentence(heads(idx)) else null
val trueHead = parseTree.parent(parseTreeIdx)
if (trueHead == null || thisHead == null) {
// if one has no head then neither should, and this should be the root
if (thisHead != null) {
Assert.assertEquals(s"Head of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.ROOT_STRING, thisHead.string)
Assert.assertEquals(s"Label of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", "root", labels(idx))
} else {
Assert.assertNotNull(s"Head of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisHead)
}
} else {
// should be the same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"Head of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueHead.string, thisHead.string)
// labels should be the same
Assert.assertEquals(s"Label of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", parseTree.label(parseTreeIdx).categoryValue, labels(idx))
// leftmost dependents should be the same
val thisLeftmostDep = sentence(state.leftmostDependent(idx))
val trueLeftmostDep = if (!parseTree.leftChildren(parseTreeIdx).isEmpty) parseTree.leftChildren(parseTreeIdx).head else null
if (thisLeftmostDep == null || trueLeftmostDep == null) {
// if one is null then they both should be
if (thisLeftmostDep != null)
Assert.assertEquals(s"Leftmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.NULL_STRING, thisLeftmostDep.string)
else
Assert.assertNotNull(s"Leftmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisLeftmostDep)
} else {
// should be the same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"Leftmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueLeftmostDep.string, thisLeftmostDep.string)
// 2nd leftmost dependents should be the same
val thisLeftmostDep2 = sentence(state.leftmostDependent2(idx))
val trueLeftmostDep2 = if (!trueLeftmostDep.parseLeftChildren.isEmpty) trueLeftmostDep.parseLeftChildren.head else null
if (thisLeftmostDep2 == null || trueLeftmostDep2 == null) {
// if one is null then they both should be
if (thisLeftmostDep != null)
Assert.assertEquals(s"2nd leftmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.NULL_STRING, thisLeftmostDep2.string)
else
Assert.assertNotNull(s"2nd leftmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisLeftmostDep2)
} else {
// should be same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"2nd leftmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueLeftmostDep2.string, thisLeftmostDep2.string)
}
}
// rightmost dependents should be the same
val thisRightmostDep = sentence(state.rightmostDependent(idx))
val trueRightmostDep = if (!parseTree.rightChildren(parseTreeIdx).isEmpty) parseTree.rightChildren(parseTreeIdx).last else null
if (thisRightmostDep == null || trueRightmostDep == null) {
// if one is null then they both should be
if (thisRightmostDep != null)
Assert.assertEquals(s"Rightmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.NULL_STRING, thisRightmostDep.string)
else
Assert.assertNotNull(s"Rightmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisRightmostDep)
} else {
// should be the same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"Rightmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueRightmostDep.string, thisRightmostDep.string)
// 2nd leftmost dependents should be the same
val thisRightmostDep2 = sentence(state.rightmostDependent2(idx))
val trueRightmostDep2 = if (!trueRightmostDep.parseRightChildren.isEmpty) trueRightmostDep.parseRightChildren.last else null
if (thisRightmostDep2 == null || trueRightmostDep2 == null) {
// if one is null then they both should be
if (thisRightmostDep2 != null)
Assert.assertEquals(s"2nd rightmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.NULL_STRING, thisRightmostDep2.string)
else
Assert.assertNotNull(s"2nd rightmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisRightmostDep2)
} else {
// should be same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"2nd rightmost dependency of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueRightmostDep2.string, thisRightmostDep2.string)
}
}
// left-nearest siblings should be the same
val thisLeftNearestSib = sentence(state.leftNearestSibling(idx))
val trueParentIdx = parseTree.sentence(parseTreeIdx).parseParentIndex
val trueLeftNearestSib = {
var i = parseTreeIdx - 1
while (i >= 0 && parseTree.sentence(i).parseParentIndex != trueParentIdx) i -= 1
if (i == -1) null else parseTree.sentence(i)
}
if (trueLeftNearestSib == null || thisLeftNearestSib == null) {
// if one is null then they both should be
if (thisLeftNearestSib != null)
Assert.assertEquals(s"Left nearest sibling of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.NULL_STRING, thisLeftNearestSib.string)
else
Assert.assertNotNull(s"Left nearest sibling of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisLeftNearestSib)
} else {
// should be same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"Left nearest sibling of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueLeftNearestSib.string, thisLeftNearestSib.string)
}
// right-nearest siblings should be the same
val thisRightNearestSib = sentence(state.rightNearestSibling(idx))
val trueRightNearestSib = {
var i = parseTreeIdx + 1
while (i < parseTree.sentence.size && parseTree.sentence(i).parseParentIndex != trueParentIdx) i += 1
if (i == parseTree.sentence.size) null else parseTree.sentence(i)
}
if (trueRightNearestSib == null || thisRightNearestSib == null) {
// if one is null then they both should be
if (thisRightNearestSib != null)
Assert.assertEquals(s"Right nearest sibling of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", ParserConstants.NULL_STRING, thisRightNearestSib.string)
else
Assert.assertNotNull(s"Right nearest sibling of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", thisRightNearestSib)
} else {
// should be same word
Assert.assertEquals(s"Right nearest sibling of token ``${tok.string}'' incorrect.", trueRightNearestSib.string, thisRightNearestSib.string)
}
}
}}
})
/* Print out the features for the first sentence */
parseDecisions.head.foreach(decision => {
print(s"${
// convert decision to a nice verbose string (rather than ints)
val transition = decision.categoryValue.split(" ")
transition.take(2).map(x => ParserConstants(x.toInt)).mkString(" ") + " " + transition(2)
}; ")
println(s"feats: ${decision.features.activeCategories.mkString(", ")}")//domain.dimensionDomain.categories.zip(decision.features.value.toSeq).filter(_._2 == 1.0).map(_._1).mkString(" ")}")
println()
})
}
} | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,903 |
\section{Introduction}
The AdS/CFT correspondence has provided us with a new approach to investigate strongly interacting systems by studying their weakly coupled gravity duals with one extra dimension\cite{M,GKP,W}. In particular, it has recently been used to model various phenomena in condensed matter systems such as superfluids and superconductors\cite{G,HHH1,HHH2}. By putting a charged scalar field on top of the bulk Einstein-Maxwell theory, the AdS black hole becomes unstable to form a scalar hair near a critical temperature, which have a dual interpretation on the boundary as a second order phase transition from a normal fluid to an s-wave superfluid or from a normal metal to an s-wave superconductor. Such a holographic system exhibits many characteristic properties shared by real materials and the basic setup has been extended to describe the condensate with a more sophisticated structure on the boundary by taking into account other types of matter fields in the bulk\cite{GP,DG,CLL,CKMWY,BHRY}.
On the other hand, the insulator to superconductor phase transition at zero temperature has also been implemented by holography in \cite{NRT}, where the AdS soliton will carry a scalar hair when one cranks up the chemical potential to a certain critical value. It is found that this holographic model has a very similarity with the resonating valence bond approach in modeling the high-T$_c$ superconductors. When this phase transition is viewed as a vacuum to superfluid phase transition, the corresponding phase diagram bears a strong resemblance to the one observed recently in ultracold cesium atoms, where the compactified dimension in the AdS soliton background can
be naturally identified as the reduced dimension in optical lattices by the very steep harmonic
potential as both mechanisms make the effective dimension of the system in consideration
reduced in the low energy regime\cite{ZHTC}. By taking into account the backreaction of matter fields onto the metric, the complete phase diagram in $T-\mu$ plane has further been constructed in \cite{HW} by numerics. Near the critical points, the analytical calculations are available and consistent with the numerical results\cite{CLZ}.
The strongly correlated systems also demonstrate the phases with many coexistent orders. Therefore, it is desirable to investigate the various order parameters coexistent in the holographic setup. Actually, such a holographic construction of the competing order parameters has been successfully accomplished in the AdS black hole background in \cite{BHMRS} for the first time. Furthermore, the case for the two competing scalar order parameters has been extensively explored by going beyond the probe limit in \cite{CLLW}. More works on the holographic multi-band systems can be found in \cite{HLM,DGSW,KKS,NCGZ,LCLW,N,CB,DM,AAJML,WYW,MRM,NCGLZ,NZ,MSW}. For a more comprehensive review, please check \cite{CLLY}.
But nevertheless, it is always significant to see how these orders compete with one another at zero temperature, as it is believed that the quantum criticality can serve as the best point of departure for understanding what happens at finite temperature. However, to the best of our knowledge, the holographic investigation of coexistent phases on top of the AdS soliton geometry has not been touched upon yet. Due to the essential difference between the AdS black hole and AdS soliton, it is a priori unknown whether there are such coexistent phases on top of the AdS soliton geometry. Not only is this issue of academic interest by itself, but also may be relevant to the feasibility of implementation of a mixture of Bose and Fermi superfluids in realistic systems such as liquid helium and cold atoms\cite{Helium1,Helium2,Cold1,Cold2}.
The purpose of this paper is to fill such a gap by investigating the zero temperature holographic superfluid model with the two competing scalar orders in the aforementioned AdS soliton background\cite{footnote}. The paper is structured as follows. In Section \ref{setup}, we will present our zero temperature holographic superfluid model, where the two charged scalar fields are coupled to one single $U(1)$ gauge field on top of the AdS soliton background. Then we shall make some analytical arguments in Section \ref{qualitative} about the possible region for the existence of bulk solution dual to the boundary coexistent phase by rephrasing the problem in terms of a Schrodinger like one. In Section \ref{numerical}, we apply the pseudo-spectral method to numerically solve the the non-linear equations of motion and construct the complete phase diagram by the free energy analysis, where as expected the coexistent phase shows up. After that, in Section \ref{linearresponse} we affirm that the system with the non-vanishing condensates indeed describes the superfluid phase by calculating the optical conductivity in the context of linear response theory. Furthermore, by employing the frequency domain analysis in Section \ref{nmss}, we spot the hydrodynamic normal modes, extract the sound speed from the dispersion relation, and figure out the variation of sound speed with respect to the chemical potential. We conclude our paper with some discussions in Section \ref{end}.
\section{Holographic Model}\label{setup}
In this section, we begin with the holographic setup for the zero temperature two component superfluids, where two complex scalar fields are coupled to one single $U(1)$ Abelian gauge field in the AdS soliton background. The action for the model reads
\begin{equation} \label{action}
S=\frac{1}{16\pi G}\int d^{d+1}x\sqrt{-g}[R+\frac{d(d-1)}{l^2}+L_{matter}].
\end{equation}
Notice that $G$ is the Newton's gravitational constant, the AdS curvature radius $l$ is related to the negative cosmological constant as $\Lambda=-\frac{d(d-1)}{2l^2}$, and Lagrangian of the matter fields is given by $L_{matter}=\frac{l^2}{e_2^2}L$ with $L$ in the form of
\begin{equation}
L=-\frac{1}{4}F^{ab}F_{ab}-|D_1\Psi_1|^2-m_1^2|\Psi_1|^2-|D_2\Psi_2|^2-m_2^2|\Psi_2|^2.
\end{equation}
Here, we are writing $F=dA$, $D_1=\nabla-i\frac{e_1}{e_2}A$, $D_2=\nabla-iA$, with $e_i$ and $m_i$ $(i=1,2)$ the charge and mass carried by the complex scalar field $\Psi_i$, respectively. In what follows, we shall work with the probe limit. Namely, the backreaction of matter fields to the bulk geometry is ignored, which can be achieved by taking the large $e_{2}$ limit but keeping the ratio of two scalar field charges, namely $e=e_1/e_2$, finite. With this in mind, we can perform the interplay of the matter fields above a fixed background geometry, which is a solution for the vacuum Einstein gravity with the negative cosmological constant. For our purpose, we choose the AdS soliton solution as our background geometry, which is obtained by the double Wick rotation of the planar AdS Schwarzschild black hole as
\begin{equation}
ds^2=\frac{l^2}{z^2}[-dt^2+d\mathbf{x}^2+\frac{dz^2}{f(z)}+f(z)d\chi^2].
\end{equation}
Notice that in this coordinate system $f(z)=1-(\frac{z}{z_0})^d$ with $z=z_0$ the tip where our geometry caps off and $z=0$ the AdS boundary. In order to avoid a conical singularity at the tip, we must impose a periodicity $\frac{4\pi z_0}{d}$ along the $\chi$ coordinate direction. The inverse of the periodicity is interpreted as the confining scale for the dual boundary theory. Without loss of generality, below we take $16\pi G e_2^2=1$, $l=1$, and $z_0=1$. In addition, we shall focus solely on the action of matter fields because the leading $e_2^0$ contribution has been frozen due to the fixed background geometry.
The equations of motion for the matter fields read
\begin{eqnarray}
&&D_{1a}D_1^a\Psi_1-m_1^2\Psi_1=0,\\
&&D_{2a}D_2^a\Psi_2-m_2^2\Psi_2=0,\\
&&\nabla_aF^{ab}=ie\left(\overline{\Psi_1}D_1^b\Psi_1-\Psi_1\overline{D_1^b\Psi_1}\right)+
i\left(\overline{\Psi_2}D_2^b\Psi_2-\Psi_2\overline{D_2^b\Psi_2}\right).
\end{eqnarray}
whence the asymptotical behavior for the matter fields near the AdS boundary is of the form
\begin{eqnarray}\label{conformaldimension}
&&\Psi_1\rightarrow\psi_{-,1}z^{\Delta_{-,1}}+\psi_{+,1}z^{\Delta_{+,1}}\label{asympt1} ,\\
&&\Psi_2\rightarrow\psi_{-,2}z^{\Delta_{-,1}}+\psi_{+,2}z^{\Delta_{+,1}}\label{asympt2} ,\\
&&A_\mu\rightarrow a_\mu+b_\mu z^{d-2}\label{asympt3}.
\end{eqnarray}
with the axial gauge $A_z=0$ and conformal dimension $\Delta_{\pm,i}=\frac{d}{2}\pm\sqrt{\frac{d^2}{4}+m_i^2}$. Below we shall devote ourselves to the case of $m_1^2=0$, $m_2^2=-2$ and $d=3$. Correspondingly, we obtain $\Delta_{-,1}=0,\Delta_{+,1}=3$ and $\Delta_{-,2}=1,\Delta_{+,2}=2$, respectively. According to the holographic dictionary for the standard quantization in the AdS/CFT correspondence, we have
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle j^\mu\rangle&=&\frac{\delta S_{ren}}{\delta a_\mu}=b^\mu,\nonumber\\
\langle O_{+,1}\rangle&=&\frac{\delta S_{ren}}{\delta\psi_{-,1}}=\overline{\psi_{+,1}},\nonumber\\
\langle O_{+,2}\rangle&=&\frac{\delta S_{ren}}{\delta\psi_{-,2}}=\overline{\psi_{+,2}}.\label{dict}
\end{eqnarray}
Here $j^\mu$ is interpreted as the boundary conserved particle current, the expectation value of the scalar operator $O_{+,1}$ and $O_{+,2}$ is regarded as the order parameters of condensate in holographic superfluid system, and $S_{ren}$ represents the holographic renormalized on-shell action obtained by adding the counter terms to remove the divergence of the original action, i.e.,
\begin{eqnarray}
S_{ren}=S+\int d^3x\sqrt{-h}|\partial\Psi_1|^2-\int d^3 x\sqrt{-h}|\Psi_2|^2.
\end{eqnarray}
When either of the two bulk scalar fields takes a non-vanishing profile under the condition that both of the sources $\psi_{-,1}$ and $\psi_{-,2}$ are switched off, the corresponding scalar operator will acquire a non-vanishing expectation value, which corresponds to the U(1) symmetry spontaneous breaking. Then the dual boundary system is perceived to be in a superfluid phase. In particular, when both of the two scalar operators have a non-vanishing expectation value simultaneously, the dual boundary system is in the coexistent superfluid phase.
To make our life easier, in what follows we shall not touch upon the striped phase structure as in \cite{JE,KWG}, but restrict ourselves solely on the homogeneous phase structure of our model, which can be implemented by the homogeneous ansatz for the bulk matter fields as
\begin{equation}
\Psi_1=\Psi_1(z),\quad \Psi_2=\Psi_2(z),\quad A_\mu dx^\mu=A_t(z)dt.
\end{equation}
As a result, the independent equations of motion can be reduced to
\begin{eqnarray}
&&\Psi_1^{''}+\left(\frac{f^{'}}{f}-\frac{2}{z}\right)\Psi_{1}^{'}+
\left(-\frac{m_1^2}{z^2f}+\frac{e^2A_t^2}{f}\right)\Psi_1=0,\label{static1}\\
&&\Psi_2^{''}+\left(\frac{f^{'}}{f}-\frac{2}{z}\right)\Psi_2^{'}+
\left(-\frac{m_2^2}{z^2f}+\frac{A_t^2}{f}\right)\Psi_2=0,\label{static2}\\
&&A_t^{''}+\frac{f^{'}}{f}A_t^{'}-2e^2\frac{\Psi_1^2}{z^2f}A_t-2\frac{\Psi_2^2}{z^2f}A_t=0,
\end{eqnarray}
where the prime denotes the derivative with respect to $z$.
\section{Qualitative Analysis}\label{qualitative}
Before solving our holographic model numerically, we would like to carry out a brief qualitative discussion on the possible solutions to the above equations. First, there obviously exists a trivial solution with a constant gauge potential $A_t=\mu$ and a vanishing profile for both scalar fields, which corresponds to the vacuum phase in the dual boundary field system. On the other hand, when one of the bulk scalars is set to zero, the system is reduced to the one component superfluid with the critical chemical potential $\mu_i$, as studied in \cite{NRT}. But in order to see whether there is a bulk solution dual to a coexistent superfluid phase, we like to convert our equations for scalar fields
\begin{eqnarray}
&&z^4\partial_z\left(\frac{f}{z^2}\partial_z\Psi_1\right)+\left(-m_1^2+e^2z^2A_t^2\right)\Psi_1=0,\\
&&z^4\partial_z\left(\frac{f}{z^2}\partial_z\Psi_2\right)+\left(-m_2^2+z^2A_t^2\right)\Psi_2=0.
\end{eqnarray}
into Schrodinger like ones as
\begin{eqnarray}
&&-\partial_y^2\widetilde{\Psi_1}+V_1\widetilde{\Psi_1}=0,\\
&&-\partial_y^2\widetilde{\Psi_2}+V_2\widetilde{\Psi_2}=0.
\end{eqnarray}
Here we have defined a new variable $y\in[0,y^*]$ as $dy=\frac{1}{\sqrt{f}}dz$ with $y^*=\frac{\sqrt{\pi}\Gamma(\frac{4}{3})}{\Gamma(\frac{5}{6})}\approx 1.40218$ and introduced the new functions $\Psi_1=Y\widetilde{\Psi_1},\Psi_2=Y\widetilde{\Psi_2}$ with $Y=\frac{z}{f^\frac{1}{4}}$. In addition, the potentials are given by
\begin{eqnarray}
&&V_1=-e^2A_t^2+\frac{m_1^2}{z^2}-\frac{z^2\partial_z(\frac{f\partial_zY}{z^2})}{Y},\\
&&V_2=-A_t^2+\frac{m_2^2}{z^2}-\frac{z^2\partial_z(\frac{f\partial_zY}{z^2})}{Y}.
\end{eqnarray}
which are found to have the following asymptotic behaviors
\begin{eqnarray}
&&V_i\approx \frac{m_i^2+2}{y^2}, y\rightarrow 0,\label{uv}\\
&&V_i\approx -\frac{1}{4(y-y^*)^2},y\rightarrow y^*.\label{ir}
\end{eqnarray}
The Hamiltonian for the potential $V(y)=\frac{\kappa}{
y^2}$ is called Calogero Hamiltonian, which leads to an ill-defined Schrodinger problem for $\kappa<-\frac{1}{4}$ due to Landau fall effect, namely the system will be unstable to infinitely many negative energy states. When
applied to (\ref{uv}), this gives rise to the well known BF bound $m^2\geq-\frac{9}{4}$. On the other hand, according to (\ref{ir}), the behavior
near the tip indicates that the system is marginally stable. However, the introduction of the gauge potential lowers the
ground state energy. In particular, when the gauge potential is cranked up to a certain value, the system will become unstable with the
scalar condensed right from the tip all the way to the AdS boundary. This IR instability corresponds to the spontaneous breaking mechanism for the aforementioned one component superfluid phase.
On the basis of the lemma proved in \cite{BHMRS}, we know that if two potentials $V_1$ and $V_2$ are over the same domain with $V_1>V_2$, then the lowest eigenvalue for the Hamiltonian associated with $V_1$ will be strictly greater than the lowest eigenvalue for that associated with $V_2$. This indicates that if the lowest eigenvalue mode for the case of $V_2$ is a zero mode, then $V_1$ cannot give rise to a zero mode in the same region. Back to our holographic model, we have
\begin{equation}
V_1-V_2=\left(1-e^2\right)A_t^2+\frac{2(m_1^2-m_2^2)}{z^2}
\end{equation}
for the two scalar fields. Note that we are focusing on the case of $m_1^2=0$ and $m_2^2=-2$. Thus for $e\leq1$, we always have $V_1>V_2$ and the zero mode of $\Psi_2$ condensates before $\Psi_1$, which further prevents the condensation of $\Psi_1$ by depleting the gauge potential. Hence, the corresponding phase structure is the same as that for the one component holographic superfluid only with $\Psi_2$ condensation. The interesting situation happens to the $e>1$ case, because there is sort of competition between the gauge potential term and mass dependent term. It is reasonable to expect that the coexistent phase shows up in an intermediate region of chemical potential, which will be confirmed by our numerical calculation below. Furthermore,
one may naively think that as we increase the chemical potential the scalar field with a large charge will eventually dominate. However, as demonstrated by our numerics, due to the $\frac{1}{z^2}$ divergent behavior near the AdS boundary, the mass dependent term becomes more important such that the scalar field with a small charge will dominate at the large chemical potential.
\section{Phase Diagram}\label{numerical}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{cd1.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{c1.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{cd2.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{c2.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The variation of particle density and condensate with respect to the chemical potential $\mu$ in one component holographic superfluid, where the top is for $\Psi_1$ with the second order phase transition triggered at $\mu_1=1.669$, and the bottom is for $\Psi_2$ with the second phase transition occurred at $\mu_2=1.718$.}
\label{phase1}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{ccd.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{cc.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The variation of particle density and condensate with respect to the chemical potential in two component holographic superfluid, where the chemical potential for the coexistent superfluid phase with two competing orders lies in the region between $\mu_{c1}=2.088$ and $\mu_{c2}=2.143$.}
\label{phase2}
\end{figure}
In this section, we shall figure out the phase diagram for our holographic model by numerics. As alluded to in the previous section, the rich phenomenon happens to the case of $e>1$. So we would like to take $e=1.63$ as a concrete example for the purpose of demonstration. To this end, we first rewrite the bulk fields in the following form
\begin{equation}
\Psi_1=\psi_1(z),\quad \Psi_2=z\psi_2(z).
\end{equation}
As a result, the equations of motion for the static configurations can be expressed as
\begin{eqnarray}
&&z(1-z^3)\psi_1^{''}-(2+z^3)\psi_1^{'}+ze^2A_t^2\psi_1=0,\\
&& (1-z^3)\psi_2^{''}-3z^2\psi_2^{'}+(A_t^2-z)\psi_2=0,\\
&&z^2(1-z^3)A_t^{''}-3z^4A_t^{'}-2(e^2\psi_1^2+z^2\psi_2^2)A_t=0.
\end{eqnarray}
These coupled non-linear differential equations together with Dirichlet boundary conditions at the AdS boundary
\begin{equation}
\psi_1=\psi_2=0, A_t=\mu
\end{equation}
can be solved by the pseudo-spectral method, supplemented with Newton-Raphson iteration method. Then we can read off all the physical quantities of interest from the resulting bulk matter field configurations by the holographic dictionary (\ref{dict}).
We plot below the variation of particle density and condensate with respect to the chemical potential for one component holographic superfluid in Figure \ref{phase1}. As we see from both the behaviors of particle density and condensate, the system undertakes a second order phase transition from the vacuum to superfluid phase. In addition, the critical chemical potential for $\Psi_1$ is less than that for $\Psi_2$, which turns out to be both the sufficient and necessary conditions for the emergence of coexistent superfluid phase. As shown in Figure \ref{phase2} for our two component holographic superfluid, when one cranks up the chemical potential to a certain critical chemical potential $\mu_{c1}$, the coexistent phase shows up, where the condensate of $\Psi_1$ starts to decrease, accompanied by the emergence of the condensate of $\Psi_2$. Eventually the competition between these two orders ends at another critical chemical potential $\mu_{c2}$, where the condensate of $\Psi_1$ disappears with the only occurrence of the condensate of $\Psi_2$. As evident from Figure \ref{phase2}, the phase transitions occuring at $\mu_{c1}$ and $\mu_{c2}$ are both second order.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fe1.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fez.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The difference of free energy density between the superfluid phases and the vacuum phase. The red line is for S1-Phase, the blue line is for S2-Phase, and the dashed line represents S1+S2-Phase. The right panel is a zoomed-in view in the coexisting phase region, which suggests a phase structure as S1+S2-Phase sandwiched by S1-Phase and S2-Phase.}
\label{energy1}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fe3.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{fe4.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The two panels represent the difference of free energy density between S1+S2-Phase and S1-Phase(left)/S2-Phase(right) in the region between $\mu_{c1}$ and $\mu_{c2}$, which indicates that S1+S2-Phase is thermodynamically favored.}
\label{energy2}
\end{figure}
In order to determine whether Figure \ref{phase2} really represents the genuine phase diagram for our two component holographic superfluid model, we are left with one thing to check. Namely we are require to calculate out the corresponding free energy density in the grand canonical ensemble and ensure it is the smallest compared to any other possible configuration. For later notational convenience, we denote the phase only with $\Psi_1$ condensate as S1-Phase, and the phase only with $\Psi_2$ condensate as S2-Phase. While the coexistent phase is denoted as S1+S2-Phase. Now by holography, the free energy density can be obtained from the renormalized on-shell action of bulk matter fields as
\begin{eqnarray}\label{free}
F&=&-\frac{1}{2}[\int dz
\sqrt{-g}i[e\left(\overline{\Psi_1}D_1^b\Psi_1-\Psi_1\overline{D_1^b\Psi_1}\right)+
\left(\overline{\Psi_2}D_2^b\Psi_2-\Psi_2\overline{D_2^b\Psi_2}\right)]A_b\nonumber\\
&&-\sqrt{-h}n_aA_bF^{ab}|_{z=0}]
=-\frac{1}{2}\mu\rho+\int dz\frac{\left(eA_t\psi_1\right)^2}{z^2}+\int dz\left(A_t\psi_2\right)^2,
\end{eqnarray}
where we have taken advantage of the equations of motion as well as the source free boundary conditions for the scalar fields at the AdS boundary.
As revealed in Figure \ref{energy1}, all the superfluid phases give a lower free energy density than that for the vacuum phase. In particular, as shown in Figure \ref{energy2}, S1+S2-Phase has the lowest free energy density compared to S1-Phase and S2-Phase in the coexistent region.
Using the similar procedure, we can figure out the complete phase diagram in the $e-\mu$ plane by numerics. But before that, we would like to make a wise guess at the rough picture for this phase diagram. First, for the one component holographic superfluid, we have a fixed phase transition point $\mu_2=1.718$ for the phase transition from the vacuum to S2-Phase. Namely the phase boundary between the vacuum and S2-Phase is given by $\mu=\mu_2$ line in the $e-\mu$ plane. While it follows from the scaling symmetry of our holographic system that the phase boundary between the vacuum and S1-Phase is given by the line $\mu=\frac{1.63\times 1.669}{e}=\frac{2.720}{e}$ in the $e-\mu$ plane. So there exists a critical $e_c=\frac{2.720}{u_2}=\frac{2.720}{1.718}=1.584$. When $e<e_c$, $\Psi_2$ starts to condense at $\mu_2$, before $\Psi_1$. In this case, we only have S2-Phase. On the other hand, when $e>e_c$, $\Psi_1$ starts to condense at $\mu_1$, before $\Psi_2$. In this case, as demonstrated for the example $e=1.63$, we shall have S1+S2-Phase sandwiched by S1-Phase and S2-Phase. Actually as plotted in Figure \ref{pdiagram} by numerics, the complete phase diagram is well captured by the above rough guess. Figure \ref{pdiagram} further shows that with a larger $e$ in our holographic model, the coexisting phase will occur in a wider region of the chemical potential, starting from a larger chemical potential.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{pdiagram.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The $e-\mu$ phase diagram, where the intersection point is located at $e=1.584$, and $\mu=1.718$.}
\label{pdiagram}
\end{figure}
\section{Optical Conductivity}\label{linearresponse}
In this section, we shall calculate the optical conductivity for our two component holographic superfluid model by the linear response theory acting onto the previous static background solutions. For our purpose, we first rewrite our scalar fields $\psi_1$ and $\psi_2$ in terms of the real and imaginary parts as
\begin{equation}
\psi_1=\psi_{1,r}+i\psi_{1,i},\quad \psi_2=\psi_{2,r}+i\psi_{2,i}.
\end{equation}
Note that the background solution is static and homogeneous, so the bulk perturbation fields $\delta\Phi$ with the following form
\begin{equation}
\delta\Phi\rightarrow \delta\Phi(z)e^{-i\omega t+iqx}
\end{equation}
are decoupled from those modes with a different $\omega$ or a different $q$. Furthermore, the perturbation equations can be reduced to
\begin{eqnarray}
0&=&z(z^3-1)\delta\psi_{1,r}^{''}+(z^3+2)\delta\psi_{1,r}^{'}+z(q^2-\omega^2-e^2A_t^2)\delta\psi_{1,r}\nonumber\\
&&-2ezA_t(e\psi_{1,r}\delta A_t+i\omega\delta\psi_{1,i}),\\
0&=&z(z^3-1)\delta\psi_{1,i}^{''}+(z^3+2)\delta\psi_{1,i}^{'}+z(q^2-\omega^2-e^2A_t^2)\delta\psi_{1,i}\nonumber\\
&&+iez(2\omega A_t\delta\psi_{1,r}+\psi_{1,r}(\omega\delta A_t+q\delta A_x)),\\
0&=&(z^3-1)\delta\psi_{2,r}^{''}+3z^2\delta\psi_{2,r}^{'}+(q^2+z-\omega^2-A_t^2)\delta\psi_{2,r}\nonumber\\
&&-A_t(2\psi_{2,r}\delta A_t+2i\omega\delta\psi_{2,i}),\\
0&=&(z^3-1)\delta\psi_{2,i}^{''}+3z^2\delta\psi_{2,i}^{'}+(q^2+z-\omega^2-A_t^2)\delta\psi_{2,i}\nonumber\\
&&+i(2\omega A_t\delta\psi_{2,r}+\psi_{2,r}(\omega\delta A_t+q\delta A_x)),\\
0&=&z^2(z^3-1)\delta A_t^{''}+3z^4\delta A_t^{'}+(2e\psi_{1,r}^2+2z^2\psi_{2,r}^2+z^2q^2)\delta A_t\nonumber\\
&&+2\psi_{1,r}(2eA_t\delta\psi_{1,r}+i\omega\delta\psi_{1,i})
+2\psi_{2,r}(2A_t\delta\psi_{2,r}+i\omega\delta\psi_{2,i})
+q\omega\delta A_x,\\
0&=&z^2(z^3-1)\delta A_x^{''}+3z^4\delta A_x^{'}+(2e\psi_{1,r}^2+2z^2\psi_{2,r}^2-z^2\omega^2)\delta A_x\nonumber\\
&&-2iq\psi_{1,r}\delta\psi_{1,i}-2iz^2q\psi_{2,r}\delta\psi_{2,i}-z^2q\omega\delta A_t,\label{opticalcond}\\
0&=&2(\psi_{1,r}^{'}\delta\psi_{1,i}-\psi_{1,r}\delta\psi_{1,i}^{'})+
2z^2(\psi_{2,r}^{'}\delta\psi_{2,i}-\psi_{2,r}\delta\psi_{2,i}^{'})+iz^2(\omega\delta A_t^{'}+q\delta A_x^{'}).\label{constraint}
\end{eqnarray}
where we have made use of the fact $\psi_{1,i}=\psi_{2,i}=0$ for the background solution.
To proceed, it is noteworthy that the perturbation of the following form
\begin{equation}
\delta A_t=-\lambda\omega, \delta A_x=\lambda q, \delta\psi_1=e\lambda\psi_1, \delta\psi_2=\lambda\psi_2.
\end{equation}
is essentially kind of gauge transformation
\begin{equation}
A\rightarrow A+\nabla\theta, \psi_1\rightarrow\psi_1e^{ie\theta}, \psi_2\rightarrow\psi_2e^{i\theta}
\end{equation}
with
\begin{equation}
\theta=\frac{1}{i}\lambda e^{-i\omega t+iqx}
\end{equation}
on top of the background solution. This spurious solution generated by the parameter $\lambda$ can be eliminated by gauge fixing. Below we shall choose a gauge such that $\delta A_t=0$ at the AdS boundary. In addition, as we are working with the standard quantization, the Dirichlet boundary conditions will be implemented for $\delta\psi_1$ and $\delta\psi_2$ at the AdS boundary. On the other hand, note that the perturbation equation (\ref{constraint}) turns to be automatically satisfied once the other equations are satisfied, thus we shall forget about (\ref{constraint}) hereafter.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{cond0.pdf}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{cond1.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The imaginary part of optical conductivity as a function of frequency for the two component holographic superfluid with $e=1.63$. The left panel is for the vacuum phase at $\mu=1.5$, while the right panel is for the S1-Phase at $\mu=1.9$ (Red), S1+S2-Phase at $\mu=2.1$ (Green), and S2-Phase at $\mu=2.3$ (Blue).}
\label{conductivity}
\end{figure}
With the above preparation, now let us calculate the optical conductivity for our two component holographic superfluid by focusing on the $q=0$ mode. As a consequence, $\delta A_x$ in (\ref{opticalcond}) is decoupled from the other perturbation fields, and can be solved by the pseudo-spectral method. With the boundary condition $\delta A_x=1$ at the AdS boundary, the holographic optical conductivity can be expressed as
\begin{equation}\label{oc}
\sigma(\omega)=\frac{\partial_z\delta A_x|_{z=0}}{i\omega}.
\end{equation}
Since the real perturbation equation together with the real boundary condition for $\delta A_x$ implies that the real part of the holographic conductivity must vanish, we only depict the nontrivial imaginary part of the optical conductivity in Figure \ref{conductivity} for the vacuum phase and the three superfluid phases. According to the Krames-Kronig relation
\begin{equation}
\mathbf{Im}[\sigma(\omega)]=\frac{1}{\pi}\mathcal{P}\int_{-\infty}^\infty d\omega'\frac{\mathbf{Re}[\sigma(\omega')]}{\omega-\omega'},
\end{equation}
the DC conductivity is equal to zero for the vacuum phase, but acquires a $\delta(\omega)$ peak for all the spontaneous breaking phases due to the $\frac{1}{\omega}$ behavior of the imaginary part of optical conductivity, which tells us that these spontaneous breaking phases correspond to the superfluid phases indeed. Furthermore, the residue for this zero pole is related to the superfluid density as $\frac{\rho_s}{\mu}$. Thus Figure \ref{conductivity} further indicates that the superfluid density
becomes large as the chemical potential is cranked up. This is consistent with Figure \ref{phase2}, in which the particle density is increased with the chemical potential. Because as shown in \cite{GNTZ} and \cite{GLNTZ}, $\rho_s=\rho$ at zero temperature. In addition, the other poles give rise to the gapped normal modes for $\delta A_x$. It follows from Figure \ref{conductivity} that the gap becomes larger with the increase of the chemical potential. In the subsequent section, we shall not care about these gapped normal modes any more.
\section{Sound Speed}\label{nmss}
In order to calculate the speed of sound by the linear response theory for our two component holographic superfluid model, we are required to work on the hydrodynamic normal modes of the gapless Goldstone boson from the spontaneous symmetry breaking in the superfluid phases. To this end, we need work not only with the $q=0$ mode, but also with the $q\neq 0$ modes. In addition, we replace $\delta A_x=1$ by $\delta A_x=0$ at the AdS boundary. Furthermore we massage the linear perturbation equations as well as the boundary conditions into the form $\mathcal{L}(\omega)v= 0$ with $v$ the values of perturbation fields at the grid points associated with the pseudo-spectral method. Note that the normal modes satisfy the condition $det[\mathcal{L}(\omega)]= 0$, so these modes can be spotted in the density plot $|\frac{det[\mathcal{L}(\omega)]'}{det[\mathcal{L}(\omega)]}|$ with the prime the derivative with respect to $\omega$ here. As a demonstration, we depict the corresponding density plot for the S1+S2-Phase at $\mu=2.1$ with $q=0.3$ and $e=1.63$ in Figure \ref{densityplot}, where the hydrodynamic normal mode locates at the closest peak to the origin, marked in red line.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{nm.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{The density plot of $|\frac{det[\mathcal{L}(\omega)]'}{det[\mathcal{L}(\omega)]}|$ with $q=0.3$ and $e=1.63$ for S1+S2-Phase at $\mu=2.1$. The normal modes give rise to the peaks, where the red line pins down the hydrodynamic normal mode at $\omega_0\approx0.107$.}
\label{densityplot}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{dispersion.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{ The dispersion relation of the gapless Goldstone mode for S1+S2 phase at $\mu=2.1$. By the fitting formula $\omega_0=v_sq$, the sound speed can be extracted as $v_s=0.359$.}
\label{dispersion}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=7.5cm]{ss.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{ The variation of sound speed with respect to the chemical potential. The phase transitions turn out to be also signaled by the non-smoothness of sound speed at the critical points. In addition, the sound speed approaches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}$ at the large chemical potential limit. }
\label{ss}
\end{figure}
With this strategy, we further plot the dispersion relation for the gapless Goldstone mode in Figure \ref{dispersion} for S1+S2-Phase at $\mu=2.1$. Then we can extract the sound speed $v_s$ by the fitting formula $\omega_0=v_s q$ for small $q$s. We present the variation of sound speed with respect to the chemical potential in Figure \ref{ss}. As one can see, the sound speed increases with the chemical potential. Furthermore, Figure \ref{ss} indicates that the sound speed can also be used to signal the phase transition because the phase transition leaves its footprint by making the sound speed also non-smooth at the critical point. In addition, when the chemical potential is much larger than the confining scale, the sound speed saturates to a constant, which is in good agreement with the predicted value $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}$ from conformal field theory for the superfluid condensate with the conformal dimension $2$\cite{HKS,Y,HY}. This is reasonable since the conformality is believed to be restored in large chemical potential limit.
\section{Conclusion}\label{end}
We have initiated the study of two component superfluid at zero temperature by investigating its dual gravitational system with two complex scalar fields coupled to a single U(1) gauge field in the AdS soliton background. We make a qualitative analysis on the possible existence of the two-component superfluid phase and verify its occurrence by numerically constructing the bulk solutions as well as making an analysis of the corresponding free energy density. We further figure out the complete phase diagram in the $e-\mu$ plane with the coexistent region specified. In addition, we make use of the linear response theory to work out the optical conductivity and sound speed. The onset of pole of optical conductivity at $\omega=0$ for the spontaneous breaking phase confirms its superfluid phase interpretation. On the other hand, the resulting sound speed exhibits the non-smoothness at the critical points. Thus we can also use the behavior of sound speed to identify the onset of phase transitions. Furthermore, as expected from the boundary conformal field theory, our sound speed approaches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}$ at the large chemical potential.
Finally, note that we have restricted ourselves onto the the probe limit, so we would like to conclude with some comments on the back reaction effect, which is controlled parametrically by $e_2$. As suggested in \cite{HW} for one component holographic superfluid model, the phase diagram is expected to have no essential change at zero temperature when $e_2$ is sufficiently large. But when $e_2$ is decreased, the phase transition from the hairless AdS soliton to the hairy AdS soliton may become first order. If one decreases $e_2$ further, there may be a hairy AdS black hole phase emergent between the hairless AdS soliton and the hairy AdS soliton. It is intriguing to work out such a fully backreacted problem explicitly for our two component holographic superfluid model and figure out how the AdS soliton geometry (hairless or hairy) is connected with AdS black hole geometry (hairless or hairy) in the full phase diagram not only at zero temperature but also at finite temperature. The probe limit we have worked out is supposed to provide us with a good preparation to attack this fully backreacted problem. We hope to report the relevant result elsewhere in the near future.
\begin{acknowledgments}
R.L. and J.Z. are supported by NSFC with Grant No.11205048. R.L. is also supported by the Foundation
for Young Key Teacher of Henan Normal University.
Y.T. is partially supported by NSFC with Grant No.11475179 and the Opening Project of Shanghai Key Laboratory of High Temperature Superconductors(14DZ2260700).
H.Z. is supported in part by the Belgian Federal
Science Policy Office through the Interuniversity Attraction Pole
P7/37, by FWO-Vlaanderen through the project
G020714N, and by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel through the
Strategic Research Program ``High-Energy Physics''. He is also an individual FWO Fellow supported by 12G3515N.
This work is also partially supported by ``the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities" with Grant No.2015NT16.
\end{acknowledgments}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 5,990 |
{"url":"http:\/\/www.nag.com\/numeric\/fl\/nagdoc_fl24\/html\/G08\/g08edf.html","text":"G08 Chapter Contents\nG08 Chapter Introduction\nNAG Library Manual\n\n# NAG Library Routine DocumentG08EDF\n\nNote:\u00a0 before using this routine, please read the Users' Note for your implementation to check the interpretation of bold italicised terms and other implementation-dependent details.\n\n## 1\u00a0\u00a0Purpose\n\nG08EDF performs a gaps test on a sequence of observations.\n\n## 2\u00a0\u00a0Specification\n\n SUBROUTINE\u00a0G08EDF\u00a0( CL, N, X, M, MAXG, RLO, RUP, TOTLEN, NGAPS, NCOUNT, EX, CHI, DF, PROB, IFAIL)\n INTEGER N, M, MAXG, NGAPS, NCOUNT(MAXG), IFAIL REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp) X(N), RLO, RUP, TOTLEN, EX(MAXG), CHI, DF, PROB CHARACTER(1) CL\n\n## 3\u00a0\u00a0Description\n\nGaps tests are used to test for cyclical trend in a sequence of observations. G08EDF computes certain statistics for the gaps test.\nG08EDF may be used in two different modes:\n (i) a single call to G08EDF which computes all test statistics after counting the gaps; (ii) multiple calls to G08EDF with the final test statistics only being computed in the last call.\nThe second mode is necessary if all the data does not fit into the memory. See parameter CL in Section 5 for details on how to invoke each mode.\nThe term gap is used to describe the distance between two numbers in the sequence that lie in the interval $\\left({r}_{l},{r}_{u}\\right)$. That is, a gap ends at ${x}_{j}$\u00a0if ${r}_{l}\\le {x}_{j}\\le {r}_{u}$. The next gap then begins at ${x}_{j+1}$. The interval $\\left({r}_{l},{r}_{u}\\right)$\u00a0should lie within the region of all possible numbers. For example if the test is carried out on a sequence of $\\left(0,1\\right)$\u00a0random numbers then the interval $\\left({r}_{l},{r}_{u}\\right)$\u00a0must be contained in the whole interval $\\left(0,1\\right)$. Let ${t}_{\\text{len}}$\u00a0be the length of the interval which specifies all possible numbers.\nG08EDF counts the number of gaps of different lengths. Let ${c}_{\\mathit{i}}$\u00a0denote the number of gaps of length $\\mathit{i}$, for $\\mathit{i}=1,2,\\dots ,k-1$. The number of gaps of length $k$\u00a0or greater is then denoted by ${c}_{k}$. An unfinished gap at the end of a sequence is not counted unless the sequence is part of an initial or intermediate call to G08EDF (i.e., unless there is another call to G08EDF to follow) in which case the unfinished gap is used. The following is a trivial example.\nSuppose we called G08EDF twice (i.e., with ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'F'}$\u00a0and then with ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'L'}$) with the following two sequences and with ${\\mathbf{RLO}}=0.30$\u00a0and ${\\mathbf{RUP}}=0.60$:\n\u2022 ($0.20$\u00a0$0.40$\u00a0$0.45$\u00a0$0.40$\u00a0$0.15$\u00a0$0.75$\u00a0$0.95$\u00a0$0.23$) and\n\u2022 ($0.27$\u00a0$0.40$\u00a0$0.25$\u00a0$0.10$\u00a0$0.34$\u00a0$0.39$\u00a0$0.61$\u00a0$0.12$).\nThen after the second call G08EDF would have counted the gaps of the following lengths:\n\u2022 2, $1$, $1$, $6$, $3$\u00a0and $1$.\nWhen the counting of gaps is complete G08EDF computes the expected values of the counts. An approximate ${\\chi }^{2}$\u00a0statistic with $k$\u00a0degrees of freedom is computed where\n $X2=\u2211i=1k ci-ei 2ei,$\nwhere\n\u2022 ${e}_{i}=\\mathit{ngaps}\u00d7p\u00d7{\\left(1-p\\right)}^{i-1}$, if $i;\n\u2022 ${e}_{i}=\\mathit{ngaps}\u00d7{\\left(1-p\\right)}^{i-1}$, if $i=k$;\n\u2022 $\\mathit{ngaps}=\\text{}$\u00a0the number of gaps found and\n\u2022 $p=\\left({r}_{u}-{r}_{l}\\right)\/{t}_{\\text{len}}$.\nThe use of the ${\\chi }^{2}$-distribution as an approximation to the exact distribution of the test statistic improves as the expected values increase.\nYou may specify the total number of gaps to be found. If the specified number of gaps is found before the end of a sequence G08EDF will exit before counting any further gaps.\n\n## 4\u00a0\u00a0References\n\nDagpunar J (1988) Principles of Random Variate Generation Oxford University Press\nKnuth D E (1981) The Art of Computer Programming (Volume 2) (2nd Edition) Addison\u2013Wesley\nMorgan B J T (1984) Elements of Simulation Chapman and Hall\nRipley B D (1987) Stochastic Simulation Wiley\n\n## 5\u00a0\u00a0Parameters\n\n1: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 CL \u2013 CHARACTER(1)Input\nOn entry: indicates the type of call to G08EDF.\n${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\nThis is the one and only call to G08EDF (single call mode). All data are to be input at once. All test statistics are computed after the counting of gaps is complete.\n${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'F'}$\nThis is the first call to the routine. All initializations are carried out before the counting of gaps begins. The final test statistics are not computed since further calls will be made to G08EDF.\n${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'I'}$\nThis is an intermediate call during which the counts of gaps are updated. The final test statistics are not computed since further calls will be made to G08EDF.\n${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'L'}$\nThis is the last call to G08EDF. The test statistics are computed after the final counting of gaps is complete.\nConstraint: ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$, $\\text{'F'}$, $\\text{'I'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$.\n2: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 N \u2013 INTEGERInput\nOn entry: $n$, the length of the current sequence of observations.\nConstraint: ${\\mathbf{N}}\\ge 1$.\n3: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 X(N) \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)\u00a0arrayInput\nOn entry: the sequence of observations.\n4: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 M \u2013 INTEGERInput\nOn entry: the maximum number of gaps to be sought. If ${\\mathbf{M}}\\le 0$\u00a0then there is no limit placed on the number of gaps that are found.\nM should not be changed between calls to G08EDF.\nConstraint: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$, ${\\mathbf{M}}\\le {\\mathbf{N}}$.\n5: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 MAXG \u2013 INTEGERInput\nOn entry: $k$, the length of the longest gap for which tabulation is desired.\nMAXG must not be changed between calls to G08EDF.\nConstraints:\n\u2022 ${\\mathbf{MAXG}}>1$;\n\u2022 if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$, ${\\mathbf{MAXG}}\\le {\\mathbf{N}}$.\n6: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 RLO \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)Input\nOn entry: the lower limit of the interval to be used to define the gaps, ${r}_{l}$.\nRLO must not be changed between calls to G08EDF.\n7: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 RUP \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)Input\nOn entry: the upper limit of the interval to be used to define the gaps, ${r}_{u}$.\nRUP must not be changed between calls to G08EDF.\nConstraint: ${\\mathbf{RUP}}>{\\mathbf{RLO}}$.\n8: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 TOTLEN \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)Input\nOn entry: the total length of the interval which contains all possible numbers that may arise in the sequence.\nConstraint: ${\\mathbf{TOTLEN}}>0.0$\u00a0and ${\\mathbf{RUP}}-{\\mathbf{RLO}}<{\\mathbf{TOTLEN}}$.\n9: \u00a0\u00a0\u2002 NGAPS \u2013 INTEGERInput\/Output\nOn entry: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'F'}$, NGAPS need not be set.\nIf ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'I'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$, NGAPS must contain the value returned by the previous call to G08EDF.\nOn exit: the number of gaps actually found, $\\mathit{ngaps}$.\n10: \u2002 NCOUNT(MAXG) \u2013 INTEGER\u00a0arrayInput\/Output\nOn entry: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'F'}$, NCOUNT need not be set.\nIf ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'I'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$, NCOUNT must contain the values returned by the previous call to G08EDF.\nOn exit: the counts of gaps of the different lengths, ${c}_{\\mathit{i}}$, for $\\mathit{i}=1,2,\\dots ,k$.\n11: \u2002 EX(MAXG) \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)\u00a0arrayOutput\nOn exit: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$\u00a0(i.e., if it is a final exit) then EX contains the expected values of the counts.\nOtherwise the elements of EX are not set.\n12: \u2002 CHI \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)Output\nOn exit: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$\u00a0(i.e., if it is a final exit) then CHI contains the ${\\chi }^{2}$\u00a0test statistic, ${X}^{2}$, for testing the null hypothesis of randomness.\nOtherwise CHI is not set.\n13: \u2002 DF \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)Output\nOn exit: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$\u00a0(i.e., if it is a final exit) then DF contains the degrees of freedom for the ${\\chi }^{2}$\u00a0statistic.\nOtherwise DF is not set.\n14: \u2002 PROB \u2013 REAL\u00a0(KIND=nag_wp)Output\nOn exit: if ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$\u00a0(i.e., if it is a final exit) then PROB contains the upper tail probability associated with the ${\\chi }^{2}$\u00a0test statistic, i.e., the significance level.\nOtherwise PROB is not set.\n15: \u2002 IFAIL \u2013 INTEGERInput\/Output\nOn entry: IFAIL must be set to $0$, $-1\\text{\u200b or \u200b}1$. If you are unfamiliar with this parameter you should refer to Section 3.3 in the Essential Introduction for details.\nFor environments where it might be inappropriate to halt program execution when an error is detected, the value $-1\\text{\u200b or \u200b}1$\u00a0is recommended. If the output of error messages is undesirable, then the value $1$\u00a0is recommended. Otherwise, because for this routine the values of the output parameters may be useful even if ${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}\\ne {\\mathbf{0}}$\u00a0on exit, the recommended value is $-1$. When the value $-\\mathbf{1}\\text{\u200b or \u200b}1$\u00a0is used it is essential to test the value of IFAIL on exit.\nOn exit: ${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}={\\mathbf{0}}$\u00a0unless the routine detects an error or a warning has been flagged (see Section 6).\n\n## 6\u00a0\u00a0Error Indicators and Warnings\n\nIf on entry ${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}={\\mathbf{0}}$\u00a0or $-{\\mathbf{1}}$, explanatory error messages are output on the current error message unit (as defined by X04AAF).\nNote: G08EDF may return useful information for one or more of the following detected errors or warnings.\nErrors or warnings detected by the routine:\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=1$\n On\u00a0entry, ${\\mathbf{CL}}\\ne \\text{'S'}$, $\\text{'F'}$, $\\text{'I'}$\u00a0or $\\text{'L'}$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=2$\n On\u00a0entry, ${\\mathbf{N}}<1$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=3$\n On\u00a0entry, with ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$, ${\\mathbf{M}}>{\\mathbf{N}}$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=4$\n On\u00a0entry, ${\\mathbf{MAXG}}\\le 1$, or with ${\\mathbf{CL}}=\\text{'S'}$, ${\\mathbf{MAXG}}>{\\mathbf{N}}$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=5$\n On\u00a0entry, ${\\mathbf{RLO}}\\ge {\\mathbf{RUP}}$, or ${\\mathbf{TOTLEN}}\\le 0.0$, or ${\\mathbf{RUP}}-{\\mathbf{RLO}}\\ge {\\mathbf{TOTLEN}}$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=6$\nNo gaps were found. You may need to use a longer sequence or increase the size of the interval $\\left({r}_{l},{r}_{u}\\right)$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=7$\nThe expected frequency of a certain class is zero, that is ${e}_{i}=0$, for some $i=1,2,\\dots ,k$.\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=8$\n${\\mathbf{IFAIL}}=9$\nSome classes have expected frequencies less than $1.0$. This implies that the ${\\chi }^{2}$-distribution may not be a very good approximation to the distribution of the test statistic.\n\n## 7\u00a0\u00a0Accuracy\n\nThe computations are believed to be stable. The computation of PROB given the values of CHI and DF will obtain a relative accuracy of five significant places for most cases.\n\nThe time taken by G08EDF increases with the number of observations $n$, and depends to some extent whether the call is an only, first, intermediate or last call.\n\n## 9\u00a0\u00a0Example\n\nThe following program performs the gaps test on $500$\u00a0pseudorandom numbers. G08EDF is called $5$\u00a0times with $100$\u00a0observations on each call. All gaps of length $10$\u00a0or more are counted together.\n\n### 9.1\u00a0\u00a0Program Text\n\nProgram Text (g08edfe.f90)\n\n### 9.2\u00a0\u00a0Program Data\n\nProgram\u00a0Data (g08edfe.d)\n\n### 9.3\u00a0\u00a0Program Results\n\nProgram Results (g08edfe.r)","date":"2014-03-10 10:08:47","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 136, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.917984127998352, \"perplexity\": 2172.004339776614}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2014-10\/segments\/1394010742343\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20140305091222-00008-ip-10-183-142-35.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
namespace engine {
namespace sys {
struct Connection
{
int socket;
};
void initNetworking()
{
LOG_WARNING("[Socket] Networking is a stub on Linux!");
}
void uninitNetworking() { }
Connection *connectToServer() { return NULL; }
Connection *createServer(int port)
{
struct sockaddr_in serverAddr;
Connection *conn = (Connection*)malloc(sizeof(Connection));
conn->socket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_UDP);
if(conn->socket == -1)
{
LOG_ERROR("Failed to create server!");
free(conn);
return NULL;
}
serverAddr.sin_family = AF_INET;
serverAddr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);
serverAddr.sin_port = htons(port);
bind(conn->socket, (struct sockaddr*)&serverAddr, sizeof(serverAddr));
//TODO: check if bind ok
return conn;
}
// Receive one message, if possible
void receiveData(Connection *conn, char *data, size_t maxLen, unsigned &bytesReceived) { }
// Send data, if clientConnection is null, use conn->dest
void sendData(Connection *conn, const char *data, size_t len) { }
// Accept a connecting client
Connection *acceptClient(Connection *server) { }
}
}
#endif
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 856 |
Q: A simple cloud function to write to database I am attempting to write my first cloud function. Here is the function that I have deployed.
import * as functions from 'firebase-functions';
import * as admin from 'firebase-admin';
exports.onMsgAdded = functions.database.ref('/users/{uid}/messages/{to_uid}/{msg}').onCreate((snap, context) =>{
const data = snap.val();
const msgRoot = admin.database().ref('/users/' + context.params.to_uid + '/messages/' + context.params.uid);
return msgRoot.set(data);
});
The problem is this does absolutely nothing. It is being triggered as I can see it in the functions dashboard, but the write is not being executed.
Here I only have one user in the database. When a message is created, I want to copy it to the to_uid's user 'messages' node.
A: I forgot to add admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase);
import * as functions from 'firebase-functions';
import * as admin from 'firebase-admin';
admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase);
exports.onMsgAdded = functions.database.ref('/users/{uid}/messages/{to_uid}/{msg}').onCreate((snap, context) =>{
const data = snap.val();
const msgRoot = admin.database().ref('/users/' + context.params.to_uid + '/messages/' + context.params.uid);
return msgRoot.set(data);
});
DERP
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 4,528 |
Q: react firebase image post 400 error on uploading I am trying to upload an image to a cloud storage and received an post 400 error
The file is in initialize in another component.
Thanks for help
const projectStorage = getStorage();
useEffect(() => {
const storageRef = ref(projectStorage, file.name);
uploadBytes(storageRef, file).then((snap) => {
let percentage = (snap.bytesTransferred / snap.totalBytes) * 100;
setProgress(percentage);
console.log('File Uploaded');
}, (err) => {
setError(err);
}, async () => {
//this url doesnt change the setstate url becuase it is in seperate score
const url = await storageRef.getDownloadURL();
setUrl(url);
})
}, [file]);
A: I created a new project on firebase and then change the permissions on the storage rules and its works.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,862 |
Devilish Impressions Eosphoros Live Videos News The Dove and the Serpent Videos
DEVILISH IMPRESSIONS RELEASES NEW LIVE VIDEOS!
Poland's black death metal mavericks of DEVILISH IMPRESSIONS are wrapping up the year with the recent release of two live videos to the tracks "Eosphoros" and "The Dove and the Serpent" respectively, both taken from their latest "The I", full-length album (Lifeforce Records, 2017). You may watch the videos here:
- "Eosphoros" - https://youtu.be/CGd8zzhr7Mw.
- "The Dove and the Serpent" - https://youtu.be/7zRvSzCOk4Y.
Shot during the group's headlining appearance at this year's Metal Head's Mission / Black Sea Storm Festival the videos show the band perform in a refreshed line-up that features both new guitarist and new drummer. Comments the band's founder, lead guitarist and vocalist Quazarre: "Ladies and gents, as some of you know, we've got fresh blood on-board for some time now. Please welcome Jakub 'Isemal' Bogatko as the band's second guitarist and Adam 'Avernatvs' Niekrasz taking over the drum throne. A new chapter has began...".
DEVILISH IMPRESSIONS will headline Dark Winter Meeting Festival set to take place in Malta on the 26th of Jan 2019 with more shows to be announced in due course.
Pics by Maxim Fisyuk
Boo Cat Chaunter New Single New Song News Videos
Chaunter Releases New Video for "Boo Cat"
Chaunter has released a new video of the track titled "Boo Cat". Check it out right HERE.
Album Artwork Album Title Altar of Madness New Album New Single New Song News Tales Beyond the Vortex Videos
Altar of Madness Releases New Album
Mexican death metal band Altar of Madness have released their debut album "Tales Beyond the Vortex". The album was recorded in "Lugra Burn's Studio", and mixed/mastered by Bryan Shortell.
Check out a track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY3h1udkVJU.
Altar of Madness was formed in 2014 at Colima, Mexico. Composed by Bonzo (Vocals), Lugra (Lead guitar) and Fab Chav (Drumms). In 2017 Kraken joined the band as their new rhythm guitarist, and the band start to work on their debut album.
Get the album here: https://store.cdbaby.com/cd/altarofmadness.
Interviews Lungless
Lungless Talks of Assortment of EPs and How People Need to Know Them!
Metalcore/post-hardcore band Lungless was formed a few years back in 2014. Since then they have released their debut EP "Inhale" with a follow-up EP "Exhale" with another EP release soon after titled "The Love That Remains". Sometime later they would release yet another EP titled "Tired\\Eyes", this being their most newest source of content, with shows set up for this next year coming up. The band goes on to talk about themselves and their music!
Lungless is somewhat of a "super group" of local Toronto bands. It all started after our old band Constellations called it quits. Our singer at the time had left to pursue a career and the rest of us weren't really read to call it quits. So Nick, Greg and Myself started writing and with in a couple months we had written and recorded our first EP Inhale. Curtis our drummer used to play in a band called Drag The Lake, a Toronto Deathcore band, he joined Lungless just over a year and a half ago.
The band name was actually Nick's doing. He was texting someone and his phone auto correct a word to Lung Less and he immediately messaged our group and said "I've got the name… Lungless" and we kind of all agreed on it right then and there.
Lungless is based out of Toronto Ontario, Canada. Our music scene is really in a weird state at the moment. The local scene is actually at a low point in my eyes from the power house it was 5-7 years ago. The metalcore scene is on the rise again which is nice but locals only shows are generally not as popular as they used to be. There is some really solid acts from around the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and those bands are: Cold Shoulder, Falsifer, Letdown, The Parallel, Throne to The Wolves, Words Like Wildfire, Certainty, The Northern and Perfect Limbs.
Our style is a combination of metalcore, post-hardcore, Nickelback riffs and Budweiser.
We have released 4 EP's to date; Inhale, Exhale, The Love That Remains and our newest release ' t i r e d \\ E Y E S' all of which are available on online on what ever streaming service you prefer. People can expect aggressive, dynamic and melodic music when they chose to listen to any off our records. We've always chose to wear our hearts on our sleeves when we write music and we encourage our listeners to find their own personal meanings in our songs!
We actually released a new record called "t i r e d \\ E Y E S" on November 23rd! It's available off our website or on any major music streaming service.
We are just finishing a little release run of shows around Ontario and Quebec. We plan to do some more local tours in early 2019 and we will be heading back down into the states in May with our friends in Samara. We are also planning on going out to the east coast in Canada in the summer and then some U.S. dates as well.
We are hoping to just play as many shows as we can and enjoy this as much as we can. The more people that know who we are the better!
All our music is available online via Spotify, Apple music, Google play or any other major streaming service. You can purchase digital copies through iTunes or through our band camp. Physical copies of our music is available on our website (www.Lungless.com) or through our bandcamp.
Make your own meanings. We try to be as honest and upfront as we can with our music so we hope that you feel something and make your own interpretations of that.
New Single New Song News Seed of Divine Serpent Lord Videos
Serpent Lord Releases "Seed of Divine" Video
Serpent Lord have released a new video of the track titled "Seed of Divine". Check it HERE.
CD Reviews Let's Have A Rockin Christmas Vol. 3 Reviews Various Artists
Various Artists – Let's Have A Rockin Christmas Vol. 3
"Let's Have A Rockin Christmas Vol. 3", by Various Artists is just the right release to come forth for this current time of year, that being Christmas of course! Just a mere couple of days away, this compilation of sorts, is just the right amount of content, with fresh takes of original pieces and some throwbacks as well. Like "Jingle Bells" by Doug Ferony or "All Around The World Christmas" by SEAY, if not other noted tracks like "Ode To Joy" by Les Fradkin and "Bells" by DocRock1007. With many other tracks as well "It's Christmas", by Doug Ferony and another by SEAY "A Christmas Heart", along with "Coming To Our Town", by Angeles and "Mary, Did You Know?" by Ann M. Wolf. All of these song selections being well grouped material that catches the essence and time of year and holiday spirit as well.
Each one is a lot like the timeless classics of years past. Being very upbeat, listenable and just a lot of fun that you will find each and every one of them, to be just as joyful and spirited with wholesomeness. Thus, the material just sounds very comforting, loving, and carefree. Upon hearing regularly all else, Christmas tunes are just a given thing when listening to music. It being not just the right timing for it, but the material is just filled with such meaning to it. You can familiarize yourself with the lyrical content along with the melodies of the music itself.
Take these array of tracks mentioned prior, each one being very different but still coming together as one, with the contents within. Each of which detailing the meaning behind the holiday and holidays in general. A lot of these tracks and album as a wholesome truths really, makes "Let's Have A Rockin Christmas Vol. 3", be a precise album that features an assortment of acts that each have variety yet class to.
Like for instance, it's just the source material that makes it all enjoyable and fun. It becomes grounded that you feel it as a welcoming type of set-up. You get that comforting feeling again, hearing each and every one of these tracks said, or any of the rest upon it. Christmas is filled from all area's that you just cannot get enough but plead for even more.
As a whole though, this album has much more going for it really. Not just being a compilation release but one that can be heard throughout that holiday time frame that is Christmas and the holidays in general, being one you can toss on and let it cool you over as you let it all in at once.
https://bongoboyrecords.com/holidaysvol3/
Live Album Reviews Live at Texas Indie Fest Reviews Tough On Fridays
Tough On Fridays – Live at Texas Indie Fest
Duo twosome Katie and Caleigh who have been friends since long ago, decided that they would come together to create art in the form of music. Thus forth, the pop punk, progressive, alternative rock group called Tough On Fridays was made into what it was, exploding onto the music scene in only 2017. Releasing a few pieces of works, including most recent being a live album titled "Live at Texas Indie Fest". This album of sorts, consisting one of the singles that had made them take off called "Lush", with other likable tracks such as "Retrospect". Other notable tracks being noticed as crafty with well rounded material. But "Retrospect" and "Lush", stand on a firmer grounding, that they are more pulsating, progressive in tone, that they keep the music kicking, that you never get tired of it. You partake in it, enjoying it, that you find yourself bobbing to the beat of the music more or less. When it comes down to it, the overall release may be short and brief, but that's what makes it just as sweet. These girls in Tough On Fridays being rowdy with just the right amount of sass, make this album a whole lot more entertaining upon each listen.
Interviews Screamking
SCREAMKING Holiday Interview
Metal group SCREAMKING have their vocalist Joe Lawson talk of how he celebrates the holidays!
1. What are you doing for the holidays?
Spending it with my family and working on the new ScreamKing record.
2. This Halloween season I did what?
Passed out candy to kids.
3. Did you dress up this year?
4. What is your favorite Halloween candy or treat?
Twix and Snickers.
5. What are you thankful for?
I am thankful for my family, my friends, my band mates, my job and many blessings.
6. Do you have a favorite dish for Thanksgiving or do you enjoy everything?
I enjoy all of it, getting together with family and feasting its really a blessing!
7. Who's the one out of the band, that eats the most, when it comes to the holiday season?
That would probably be me!
8. Do you or have you gone shopping on Black Friday, if so what did you find and buy? Or have you gone out to see the sights of the crowds?
I have went out on Black Friday one time with my wife and daughter. I usually avoid that insanity though!
9. When it comes to the holiday season, does the band all get together, or does everyone do their own thing?
Do their own thing for the most part, Rafael and I usually exchange gifts and hangout around the holidays though.
10. What is your favorite Christmas song to sing and why?
Get into the Spirit by the Halford band. Why because its the Halford band and I think its one of the coolest Christmas songs ever!
11. One thing you really want for Christmas is what?
Time off work!
12. Do you still believe in Santa Claus? Enough so, that you would pay him a visit at the mall or other local events?
Sure why not.
13. What type of Christmas tree do you prefer white or green or your own version?
Ours is green with white accents.
14. Are you a late or early Christmas shopper?
This year were running behind schedule a bit.
15. One thing you have to do on New Year's Eve?
Spend it with my wife and family.
16. Do you have any New Year's resolutions?
Just to keep on pushing and making Metal music as long as I possibly can! Thanks for the interview and Happy Holidays to you and all the readers from ScreamKing!
Corners Of Sanctuary Interviews
CORNERS OF SANCTUARY Holiday Interview
New wave of Traditional American heavy metal band CORNERS OF SANCTUARY have guitarist Mick Michaels talk of the holidays for this time of year!
Mick Michaels: Like many people, I will be spending time with my family...enjoy each other's company, getting caught up and indulging in some great food. Food always seems to be the highlight. Food, family and fun... the perfect Holiday combination.
MM: I watched a ton of fun Halloween movies with my family throughout October. We made a list and watched a movie each night… capping it off with "A Nightmare Before Christmas" on Halloween night.
MM: Absolutely! I dress up every year as a rock star... :)
MM: Hands down it has to be the Baby Ruth bar. Snickers comes in as a close second.
MM: Besides being alive and kicking, I am so grateful for my family. Their love and support is what keeps me going and has me believing anything is possible.
MM: I'm definitely a sampler when it comes to Holiday meals... a little bit if this, some of that...to me it is part if the experience. But if I had the choice, I'd say go right to desserts.
MM: I would have to say Mad T can really eat like a champ… regardless whether or not it the Holiday season. He has a stomach of steel.
MM: I am not a Black Friday guy at all… ever. I usually put up the tree and all the decorations on Black Friday. I like to avoid the crowds if I can. These days I'm an online shopper. One and done!
MM: The band does get together for a Holiday dinner. We exchange presents and all...it's a real good time. It's a chance for us to spend time together and not be music related. During the month of December, while we are out on the road, we try and take as many photos of Christmas trees as we can find in different places. It's fun and everyone gets into the spirit of things. It also makes the long drives interesting.
MM: I have always enjoyed "Holly, Jolly Christmas" by Burl Ives as well as "Jingle Bell Rock" by Bobby Helms. These songs just reflect the fun and purity of the season and I find them uplifting. Plus, I really dig the banjo in "Holly, Jolly Christmas".
MM: To have a great time with my family. My family is my greatest gift. I can't ask for anything more. But I can always use socks.
MM: Absolutely do! Santa is cool and he represents the magic of the season. If we stop believing in the magic all could be lost. And yes…I have been known to swing by a mall or two and have a photo taken with the big man.
MM: I'm a traditionalist...go green!
MM: Early… The sooner the better. This allows me time to actually enjoy the Holiday happenings.
MM: Eat sushi!
MM: Not really resolutions, more like goal settings. Each year I write a list of things I want to accomplish for the coming year. I put them on paper with the best intentions. Committing them to paper is my way of letting the Universe know what my hopes are. On New Year's Day the following year I look at that list and go through what was accomplished. Of course there are always things that didn't get done. But what surprises me most are the things that get done that you didn't expect. That is always exciting. That's the magic of life.
Interviews Shallow Ground
SHALLOW GROUND Holiday Interview
Thrashers SHALLOW GROUND have guitarist Keith Letourneau talks of the holidays and how he spends them!
Hanging out with family and my dogs.
I watched Godzilla movies and enjoyed it totally!!!!!!
No I don't dress up for Halloweens or Weddings or most anything lol!
Oktoberfest Sam Adams.
Everything!!!!
Green been Casoral.
That's a toss up. Varies day to day on who for this question lol.
No I'm a early bird shopping done by Sept.
We do our own thing for the most part.
Father Christmas by the Kinks!!!!!! Why because its awesome.
A new guitar but that's in Feb lol.
No I got to old and forgot to believe.
Green has to be green!!! Its a tree for FUCKS sake lol!!!
Early big time.
Prim Rib and a good movie.
Yes to get our new CD finished up and out.
Interviews KNIGHTMARE
KNIGHTMARE Holiday Interview
Metal rock n' rollers KNIGHTMARE have guitarist Reid Rogers talk about what he does for the holidays!
Just hanging around. Visiting with family.
Worked. Haha!
I was Butthead and a friend of mine was Beavis.
My life, family, friends, rock and roll and Star Wars. Haha.
I like everything.
All four of us put away some food, but I honestly believe I eat the most. Haha. Probably tied between me and Jared, the other guitarist
Nah, I worked on Black Friday.
We usually get each other a small gift or something, but usually we're all doing family stuff around the Christmas holiday.
My favorite Christmas song is probably a tie. Oh Holy Night because it's just an epic song and Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Darlene Love because it's super catchy and has a killer sax solo. Haha.
Gibson Les Paul Gold Top!
He's always been part of the spirit of Christmas to me. Sure I know he's not real, but it's still fun. Reminds me of being a kid and how stoked I was thinking Santa was coming. My parents played it so well and I have some great memories of Christmas and Santa.
Green. Fraser Fir all the way. Haha.
Drink. Haha.
To get in better physical and mental shape and take care of myself. And to stop stressing about what I can't control.
Interviews ST. JAMES
ST. JAMES Holiday Interview
Melodic hard rock band ST. JAMES' bassist Robert Jacobs talks of the holidays and just how he celebrates during this time of the year!
Like everyone else spending time with family, but also working on songs. We have a lot demoed and I am just kind of getting things together to make sure I have the best bass lines to complement the songs.
I actually was on the KISS KRUISE for Halloween. I am a Kiss freak and have gone on 4 of them. It's a lot of fun and I have a lot of friends that go too.
No usually my wife puts things together, but next year I will make sure we do.
Reeses.
Family , band, music......I have a lot in life. I have lost 2 people close to me and it makes you realize time on this planet is short and you don't know when it will end.
All of it!
7. Who's the one out of the band, that eats the most, when it comes to the holiday
season?
No one we all watch our weight!!!!
8. Do you or have you gone shopping on Black Friday, if so what did you find and
buy? Or have you gone out to see the sights of the crowds?
Yes... and it wasn't bad ... I do do a lot on Amazon... but the stores aren't bad.
9. When it comes to the holiday season, does the band all get together, or does
everyone do their own thing?
Well... we are getting together in January for a lot of studio sessions... we tend to call a lot and text a lot!
10. What is your favorite Christmas song to sing/why?
I don't really have one to be honest.
I have a lot I guess just good health for me the guys in there band and families.
12. Do you still believe in Santa Claus? Enough so, that you would pay him a visit
at the mall or other local events?
I have 4 kids so we visit several of Santa's helpers.
We do a big fake one and real one too.
This year late... I have been playing a lot and just busy in general.
Not go anywhere too many amateurs out on the road. I got use to playing every New Years so we keep it very quiet.
Yes... not to internalize things, enjoy life more, and have more experiences over more things.
Interviews Malice
MALICE Holiday Interview
Heavy metal act MALICE have their bassist RayMan James talk about how he celebrates the holidays!
I will be in Romania for a while, I am actually doing this interview from Bucharest.
I was just working I don't really do the whole dressing up thing I haven't since I was a kid.
NOPE haven't in years
I like Snickers, and M&Ms.
Family, Friends, my band, life in general, my health that I have all my abilities.
Deviled Eggs, Thanksgiving is really my favorite holiday because I do love cooking.
I would guess that be me cause I tend to eat the most in general.
No I hate crowds in public and waiting in lines.
Everyone is on their own really
I hate Xmas songs I cant stand that all the stations play them non stop after thanksgiving. however there are a few I find tolerable or like able Elvis "Blue Christmas" T.S.O and I do like the song "Christmas (baby please come home)".
Nothing really I mean I would take money but nothing much really.
It would probably end up like that scene in "Always Sunny".
I can't stand Xmas trees!
Neither really, I don't really Xmas shop for anyone. I don't have a wife or kids.
Sleep, for some reason New Years Eve is the one night of the year I pass out by like 9PM normally most nights I am awake til 2AM.
Same as every year just keep trying to be a better person.
Hellevate Interviews
HELLEVATE Holiday Interview
Metal go getters HELLEVATE have their guitarist Dan Whitmer talk about the holidays for this year!
Spending time at home with family and friends.
Got hella drunk and watched horror flicks.
I threw on my battle jacket and handed out candy.
Anything with chocolate.
Friends, family, and music.
Giant-ass turkey legs are my shit!
Maaaan, that's a tough one since we all definitely eat way too much.
I went out for a bit to see the crowds, though I did grab myself a $200 external hard drive for $80!
We hang out with each other off and on, though most of us have family stuff to attend to as well.
Lemmy's cover of "Run Rudolph Run", because Lemmy impressions are always fun!
Music gear, of course.
What do you mean, "believe?" He's totally real, right?! RIGHT??!!
Green all the way.
Definitely super late.
Just to be a better guy than I was last year. Also to dominate the world with music.
Interviews Space Vacation
Space Vacation Holiday Interview
Heavy metal band SPACE VACATION gets into the holiday spirit, by having guitarist/vocalist Scott Shapiro discuss how he celebrates this time of year!
Hanging with family and friends in San Francisco
Prayed to the lord of darkness to abate my candy hangover
Yes. I made a great Albert Einstein.
Blood from an unborn fetus.
That we finally had rain in California to put out the fires.
Turkey and pretty much any pie.
7. Who's the one out of the band that eats the most, when it comes to the holiday season?
Since Eli is vegan and Kiyo drinks whisky as his only sustenance, it would have to be me, although it looks like Steve's belly got a bit bigger so maybe it's a toss up?
No fucking way am I going out on Black Friday to save $10 on some consumer crap. I live in San Francisco, so there's crowds everyday all the time, but the tree in Union Square is always a site and my daughter loves to go ice skating there so it's on the list.
We usually take a few weeks off before the new year to just unwind and refresh before we get back at it. This year we are hard at work writing the new record which will have a late 2019 release.
Grandma got run over by a reindeer. Because running over Grandmas is a Christmas tradition.
A 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans-Am. Or maybe a handjob?
We do have a gig booked at the Santa's Workshop Post-Christmas company party. I'm hoping to meet the big man.
Indica. Definitely Indica.
Neither. I have a flux capacitor installed in my 1984 Delorean. Time is but a concept.
Community service is big for us on New Year's Eve. We throw bundles of cocaine at the party goers so they don't drive drunk.
This will be the year that I finally stop sniffing glue!
Degeneratum Interviews
Degeneratum Talks of Latest EP Release, Working Upon New Music and Wanting to Be Heard!
Degeneratum incorporates genres such as death metal, groove, core, and djent, into their styling that becomes rather unique. They have released an EP titled "Circuits", with them always working on new material as well. Shows are in the ready with all else set for everyone to hear them! Talks of more is said and found right below!
Anthony and Liam came back together after the split of a previous project and recruited Greg on drums. Through a mutual friend, Anthony tracked me down and I came on board shortly after. Struggling to complete our line up and going through many options, Alex and Luke joined the Degen Train.
Latin for Degenerate, Degeneratum seemed appropriate for the current state of our planet and the band members.
We are based around Brisbane where the metal scene is thriving, a few honourable mentions would be Elephant and Tai Sui.
A progressive groove while not being over the top technical Death Metal.
We've just released a new single on Spotify, our "Circuits" EP dropped earlier this year. You could expect brutality at its finest with a melodic feel.
We have not long released the single "For The Many" and we are always working on fresh tracks.
We have a few shows booked for the new year and currently working on others.
As a band we would like to share our musical creations with the world and one day see people from all over enjoying it.
Check us out on Spotify, Bandcamp and YouTube. You can buy merch at Degeneratum.com.
I hope people can get some form of release from listening to our music and they come away feeling empowered and complete.
Interviews TV Coma
TV Coma Discussion of Music, Playing, and Being Just Like You!
Punk rock act TV COMA have a simple saying "TV Coma are just like you!" With that said, the band goes into discussion about themselves, music, and their plans ahead.
The history of the band is somewhat simple, yet thoroughly complex, something organic in to its core, yet, inherently man-made. One supposes that the band's infancy was born through the infancy of its two truly fraternal members, though the fraternity of bandsman-ship is often as true as any made of skin and bone. To conceptualized this 'band' as such is, to put it lightly, pedestrian at best, this ensemble of troubadours, of flames, of mutual inspirations would always find one another in the gloom that makes up this post-millennial world.
The origin of appellation this artistic cooperative lies in the joining of its two halves, in the wholly artificial construction of the television, first demonstrated in the invention of John Logie Baird, but also the terrible sleep of the coma, which for centuries could have meant all but certain death to the individuals that fell to the condition.
The music of this troupe transcends a locale or specific geography resonating perfectly with a generation, un so very special, and many that shall come after. If pressed, our scene is the street, the coffee house, the art gallery, the local swimming pool. It is Nelsons Column, it is the Cutty Sark, it is the multi-story car park at The Corn Exchange. It is the local comprehensive school, it is the bins round the back of Tesco.
Fashions come and go, but the way in which we present ourselves and our passion can only be truly appreciated in the flesh. From the array of instruments we dance with, to the fabrics that select us for our meticulously kept garments, to dove-hole our 'style' would be too crass.
Our works aren't so much released by us, than we are released to the world via our fastidious works. Of late, they have been two arrangements, one "I don't much care for Association Football", and one entitled simply "Trudy".
Music shall always be new to those who hear it for the first time.
We're always on tour, we're always home, as each new venue and old we perform in becomes as a second home to us – to enlist the gentle assistance of a few lines of the poet Keith Buckley, "everywhere we go we're the local boys and we're back in town."
When one gets to a certain age, one cannot place too great an expectation upon anything. Seasons come and go, and the only inevitability is the low lope towards the next world. Love, and be good to one another is all that can be expected.
Have you tried the internet? We've heard rather good things about it as a tool for collaboration, discovering new music and the consumption of hefty quantities of pornography.
TV Coma are just like you.
DEITRE Interviews
DEITRE TALKS OF EP, NEW MUSIC, AND MUCH MORE!
New wave glam rock duo DEITRE, have an EP out and about, with another EP to drop next year. Several singles are also around with more coming along. For now though, the plan is to be hard with some shows happening next year with more plans in the works. Find out what else was said below.
Richie Bee - Frontman/writer
Peter Savad - Guitar/producer/writer
Andy Pena - Bass
Joseph D'Amico - Drums
DEITRE is a spiritual guide sent to help us achieve what we are destined to achieve.
We are based out of Brooklyn, NY. The scene here is saturated with some pretty badass bands. Shadow monster, Darkwing, Fruit & Flowers, Sic Tic.
Alt/rock Glam/pop - and lots of sass.
We have an 11 song EP out on most music platforms (iTunes, Spotify, etc) as well as two music videos. You can expect a fire to be lit under your ass. Our stuff is all about embracing who you are and getting what you want.
We have our third music video being released in a month as well as a couple of singles coming out in prep for our EP drop this summer 2019.
Our next show is in the new year. We are spending this time recording and writing.
The plan is to be heard.
iTunes/Spotify/SoundCloud/etc.
How it made them feel. Listen to the messages. There is a lot of heart & honesty in our stuff.
Alex Wilke New Single New Song News Ohmfield Rec Hom Videos
Ohmfield Releases New Track "Rec Hom" (feat. Alex Wilke)
Ohmfield have released a new track titled "Rec Hom" featuring a guest spot from Alex Wilke. Check it HERE.
Album Artwork Album Title Gates Of Paris New Album News Self Titled
Gates Of Paris Releases Debut Album
French symphonic power metal band Gates Of Paris have released their debut self-titled album. The album was recorded in "StudioArtMusic Studio" and mixed/mastered by Damien Rainaud (ONCE HUMAN).
Check out the album here: https://gatesofparis.bandcamp.com/releases.
Gates Of Paris was formed in 2016 by ex-Kerion guitarist Remch Carrayrou at Nice, France. Soon after Raphael Dantas (vocal), Damien Rainaud (drums) and Steph Papasergio (bass) jopined the band, and the lineup was complete.
Amoriello Michael Vescera Music is the Monarch New Single New Song News Videos Yngwie
Ex-Yngwie Singer Michael Vescera Featured on Latest AMORIELLO Single "Music is the Monarch"
Amoriello has released a new single called "Music is the Monarch", which features a guest spot of ex-Yngwie singer Michael Vescera. Check it HERE.
I-89 New Single New Song News The Giant Peach Videos
The Giant Peach Releases New Single "I-89"
The Giant Peach have released a new single titled "I-89".
Check it right over HERE.
Album Artwork Album Title Dawn My Darkest Time New Album News
My Darkest Time Releases New Album "Dawn"
Macedonia's own metal act My Darkest Time have released an all new album titled "Dawn".
Check it out HERE.
Enterprise Earth He Exists New Single New Song News Videos
ENTERPRISE EARTH RELEASE NEW MUSIC VIDEO FOR "HE EXISTS"
Enterprise Earth have released a new video of the track titled "He Exists". Check it HERE.
Classical Rap @TheRealFabp EP Reviews Fabp aka Fabpz The Freelancer Reviews
Fabp aka Fabpz the Freelancer - Classical Rap @TheRealFabp
Fabp aka Fabpz the Freelancer has released an all new EP titled "Classical Rap @ TheRealFabp". Twelve tracks that bring out a more creative side of the hip hop/rapper. Take such tracks as "Gal Ah Nike", "Yes She Bouncing", "Dealing With A Clown", and "Rock Rock On" for instance. These array of tracks, have a uniqueness towards them. Each one being different but slightly similar in sound and set-up. The melodies are rough on the edges, whilst the vocalization is provided in a type of tone, that twists the abilities, with the effects done within them. You can understand them but they are tweaked out that other affects are thrown in to make them sound distorted. It makes the material more rounded and in term's of styling goes, a tad more creative as well. The rest of the works off this EP "Classical Rap @ TheRealFabp", is a lot of the same type of styling, having differences ever so slightly, that make it still unique and rather upbeat. It's how the material works its ways around the music that is playing forth. You get works, that sound just easy going but very catching and upbeat as said prior. Fabp aka Fabpz the Freelancer is an artist of his kind with a persistence with releasing content ever so often, that with each release, the works upon it sound slightly better with said assortment of material works.
New Single New Song News Rewind Replay The World Over Videos
The World Over Releases New Video for "Rewind/Replay"
The World Over has released a new video of the song called "Rewind/Replay". Check it HERE.
Album Title Cocoa Futures New Album New Single New Song News Recovery Videos
Cocoa Futures Releases New Track "Recovery"
Cocoa Futures has released their title track alongside the release of their new EP "Recovery". Check it out HERE.
Angry Me Corrosive New Single New Song News Videos
Corrosive Releases New Single "Angry Me"
Swedish melodic death metal band Corrosive released their new single "Angry Me". The single was recorded at "Dark City Sound Records", mixed by Erik Berglund and mastered by Kenny Boufadene in "Meltdown Studio".
Check out the track here: https://soundcloud.com/corrosive-sweden/corrosive-sweden-angry-me-original-2018.
Corrosive was formed in 1997 by Johan Bengtsson at Iggesund (Sweden) and have since then released a number of recordings and have mainly played at clubs and festivals in Sweden with bands like The Hellacopters, Amaranthe, Engel, Dead By April, Corroded, Freedom Call and many more.
Mr Right New Single New Song News Riva Taylor Videos
Riva Taylor Releases New Track "Mr. Right"
Riva Taylor have released a new track titled "Mr. Right". Check it HERE.
Dream Theater New Single New Song News Untethered Angel Videos
DREAM THEATER RELEASE DEBUT TRACK "UNTETHERED ANGEL"
Dream Theater have released a new track titled "Untethered Angel". Check it HERE.
New Single New Song News Revel Videos Villows
Villows Releases New Song "Revel"
Villows have released a new track titled "Revel". Check it out right HERE.
Hitwood New Single New Song News Orrido Videos
Hitwood Releases New Single "Orrido"
Hitwood has released a new single called "Orrido". The song is dowbloadable for free on http://hitwood.bandcamp.com/ and the lyric video is on YouTube at this link https://youtu.be/D3Low6Vj1VE.
Ave Malaria Maria Death Valley High New Single New Song News Videos
Death Valley High Releases New Track "AVE Malaria (Maria)"
Death Valley High have released an all new track titled "AVE Malaria (Maria)". Check it HERE.
Dreamsense Glasswall New Single New Song News Videos
Dreamsense Releases New Single "Glasswall"
Russian symphonic metal band Dreamsense have released their new single "Glasswall". The single was recorded in "Chaika Studio" and mixed/mastered at MxD Recordings (Berlin). Check it out here: https://soundcloud.com/dreamsense_band/glasswall.
Dreamsense was formed in 2012 at Moscow by the tenor vocalist George Ognev. In 2015 the band released their first demo "Feel Alive" and played shows in Russia with bands like Eluveitie, Witchcraft and Fiend. This days the band is working on their debut full-length album, that will be released in 2019.
CD Reviews Reviews Reviresco Voodoo Zombie
Voodoo Zombie - Reviresco
For the past 12 years, Voodoo Zombie has come quite the ways, in term's of showcases and releasing an array of content, including their most recent and newest album to date "Reviresco", the fourth in their assorted discography. "Amarte Es Peligroso", was the first glimpse into how much the band has come since their previous and third full-length "Santa Muerte" was released back in 2011, with a short follow-up single afterwards in 2012 with single track titled "ZombieWalk". It wouldn't be until 5 years later that any newer content would come around, which would bring us back to that single of a track titled "Amarte Es Peligroso".
"Amarte Es Peligroso", is a toss up between sounding plugged in but unplugged as well, if that makes any sense. It's sounding a lot like No Doubt but without the ska punk tone. More of an uplifting effect, combining rock and more psychobilly essence; that would come out of an era of when the genre that is the one they have picked on, psychobilly and rock even began.
To point it simply, Voodoo Zombies' tone is straight forward as rock mixed with punk with some edginess added in for good measurements. Take other tracks off this album such as "La Cara Oculta de la Luna ", "Existencia Infernal", "Esquizomortal", and "Zombiewalk", that was mentioned prior and released as a single that would accompany this release as it turns out. These selections have that same type or tone, being edgy yet intense, whilst being very upbeat and catching for the ears listening in. You get this mellow undertone that keeps the material consistent yet refreshing with each play through.
It's as if, Voodoo Zombie's entirety as a band, is more rounded, being not just a successful act as they have become, but one who will continue to grow and expand upon their artistic works and performance skills as well. These tracks and fourth full-length album to date "Reviresco", demonstrates this, igniting more to come in no time at all.
Kingdom of Disturb New Single New Song News Nostalghia Videos
Nostalghia Releases New Song and Video for "Kingdom of Disturb"
Nostalghia has released a new song made video called "Kingdom of Disturb". Check it right HERE.
Bongo Boy Bongo Boy Rock n Roll TV Show Reviews Season 7 Episode 12 Vibes Of Light
Bongo Boy Rock n Roll TV Show Episode 12 Season 7 "Vibes Of Light"
Bongo Boy TV Ep12 Season 7 "Vibes of Light" from Bongo Boy on 66+ TV Channels.
Bongo Boy TV's next episode from season 7 is episode 12 titled "Vibes Of Light". Having been produced by Monique Grimme and Gar Francis at Bongo Boy TV is a music video television show, that has been broadcasted on 66+ terrestrial TV channels in the U.S.A.
With that said, Frank Trousdell's track "The Long Road Home", kicks things off. His styling being a mix between rock and country, the two working rather nicely together. His vocal chords being fresh yet clear, as the video depicts his daily life as being what else a musician. The song itself plays out to be catchy yet laid back in tune. It's one song you can enjoy just sitting back on a quiet evening, enjoying the soft yet easy going melodies with catching vocal chords, that it comes together nicely.
Angeles' comes up next with a track titled "God, Country, and King", when placing this particular track and accompanying artist it was hard to do so. The visuals for the video were an added bit of flare, with the track being average yet heavy at times. Think heavy metal and rock n' roll you get a blend of genres that is very gripping yet still fun to hear from start to finish. Vocalization provided is done willingly that it makes them sound binding yet free at the same time. Angeles' style is interesting and can be heard with style of stride.
My Demons Galore follows with their song called "Carry Your Own Light", which immediately brings to mind power metal if not heavy metal elements. They got this edge to their styling, it has spunk, power, and just lots of aggression thrown together. If Bullet for my Valentine crossed paths with these guys then it would be no wonder they sound very similar at times. It's again a song and video choice that is very melodic yet heavy as well, keeping all in tune but still enjoyable to bear with one's ears.
Now then here is an act with a very different source of style. Nuke The Soup's "Network", sounds as if it came from the 70's or early 80's time frame eras. Think slightly like Depeche Mode with Tears for Fears musically, that is now this act sounds at times at least. The song has this creepy yet bouncy effect to it, combining rock for all it is worth. It's one that would be played on repeat for countless times.
The Vice Rags' "Jersey Boy", is clearly rock with some format of punk or pop. It's a hit or miss really but still a nice putting for the song and accompanying band in question. Think if it as if it played in a time once in the past era, you blaring it on the radio at home or in car, that is how this act does their style of sound. Very crude yet entertaining you just cannot get enough of it!
"What's It Gonna Take?" by Spin is a one off band, whose sound blends pop instantly creating this music source that draws attention. It is upbeat, catchy, and very pleasing to the ears. One that will find it just flawless. Truly just a track of its own accordance, that you will find humming soon after hearing it.
BLXPLTN's "No English", is hard rock but enlightened. Lots of energy provided for sure throughout, getting that angst pumping with plenty to spare. With an act like this one they just become one that is very outgoing, keeping their style of music on the lowdown but still hyperactive too.
Lounge Zotica 3000 wraps up the episode with "Martian 9", a single release that showcases instrumental content on a level of unknowing what to even say about it. The track is a brief preview stunt, that captures your interest, as to what the single will go upon release. But first glance it may be a keeper after all perhaps.
Overall Bongo Boy TV's episode 12 "Vibes Of Light", is a round up of artists and bands that have material, suited for themselves, and for others to experience. It has lots of upbeat nonsense with catchy drawbacks that keeps the entertainer witnessing such works, curious yet interested.
www.bongoboytv.com
Lets talk about future noodles catacotti Maximum The Hormone New Single New Song News Videos
Maximum The Hormone Releases Video for "Let's talk about future noodles catacotti"
Maximum The Hormone have released a new video of the new song called "Let's talk about future noodles catacotti". Check it HERE.
Acoustic News Ode To Darkness The Other Videos
The Other Releases Acoustic Version of "Ode To Darkness"
Horror punks The Other have released an unplugged acoustic live version of their track titled "Ode To Darkness". Check it HERE.
2019 Tours Cradle Of Filth News Raven Black Tours Wednesday 13
Cradle Of Filth Announces New Tour
Cradle Of Filth have announced a new headlining tour with support coming from Wednesday 13 and Raven Black! Check out the dates below!
07.03. Las Vegas, NV - House Of Blues
08.03. Anaheim, CA - House Of Blues
09.03. Sacramento, CA - Ace Of Spades
11.03. Portland, OR - Crystal Ballroom
12.03. Seattle, WA - El Corazon
14.03. Billings, MT - Pub Station Ballroom
15.03. Calgary, AB - Marquee
16.03. Edmonton, AB - Starlight Room
18.03. Winnipeg, MB - Burton Cumming Theatre
20.03. Minneapolis, MN - Varsity Theatre
21.03. Milwaukee, WI - The Rave
22.03. Flint, MI - The Machine Shop
24.03. Grand Rapis, MI - Intersection
25.03. Chicago, IL - House Of Blues
26.03. Cleveland, OH - House Of Blues
27.03. Toronto, ON - Opera House
29.03. Guelph, ON - Guelph Concert Theatre
30.03. Montreal, QC - Corona Theatre
31.03. Quebec City, QC - L'Imperial Bell
01.04. Boston, MA - Paradise Rock Club
02.04. Huntington, NY - Paramount Theatre
04.04. New York, NY - Irving Plaza
05.04. Asbury Park, NJ - Stone Pony
06.04. Baltimore, MD - Baltimore Soundstage
07.04. Newport News, VA - Boathouse Live
09.04. Greensboro, NC - Cone Denim Entertainment Theatre
10.04. Charleston, SC - Music Farm
12.04. Fort Lauderdale, FL - Revolution
13.04. Pensacola, FL - Vinyl Music Hall
14.04. New Orleans, LA - House Of Blues
15.04. San Antonio, TX - Aztec Theatre
17.04. Houston, TX - House Of Blues
18.04. Dallas, TX - House Of Blues
New Single New Song News The Casualties Videos Ya Basta
THE CASUALTIES DEBUT NEW VIDEO FOR "YA BASTA"
The Casualties have released new video of the track titled "Y Basta". Check it HERE.
Aktarum Interviews
Aktarum Chats of Album Debut!
Troll metalheads AKTARUM released their debut EP "Gane of Trolls" sometime ago but now have their debut full-length album "Ragnatroll" coming soon. In fact, the band goes into chats about said release and what their future holds for them!
Aktarum was created back in 2005 by Trollour (Keyboard/vocals) and Trollaklass (Guitars).
Aktarum was created around 2005 near Brussels in Belgium. Trollour (Keaboard/lead vocals) and Trollaklass (Guitars) came from black metal and Thrash metal bands. They wanted to create something new in the neighborhood. Back in those days in Belgium, there wasn't any folk metal bands and they wanted to change that. I think Finntroll and Moonsorrow were really like revelations to them. So they did everything to put that kinda band in the place. And really fast they opened for Ensiferum and other huge bands. The audience really followed the band across the country and the band grew quickly a European fan base
The origin of the band's name is totally explained in the new album. I won't tell the twist of the story. You'll find out by yourself. :)
We're from a little town near Brussels in Belgium. The local scene in Belgium is really huge. You have gigs every weekend everywhere in the country. A lot of people work their asses off to give metal show almost everyday. I could recommend a lot of bands. Here are a few that I like. Lemuria, Cocyte, Cryptogenic, Ithilien (not that local though), Ethernity, Exuviated, Annwyn,... There are so many bands and almost every band worth's the trip so.
We play Troll Metal. The main idea was to play folk metal with a unique touch. Trollour and Trolaklass dug way too much everything related to trolls so they wanted to add the "Troll" idea behind the folk metal they wanted to play. So everything is about Trolls. The music combines heavy loud riffing with epic melodies. Telling tales of battles, parties of the village of Aktarum.
The band released the first album "Gang of Trolls" in 2010.The line-up changed a lot. So it took time to find the perfect match and work on new songs. In 2014 the band released the "Game of Troll" EP and toured in Belgium, France, Germany,... We found the perfect missing bass player in 2016 and we worked for 2 years on the new album "Ragnatroll" which will be out in the 8th of December.
Yes we're about to unleash our bran new record "Ragnatroll" in early December. We are super excited to release it. We worked for 2 years so we can't wait to play it live.
Yes, we'll be playing some cool shows in Belgium and we're looking right now to book a lot of shows in France, Germany, The Netherlands,...The making of the album took a really long time so now we can settle down and work on the promotion. So everything will be planned soon.
Touring across Europe. Show the rest of the world our last album. Make a music video and spreading the message of the trolls of Aktarum. And then work on the next album.
Go on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/aktarum/?ref=br_rs or visit our website http://www.aktarum.com/. You'll have everything you need. And we are on Deezer and Spotify. Aktarum's music is just one click away from you.
We want them to enjoy themselves as much as we do. We play music to share with the audience our way of having fun and partying. So we when people hear our music we want them to feel like "Yeah I have to see them live coz I'll bet we're gonna have fun".
Interviews Red Legs
Red Legs' Discusses Latest Album and Plans at Hand
Pop, rock, alternative gents Red Legs, have two full-length's under their belts one being the debut release "Influencer" and the follow-up release "Animal Bones". This current release being the main focus at this time, with other plans in the works as we speak! Speaking of which, the band goes into discussion about this album and other topics at range.
We all came together from different corners of Michigan. The rest is history (which we're still writing — stay tuned).
"Red Legs" otherwise known as "Jayhawkers" were spies against the Confederates in the the mid 1800's. They practiced some guerrilla warfare against pro-slavery groups.
The band is based mostly out of Ionia, Michigan, but David is from Holland, MI originally, and Jaysyn is from Detroit.
Talk Radio, The Autumnatic, Boy From School, and Secret Forte; really, the West Michigan scene is stellar all around.
We play American rock and roll.
We just dropped our new album "Animal Bones" in September. We actually fully crowdfunded it and we couldn't be more proud about it. Every song is emotional driven with subtle but poignant blues elements. Have a listen, we'd love to know what you think.
We always find ourselves writing, but are trying to focus on "Animal Bones" as best we can.
We have a show at The Stache in Grand Rapids, MI this December, It's a charity event which is the brainchild of Logan to help homeless families in the local area find housing. We have a few things planned for late winter/early spring as well, You can find more info for donations/tickets to the charity show at sectionlive.com!
Play as many shows as we can.
https://www.youtube.com/c/redlegs
https://www.wehaveredlegs.com
That each song comes from somewhere very personal, and we mean every word.
Lungless Talks of Assortment of EPs and How People...
Various Artists – Let's Have A Rockin Christmas Vo...
Degeneratum Talks of Latest EP Release, Working Up...
TV Coma Discussion of Music, Playing, and Being Ju...
Ohmfield Releases New Track "Rec Hom" (feat. Alex ...
Ex-Yngwie Singer Michael Vescera Featured on Lates...
ENTERPRISE EARTH RELEASE NEW MUSIC VIDEO FOR "HE E...
Fabp aka Fabpz the Freelancer - Classical Rap @The...
Death Valley High Releases New Track "AVE Malaria ...
Nostalghia Releases New Song and Video for "Kingdo...
Bongo Boy Rock n Roll TV Show Episode 12 Season 7 ...
Maximum The Hormone Releases Video for "Let's talk...
The Other Releases Acoustic Version of "Ode To Dar...
Dance Pad Hair Styler Mattel Frankie Stein Monster High Watches Walkie Talkie Draculaura Soft Diary News (1) Standby Records Under the Gun Modern Day Escape Mark Burns Jail Guitarists News Marti Rubels Twitter (1) [B.ABUSE] (1) €˜To Co W Człowieku Nieuniknione (1) 000 Feet (1) 03 (1) 1 (1) 1 Year Anniversary (1) 1% (1) 10 (1) 10 Anniversary (2) 10 Million Yen (1) 10 Second Songs (2) 10 Second Songs Holiday Songs (1) 10 Songs In The Skye of Korn (1) 10 Year Anniversary (2) 10 Year Anniversary Tour (1) 10 Years (15) 10 Years In The Black Tour (1) 10 Years of Hail Destroyer Tour (1) 10 Years Of Slaughter Tour (1) 10/31 (1) 100 Show (1) 1000 Lies (1) 10000 Tears Later (1) 1099 (2) 10th Anniversary (2) 10th Anniversary The Somatic Defilement (1) 10th Anniversary Tour (1) 10th Studio Album (1) 11 (1) 11-11-11 (1) 12 (1) 12 Dreary Days of XMAS (1) 12 Songs in the Style of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1) 12 Weeks of Summer (1) 13 (3) 13 Wishes (7) 131ers (1) 1349 (9) 1349 Ozzfest (1) 1476 (1) 14NI (1) 15 Factors to Consider According to Science (1) 15 Years of Revolution Anniversary Tour (1) 15 Years of Wasted Youth (1) 15-18 (1) 150 Words (1) 156 Silence (1) 15th Anniversary (1) 15th Anniversary Flow (1) 15th Century (1) 1695 (2) 16th Annual International Independent Music Awards 2018 (1) 17 (1) 17 Crimes (1) 1720 (1) 1755 Lisbon Earthquake (1) 18 Days (2) 18 inch dolls (1) 180 (1) 19 Technology (1) 1979 (1) 1981 (1) 1982 (1) 1999 (1) 19th Moon (1) 19z premium party 09 aim the next day (1) 2 Cents (1) 2 Guys 1 Whiskey (1) 2 On (1) 2 Pack (1) 2 Rotten (1) 2 Shadows (2) 20 20 (1) 20 Anniversary (1) 20 Below (1) 20 Year Anniversary Tour (1) 20 Years Down and Dirty Tour (1) 20/20 (1) 2011 (4) 2011 Tour (134) 2012 (5) 2012 Tour (358) 2012 Tours (11) 2013 (1) 2013 Tour (4) 2013 Tours (187) 2014 (1) 2014 Tours (150) 2015 Tours (260) 2016 Tours (230) 2017 Edition Defenders Of The Riff (1) 2017 Tours (316) 2018 Levitation Festival (1) 2018 Oscars (1) 2018 Tours (621) 2018 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony (1) 2019 Pokemon World Championships (1) 2019 Tours (21) 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games (1) 2020 Tours (4) 2021 Tours (3) 2022 Tours (2) 2045 (1) 20th Anniversary (3) 20th Anniversary Tour (1) 20th Anniversary Tour for Beyond Resonable Doubt (1) 20th Annual New England Metal and Hardcore Fest (1) 22 22 (1) 24th Anniversary of Superunknown (1) 25 Anniversary (2) 25 Anniversary Best Album (1) 25 The Greatest Hits (1) 26 (1) 27 (1) 2D Video (1) 2Deepin (1) 2nd Impression (1) 2nd Sucks (1) 2Pac (1) 2Pack (3) 3 Doors Down (1) 3 From Hell (1) 3 Inches of Blood (11) 3 Parts Dead (1) 3 Pieces Of Evil (2) 3 Pill Morning (1) 3 Ribs (1) 3 Years Hollow (5) 30 (1) 30 Anniversary (1) 30 Seconds to Mars (4) 30 Years Sodomized (1) 30°6'38"E (1) 300 Entertainment (1) 30th Anniversary (2) 30th Anniversary Digital Dictator World Tour 2018 (1) 30th Anniversary Tour (1) 30th Year Anniversary Tour (1) 31 Days In May (1) 31 Days In May A Visual Journey (1) 31 Days In May Tour (1) 331ERock (1) 35th Anniversary (2) 35xxxv (1) 36 Crazyfists (11) 36 Crazyfits (1) 360 Degree (1) 360 Degree Video (7) 360 Degree Videos (1) 360 Degrees (1) 360 Live Concert App (1) 360 Video (5) 360 Videos (1) 365 (1) 39 By Design (1) 3AM (1) 3D In Your Face (7) 3D Video (1) 3OH3 (1) 3s (1) 3teeth (1) 4 Hour Long Specials (1) 40 Days (1) 40 Years to Rise (1) 400 Miles (1) 404 (1) 4321 Hi o Tukero (1) 44 (1) 44Mag (1) 45 Grave (1) 45 To Argos (3) 4ARM (1) 4DE (1) 4K (1) 4th Dimension Entertainment (2) 5 (1) 5 Feet Underground (1) 5 Pack (2) 5 Seconds Of Summer (1) 5 Song Teaser (1) 5 Star Bar (2) 5 Star Flying (1) 5 Star Grave (1) 5 The Gray Chapter (1) 5 Year Plan (1) 50 and Counting (1) 51 23 20N 30 638E (1) 51°23'20"N (1) 512 (2) 570 (2) 5927'46"E (1) 5Rand (1) 5th Anniversary Silent Siren Live Tour 2017 The New World (1) 6 (1) 6 Nights Of Miracles Acoustic Special (1) 6145'17"N (1) 666 Inch Vinyl Special Collectors Edition (1) 68 (3) 6Gang (1) 7 (1) 7 EP (1) 7 From Bedlam (1) 7 Mazes (1) 7 Minutes In Heaven (2) 72 (2) 7C (1) 8 (1) 86 Missed Calls (1) 9 (1) 9 Electric (2) 90s Babies (1) 98 Rock (1) 99 Soul (1) 9Electric (10) 9MM Solution (1) A Band Of Orcs (4) A Battle Won (1) A Beautiful Nightmare (4) A Beautiful Nightmare. What Have You Done (1) A Better Hand (2) A Bitter Broken Memory (1) A Blessing Through Tragedy (4) A Boy Named John (1) A Breach Of Silence (17) A Bullet for a Pretty Boy (1) A Bullet For Pretty Boy (4) A Burning Cinder (1) A Candle Lit City (1) A Chance To Change My Ways (1) A Change is Gonna Come (1) A Christmas Carol (1) A Cold Fire From The One I Loved (1) A Common Collapse (1) A Common Thread (2) A Complex Of Cages (1) A Cosmic Interlude Tour 2018 (1) A Cowards Existence (1) A Crime To Remember (1) A Crippling Wind (1) A Cruce Salus (1) A Cryptic Ending (1) A Dance You Won't Forget (1) A Dance You Wont Forget (1) A Dark Metal Carnival The Beginning (1) A Darker Man (1) A Day in the Life of America (1) A Day To Remember (9) A Dead Tree Doesnt Talk (1) A Death Grip On Yesturday In Full (1) A Decade Of Guilt (1) A Deep Slow Panic (1) A Delicate Motor (3) A Different Kind (1) A Different Kind Of Truth (2) A Disturbing Presence (1) A Donald Trump Dittie (1) A Dream (1) A Dying Machine (3) A Fall To Break (1) A Faylene Sky (1) A First Date with Blink 182 and Linkin Park (1) A Flash Flood Of Colour (1) A Foreign Affair (2) A Forest Of Stars (1) A Freak Like Me (1) A Friend Named Paul (1) A Frozen Heart (1) A Future Divided (1) A Game (1) A Gathering Of None (2) A Gentle Disease (1) A Gift A Curse (1) A Gift For The Obsessed (2) A Grand Reclamation (1) A Grotesque Reflection (1) A Hero A Fake (6) A Higher Demise (11) A History of Radness (1) A Holy Sin (5) A Home (1) A Hotel In Valdosta (1) A KIllers Confession (2) a knot (1) A l'Heure du Crépuscule (1) A Last Farewell (1) A Lesson In Futility (1) A Lesson Never Learned (1) A Letter of Departure (1) A Lie Nation (1) A Life Once Lost (4) A Light Divided (1) A Light Within (1) A Long Summer In Ohio (1) A Lot Like Birds (4) A Lot Like Love (1) A Love Like War (1) A Love Unreal (1) A Lucky Day Later (1) A Melodic Rock Night (1) A Melodic Rock Night 2 (2) A Memory Stained (1) A Midnight Tragedy (6) A Midwestern State Of Emergency (1) A Million Miles (1) A Million Times (1) A New Beginning (1) A New Breed (1) A New Chance To Begin (1) A New Normal (1) A New Safe Path (2) A Night In Texas (1) A Night In The Snow (1) A Paranormal Evening With Alice Cooper (1) A Party At Crystal Lake (1) A Perfect Circle (12) A Perfect Day (1) A Perfect Day For Fun (1) A Perfect Lie (1) A Permanent Shadow (1) A Phoenix Will Rise (1) A Place Both Wonderful and Strange (2) A Place Where the Sun Is Silent (3) A Plea For Purging (3) A Plus Or A Minus (1) A Poison Alibi (8) A Pony Kind Of Christmas (2) A Prelude To Sorrow (1) A Pretty Nice Little Dadurday (1) A Prey For Sunday (1) A Price To Pay (1) A Promise To Burn (1) A Prophecy (1) A Question Of Time (2) A River Runs Thru It (1) A Rocket To The Moon (1) A Rocking Chair (1) A Room Swept White (2) A Scar For The Wicked (2) A Second Chance to Fail (4) A Self Unseen (1) A Sight To See (1) A Skeletal Domain (2) A Skylit Drive (20) A Skytlit Drive (1) A Solitary Reign (1) A Song For The Weak (1) A Song of the Night Part I (1) A Stare Bound In Stone (1) A Static Lullaby (1) A Statue Of The King (1) A Step Ahead (1) A Storm is Coming (1) A Story Inspired (1) A Story To Tell (1) A Story Told (2) A Symphony Of Wolf Tones and Ghost Notes (1) A Tear Beyond (2) A Tension (1) A Theme For Her Murder (1) A Thorn For Every Heart (2) A Thousand Graves (1) A Thousand Shall Fall (3) A Thousand Thoughts (2) A Thousand Years (1) A Tough Road For The Heart (1) A Tribute To Bjorn Mertz (1) A Tribute To The Beach Boys (1) A Trip Of Violence (1) A True True Friend (1) A Universe Reborn (1) A Very Scay Night With Attack Attack (1) A Victory Of Love (1) A Violent Breed (1) A Void Most Obscure (1) A Vulgar Display Of Pantera (1) A Wake in Providence (2) A War Within (3) A Warriors Call (1) A Wasted Effect (1) A Weekend of Flordia Terror (1) A Whisper of Destiny (1) A Whole New World (1) A Wilhelm Scream (1) A Wolf In My Heart (1) A Womans Word (1) A World Extinct (1) A World Without You Has No Sound Or Color (1) A Yar and a Half in the Life of Thy Will Be Done (1) A.K. Yearling (1) A.W.G. (1) A1 Joseph (1) A1 Picutres (1) A2aThoT (2) A7X (18) AA (2) AaahRealMonsters (1) Aaron Berkshire (1) Aaron Bernbach (1) Aaron Brooks (1) Aaron Bruno (1) Aaron Matts (1) Aaron Melzer (1) Aaron Nordstrom (1) Aaron Pauley (1) Aaron Smith (1) Aaron Sprinkle (1) Aaron Wheelz Fotheringham (1) Aavatar (1) Abalone (1) Abandon (1) Abandon All Ships (2) Abandoned By Bears (4) Abbath (7) Abbey (1) Abbey Bominabe (1) Abbey Bominable (23) Abby Weitz (1) ABC (2) ABC Family (1) ABC Television (1) Abdomen Canvas (1) Abduction (2) Abend (1) Abhordium (2) Abhorrent Affliction (1) Abhorrent Decimation (2) Abi F Jones (2) Abigail Williams (10) Abiotic (4) Abnormality (5) Abolishment of Flesh (4) Abolitionism (1) Abominate The World Tour (1) Abomination (1) Abomination Chants From Beyond The Grave (1) Abominator (1) Aborted (15) Aborted Life (1) About Abortions (1) About Pessimistic Elements and Rebirth Of Tragedy (1) Above It All (4) Above Us The Waves (2) Abrahadabra (1) Abramis Brama (2) Abraskadabra (2) Abriosis (1) Absconditus (1) Absence (4) Absence of Despair (1) Absent (1) Absolute Hope Absolute Hell (1) Absolute Zero (1) Absolutego (1) AbsolutePunk (2) AbsolutePunk.net (1) Absolution (1) Absolve (1) Absorb (1) Absque Cor (1) Abstracts and Keywords (1) Abysmal Dawn (9) Abysmal Predator Tour (1) Abyss Above Me (1) AC/DC (2) AC3 (1) Acadia (2) Acaedia (1) Accept (2) Accept The Death (1) Acceptance (1) According to Pleasure I WasLow on the Food Chain (1) Accu§er (1) Accursed Spawn (1) Accuser (2) ACDC (4) Ace Frehley (3) Ace of Wands (2) Acedia (1) Acey Slade (1) Acherontas (4) Acid Drops (1) Acid Fuzz (1) Acid Mist Tomorrow (2) Acid Rain (3) Acidic (2) Acoustic (9) Acoustic Album (1) Acoustic EP (1) Acoustic Song (7) Acoustic Tour (3) Acoustic Track (1) Acoustic Version (11) Acoustic Version Of Seasons (1) Acoustic Video (9) Acrania (1) Across The Atlantic (2) Across the Empty Plains (1) Across The Wounds (1) Act 1 Elysium 77 (1) Act Of Defiance (6) Actin Like A Friend (1) Action (1) Action Bronson (1) Action Doll (1) Action Figures (1) Activator (1) Actor Observer (1) Actors Pages (1) Actual Pain (2) Actual Villains (1) AD (2) AD Adams (1) ADA (1) Adagio Dazzle (2) Adakain (1) Adalene (1) Adaliah (1) Adam (1) Adam Carroll (1) Adam Clemans (1) Adam Darski (1) Adam Duce (1) Adam Exler (2) Adam Gontier (3) Adam Granduciel (1) Adam Green (1) Adam Levine (1) Adam Lightspeed (1) Adam Lovesick (1) Adam Morris (1) Adam Russell (1) Adam Russell Returns (1) Adam Savage (1) Adam Tremblett (1) Adam Warren (1) Adam West (1) Adamas (1) Adan (1) Add Some Music To Your Chrismastime (1) Added Color (2) Addendum (1) Addict (2) Addicted Heart (1) Addicted To Your Heart (2) Addiction (1) Addictions Turfu (1) Addictive (1) Addictive Substance (1) Additional Tickets for Sale (1) Ade (2) Ade Fabola (2) Adele (2) Adeline (2) Adelitas Way (4) Adelphia (1) Adept (2) Adimere Records (1) Adley Stump (2) Adonai (1) Adonay (1) Adoration Destroyed (3) Adore You (1) Adrana (1) Adrealine Mob (1) Adrenalize (2) Adrenechrome (2) Adrian Benegas (1) Adrian Galysh (1) Adrian Garcia (1) Adrian Urias (1) Adrift in Remorse (1) Adult Swim (3) Adulting (1) Advance To The Front Lines (1) Advanced Album Stream (1) Advent Sorrow (1) Adventuer (1) Adventure Out (1) Adventures of the Ghoul Squad (2) Adventures of the Ghoul Squad Theme Song (1) Adventus Regis (1) Adventvs (2) Adverse (1) Aelonia (1) Aenimus (1) Ænimus (1) Aeolian (2) Aeon (3) Aeons Of Corruption (1) Aepoch (1) Æpoch (3) Aeraco (1) Aeren (1) Aerial (1) Aerial Roots (1) Aerodyne (4) Aeronaut (2) Aerosmith (1) Aesop Rock (1) Aesthetic Perfection (1) Æsthetica (2) Aeterna Veritas (1) Aeternam (2) Aeterno Elementum (1) Aether Realm (1) Aethereus (2) Aetherial (2) Æves (3) Aevum (1) Affasia (1) Affiance (5) Afflicted (1) Affliction (1) AFI (18) AFM (1) AFM Records (1) Afraid of Ghosts (1) Afraid To BeMyself (1) Afrerlife (1) Afropunk (1) After Earth (1) After Laughter (1) After Midnight (2) After Midnight Project (1) After the Burial (12) AfterBlood (1) Afterlife (6) Afterlife Symphony (1) Aftermath (3) Aftermoon (1) Aftershock (1) Aftershock Festival (1) ag (2) Again (1) Against (1) Against Evil (1) Against Flesh and Blood (1) Against Me (1) Against The Gain (1) Against The Plagues (1) Against The World (1) Against Them All (1) Agar Agar (1) Agarttha (1) Agathos (1) Age Of Arcadia (1) Age Of Artemis (1) Age Of Damnation (1) Age Of Disclosure (1) Age Of Fear (2) Age Of Rage (2) Age Of Taurus (1) Age of the Absurd (1) Ageless (2) Agenda (2) Agent Fresco (1) Agent Of Sleep (1) Agents of Fate (1) Ages Apart (1) Aggressive Psychotic Behavior (1) Aggressive Tendencies Presents (1) Agon (1) Agonia Records (3) Agonize (1) Agony (2) Agony Kings (1) Agony Of The Human World (1) Ahead Of Myself (1) Ahmad Mehdy Ghazali (1) Ahmet Zappa (1) Aho Girl (1) Ahoy (1) AI Freaks Me Out (2) Aibou 12 (1) Aiden (45) Aiden Returns (1) Aiden Reunites (1) Aiden Von Rose (1) AIDs Foundation 26th Annual Academy Awards Viewing Party (1) Ails (2) Ainikoiyo (5) Aint Always Easy (2) Aint Enough (1) Aint No Sunshine (1) Aint Nobodys Fool (1) Air (1) Air Raid (1) Air Traffic Controller (1) Airbound (6) Airbourne (15) Airport Hotel (2) Aisha (6) Aismart (1) Äiti Maa (1) Ajan Hammas (2) AK Patterson (2) Akane (1) Akari Mon Amour (1) Akihito Kinoshita (1) Akira (1) Akira Toriyama (1) AKIVA (1) AKon (5) AKon 2016 (1) Akon 26 (2) AKon27 (1) Akrasia (1) Aktarum (1) Akuma (3) Akumade Akuma (2) Al Ard (2) Al Deferender (1) Al Jourgensen (3) Al Jourgensen Predictions (1) Al Roker (1) Aladdin (2) Alan Damien (1) Alan Douches (1) Alan Sacks (1) Alana (1) Alanna Matty (1) Alarm For War (1) Albatross (1) Albert Hammond Jr (4) Album (7) Album Artwork (664) Album Artwork "Remnants of Devastation (1) Album Artwork Reaching Into Infinity (1) Album Artwork Through It All (1) Album Artwotk (2) Album Charts (1) Album Cover (4) Album Debut (1) Album Name (2) Album Preview (2) Album Reissue (1) Album Release Party (1) Album Release Show (1) Album Rerelease (1) Album Revenge For The Revenge (1) Album Split (2) Album Stream (32) Album Teaser (14) Album Teaser Trailer (2) Album Teaser Video (2) Album Teasers (1) Album Tile (1) Album Title (1542) Album Title 7 (1) Album Title Overcome Overthrow (1) Album Title Surge (1) Album Title The Silence (1) Album Titled (2) Album Titlw (1) Album Tracklisting (46) Album Trailer (7) Alcest (1) Alchemy (2) Alcohol (2) Aldaria (1) Alder Lights (1) Aldious (1) Aldrig Mer (1) Aleksi Susi (1) Alesana (31) Alesana Origins Project (1) Alessandro Bragalini (1) Alessandro Conti (1) Alessandro Gobbi (1) Alessia Scolletti (1) Alestorm (5) Alex (1) Alex Boyarski (1) Alex Burgos (1) Alex Calise (1) Alex Di Leo (1) Alex Essoe (1) Alex Garskarth (1) Alex Gaskarth (1) Alex Koehler (1) Alex Malevolence (1) Alex Otey (1) Alex Price (1) Alex Riddle (2) Alex Rogers (1) Alex Siegel (1) Alex Smith (1) Alex Somers (Sigur Ros) (1) Alex Theater (1) Alex Theater Sugar Musical (1) Alex Varkatzas (2) Alex Wilke (1) Alexa (1) Alexa Dark (1) Alexa Ferr (12) Alexander (1) Alexander Hatziyannis (1) Alexandrias Library (1) Alexi Laiho (1) Alexi Laiho Tribute (1) Alexia Rodriguez (1) Alexisonfire (2) Alexx Calise (2) Alexxandra (1) Alexxiss Jackson (1) Alezzandra (3) Ali Express (1) Ali In The Jungle (1) Ali Project (1) Alibis (1) Alice Bag (1) Alice Cooper (12) Alice Cooper Dash Cooper CO-OP (1) Alice Cooper Songwriters Hall Of Fame (1) Alice in Chains (11) Alice In Chains Hollywood Palladium (2) Alice In Hell (2) Alice In Wonderland (2) Alice Merton (1) Alice Through the Looking Glass (1) Alicia Keys (1) Alien (1) Alien Ant Farm (2) Alien Beans (1) Alien Hazard (1) Alien Knife Fight (2) Alien Lanes (1) Alien Pains (1) Alien Voodoo (1) Alien Weaponry (2) Aliens (2) Alif (1) Alike (1) Alison Krauss (1) Alissa White Gluz (1) Alive (7) Alive And Burning (3) Alive and Kickin (1) Alive In Barcelona (3) Alive Like Me (1) Alkaline Trio (1) Alkemy (1) All Access Tour Documentary (1) All American Rejects (3) All Axess (1) All Bad Things (1) All Bitches Die (1) All But A Memory (1) All Come Running (1) All Drunks On Deck (1) All Else Fails (3) All Engines Go (1) All Falls Down (1) All Gods Kill (2) All Good Things (2) All Hail Science (1) All Hail the Yeti (3) All Hallows Evil (1) All Hallows Evil. New Single (1) All Heart (2) All Hell Retreats (1) All Hope Is Gone (1) All Human (1) All I Am (1) All I Believe (1) All I Know (1) All I Need (1) All I See Is War (1) All I Want for Christmas is You (2) All In (1) All In Favor (1) All In Favour (1) All In Now (1) All Is One (1) All Is One Documentary (1) All Lanes (1) All Lips Go Blue (1) All Love Is Lost (1) All My Friends Were Glorious (1) All Night Long (1) All Of The Dead Girls (1) All Of The Posion All Of The Pain (1) All Okay (1) All or Nothing (3) All Out War (1) All Over The Internet (1) All Pigs Must Die (3) All Rise (1) All Shall Perish (13) All Souls (4) All Stars Tour (1) All That Once Shined (1) ALL THAT REMAINS (16) All That We Need (1) All That You Are (1) All Thats Left is Blood (2) All The Best Comebacks (1) All The Broken Things (1) All The Dead Pilots (1) All the Devils In Hell (1) All The Devils Toys (1) All The Rage (1) All The Shelters (2) All The Time (1) All These Reasons (2) All Things Considered (1) All Things Lost On Earth (1) All This Time We Wait (1) All Threes (2) All Time Low (31) All Time What (1) All Timw Low (1) All Tomorrows Funeral (2) All Tomorrows Funerals (1) All Truths Be True (1) All We Have (1) All We Love We Leave Behind (1) All You Need is a Heartbeat (1) All You Need Is Already Within You (1) All You Need Is Soul (1) Allegaeon (11) Allegaeon Rush Cover Animate (1) Allegeaon (1) Allegiance (2) Allegiance to Fall (1) Allele (1) Alleluia The Devils Carnival (1) Allfather (1) Allie Goertz (1) Allies to the Adversary (1) Alligator Blood (1) Allison Ireheta (1) Allison Park (1) Allspark (1) Allstar Weekend (3) Allstars Tour (1) Allt för Sverige (1) Allure of the Earth (1) Ally Ryan (1) Alma (1) Alma Mater (1) Almond Noir (1) Almost Awake (1) Almost Classy (1) Almost Heaven (2) Almost Punk (1) Alone (4) Alone Against All (1) Along Came A Spider (1) Along the Road (1) Along The Way (1) Alpha (1) Alpha and Omega (2) Alpha Go (2) Alpha Mule (1) Alpha Omega (1) Alpha Omega Management (10) Alpha Omega Management and Metalheads Foever Management Network (1) Alpha Tiger (1) Already Dead (1) Already Forgotten (1) Already Gone (2) Alright (1) Also Am I (2) Alt Det Du Ku (1) alt J (1) Alt Press (1) Altair (1) Altar of Madness (1) Altec Lansing (1) Alter Bridge (4) Alterantive Press (1) Alterantive Press Magazine (1) Alteras (5) Alterbeast (2) Altered Beast (1) Altered Perceptions (2) Altered Shade (1) Alternative Nation (1) Alternative Press (20) Alternative Press Magazine (3) Alternative Reality (1) Alternative Revolt Magazine (2) Alterpodes (1) AlterRed (1) Althea (3) Altostratus (1) AltPress (2) Alucinari IV The Fall (1) Alukah (1) Alum Title (1) Alvorecer De Almas Perdidas (1) Alwaid (1) Always (2) Always and Forever (6) Always Focused (1) Alyeska (1) Am I Alive (1) Am I Dead Yet (1) Am I Evil (1) Am I The Enemy (1) AM PM (1) Amaazon (1) Amain (1) AmaLee (1) Amalur (1) Amanda Palmer (1) Amanda Seyfriend (1) Amanita Nightshade (1) Amanita Virosa (1) Amaon Amarth (1) Amaranthe (4) Amaranthine (1) Amarth (1) Amaurosis (1) Amaze Knight (4) Amazing (1) Amazing Demon Boy (4) Amazon (17) Amazon Fashion Week Tokyo (1) Amazon Fashion Week Toyoko 2017 SS (1) Amazon Music (1) Amazon Music Playlist Love Me Not (1) Amazon Studios (1) AmazonMP3 (1) Ambassador (3) Amber Run (1) Amber Sea (1) Amberian Dawn (3) Ambiguous (1) Ambition Price (1) Ambush (1) AMC (1) Amelia (2) Amely (1) Amen (1) Amend (1) Amenra (4) America (1) America Young (1) American (1) American Attraction (1) American Authors (1) American Daddy (1) American Dream (1) American Fall (1) American Girl (1) American Girls (1) American Head Charge (2) American Hero (1) American Idol (1) American Nightmare (4) American Outlaws (1) American Satan (9) American Satan Official Trailer (1) American Satan Preorder (1) American Satan Soundtrack (5) American Satan The Relentless (1) American Satan Worldwide Release (1) American Scum (1) American Sharks (1) American Sin (2) American Songwriter (1) American Soul (1) American Spring (2) American Standards (8) American Valhalla (2) American Valhalla Digital (1) American Valhalla DVD (1) American Valhalla Eagle Rock Entertainment (1) American Witch (2) American Wolves (2) American Young (1) Americas Got Talent (3) Americas Next Top Model (1) Amerikan Gothick (1) Amerikill (1) AmeriKKKant (1) Amethyst (3) Amethyst Star (1) Amid Vultures (1) Amiensus (1) Amilia K Spicer (2) AMKEN (1) Ammee Pearl (1) Ammonia and Bleach (1) Ammonite (1) Ammunition (2) Amnesia (1) Amnesiac (1) Amnesty (1) Amon (1) Amon Amarth (21) Amon Amarth Video Game (1) Among The First (1) Among The Prety (1) Among The Thorns (1) Amongst a Sea of Darkness (1) Amongst The Forgotten (2) Amoretum Vol. 1 (1) Amoretum Volume 1 (1) Amoriello (2) Amorphis (1) Amped (1) Amped Distribution (1) Amphitrite: Ancient Sanctuary In The Sea (1) Ampora (1) Amsterdam (2) Amue (1) Amulet (1) Amuse (1) Amuse Multilingual Artists Audition 2 (1) AMV Tribute (1) Amy Lawton (2) Amy Lee (4) Amy Mantis and The Space Between (1) Amy Ratcliffe (1) Amy Steeke (1) Amycanbe (1) Amyst (1) An Abduction (1) An Asphyxiating Embrace (1) An Awkward Attempt (1) An Ending (1) An Endless Heretic (1) An Endless Journey (1) An Evening With (1) An Instrument Of His Love (1) An Open Sore (1) An Orgy of Grotesqueries (1) Ana (2) Anaal Nathrakh (1) Anagnorisis (2) Anaheim (1) Anahita Skye (1) Anakysis Paralysis (1) Anal Cunt (1) Analogue Collective (1) Anama (1) Anamanaguchi (3) Anaon (1) Anarbor (2) Anarcha (1) Anarcheon (2) Anarchy My Dear (1) Anathema (4) Anathematize The Bleeding (1) Anatomy Of A Sailing Ship (1) Ancestor (1) Anchorite (1) Anchorlines (1) Ancident Vvisdom (1) Ancient Architects (1) Ancient Existence (1) Ancient Heart (1) Ancient Oak Consort (2) Ancient Spirit (1) And I Told Her So (1) And In The End I Am Nothing (1) And It All Began With You (1) and Little Dead Riding Hood (1) And None Shall Rise (1) And Now We Fall (1) And So It Begins (1) And The Battle Royale (1) And the Stars Above (1) And Then There Was Pain (1) And They All Blew Away (1) And Your Children To Be Damned (1) Anders Manga (1) AnderStein (1) Andrea Giovanetti (1) Andrea Giovanetti Departs (1) Andreana Clemenz (1) Andreas Kisser (1) Andreas Magnusson (1) Andreas Weiss (1) Andrew Bennett (1) Andrew Carter (1) Andrew De Leon (4) Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness (1) Andrew Staley (1) Andrew W Boss (1) Andrew WK (1) Andro (1) Android Lust (1) Andromeda (1) Andy Biersack (20) Andy Black (7) Andy Black Juliet Simms (1) Andy Grammer (1) Andy James (1) Andy LaPleagua (1) Andy LaPlegua (1) Andy Lewis (1) Andy Pilkington (2) Andy Price (1) Andy Six (4) Andy Sixx (11) Andy Wylie (1) Andys Room (2) Anels of the Black Dawn Part One (1) Anette Olzon (1) Anewrage (1) Anfractuous Moments (1) Angel (2) Angel Dust (1) Angel Eyes (1) Angel in the Dark (1) Angel Nation (1) Angel Nightmare (1) Angel Of Mercy (1) Angel On The Outside (1) Angel Stadium (1) Angela (3) Angela Edge (1) Angela Gossow (1) Angelic (2) AngelicDreamz (1) Angeliz Dreamz (1) Angellore (1) Angelo Parante (1) Angels (1) Angels and Airwaves (2) Angels Out of Grace (1) Angels Shall Sin Demons Shall Pray (1) Angelseed (1) Angelspit (23) Angelus Apatrida (1) Angelus Aptrida (1) Anger Denial Accpetance (1) Anger from Above The Hate (1) Anger Left Behind (1) Anger Music Group (1) Angerdome (1) Angertea (1) Ängie (5) Anglesea (1) Angra (4) Angrboda (1) Angry Me (1) Angst (1) Anguish Symmetry (1) Anhedonia (1) Anima (1) Anima Damnata (1) Anima Tempo (1) Animae (1) Animae Silentes (1) Animal Behaviour (1) Animal Creature Of Habit (1) Animal Drive (1) Animal Farm (2) Animal In Me (1) Animal Years (2) Animals (2) Animals As Leaders (7) Animat (1) Animate (2) Animated (1) Animated Series (2) Animated Video (3) Animated Videos (3) Anime (14) Anime Expo (22) Anime Expo 2014 (2) Anime Expo 2015 (1) Anime Expo 2017 (7) Anime Expo 2018 (4) Anime Expo 2019 (2) Anime Expo Anisong World Matsuri (1) Anime Expo Day 0 (1) Anime Expo Day 1 (1) Anime Expo Day 2 (1) Anime Expo PreShow Night (1) Anime Expo We Are X Screening (1) Anime Only Flow (1) Animi (1) Animus (2) Anisong World Matsuri (5) Anisong World Matsuri 2017 (2) Anisong World Matsuri Otakon (1) Anisong World Tour (2) AnisongWolrd Matsuri 2018 (1) Anisoptera (2) Ann Jangle (1) Ann My Guard (1) Anna (1) Anna Elsa React To (1) Anna Pena (2) Annabel Book (1) Annabelle (1) Annalisa (1) Anne Autumn Erickson (1) Anne Marie (1) Annie Hardy (2) Annie Off The Rails (1) Annihilation (2) Annihilation Crusade (1) Annihilator (3) Annihilist (1) Annique (1) Annisokay (3) Anno 1423 (1) Annouces New Lineup (1) Announcement (4) Announcing The End (1) Annunaki (1) Anodyne Sea (1) Anointed (1) Anomalies (1) Another Breath (1) Another Century (1) Another Century Records (7) Another Days Armor (1) Another Dead Rockstar (1) Another Dimension (1) Another Face (1) Another Level (1) Another Life (2) Another Lost Year (2) Another Mans Woman I Dont Wanna Lose This (1) Another One (2) Another Sort of Homecoming (1) Another Victim (1) Another You (1) Anson (3) Answers (1) Antagonism of the Soul (2) Antagonist (1) Antagonist AD (1) Antheist Omnist (1) Anthem (1) Anthem Films (1) Anthems For The Victorious (1) Anthoni Grande (1) Anthony Anzaldo (1) Anthony Assaker (1) Anthony Lopardo (1) Anthony Vincent (5) Anthrax (21) Anti Bullying (1) Anti Flag (1) Anti Hero Magazine (1) Anti Mortem (1) Anti Social Social Club (1) Anti System Revolution (1) Anti Terrestrial Black Metal (1) Anti-Flag (2) Antichrist Magazine (1) Antidote (1) Antifa (1) AntiFlag (13) AntiHero Magazine (2) AntiLife (1) AntiTrump (1) Antiwave (1) Antlerz (1) AntropomorphiA (2) Antwon (1) Anunnaki Patterns of Light (1) Anvil (3) Anxiety (1) Anxiety Attack (1) Anxious and Angry Records (1) Anymore (1) Anyone Else (1) Anything You Want (1) Anywhere But Here (2) AOL (12) AOL Listening Party (1) AOL Music (2) AOLs Noisecreep (1) AOP Records (1) Aosoth (2) AP (7) Apartment (1) Apath of The Immortal (1) Apex Predator (1) Apex Predator Easy Meat (1) APF Records (2) APF Records Showcase (1) Aphelia (1) Apocalypse Joe (1) Apocalypse Orchestra (1) Apocalyptic (1) Apocalyptic Omen (1) Apocalyptica (5) Apocrypha (1) Apocryphon (1) Apokalypse jetzt (1) Apokalypsis (1) Apology (1) Apopheny of Life (1) Apophis Black Dragon (1) Apophys (3) Apostle Of Solitude (3) Apothecary (2) Apotheosis (1) App (3) App Store (1) Apparition (1) Apparitions (1) Appe Music (1) Appease The Beast 2 (6) Appetizer Mobile (1) Appice (3) Applause (1) Apple (2) Apple Jack (1) Apple White (11) Appleby (1) Applejack (14) Approaching Atlantean Monoliths (1) Apptivity (1) Apricot Dreams (1) Apricots Apricate Alligators Alligate (1) April 11 (1) April 2 (1) April Fools (1) April Stooge Day (1) Aqours (3) Aqours First Love Live Step Zero to One (2) Aqours Love Live Sunshine (1) Aqvilea (1) AR (1) Ara Kus Productions (1) Arabic Mehndi (1) Arabic Mehndi Tattoo (1) Arachne Exanguine (1) Aradia (1) Arallu (2) Arbiters of the Apocalypse (1) Arca (1) Arca Progjet (1) Arcadia (2) Arcadian Haze (1) Arcana Imperii (1) Arcane Saints (1) Arcanium (1) Arcanum (1) Arch Enemy (24) Archangel Diamond (1) Archers (1) archery (1) Archery Dolls (1) Archie Comics (1) Archie Faulks (1) Architects (12) Architects Stream New Album The Here and Now (3) Architects UK (2) Architecture (1) Architecture of Chaos (1) Architecture of Self Destruction (1) ArchrFox (1) Archspire (3) Arctic Blood (3) Are We All We Are (1) Are We Doing The Best We Can (1) Are You Gothic (1) Are You In Love (1) Are You Not Entertained (1) Are You Okay? (1) Are You Ready (1) Are You With Me Now (1) Area (1) Arecibo (1) Arena (2) Arguing With Thermometers (1) Argus (1) Argus Megere (1) Ari Hauntington (3) Ari Mihalopoulos (1) Aria Blaze (1) Ariana Grande (2) Arificial Storage (1) Arin Iiejay (1) Arin Ilejay (1) Arise (2) Arise In Chaos (1) Arise the War Cry (1) Arisen From Nothing (1) Arista Records (1) Aristo (1) Arkaik (2) Arkaik Clothing (1) Arkheth (1) Arkhitecturenominus (1) Arkhon Infaustus (1) Arkona (2) Armada (8) Armageddon (1) Armand Jasari (1) Armchair Expert (1) Armonite (1) Armor For Sleep (1) Armored Saint (4) Armorist (1) Arms and Sleepers (1) Arms Of A Dream (1) Arms Of Pleonexia (2) Army Of Darkness (2) Army Of Noise (2) Army Of The Universe (2) ARO Mix (1) Aromantic Part 1 (1) Around The World (1) Arrested (6) Arrival Of Autumn (6) Arsenic in the Year of the Snake (1) Arsis (15) Arsis. 2012 Tours (1) Arson (2) Arson Anthem (1) Arsonists Get All The Girls (2) Art Of Deception (1) Art Cruz (1) Art Funds Art Tour (1) Art Of Anarchy (1) Art Of Deception (4) Art Of Dying (3) Art Of Melody Music (5) Art of War (1) Artemisia (1) Artery Recordings (10) Artery Records (1) Artifas (1) Artificial Brain (1) Artificial Selection (2) Artisan (1) Artist Direct (1) Artist of the Year (1) ArtistDirect (2) Artistic Integrity (1) Artists for Disaster Relief (1) Arts and Crafts (1) Artwork (5) Artyfiction (1) Arv (1) Arya (1) Aryn Adonis (1) As A Butterfly (1) As Above (1) As Aimless Glory (2) As All Must Come To Pass (1) As Angels Bleed (3) As Blood Runs Black (12) As Cities Burn (1) As crazy As It Seems (1) As Hell Retreats (1) As Hope Welcomes Death (1) As Humanity Weeps (1) As I Go Under (1) As I Lay Dying (25) As It Is (2) As It Is Written (1) As Life Slowly Fades (1) As Lions (2) As Luck Would Have It (1) As Luck Would Have It Documentary (1) As Paradise Falls (3) As Real As It Gets 15th Anniversary Tour (1) As Spectra Wither (1) As Strange As Angels (2) As Summer Dies (2) As Temples Collide (1) As The Ages Passing By (1) As The Ashes Fall (1) As The Dead Lie (1) As The Night Crawls In (1) As The Palace Burn (1) As The Vultures Circle (1) As The World Turns Black (1) As They Burn (5) As Thick As Thieves (4) As We Die (1) As We Die World Abomination Tour 2018 (1) As We Drift (1) As We Walk (1) As Your Kingdom Falls (1) Asahi Music Station Ultra Fes 2017 (1) Ascend (2) Ascendants (1) Ascending (1) Ascending Dawn (6) Ascending From The Putrid Grave (1) Ascension (2) Ascension Gate (1) Ascension Monuments Media (1) Asenblut (1) Asesinos Ocultos (1) ASG (3) Ash (1) Ash Avildesen (1) Ash Costello (2) Ash of Eden (1) Asher Monroe (1) Ashes (5) Ashes for Air (1) Ashes Of Dawn (1) Ashes Of Existence (1) Ashes Of My Regret (1) Ashes Of My Regrets (1) Ashes of the Dawn (1) Ashes Remain (1) Ashes To Ashes (1) Ashes to Dust (1) Ashes You Leave (1) Ashestoangels (16) Ashia (1) Ashley (1) Ashley Bad (1) Ashley J (3) Ashley Miller (1) Ashley Purdy (1) Ashley Worhol (1) Ashlynn (1) Ashlynn Ella (2) ASHRR (1) Ashton Nyte (1) Ashylus (1) Asian Fred (1) ASide (3) Asila (3) Ask Carol (1) Asking Alexandra (1) Asking Alexandria (60) Asleep With Your Devil (1) ASPCA (1) Aspherium (2) | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 510 |
\section{Introduction}
In recent years, there are many interests in investigating possible parity violations in gravity theories in the literature, partly stimulated by the experimental detections of gravitational waves (GWs) \cite{ligo1,ligo2}
and the developments in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) experiments \cite{CMB1,CMB2}.
A famous and frequently studied parity violating gravity model is the so-called Chern-Simons (CS) modified gravity \cite{CSgravity1,CSgravity2},
which within the framework of Riemannian geometry modifies general relativity (GR) by a gravitational CS term
$\phi R\tilde{R}$, where $R\tilde{R}\equiv\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}R_{\mu\nu}^{~~~\alpha\beta}R_{\rho\sigma\alpha\beta}$,
$\phi$ is a scalar field,
$R_{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}$ is the Riemann tensor constructed from Levi-Civita connection,
$\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}=\epsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}/\sqrt{-g}$ is the Levi-Civita tensor,
$\epsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}$ is the totally antisymmetric symbol and $g$ is the determinant of the metric.
The CS modified gravity makes a difference between the amplitudes of the left- and right-handed polarized components of GWs,
but no difference between their velocities. This is the so-called amplitude birefringence phenomenon.
However, the CS modified gravity suffers from the problem of vacuum
instability because one of the circularly polarized components of GWs becomes a ghost at high frequencies \cite{CSgravity3}, i.e., its kinetic term has the wrong sign.
Further extensions to the CS modified gravity were made in Refs.~\cite{Crisostomi:2017ugk,Gao:2019liu,Zhao:2019xmm}, but these did not stop the ghost mode at high frequencies, as shown explicitly in Ref. \cite{Bartolo:2020gsh}. It seems to be difficult to have a ghost-free parity violating gravity model within the framework of Riemannian geometry.
To search for possible consistent parity violating gravity models, we may go beyond the Riemannian geometry.
Along this way, the Nieh-Yan modified Teleparallel Gravity (NYTG) model \cite{PVtele1,PVtele2} was proposed.
The NYTG model is based on the teleparallel gravity (TG) \cite{Tele,tele2021} which may be considered as a constrained metric-affine theory and is formulated in a spacetime endowed with a metric compatible but curvature free connection, the gravity is identified with the spacetime torsion. One may have a GR equivalent model within the framework of TG (we simply call it TGR because we usually use $T$-tensor to represent the torsion). The NYTG model \cite{PVtele1,PVtele2}
modifies TGR slightly by the anomalous coupling $\phi \mathcal{T}\widetilde{\mathcal{T}}$ between an axionlike field (it is a pseudo scalar field) $\phi(x)$ and the Nieh-Yan density \cite{Nieh:1981ww}: $\mathcal{T}\widetilde{\mathcal{T}}=(1/2)\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\mathcal{T}^{\lambda}_{~\mu\nu}\mathcal{T}_{\lambda\rho\sigma}$ with $\mathcal{T}^{\lambda}_{~\mu\nu}$ being the torsion tensor. The Nieh-Yan density is parity odd, so at the background with $\partial_{\mu}\phi\neq 0$, the Nieh-Yan coupling term $\phi \mathcal{T}\widetilde{\mathcal{T}}$ violates parity spontaneously.
When applying the NYTG model to cosmology \cite{PVtele1,PVtele2}, it was found that around the Friedmann-Roberson-Walker (FRW) background, there is a difference between the propagating velocities of the left- and right-handed polarized components of GWs, but the damping rates of their amplitudes are the same. This is the so-called velocity birefringence phenomenon. More importantly the NYTG model is ghostfree. Recently, the NYTG model was found to be compatible with the results of most local tests in the solar system at the post-Newtonian order \cite{Rao:2021azn,Qiao:2021fwi},
the upper limit on its model parameters by the GWs data of LIGO/Virgo Collaboration was obtained in Ref. \cite{Wu:2021ndf}, and the enhancement of primordial GWs during inflation due to the velocity birefringence of NYTG model and its implications in the air-based GWs experiments were studied in Ref. \cite{Cai:2021uup}. More recently, it was found in Ref. \cite{Li:2022mti} that generalizations of NYTG by considering the couplings of $\phi$ to other parity-odd terms quadratic in the torsion tensor \cite{Hohmann:2020dgy} are perplexed by the ghost problem again. It means in this scenario, the NYTG model is the unique one that can avoid the ghost problem. In addition, the application of Nieh-Yan term on the big-bounce cosmology was considered in Ref.~\cite{Bombacigno:2021bpk}.
Recent constraints on the parity violations in gravities from observational data can be found in Ref. \cite{Gong:2021jgg}.
Besides TG, there is another similar non-Riemannian framework to build gravity models, \textit{e.g.}, the so-called symmetric teleparallel gravity (STG) \cite{J.M.N:1999}. The STG models are formulated in spacetime endowed with a metric and a connection which is curvature free and torsionless, and gravity is identical to the nonmetricity. One may have a GR equivalent model within the framework of STG (we simply call it QGR because we usually use $Q$-tensor, \textit{e.g.}, $Q_{\alpha\mu\nu}=\hat{\nabla}_\alpha g_{\mu\nu}$, to express the nonmetricity). Similar to the CS modified gravity and the NYTG model, the simplest parity violating extension to QGR is given by the coupling: $\phi(x)\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}Q_{\rho\sigma}^{~~~\alpha}$. This modification indeed produces velocity birefringence phenomenon in the cosmological tensor perturbations \cite{Conroy:2019ibo}, but it was found in Ref. \cite{ STGPV2} that it suffers from severe theoretical problems when cosmological vector perturbations are considered. As was pointed out in Ref. \cite{ STGPV2}, this parity violating extension promotes the vector perturbations to dynamical degrees of freedom and also causes velocity and amplitude birefringence phenomena in the vector modes, and more importantly, one of the vector modes becomes ghost at high momentum scales. It seems that the amplitude birefringence is always accompanied by the ghost instability.
In this paper, within the STG framework we consider a more general model which extends QGR by several parity violating interactions between the scalar field and the parity-odd terms, which are quadratic in the nonmetricity tensor, \textit{i.e.} $\mathcal{L}\sim\varepsilon QQ\hat{\nabla}\phi\hat{\nabla}\phi$. These interactions have been considered in \cite{Conroy:2019ibo}, but only the tensor perturbations were studied there. Though no dangerous mode was found in the tensor perturbations, this cannot guarantee the absence of pathologies in the scalar and vector perturbations. In this paper, we will make detailed investigations on the linear cosmological perturbations of this model, including all the scalar, vector, and tensor types of perturbations. We will attach much importance to the vector perturbations and show in what conditions this model can be free from the ghost problem.
This paper is organized as follows. In Sec. \ref{section basic knowledge}, we will introduce the STG model with parity violations we will consider in this paper. In Sec. \ref{cosmology}, we will apply this model to cosmology and present our main results about the studies on the linear cosmological perturbations. Section \ref{conclusion} is a summary.
\section{The Symmetric Teleparallel Gravity Model with Parity Violations}\label{section basic knowledge}
We will take the unit $8\pi G=1$ and the convention for the metric signature: $\left\lbrace +,-,-,-\right\rbrace$. As usual, the Greeks $\mu,\nu,\rho,\dots=0,1,2,3$ are used to represent spacetime tensor indices, and the Latins $i,j,k,\dots=1,2,3$ are used to denote the spatial components. As mentioned before, the STG theory is considered as a constrained metric-affine theory, it is formulated by a metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ and an affine connection ${\Gamma^\lambda}_{\mu\nu}$, which is curvature free and torsionless,
\begin{equation}
{\hat{R}^\rho}_{\sigma\mu\nu}\equiv\partial_\mu{\Gamma^\rho}_{\nu\sigma}+\Gamma^\rho_{~\mu\alpha}{\Gamma^\alpha}_{\nu\sigma}-\left\lbrace\mu\leftrightarrow\nu\right\rbrace=0~,~\mathcal{T}^\rho_{~\mu\nu}\equiv\Gamma^\rho_{~\mu\nu}-\Gamma^\rho_{~\nu\mu}=0.
\end{equation}
With these constraints, the affine connection can be generally expressed as
\begin{equation}
{\Gamma^\lambda}_{\mu\nu}=\frac{\partial x^\lambda}{\partial y^\alpha}\partial_\mu\partial_\nu y^\alpha~,
\end{equation}
where the four functions $y^\alpha$ themselves form a special coordinate system in which all the components of the affine connection vanish. One can carry out the calculations by fixing to this special coordinate system. In fact, such "coincident gauge" had been frequently adopted in the literature. However, for the purpose of making our analysis as general as possible, we prefer to work in an arbitrary coordinate system in this paper. We will consider the metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ and the four functions $y^\mu$ as the fundamental variables of the STG theory.
Within STG, the gravity is attributed to the nonmetricity tensor $Q_{\alpha\mu\nu}\equiv\hat{\nabla}_\alpha g_{\mu\nu}=\partial_\alpha g_{\mu\nu}-{\Gamma^\lambda}_{\alpha\mu}g_{\lambda\nu}-{\Gamma^\lambda}_{\alpha\nu}g_{\mu\lambda}$,
which measures the failure of the connection to be metric compatible. The QGR model, which is equivalent to GR within the STG framework, has the following action:
\begin{equation}\label{Qac}
S_g=\frac{1}{2}\int d^4x \sqrt{-g}\mathbb{Q} \equiv \frac{1}{2}\int d^4x \sqrt{-g} \left( \frac{1}{4}Q_{\alpha\mu\nu}Q^{\alpha\mu\nu}-\frac{1}{2}Q_{\alpha\mu\nu}Q^{\mu\nu\alpha}-\frac{1}{4}Q_{\alpha}Q^{\alpha}+\frac{1}{2}Q_{\alpha}\bar{Q}^{\alpha}\right)~,
\end{equation}
where $Q_\alpha=Q_{\alpha\mu\nu}g^{\mu\nu}$ and $\bar{Q}_\alpha=Q_{\rho\sigma\alpha}g^{\rho\sigma}$ are two nonmetricity vectors. This action is identical to the Einstein-Hilbert action up to a boundary term,
\begin{equation}
S_g=\frac{1}{2}\int d^4x \sqrt{-g} \left[-R-\nabla_{\alpha}(Q^\alpha-\bar{Q}^\alpha)\right],
\end{equation}
where both the curvature scalar $R$ and the covariant derivative $\nabla_{\alpha}$ is associated with the Levi-Civita connection.
Similar to the CS modified gravity and the NYTG model, a simple parity violating extension to QGR can be realized by introducing an extra term
$S_{PV}\sim \int d^4x\sqrt{-g} \phi\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,{Q_{\rho\sigma}}^\alpha$ to the action (\ref{Qac}).
However, as pointed out in Ref. \cite{ STGPV2}, with this modification, the vector perturbations in the gravity sector are promoted to be propagating dynamical modes, and one of the vector modes becomes a ghost at high momentum scales.
Now we turn to the more general (and of course more complex) case where parity violating extensions in gravity are provided by several interactions between the scalar field and the parity-odd terms which are quadratic in the nonmetricity tensor. At the same time, we should guarantee the equations of motion of the metric and the scalar field to be second order. This is in order to exclude the Ostrogradsky ghosts, which are originated from higher derivatives. Totally there are seven couplings satisfying the requirements, as listed below,
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}\label{PVc}
M_1&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,{Q_{\rho\sigma}}^\alpha\,\nabla_\beta \phi\,\nabla^\beta \phi,\\
M_2&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,{Q_{\rho\sigma}}^\beta\,\nabla^\alpha \phi\,\nabla_\beta \phi,\\
M_3&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,{Q_{\rho}}^{\alpha\beta}\,\nabla_\sigma \phi\,\nabla_\beta \phi,\\
M_4&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,{Q^{\alpha\beta}}_\rho\,\nabla_\sigma \phi\,\nabla_\beta \phi,\\
M_5&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,{Q^{\beta\alpha}}_\rho\,\nabla_\sigma \phi\,\nabla_\beta \phi,\\
M_6&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,Q_{\rho}\,\nabla^\alpha\phi\,\nabla_\sigma \phi,\\
M_7&=\varepsilon^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\,Q_{\mu\nu\alpha}\,\bar{Q}_{\rho}\,\nabla^\alpha\phi\,\nabla_\sigma \phi.
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
Then the action of parity violation is written as
\begin{equation}\label{PVa}
S_{PV}=\int d^4x\sqrt{-g}\sum_{a} c_a(\phi,\nabla^\mu \phi \nabla_\mu \phi) M_a\equiv\sum_{a} S_{PVa}~,
\end{equation}
with $a=1,2,\cdots,7$. The coupling coefficients $c_a$ can also rely on the scalar field and its first derivatives.
So the full action of the model under consideration is
\begin{equation}
S=S_g+S_{PV}+S_\phi= \int d^4x\sqrt{-g}\left[\frac{\mathbb{Q}}{2}+\sum_{a} c_a(\phi,\nabla^\mu \phi \nabla_\mu \phi) M_a +\frac{1}{2} g^{\mu\nu}\partial_\mu\phi\partial_\nu\phi-V(\phi)\right] \label{S2}~,
\end{equation}
where we have neglected the matter other than the scalar field $\phi$ in the Universe. The model studied in Ref. \cite{ STGPV2} is equivalent to a special case with $c_2=c_3=...=c_7=0$.
This more general model was considered in \cite{Conroy:2019ibo}, where only the tensor modes of the linear cosmological perturbation were considered. However, as a modified gravity model, only considering tensor perturbations is not enough. In the following, we will make a full investigation on its linear cosmological perturbations around the FRW universe by considering all the scalar, vector and tensor perturbations.
\section{Application to Cosmology}\label{cosmology}
\subsection{The background dynamics}
For simplicity, we take the spatially flat FRW universe as the background, its line element is given by
\begin{equation}
ds^2=a^2(\eta)(d\eta^2-\delta_{ij}dx^i dx^j),
\end{equation}
where $\eta$ is the conformal time. In GR we only need the metric to define a background, since only the metric is the fundamental variable; while in the STG theory, the four functions $y^\mu$ determining affine connection are also considered as fundamental variables. Hence, besides the metric, these four functions should also be given. According to \cite{2104.02483}, $\bar{\Gamma}^{\lambda}_{~\mu\nu}=0$ is a good solution (not a gauge choice) to the background evolution equation, which means we can set $y^\mu =x^\mu\equiv\left\lbrace\eta,x^i \right\rbrace$ for the cosmic background. There are other solutions for the affine connection compatible with the metric ansatz in above line element, for instances, the nontrivial solutions found in Refs. \cite{Hohmann:2021ast, DAmbrosio:2021pnd}, but in this paper we only consider the simplest one. After some calculations, one can straight forwardly find that the extra parity violating terms in the model (\ref{S2}) do not have effects on the evolution of the background. Thus the background dynamics is the same as in GR,
\begin{equation}
3\mathcal{H}^2=a^2\rho_\phi,\quad-2\mathcal{H}'-\mathcal{H}^2=a^2 p_\phi,\quad\phi''+2\mathcal{H}\phi'+a^2\phi=0,
\end{equation}
where the prime represents the derivative with respect to the conformal time $\eta$ and $\mathcal{H}=a'/a$ is the conformal Hubble rate. As usual, $\rho_\phi= \phi'^2/(2a^2)+V(\phi)$ and $p_\phi=\phi'^2/(2a^2)-V(\phi)$ are the energy density and pressure of the scalar field, respectively.
\subsection{Cosmological perturbations}
Now we consider the linear cosmological perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}). With the Scalar-Vector-Tensor decomposition, the perturbed metric is contained in the following parametrized line element:
\begin{equation}
ds^2=a^2\left\lbrace (1+2A)d\eta^2+2(\partial_i B+B_i)d\eta dx^i-\left[(1-2\psi)\delta_{ij}+2\partial_i\partial_jE+\partial_jE_i+\partial_iE_j+h_{ij}\right]dx^i dx^j \right\rbrace~,
\end{equation}
where $A,\psi,B,E$ are the scalar perturbations, $E_i, B_i$ are the vector perturbations which satisfy the transverse conditions: $\partial_i B_i=\partial_i E_i=0$, and the tensor perturbations $h_{ij}$ are transverse and traceless: $\partial_i h_{ij}=0$ and $\delta^{ij}h_{ij}=0$.
Since the connection vanishes on the background, itself is considered as the perturbation. The four functions used to construct the connection can be decomposed as $y^\alpha=x^\alpha+u^\alpha$, where the perturbation $u^\alpha$ is further decomposed as $u^\alpha\equiv\left\lbrace u^0,\partial_i u+u_i \right\rbrace$ with the transverse condition: $\partial_i u_i=0$. So we have two more scalar perturbations $u^0$ and $u$, and one more vector perturbation $u_i$. Then, up to the second order the perturbed connection built from $y^\alpha$ is
\begin{equation}
{\Gamma^\lambda}_{\mu\nu}=\frac{\partial x^\lambda}{\partial y^\alpha}\partial_\mu \partial_\nu y^\alpha =\partial_\mu \partial_\nu u^\lambda -\partial_\mu \partial_\nu u^\alpha \partial_\alpha u^\lambda.
\end{equation}
As usual, the background and perturbation decomposition for the scalar field is: $\phi(\eta,\vec{x})=\phi(\eta)+\delta\phi(\eta,\vec{x})$.
One can get the equations of motion by varying the action (\ref{S2}) with respect to the metric $g_{\mu\nu}$, the functions $y^{\alpha}$ and the scalar field $\phi$, then using the background-perturbations decomposition to obtain the equations for the scalar, vector and tensor perturbations, respectively. For our purpose in this paper, it is better to consider directly the quadratic actions for the perturbations. The linear perturbation equations can be obtained from the quadratic actions through the variational principle, so all the properties of the perturbation equations have been contained in the quadratic actions already. Furthermore, the quadratic action has an advantage of showing clearly whether there are dangerous modes in the spectrum. Hence, in the following subsections, we will focus on the quadratic actions for the perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}).
\subsection{Quadratic actions for scalar and tensor Perturbations}
For the scalar perturbations, it is not difficult to find that all the parity violating terms in Eq. (\ref{PVc}) vanish up to the second order. So, they are at least third order quantities and have no contribution to the quadratic action. Therefore, the quadratic action for the scalar perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}) is the same as the one in GR with a minimally coupled scalar field:
\begin{equation}
S^{(2)}_S= \int d^4x \frac{a^2\phi'^2}{2\mathcal{H}^2}\left(\zeta'^2-\partial_i\zeta\partial_i\zeta\right)~,
\end{equation}
where $\zeta=-(\psi+\mathcal{H}\delta\phi/\phi')$ is a gauge invariant variable and denotes the curvature perturbation of the hypersurface with the constant $\phi$ field.
For tensor perturbations, one can find that only the first and the fifth parity violating terms of Eq. (\ref{PVc}) have non-zero contributions to the quadratic action:
\begin{equation}
S_{PV1}=-\int d^4x\,2c_1\,\phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}h_{jl,i}h'_{kl}~,~ S_{PV5}=\int d^4x\,c_5\,\phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}h_{jl,i}h'_{kl}~,
\end{equation}
where $\epsilon_{ijk}$ is the 3-dimensional anti-symmetric symbol and $\epsilon_{123}=-1$. So the full quadratic action for tensor perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}) is
\begin{equation}\label{qSt}
S^{(2)}_T= \int d^4x \left\lbrace \frac{a^2}{8}\left( h'_{ij}h'_{ij} -h_{ij,k} h_{ij,k}\right) +\frac{1}{2}[(2c_1-c_5)\phi'^2]' \epsilon_{ijk}h_{jl,i}h_{kl}\right\rbrace~.
\end{equation}
The parity violations can be shown more clearly in the Fourier space. For this, we expand the tensor perturbations $h_{ij}$ in terms of the plane wave and the circular polarization bases $e^A_{ij}$,
\begin{equation}
h_{ij}=\sum_{A=L,R}\int d\eta d^3\vec{k}\,e^{-i\vec{k}\cdot\vec{x}}\,h^A(\eta,\vec{k})\,e^A_{ij}~,
\end{equation}
the index $A=L,R$ denotes the left- and right-handed polarizations, the bases $e^A_{ij}$ satisfy the relations $e^A_{ij}e^{B*}_{ij}=\delta^{AB}$, and $i\epsilon_{ijk}k_i e^A_{jl}=\lambda_A k e^A_{kl}$.
The parameter $\lambda_A=\mp 1$ for $A=L, R$, respectively, and is used to remind the helicity dependence. Then the quadratic action (\ref{qSt}) is rewritten as
\begin{equation}\label{qSt1}
S^{(2)}_T=\sum_{A=L,R} \int d\eta d^3\vec{k} \frac{a^2}{8} (h'^A h'^{A*}-\omega^{2}_{AT}h^A h^{A*})~,
\end{equation}
with
\begin{equation}
\omega^2_{AT}=k^2\left\lbrace 1+\frac{4\lambda_A}{a^2k}[(2c_1-c_5)\phi'^2]'\right\rbrace \label{drT}~.
\end{equation}
The quadratic action (\ref{qSt1}) showed that there is no ghost mode in the tensor perturbations because both the left- and right-handed polarization modes of GWs have the right sign in their kinetic terms. But the dispersion relation (\ref{drT}) is helicity dependent. This implies a velocity difference between the two circular polarization modes, i.e., the velocity birefringence phenomenon.
Both polarization modes have propagating velocities different from the speed of light, so are constrained by the event GW170817 observed by LIGO/Virgo \cite{ligo2}; this in turn puts constraints on the coefficients $c_1$ and $c_5$ of this model \cite{Conroy:2019ibo}.
\subsection{Quadratic action for vector perturbations}
We have seen that the scalar perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}) are trivial, and its tensor perturbations have been considered in \cite{Conroy:2019ibo}. The vector perturbations of this model have not been explored, and their properties are our main interests in this paper.
After some tedious calculations, we find the following five parity violating terms have contributions to the quadratic action for the vector perturbations:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
S_{PV1}&=\int d^4x 2c_1 \phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}\left[ (B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i})(B'_k+u''_k)-(E_{j,il}-u_{j,il})(E'_{k,l}-u'_{k,l}) \right],\\
S_{PV2}&=\int d^4x 2c_2 \phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}(B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i})(B'_k+u''_k), \\
S_{PV4}&=-\int d^4x c_4 \phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}\left[ (B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i})(B'_k+u''_k) +(E_{j,il}-u_{j,il})(B_{k,l}+u'_{k,l})\right], \\
S_{PV5}&=\int d^4x c_5 \phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}\left[(E_{j,il}-u_{j,il})(E'_{k,l}-u'_{k,l}) -(B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i})(B'_k+u''_k)\right], \\
S_{PV7}&=-\int d^4x c_7 \phi'^2 \epsilon_{ijk}(B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i})\left[(B'_k+u''_k) +\nabla^2(E_k-u_k)\right],
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
where $\nabla^2=\partial_i\partial_i$ is the Laplacian. In order to simplify the calculations, we will fix a gauge before further investigations. In this subsection, we will take the coincident gauge: $\Gamma^{\mu}_{~\rho\nu}=0$, this means the four functions $y^{\mu}$ used to construct the affine connection match the coordinates $x^{\mu}$, i.e., $y^{\mu}=x^{\mu}$, to all orders. So the vector perturbations $u_i$ separated from $y^{\mu}$ vanish identically, $u_i=0$. After some calculations under the coincident gauge, we have the full quadratic action for the vector perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}),
\begin{equation}
S^{(2)}_V=\int d^4x \left[ \frac{1}{4}a^2(B_{i,j}+E'_{i,j})(B_{i,j}+E'_{i,j}) +\epsilon_{ijk}\phi'^2\left( b_1 B'_k B_{j,i} -b_2 B_{k,l} E_{j,il} -b_3 E'_{k,l} E_{j,il}\right) \right]\label{qSv}~,
\end{equation}
where we have defined $b_1=2c_1+2c_2-c_4-c_5-c_7$, $b_2=c_4-c_7$ and $b_3=2c_1-c_5$.
It is clear from above quadratic action that the variables $B_i$ are not dynamical modes, the variation of (\ref{qSv}) with respect to $B_i$ yields the following constraint equation:
\begin{equation}
-\frac{1}{2}a^2\nabla^2(B_k+E'_k) -\epsilon_{ijk}\left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'B_{j,i} +\epsilon_{ijk}b_2 \phi'^2 \nabla^2 E_{j,i}=0.
\end{equation}
It is better to solve this equation in the Fourier space. Similar to what we have done in the previous subsection for the tensor perturbations, one can expand the perturbations $B_i$ and $E_i$ in terms of the plane wave and the circular polarization bases $e^A_i$ with $A=L,R$ as
\begin{equation}\label{constraint}
B_i\equiv\int d\eta d^3\vec{k}\,e^{-i\vec{k}\cdot\vec{x}}\,B^A(\eta,\vec{k})\,e^A_i~,
\end{equation}
and a same expansion for $E_i$. Similarly, the circular polarization bases for vector perturbations $e^A_i$ satisfy the relations $e^A_i e^{B*}_i=\delta^{AB}$ and $ik_i e^A_j \epsilon_{ijk}=k\lambda^A e^A_k$. Again, the parameters $\lambda^A=\mp 1$ for $A=L, R$ remind the helicity dependence when they appear.
With these equipments, the constraint equation (\ref{constraint}) is rewritten in the following form:
\begin{equation}
a^2k^2 (B^A+E'^A)+2k\lambda^A\left[\left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'B^A +b_2 \phi'^2 k^2 E^A\right]=0~,
\end{equation}
and can be solved as
\begin{equation}\label{BA1}
B^A= -\frac{2\lambda^A b_2 \phi'^2 k^2}{a^2 k+2\lambda^A \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'}E^A-\frac{a^2 k}{a^2 k+2\lambda^A \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'} E'^A~.
\end{equation}
At the same time, we also rewrite the quadratic action (\ref{qSv}) in the Fourier space:
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
S^{(2)}_V&= \sum_{A=L,R} \int d\eta d^3\vec{k} \left\lbrace \frac{1}{4} a^2 k^2(B^A+E'^A)(B^{*A}+E'^{*A})+\frac{1}{2}\lambda^A k\left[ \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'B^A B^{*A}\right.\right.\\
&\left.\left.\quad\quad\quad\quad\quad\quad\quad\quad +2b_2\phi'^2 k^2 E^A B^{*A}-\left(b_3\phi'^2\right)'k^2 E^A E^{*A}\right] \right\rbrace.
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
Then substitute the solution (\ref{BA1}) back into the action (\ref{qSv}), one finally obtains the quadratic action for the vector perturbations,
\begin{equation}\label{BV1}
S^{(2)}_V= \sum_{A=L,R} \int d\eta d^3k \, \left( z_A^2 E'^A E'^{*A} -w_A^2 E^A E^{*A}\right)~,
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}\label{kc}
\begin{aligned}
z_A^2&= \frac{\lambda^A \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)' a^2 k^2}{2a^2 k+4\lambda^A \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'}~,\\ w_A^2&= \frac{a^2 k^4 b_2 \phi'^2 \left(b_1 \phi'^2\right)''}{\left[ a^2 k+2\lambda^A \left(b_1 \phi'^2\right)'\right]^2} +\frac{2k^5 b_2^2 \phi'^4 -\lambda^A a^2 k^4 \left(b_2 \phi'^2\right)'}{2a^2 k+4\lambda^A \left(b_1 \phi'^2\right)'} +\frac{1}{2}\lambda^A k^3 \left(b_3 \phi'^2\right)'~.
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
The key properties can be read out from the action (\ref{BV1}) and Eq. (\ref{kc}). First, as long as $(b_1\phi'^2)'\neq 0$, the factors $z_A^2$ with $A=L, R$ in front of the kinetic terms of $E^A$ do not vanish, so both components of the vector perturbations represent dynamical degrees of freedom. They propagate in the Universe since generating in the very early time (e.g., inflation epoch). This is different from the model of GR with a coupled scalar field, where both components of vector perturbations just represent some constraints. Second, $z_A^2$ depend on the helicity as well as the wave number $k$. The former dependence induces different damping rates for different polarization modes when they propagating in the Universe and implies the amplitude birefringence phenomenon. The dependence on $k$ means the behaviors of the polarization modes are scale dependent. From Eq. (\ref{kc}), one can see that at large length scales, where $k\ll 2a^{-2}\left| \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'\right| $, the factors $z_A^2\simeq a^2 k^2/4>0$ are positive and helicity independent. So, both polarization modes are healthy. However, at small length scales, where $k\gg 2 a^{-2}\left| \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'\right| $, $z_A^2\simeq\lambda^A \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)' k/2$. We know $\lambda^A=\pm 1$, as long as $\left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'\neq0$, one of the two components must be a ghost mode because it receives a minus sign in its kinetic term. Third, one may define $\omega_{A}^2\equiv w_A^2/z_A^2$, their dependences on the wave number $k$ define the dispersion relations. In general, the dispersion relations are expected to be helicity dependent; this implies the velocity birefringence phenomenon. In all, as long as $(b_1\phi'^2)'\neq 0$, the vector perturbations in this model (\ref{S2}) are dynamical, present both amplitude and velocity birefringence phenomena. The worse consequence is that one of the circularly polarized components of the vector perturbations is a ghost mode and leads to vacuum instability. All these results have been shown in \cite{STGPV2} for a simpler version of this model.
The above discussions at the same time pointed out the way circumventing these difficulties (at least for linear perturbation theory): that is $z_A^2=0$ or $\left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'=0$, so that $b_1= {\rm const.}/\phi'^2$. To have a nonzero $b_1$ satisfying such requirement will need to fine tune the scalar field model. A simpler choice is to have a vanished $b_1$, i.e., $b_1=2c_1+2c_2-c_4-c_5-c_7=0$. Under this condition, neither components of vector perturbations are dynamical fields; they just represent constraints, as same as the model of GR with a coupled scalar field. In this case, the problem of ghost instability certainly does not exist.
Through the same procedure, one may find that in the cases of $b_1=0$,
the quadratic action (\ref{qSv}) reduces to
\begin{equation}
S^{(2)}_V=- \sum_{A=L,R} \int d\eta d^3k w_A^2 E^A E^{*A}~,
\end{equation}
where
\begin{equation}
w_A^2=\frac{k^4}{a^2} b_2^2 \phi'^4 +\frac{1}{2}\lambda^A k^3 \left[(b_3-b_2)\phi'^2\right]'~.
\end{equation}
It is evidently an action for non-dynamical fields.
\subsection{Another approach: conformal-Newtonian gauge}
In the literature, many works on the cosmological perturbations of the STG models adopted the coincident gauge to simplify the calculations, just like we have done in the previous subsection. In this subsection we take another gauge used extensively in GR, \textit{i.e.} the conformal-Newtonian gauge, under which $E_i=0$. We expect these two approaches should give the same results.
Under the conformal-Newtonian gauge, the quadratic action for the vector perturbations of the model (\ref{S2}) is
\begin{equation}
S^{(2)}_V=\int d^4x \left\lbrace \frac{1}{4}a^2 B_{i,j} B_{i,j}+\epsilon_{ijk}\phi'^2\left[ b_1(B'_k+u''_k)(B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i}) +b_2 B_{k,l} u_{j,il} -(b_3-b_2) u'_{k,l} u_{j,il}\right] \right\rbrace\label{qSv2}
\end{equation}
where $b_1$, $b_2$ and $b_3$ are defined as same as before. With similar operations in the previous subsection, the variation of (\ref{qSv2}) with respect to $B_k$ gives
\begin{equation}
-\frac{1}{2}a^2\nabla^2 B_k -\epsilon_{ijk}\left[\left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'(B_{j,i}+u'_{j,i}) +b_2 \phi'^2 \nabla^2 u_{j,i}\right] =0
\end{equation}
After transforming this constraint equation to the Fourier space, one can solve $B^A$ as
\begin{equation}\label{BA2}
B^A= 2\lambda^A\frac{-\left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'u'^A +b_2\phi'^2 k^2 u^A}{a^2 k+2\lambda^A \left(b_1\phi'^2\right)'}
\end{equation}
Then substitute (\ref{BA2}) back into the action (\ref{qSv2}), one obtains the final result for the quadratic action,
\begin{equation}\label{BV2}
S^{(2)}_V= \sum_{A=L,R} \int d\eta d^3k \left[z_A^2 u'^A u'^{*A} -w_A^2 u^A u^{*A}\right]~,
\end{equation}
where $z_A^2$ and $w^2_{A}$ are the same as those in Eq. (\ref{kc}) in the last subsection.
So, for the vector perturbations we can define gauge invariant variables $V_i=E_i-u_i$, or $V^A=E^A-u^A$ under the circular polarization bases. Thus, in the conformal-Newtonian gauge, $V_i=-u_i$, and in the coincident gauge, $V_i=E_i$. In practice, if we do not take any gauge during the calculations, we finally get a quadratic action for the gauge invariant vector perturbations. This action has the same form as those of the actions (\ref{BV1}) and (\ref{BV2}), except replacing $E^A$ in Eq. (\ref{BV1}) and $u^A$ in Eq. (\ref{BV2}) by the variable $V^A$.
\section{Conclusion}\label{conclusion}
In this paper, we studied a STG model (\ref{S2}) which modifies QGR (\ref{Qac}) by several parity violating interactions between the gravitational field and a scalar field. These extra interactions are quadratic in the nonmetricity tensor and do not introduce any higher derivatives. Through applying this model to cosmology, we found that these modifications do not change the background dynamics and the scalar perturbations. They brought changes to the tensor perturbations and caused velocity birefringence in GWs. We attached much importance on the vector perturbations of this model. Our results showed that, in general, the vector perturbations are promoted to be dynamical propagating fields and present both amplitude and velocity birefringence phenomena. The worst consequence is that one of the circularly polarized components of the vector perturbations becomes a ghost at small length (large momentum) scales. All these features also appeared in a simpler version of this model \cite{STGPV2}.
We also showed a way out of these difficulties, at least for linear perturbation theory. We found that under a special combination of the PV interaction terms, the vector perturbations do not propagate and go back to be constraints, so the model can be free from ghost modes. In more detail, the condition to avoid ghost requires the coefficients in the action (\ref{S2}) satisfy $b_{1}\equiv 2c_1+2c_2-c_4-c_5-c_7=0$.
We also notice that the ghostfree condition covers five of the parity violating terms only, while the rest two terms vanish up to the second order for the FRW background and have no contribution to the quadratic actions. We suspect that these two terms may have effects for linear perturbations around other backgrounds.
\section{Acknowledgments}
This work is supported in part by NSFC under Grant No. 12075231 and No. 12047502, and by National Key Research and Development Program of China Grant No. 2021YFC2203100.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 5,884 |
Q: Need suggestion about java thread pool execution queue processing
*
*In my application we have number of clients Databases, every hour we
get new data for processing in that databases
*There is a cron to checks data from this databases and pickup the data and
*Then Create thread pool and It start execution of 30 threads in parallel and
remaining thread are store in queue
*it takes several hours to process this all threads
*So while execution, if new data arrives then it has to wait, because this cron
will not pickup this newly arrived data until it's current execution is not
got finished.
*Sometimes we have priority data for processing but due to this case that
clients also need to wait for several hours for processing their data.
Please give me the suggestion to avoid this wait state for newly arrived data
(I am working on java 1.7 , tomcat7 and SQL server2012)
Thank you in advance
Please let me know, for more information on this if not clear
A: Each of your thread should procces data in bulk (for example 100/1000 records) and this records should be selected from DB by priority. Each time you select new records for proccesing data with highest priority go first.
I can't create comment yet :(
A: For this problem we are thinking about two solution
*
*Create more then one thread pool for processing normal and high
priority data.
*Create more then one tomcat instance with same code for processing normal and priority
data
But I am not understanding which solution is best for my case 1 or 2
Please give me suggestions about above solutions, so that i can take decision on it
A: You can use ExecutorService newCachedThreadPool()
Benefits of using a cached thread pool :
The pool creates new threads if needed but reuses previously constructed threads if they are available.
Only if no threads are available for reuse will a new thread be created and added to the pool.
Threads that have not been used for more than sixty seconds are terminated and removed from the cache. Hence a pool which has not been used long enough will not consume any resources.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 9,226 |
Onder verstek wordt in het algemeen een niet-haakse hoek bedoeld. In de meeste gevallen is het een hoek van 45°. Met behulp van een verstekbak of verstekzaag kan een hoek van 45° aan het te verbinden onderdeel worden gemaakt. Op deze manier worden bijvoorbeeld de hoekverbindingen van een schilderijlijst gemaakt.
Voor deze hoekverbinding wordt gekozen omdat dan de profilering van de lijst omloopt. Tegenprofilering behoort ook tot de mogelijkheden. Een verstekverbinding kan eenvoudig rechtstreeks verlijmd zijn, maar kan ook als een verborgen verbinding worden uitgevoerd bestaande uit deuvels, schroeven, spijkers, zwaluwstaartverbindingen of (bij holle profielen) met speciale inwendige hoekverbinders.
Zogenaamde valse verstekken ontstaan als beide delen niet dezelfde breedte hebben of geen hoek van 90° vormen.
Externe link
: The Mathematics of Mitering and Its Artful Application, Bridges Leeuwarden: Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science, Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Bridges Conference, pp. 225–234, juli 2008.
Gereedschap
Vormgevingstechniek | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 2,807 |
Every brand has a cult product that they're highly renowned for and when it comes to Napapijri, it's their Rainforest Jacket that gets everyone talking.
A cool, casual but also highly practical pullover anorak-style coat, the Rainforest Jacket is a best seller for a number of reasons and today we're going to be looking at all the elements of this jacket that make it so popular.
For men, women and children, the Napapijri Rainforest Jacket is designed to be a versatile and inclusive jacket for all. Made to ignore trends, seasons and other factors that usually dictate how a jacket is constructed, the Rainforest jacket prioritises practicality and quality to create a design that is ideal all year round, for all occasions.
Available in a variety of colours and materials to please everyone but all with the same trustworthy and iconic design, the Rainforest Jacket can fit into your wardrobe in so many ways, whether you're a big adventurer or not.
You'd think a jacket with this much talk around it would be made using a complex combination of unique fabrics to achieve such great performance but that's where you're wrong. The Rainforest Jacket is quite simply made with 100% polyamide.
A common and easy to source fabric, polyamide is a synthetic fabric, usually containing fibres of nylon, hence it has such great stretch and durability.
Polyamide is known for being resistant and robust when used in a number of different ways, hence it is such a perfect choice for the Rainforest Jacket. Known officially as a 'Nylon Ottoman Fabric', the material used to make these jackets is PFC free but also coated to offer better weather protection.
Best known for being a comfortable, relaxed fitting anorak, the Rainforest Jacket has a number of built-in features to the fit that ensures it is going to provide the best possible weather protection as well as comfort.
Elasticated trims are combined with inner cuffs and adjustable hem, all of which means you get a custom fit with your individual jacket as it will naturally adjust to your shape, as well as being manually adjusted at the hem.
The Rainforest Jacket also has taped seams which are designed to keep bad weather at bay and keep you warm and dry inside the jacket.
One thing that makes the Rainforest Jacket such a best seller is the abundance of features hidden in what looks like such a basic design.
As well as the above elements that make the fit of the jacket so customised, this jacket also boasts a whole array of other features that make it so practical and handy.
The hood is an essential part of the weather protection this jacket offers and with advanced hood regulation, you get a comfortable fit with this hood and the best guarding against the elements possible.
A side zip fastening and half zip down the front make the Rainforest jacket super easy to throw on and the ventilation eyelets mean you'll stay the ultimate temperature once you're wearing.
Underneath the iconic badge on the front of the jacket is one of the key features that everyone recognises this jacket for – the pouch-style pocket.
This generously sized central chest pocket has a zip fastening to ensure everything inside is protected as best as possible while the flap covering makes the whole jacket look super smart.
The finer details of this jacket bring it all together and we're sure anyone who has treated themselves to a Napapijri Rainforest Jacket will agree when we say they're worth every penny.
Shop the Napapijri Rainforest Jacket and more clothing items from the brand at Tiso today! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 5,798 |
\section{Introduction}
The ocean covers more than the $70\%$ of our planet, being a large source of energy, food and materials. Yet, it is still in large part unknown, given the technological challenges that have to be faced during any underwater mission: poor visibility, high hydrostatic pressure, poor communications (essentially still based on acoustic systems), absence of GPS with consequent challenging localizaton and navigation. Despite these challenges, many kinds of underwater missions are necessary to preserve the environment, explore deep sea and support human activities. Scientific missions are oriented to exploration and monitoring of underwater geology and ecosystems; other missions aim to find and explore submerged archeological sites (like sheep wrecks along commercial sea routes from ancient times, that can improve the knowledge of past civilations).
Technological missions are oriented to exploitation of underwater resources (oil, natural gas, minerals). Nowadays, offshore wind farms are becoming more and more common, providing a source of clean energy. Fish farms installations are also increasing, to provide additional source of food; this phenomenon is also expected to increase, given the predicted worldwide shortage of food in the coming decades. Finally, rescue missions are very relevant, given the intense marine traffic for transportation of goods and people that occasionally may lead to accidents, often causing natural disasters and risk of loss of life of men overboard. All these activities become even more challenging in harsh environments, like very deep ocean or polar areas.
For all the above reasons, underwater data, images and videos collection and processing become more and more important to support marine operations at sea. Underwater imaging is particularly challenging because the images suffer from light absorption, light backscattering due to suspended particles, color attenuation that drastically affect the quality of the image, especially at greater depths (where the natural light is poor), or in dirty water. Colours and contours are both lessen in the underwater environment producing a blurry image with indistinct background, where the blue color is dominating as it can be easily explained based on the optical spectrum of the water. These are specific drawbacks affecting the performance of operative tasks like image-based underwater navigation algorithms, object detection or fish tracking. On the other hand, due to the limited and low-bandwidth communications channels that are nowadays available, the image processing has to be performed on board of underwater robots, enhancing the need for fast and efficient algorithms.
Image processing has seen rapid improvement since the use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for many tasks such as super-resolution, image denoising \cite{TIAN2020117_denosing}, dehazing \cite{cai2016dehazenet_dehazing}, deraining \cite{deraining35} and other image enhancement tasks. Also in the marine context, many CNN-based networks have been developed to enhance the quality of underwater images \cite{DCP,IBLA,WaterNet,U_GAN,FUnIE-GAN,ufo120}. Meanwhile, image transformer networks have proven to be a strong competitor to the ordinary CNNs in many tasks as shown in a recent work \cite{ipt}. The pre-trained image transformer \cite{ipt} network has been trained to perform four main tasks: denoising, dehazing, and two levels of up-scaling. The results of the Image Processing Transformer (IPT) network showed that the trained IPT in most cases has outperformed the other specialized CNNs in the mentioned tasks. Transformer networks \cite{Image_Transformer,Attention_Is_All_You_Need} usually deal with sequential data. The input sequence consists of a number of indexed units. The sequence is fed to the network which applies attention on the input. The attention operation is done by calculating the product between each two units in the sequence. This results in an exponentially growing number of computations as the length of the input sequence increases. For instance, increasing the the resolution of the image from 100*100 to 200*200 increases the number of pixels by a factor of 4 [\(100^{2}=10,000 , 200^{2}=40,000\)], while the number of computation required by the attention network will increase by a factor of 16 [\((100^{2})^{2}=\num{100e6} , (200^{2})^{2}=\num{1600e6}\)]. Due to the required large number of operations when dealing with images, local attention is used where the image is divided into clusters and the attention is calculated within the cluster \cite{an_image}. The process of relating each pixel with other pixels showed high performance in many tasks that vary from natural language processing to image processing.
In this work, we utilize the pre-trained image transformer IPT \cite{ipt} for creating a model that performs image enhancement for underwater images based on the dataset UFO-120 \cite{ufo120}. The results show good performance (see an example in figure \ref{img}) indicating the potential of using a vision transformer for image enhancement. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the related work for underwater image enhancement. In Section 3 we discuss the methodology of our work. Section 4 describes the experimental setup. Section 5 shows the results of this work and finally, Section 6 concludes the paper.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{images/img.jpg}
\caption{Example of the input and output of the trained IPT model.} \label{img}
\end{figure}
\section{Related work}
There have been many proposed works that performed image dehazing/enhancement using different approaches ranging from simple math-based technqiues to more complex systems using CNNs. One of the works that build up upon a basic yet effective concept is \cite{DCP} which utilizes the dark channel prior approach to estimate and remove the haze from an image. This method is based on the assumption that in an image with haze, some pixels (usually background pixels) will have a low-intensity value in at least one of the color channels that represent the haze in the image. By finding those pixels we can estimate the haze in the image and thus remove it considering it as an additive noise to the image. One drawback of this technique is that it depends on the estimation of the atmospheric light which might be invalid in some underwater lighting conditions. The work \cite{IBLA} also proposes a math-based approach but instead of relying on the dark channel prior, it utilizes the image blurriness map to estimate background light, transmission map, and depth estimation. Using those three estimations, an enhanced image can be produced from the underwater image. This method showed a noticeable improvement over the dark channel prior method. Since CNNs are continuously proving its robustness in many domains, some works have utilized it to perform underwater image enhancement. The work \cite{WaterNet} presents a "Water-Net" network that processes images at a deeper level. The network applies White balance, Histogram equalization, and Gamma Correction on the inputted image individually. The output of each processes is then fed into a CNN network with 8 layers. The same output of the three processes will also be fed to three Feature Transformation Units (FTU) which have the purpose of decreasing the color casts and artifacts created by the these processes. The outputs of the CNN for each process will be then combined with the corresponding output of the FTU to form the final enhanced image. This network showed the ability to adapt to different types of image distortion introduced by different underwater conditions. In a different approach, \cite{U_GAN} proposed a Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which utilize the concept of game theory to create a network for enhancing underwater images. The network consists of two parts, the generator, and the discriminator. The generator will always work to create "fake" aiming to fool the discriminator while the discriminator will always try to differentiate between the "real" and "fake" data. In the case of underwater image enhancement, the generator will try to generate a copy of the haze image that looks similar to the clean image and the discriminator will try to distinguish between the clean image and the enhanced haze image thus it drives the generator to generate a further enhanced images that look as close to the clean images, and so on. The network was tested on a diver tracking algorithm where it showed an improvement in the tracking performance compared to when it is used with images without any enhancement. In a similar manner, \cite{FUnIE-GAN} proposed a GAN approach. The generator is based on the U-Net \cite{unet} and it consists of an encoder-decoder network with skip-connections between the mirrored layers followed by Leaky-ReLU non-linearity and Batch Normalization. As for the discriminator, it was designed based on Markovian Patch-GAN architecture \cite{Markovian} which assumes the independence of pixels thus improving the effectiveness of capturing high-frequency features in addition to requiring fewer parameters to compute. The proposed network showed higher performance for algorithms of object detection, saliency prediction, and human pose estimation. Last but not least, \cite{ufo120} presents a CNN-based approach called Deep SESR that performs the best among the discussed methods on the UFO-120 dataset. The work proposes an end-to-end architecture that performs underwater image cleaning and up-sampling. The network mainly consists of Feature Extraction Network (FENet) block followed by an Auxiliary Attention Network (AAN) for saliency and convolutional layers for up-sampling. The FENet block aims to learn locally dense features while keeping shallow global architecture to guarantee fast feature extraction. The FENet consists of convolutional layers in addition to Residual Dense Blocks (RDBs) which in turn, consists of three sets of convolutional layers while the input and the output between each layer are concatenated. Such a design of the RDBs improves the ability to learn hierarchical features. The robust design of the Deep SESR network has achieved the highest PSNR and SSIM values on the UFO-120 dataset.
\section{Methodology}
The pre-trained image transformer \cite{ipt} showed good results in denoising, deraining, and super-resolution that outperformed some state-of-art algorithms which was the reason for choosing this network. The IPT network has four main parts: heads, transformer encoder, transformer decoder, and tails. The first part contains four heads, each head consists of three convolutional layers and handles one task (denoising, deraining, *2 up-scale and *4 up-scale). Each head will generate a feature map and flatten it into patches before passing it to the transformer encoder. The transformer encoder has the same structure as in the work \cite{ipt2} which is based on a multi-head self-attention module with a feed-forward network. It follows that the transformer decoder that has the same structure as the encoder with the difference being the use of task-specific embedding as additional input. The output of the transformer decoder will be reshaped into the original input dimensions before passing to the next step. Last but not least, four tails for each of the four tasks similar to the heads. Patch normalization was not used. The general network can be seen in figure \ref{flow}.
\begin{figure}
\includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{images/flow.PNG}
\caption{The overall process of the proposed work \cite{ipt}.} \label{flow}
\end{figure}
The proposed network was trained on images from the ImageNet dataset. For each task, the images from the dataset were modified to train the network for each of the target tasks. For instance, to train the network for denoising, an image will be taken from the dataset regardless of its label. A Gaussian noise will be applied to the image, then the image with noise will be fed to the network as an input while the original image without the noise will be the ground truth. The same concept is applied to deraining where a "rain noise" is applied to the image. As for up-scaling, the inputted image is a down-scaled copy of the original image. The work presented a number of pre-trained models for two levels of noise, deraining, and super-resolution. The hardware used for creating the trained models consist of 32 NVIDIA Tesla V100 cards.
Since the ground truth image is available during the training, a supervised fashion loss function was used as follow:
\begin{equation}
L_{supervised}=\sum_{i=1}^{N_{t}}L_{1}(IPT(I_{corrupted}^{i}),I_{clean})
\end{equation}
Where \(I_{clean}\) is the ground truth image and \(I_{corrupted}^{i}\) is the corrupted while \(i\) is one of the four tasks which indicate that the training of the different tasks occurs simultaneously. $L_1$ is the $L_1$ norm.
As for the optimizer, the Adam optimizer was used.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\begin{tikzpicture}
\begin{axis}[
title={Loss during training},
xlabel={Epoch},
ylabel={Loss},
xmin=0, xmax=5,
ymin=0, ymax=20,
]
\addplot[
color=blue,
]
coordinates {(0.005,2.8176)(0.01,18.1786)(0.015,8.2534)(0.02,4.5324)(0.025,6.567)(0.03,3.9327)(0.035,1.7306)(0.04,2.8769)(0.045,2.4757)(0.05,1.4754)(0.055,1.7166)(0.06,1.3018)(0.065,1.1679)(0.07,1.4587)(0.075,0.7211)(0.08,1.4781)(0.085,1.1774)(0.09,0.6182)(0.095,0.9205)(0.1,0.9029)(0.105,0.797)(0.11,0.658)(0.115,0.5841)(0.12,0.6863)(0.125,0.5126)(0.13,0.5084)(0.135,0.6433)(0.14,0.4427)(0.145,0.5354)(0.15,0.4265)(0.155,0.4464)(0.16,0.4282)(0.165,0.4554)(0.17,0.3692)(0.175,0.3457)(0.18,0.3584)(0.185,0.3529)(0.19,0.2853)(0.195,0.3023)(0.2,0.2243)(0.205,0.2472)(0.21,0.2403)(0.215,0.2361)(0.22,0.2795)(0.225,0.2591)(0.23,0.2327)(0.235,0.1906)(0.24,0.2319)(0.245,0.2543)(0.25,0.255)(0.255,0.2856)(0.26,0.2695)(0.265,0.217)(0.27,0.2584)(0.275,0.2748)(0.28,0.2432)(0.285,0.2372)(0.29,0.2315)(0.295,0.2296)(0.3,0.2759)(0.305,0.2035)(0.31,0.3066)(0.315,0.2264)(0.32,0.2717)(0.325,0.2248)(0.33,0.2217)(0.335,0.2136)(0.34,0.1873)(0.345,0.2849)(0.35,0.3631)(0.355,0.2471)(0.36,0.2672)(0.365,0.2195)(0.37,0.2933)(0.375,0.2139)(0.38,0.225)(0.385,0.2492)(0.39,0.2983)(0.395,0.3247)(0.4,0.2568)(0.405,0.4295)(0.41,0.4311)(0.415,0.3977)(0.42,0.3365)(0.425,0.3787)(0.43,0.3321)(0.435,0.246)(0.44,0.2224)(0.445,0.3107)(0.45,0.2726)(0.455,0.2693)(0.46,0.2691)(0.465,0.2724)(0.47,0.2829)(0.475,0.2331)(0.48,0.2964)(0.485,0.2565)(0.49,0.2872)(0.495,0.307)(0.5,0.2702)(0.505,0.2719)(0.51,0.2987)(0.515,0.265)(0.52,0.3698)(0.525,0.2884)(0.53,0.4152)(0.535,0.3387)(0.54,0.422)(0.545,0.3113)(0.55,0.398)(0.555,0.2998)(0.56,0.4257)(0.565,0.3017)(0.57,0.4427)(0.575,0.4215)(0.58,0.5497)(0.585,0.2678)(0.59,0.5575)(0.595,0.5179)(0.6,0.4043)(0.605,0.4379)(0.61,0.3424)(0.615,0.4285)(0.62,0.3051)(0.625,0.2857)(0.63,0.319)(0.635,0.196)(0.64,0.2434)(0.645,0.2498)(0.65,0.1986)(0.655,0.2251)(0.66,0.2312)(0.665,0.185)(0.67,0.2104)(0.675,0.2187)(0.68,0.1734)(0.685,0.2002)(0.69,0.224)(0.695,0.2596)(0.7,0.1894)(0.705,0.2077)(0.71,0.2071)(0.715,0.1968)(0.72,0.2686)(0.725,0.1936)(0.73,0.2374)(0.735,0.1884)(0.74,0.1695)(0.745,0.1802)(0.75,0.1474)(0.755,0.161)(0.76,0.1345)(0.765,0.1547)(0.77,0.1093)(0.775,0.1442)(0.78,0.1305)(0.785,0.1411)(0.79,0.1743)(0.795,0.1989)(0.8,0.1679)(0.805,0.2424)(0.81,0.1758)(0.815,0.1482)(0.82,0.2625)(0.825,0.1835)(0.83,0.1372)(0.835,0.2662)(0.84,0.185)(0.845,0.1436)(0.85,0.3005)(0.855,0.172)(0.86,0.1766)(0.865,0.2506)(0.87,0.1672)(0.875,0.1497)(0.88,0.1864)(0.885,0.1667)(0.89,0.1357)(0.895,0.1333)(0.9,0.2043)(0.905,0.2424)(0.91,0.1395)(0.915,0.219)(0.92,0.238)(0.925,0.1729)(0.93,0.3287)(0.935,0.2161)(0.94,0.2877)(0.945,0.1568)(0.95,0.1747)(0.955,0.2464)(0.96,0.2193)(0.965,0.3113)(0.97,0.2207)(0.975,0.2726)(0.98,0.2427)(0.985,0.1865)(0.99,0.2981)(0.995,0.1487)(1,0.28)(1.005,0.1698)(1.01,0.2133)(1.015,0.1997)(1.02,0.1911)(1.025,0.4465)(1.03,0.325)(1.035,0.4249)(1.04,0.4403)(1.045,0.2826)(1.05,0.281)(1.055,0.3246)(1.06,0.2693)(1.065,0.3227)(1.07,0.2734)(1.075,0.3607)(1.08,0.2593)(1.085,0.3393)(1.09,0.2867)(1.095,0.3151)(1.1,0.36)(1.105,0.2255)(1.11,0.3611)(1.115,0.3806)(1.12,0.2816)(1.125,0.2204)(1.13,0.2504)(1.135,0.1965)(1.14,0.3144)(1.145,0.2673)(1.15,0.2003)(1.155,0.2741)(1.16,0.1432)(1.165,0.1857)(1.17,0.138)(1.175,0.1755)(1.18,0.1645)(1.185,0.1693)(1.19,0.2189)(1.195,0.188)(1.2,0.1456)(1.205,0.1227)(1.21,0.2524)(1.215,0.2888)(1.22,0.165)(1.225,0.264)(1.23,0.2156)(1.235,0.186)(1.24,0.3968)(1.245,0.2227)(1.25,0.2752)(1.255,0.2448)(1.26,0.2071)(1.265,0.2763)(1.27,0.0922)(1.275,0.2602)(1.28,0.2463)(1.285,0.2288)(1.29,0.313)(1.295,0.3147)(1.3,0.5371)(1.305,0.5346)(1.31,0.1843)(1.315,0.45)(1.32,0.2621)(1.325,0.4202)(1.33,0.3486)(1.335,0.2947)(1.34,0.3591)(1.345,0.2297)(1.35,0.2145)(1.355,0.1736)(1.36,0.2363)(1.365,0.2176)(1.37,0.2545)(1.375,0.158)(1.38,0.2225)(1.385,0.1875)(1.39,0.2053)(1.395,0.1843)(1.4,0.1871)(1.405,0.166)(1.41,0.1986)(1.415,0.2362)(1.42,0.1874)(1.425,0.2475)(1.43,0.1881)(1.435,0.2446)(1.44,0.1832)(1.445,0.2435)(1.45,0.153)(1.455,0.234)(1.46,0.2061)(1.465,0.2587)(1.47,0.1548)(1.475,0.2686)(1.48,0.1834)(1.485,0.2725)(1.49,0.1819)(1.495,0.2444)(1.5,0.1551)(1.505,0.2601)(1.51,0.1644)(1.515,0.2584)(1.52,0.1365)(1.525,0.2432)(1.53,0.144)(1.535,0.2179)(1.54,0.1491)(1.545,0.2703)(1.55,0.1614)(1.555,0.2319)(1.56,0.1602)(1.565,0.2158)(1.57,0.1272)(1.575,0.1304)(1.58,0.1447)(1.585,0.1275)(1.59,0.1413)(1.595,0.1232)(1.6,0.1734)(1.605,0.1278)(1.61,0.1602)(1.615,0.1366)(1.62,0.1747)(1.625,0.1428)(1.63,0.1775)(1.635,0.2132)(1.64,0.1453)(1.645,0.2805)(1.65,0.2032)(1.655,0.2744)(1.66,0.1893)(1.665,0.2829)(1.67,0.27)(1.675,0.2128)(1.68,0.2452)(1.685,0.1984)(1.69,0.2299)(1.695,0.1331)(1.7,0.1926)(1.705,0.1389)(1.71,0.1632)(1.715,0.1679)(1.72,0.1686)(1.725,0.1447)(1.73,0.1652)(1.735,0.1438)(1.74,0.1311)(1.745,0.1596)(1.75,0.1304)(1.755,0.1432)(1.76,0.1309)(1.765,0.1243)(1.77,0.1545)(1.775,0.1371)(1.78,0.1559)(1.785,0.1402)(1.79,0.1719)(1.795,0.2091)(1.8,0.2246)(1.805,0.2327)(1.81,0.1591)(1.815,0.2263)(1.82,0.2114)(1.825,0.1824)(1.83,0.1971)(1.835,0.2297)(1.84,0.1253)(1.845,0.2065)(1.85,0.1883)(1.855,0.1461)(1.86,0.1818)(1.865,0.1832)(1.87,0.1484)(1.875,0.1716)(1.88,0.1284)(1.885,0.1724)(1.89,0.177)(1.895,0.149)(1.9,0.1652)(1.905,0.1513)(1.91,0.1314)(1.915,0.1309)(1.92,0.1378)(1.925,0.1407)(1.93,0.1168)(1.935,0.1419)(1.94,0.1409)(1.945,0.132)(1.95,0.1316)(1.955,0.1412)(1.96,0.1341)(1.965,0.1553)(1.97,0.158)(1.975,0.1445)(1.98,0.1489)(1.985,0.1562)(1.99,0.1017)(1.995,0.1397)(2,0.1161)(2.005,0.1204)(2.01,0.126)(2.015,0.1089)(2.02,0.3606)(2.025,0.2233)(2.03,0.1879)(2.035,0.1691)(2.04,0.2483)(2.045,0.1326)(2.05,0.2138)(2.055,0.2229)(2.06,0.2031)(2.065,0.1513)(2.07,0.2488)(2.075,0.2167)(2.08,0.146)(2.085,0.2894)(2.09,0.241)(2.095,0.2234)(2.1,0.2431)(2.105,0.1805)(2.11,0.1869)(2.115,0.1898)(2.12,0.1767)(2.125,0.2723)(2.13,0.1406)(2.135,0.248)(2.14,0.1514)(2.145,0.2924)(2.15,0.242)(2.155,0.2693)(2.16,0.3036)(2.165,0.1256)(2.17,0.1807)(2.175,0.1783)(2.18,0.118)(2.185,0.2162)(2.19,0.1872)(2.195,0.1247)(2.2,0.1771)(2.205,0.1673)(2.21,0.1446)(2.215,0.1711)(2.22,0.1561)(2.225,0.1261)(2.23,0.1607)(2.235,0.1553)(2.24,0.2156)(2.245,0.1482)(2.25,0.1606)(2.255,0.138)(2.26,0.1502)(2.265,0.1353)(2.27,0.1293)(2.275,0.1318)(2.28,0.1184)(2.285,0.1462)(2.29,0.0948)(2.295,0.173)(2.3,0.2024)(2.305,0.1322)(2.31,0.2279)(2.315,0.1564)(2.32,0.2537)(2.325,0.2261)(2.33,0.1938)(2.335,0.2301)(2.34,0.1467)(2.345,0.1794)(2.35,0.164)(2.355,0.0996)(2.36,0.1243)(2.365,0.1241)(2.37,0.0953)(2.375,0.1339)(2.38,0.1589)(2.385,0.1587)(2.39,0.1438)(2.395,0.1463)(2.4,0.1295)(2.405,0.124)(2.41,0.2297)(2.415,0.1549)(2.42,0.2007)(2.425,0.211)(2.43,0.1581)(2.435,0.282)(2.44,0.1556)(2.445,0.2782)(2.45,0.1656)(2.455,0.2755)(2.46,0.1809)(2.465,0.1403)(2.47,0.2163)(2.475,0.1939)(2.48,0.1694)(2.485,0.2038)(2.49,0.1274)(2.495,0.1462)(2.5,0.131)(2.505,0.1407)(2.51,0.1277)(2.515,0.1257)(2.52,0.1167)(2.525,0.141)(2.53,0.127)(2.535,0.121)(2.54,0.1272)(2.545,0.148)(2.55,0.151)(2.555,0.1149)(2.56,0.1685)(2.565,0.1176)(2.57,0.1481)(2.575,0.1513)(2.58,0.1282)(2.585,0.1379)(2.59,0.1564)(2.595,0.1201)(2.6,0.1792)(2.605,0.1468)(2.61,0.1576)(2.615,0.1443)(2.62,0.1537)(2.625,0.1053)(2.63,0.089)(2.635,0.0874)(2.64,0.0633)(2.645,0.0773)(2.65,0.0836)(2.655,0.1166)(2.66,0.1143)(2.665,0.1266)(2.67,0.1144)(2.675,0.1209)(2.68,0.1138)(2.685,0.1414)(2.69,0.1549)(2.695,0.1518)(2.7,0.146)(2.705,0.1457)(2.71,0.1084)(2.715,0.1688)(2.72,0.1121)(2.725,0.1886)(2.73,0.1158)(2.735,0.2061)(2.74,0.1585)(2.745,0.1794)(2.75,0.1253)(2.755,0.2125)(2.76,0.1635)(2.765,0.2732)(2.77,0.2588)(2.775,0.1581)(2.78,0.2245)(2.785,0.1628)(2.79,0.1488)(2.795,0.1674)(2.8,0.1694)(2.805,0.1528)(2.81,0.1312)(2.815,0.1683)(2.82,0.1278)(2.825,0.1086)(2.83,0.1317)(2.835,0.12)(2.84,0.1013)(2.845,0.1229)(2.85,0.1416)(2.855,0.159)(2.86,0.1763)(2.865,0.1428)(2.87,0.1265)(2.875,0.153)(2.88,0.1098)(2.885,0.1383)(2.89,0.1422)(2.895,0.0941)(2.9,0.1225)(2.905,0.1421)(2.91,0.2126)(2.915,0.222)(2.92,0.136)(2.925,0.1697)(2.93,0.1905)(2.935,0.1368)(2.94,0.1675)(2.945,0.1941)(2.95,0.1277)(2.955,0.1588)(2.96,0.1691)(2.965,0.1733)(2.97,0.1793)(2.975,0.1464)(2.98,0.1519)(2.985,0.1814)(2.99,0.1193)(2.995,0.1442)(3,0.1351)(3.005,0.1299)(3.01,0.146)(3.015,0.1562)(3.02,0.2474)(3.025,0.2045)(3.03,0.1958)(3.035,0.1803)(3.04,0.2168)(3.045,0.1558)(3.05,0.1479)(3.055,0.2162)(3.06,0.1634)(3.065,0.1141)(3.07,0.1556)(3.075,0.156)(3.08,0.1457)(3.085,0.1481)(3.09,0.1437)(3.095,0.1289)(3.1,0.1313)(3.105,0.1088)(3.11,0.1496)(3.115,0.1115)(3.12,0.1376)(3.125,0.1231)(3.13,0.1649)(3.135,0.1695)(3.14,0.1378)(3.145,0.1523)(3.15,0.144)(3.155,0.1205)(3.16,0.1116)(3.165,0.1102)(3.17,0.1101)(3.175,0.0885)(3.18,0.1503)(3.185,0.1104)(3.19,0.1)(3.195,0.1037)(3.2,0.0996)(3.205,0.0965)(3.21,0.1212)(3.215,0.0932)(3.22,0.1118)(3.225,0.1042)(3.23,0.0951)(3.235,0.109)(3.24,0.1485)(3.245,0.1421)(3.25,0.1143)(3.255,0.1404)(3.26,0.1228)(3.265,0.1561)(3.27,0.1498)(3.275,0.1238)(3.28,0.1661)(3.285,0.1381)(3.29,0.1114)(3.295,0.1724)(3.3,0.2036)(3.305,0.1364)(3.31,0.1109)(3.315,0.1762)(3.32,0.1295)(3.325,0.1178)(3.33,0.1648)(3.335,0.0876)(3.34,0.1326)(3.345,0.1945)(3.35,0.1202)(3.355,0.1263)(3.36,0.138)(3.365,0.1267)(3.37,0.1063)(3.375,0.1239)(3.38,0.0664)(3.385,0.0724)(3.39,0.0846)(3.395,0.0643)(3.4,0.0793)(3.405,0.1508)(3.41,0.1361)(3.415,0.1783)(3.42,0.1194)(3.425,0.1729)(3.43,0.1265)(3.435,0.1777)(3.44,0.1059)(3.445,0.1783)(3.45,0.1308)(3.455,0.1318)(3.46,0.0949)(3.465,0.1413)(3.47,0.1136)(3.475,0.1177)(3.48,0.1271)(3.485,0.1087)(3.49,0.1159)(3.495,0.0969)(3.5,0.1095)(3.505,0.096)(3.51,0.1083)(3.515,0.1062)(3.52,0.1227)(3.525,0.1195)(3.53,0.121)(3.535,0.1075)(3.54,0.1079)(3.545,0.0903)(3.55,0.1064)(3.555,0.087)(3.56,0.1328)(3.565,0.0871)(3.57,0.1428)(3.575,0.1098)(3.58,0.1118)(3.585,0.1099)(3.59,0.1114)(3.595,0.1083)(3.6,0.0982)(3.605,0.0969)(3.61,0.1014)(3.615,0.0923)(3.62,0.0957)(3.625,0.0895)(3.63,0.1253)(3.635,0.1246)(3.64,0.1195)(3.645,0.1273)(3.65,0.1193)(3.655,0.0882)(3.66,0.0784)(3.665,0.0908)(3.67,0.08)(3.675,0.0889)(3.68,0.0981)(3.685,0.0875)(3.69,0.1406)(3.695,0.0729)(3.7,0.162)(3.705,0.092)(3.71,0.2789)(3.715,0.1353)(3.72,0.2212)(3.725,0.1668)(3.73,0.2026)(3.735,0.1574)(3.74,0.0973)(3.745,0.1447)(3.75,0.1134)(3.755,0.1312)(3.76,0.1154)(3.765,0.1194)(3.77,0.1183)(3.775,0.1259)(3.78,0.1081)(3.785,0.1244)(3.79,0.1062)(3.795,0.1499)(3.8,0.1161)(3.805,0.1351)(3.81,0.1113)(3.815,0.1239)(3.82,0.1532)(3.825,0.1021)(3.83,0.1488)(3.835,0.1042)(3.84,0.1442)(3.845,0.1034)(3.85,0.1697)(3.855,0.0959)(3.86,0.1645)(3.865,0.1171)(3.87,0.1585)(3.875,0.1183)(3.88,0.139)(3.885,0.1154)(3.89,0.1208)(3.895,0.1015)(3.9,0.1063)(3.905,0.1034)(3.91,0.1099)(3.915,0.1126)(3.92,0.1042)(3.925,0.1078)(3.93,0.1042)(3.935,0.0765)(3.94,0.1091)(3.945,0.0804)(3.95,0.1026)(3.955,0.0946)(3.96,0.1303)(3.965,0.1206)(3.97,0.1372)(3.975,0.1188)(3.98,0.1304)(3.985,0.1097)(3.99,0.1218)(3.995,0.09)(4,0.0997)(4.005,0.1004)(4.01,0.0814)(4.015,0.1173)(4.02,0.1264)(4.025,0.0932)(4.03,0.1184)(4.035,0.1119)(4.04,0.096)(4.045,0.1087)(4.05,0.0895)(4.055,0.1032)(4.06,0.0897)(4.065,0.093)(4.07,0.1346)(4.075,0.1471)(4.08,0.1094)(4.085,0.1397)(4.09,0.1254)(4.095,0.0999)(4.1,0.1128)(4.105,0.1102)(4.11,0.1073)(4.115,0.0997)(4.12,0.1018)(4.125,0.0953)(4.13,0.1622)(4.135,0.1401)(4.14,0.1391)(4.145,0.1309)(4.15,0.1274)(4.155,0.0857)(4.16,0.1054)(4.165,0.0978)(4.17,0.0879)(4.175,0.1206)(4.18,0.1169)(4.185,0.0871)(4.19,0.1187)(4.195,0.0917)(4.2,0.1155)(4.205,0.092)(4.21,0.1114)(4.215,0.0795)(4.22,0.1092)(4.225,0.1091)(4.23,0.0971)(4.235,0.1028)(4.24,0.1098)(4.245,0.0968)(4.25,0.1048)(4.255,0.0836)(4.26,0.1014)(4.265,0.1657)(4.27,0.1283)(4.275,0.1623)(4.28,0.1084)(4.285,0.1431)(4.29,0.1045)(4.295,0.0776)(4.3,0.0698)(4.305,0.0789)(4.31,0.0729)(4.315,0.0823)(4.32,0.0861)(4.325,0.1052)(4.33,0.0852)(4.335,0.1102)(4.34,0.1045)(4.345,0.1053)(4.35,0.0835)(4.355,0.1046)(4.36,0.0802)(4.365,0.1147)(4.37,0.1054)(4.375,0.1737)(4.38,0.1157)(4.385,0.1744)(4.39,0.0964)(4.395,0.1533)(4.4,0.1398)(4.405,0.1309)(4.41,0.1075)(4.415,0.1213)(4.42,0.0986)(4.425,0.1012)(4.43,0.0991)(4.435,0.101)(4.44,0.1078)(4.445,0.0906)(4.45,0.1001)(4.455,0.0996)(4.46,0.1274)(4.465,0.1724)(4.47,0.1172)(4.475,0.1577)(4.48,0.1152)(4.485,0.1594)(4.49,0.0719)(4.495,0.1007)(4.5,0.0869)(4.505,0.0959)(4.51,0.0868)(4.515,0.0889)(4.52,0.1914)(4.525,0.1631)(4.53,0.1488)(4.535,0.155)(4.54,0.1637)(4.545,0.0973)(4.55,0.1077)(4.555,0.1232)(4.56,0.0871)(4.565,0.1178)(4.57,0.1332)(4.575,0.1394)(4.58,0.1593)(4.585,0.128)(4.59,0.1166)(4.595,0.1395)(4.6,0.1603)(4.605,0.1516)(4.61,0.1613)(4.615,0.1434)(4.62,0.1412)(4.625,0.1237)(4.63,0.1036)(4.635,0.1175)(4.64,0.1212)(4.645,0.0902)(4.65,0.1038)(4.655,0.092)(4.66,0.1087)(4.665,0.0997)(4.67,0.0885)(4.675,0.1221)(4.68,0.129)(4.685,0.2042)(4.69,0.1663)(4.695,0.1506)(4.7,0.1757)(4.705,0.1113)(4.71,0.1484)(4.715,0.0957)(4.72,0.1115)(4.725,0.1017)(4.73,0.0847)(4.735,0.1229)(4.74,0.087)(4.745,0.0852)(4.75,0.0896)(4.755,0.0798)(4.76,0.0865)(4.765,0.1254)(4.77,0.1205)(4.775,0.1291)(4.78,0.12)(4.785,0.1258)(4.79,0.0905)(4.795,0.1123)(4.8,0.0911)(4.805,0.1006)(4.81,0.0988)(4.815,0.0918)(4.82,0.0927)(4.825,0.0983)(4.83,0.094)(4.835,0.0939)(4.84,0.0951)(4.845,0.1094)(4.85,0.1151)(4.855,0.0825)(4.86,0.1173)(4.865,0.0815)(4.87,0.0929)(4.875,0.113)(4.88,0.0849)(4.885,0.096)(4.89,0.0979)(4.895,0.0868)(4.9,0.1385)(4.905,0.1056)(4.91,0.1421)(4.915,0.1146)(4.92,0.1383)(4.925,0.0945)(4.93,0.1986)(4.935,0.1648)(4.94,0.1529)(4.945,0.1852)(4.95,0.1241)(4.955,0.1386)(4.96,0.0908)(4.965,0.0786)(4.97,0.0825)(4.975,0.0828)(4.98,0.0781)(4.985,0.0892)(4.99,0.0842)(4.995,0.0808)(5,0.0876)};
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{The loss values during the training process of 5 epochs.} \label{loss}
\end{figure}
\section{Experiment}
The pre-trained transformer came with pre-trained models for the four previously mention tasks (denosing, deraining, 2x up-scaling and 4x up-scaling). Since we have limited processing power, we will fine-tune one of the pre-trained models. The model that gave the best initial results was the model for denosing with Gaussian noise of (\(\Sigma=30\)) which make sense since the distortion in underwater images is basically a noise in the image, we fine tune the pre-trained model with images from underwater dataset. The dataset that will be used is UFO-10 \cite{ufo120}. This dataset was created for three main tasks: image enhancement, super-resolution and object segmentation. The dataset consists of 1500 pairs of clear and non-clear underwater images as well as a mask for the objects in the image. The clear images come with higher resolution in comparison to the non-clear images for the up-scaling task. Since we do not attempt to train for up-scaling, we applied a smoothing filter with a size of
3 $\times$ 3 so both clear and non-clear images have the same level of details. In addition to that, data augmentation was applied in the form of rotation of 5 different angles (0, 45, 135, 225 and 315) to make the total number of images pairs (haze \& ground truth) 7500. 6000 images pairs were taken for training while the rest 1500 images pairs were reserved for testing.
\begin{figure*}[ht]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=1\linewidth]{images/results.png}
\caption{Some of the results on the testing images where the top row represents the input image, the middle row represents the output image and the bottom row represents the ground truth.}
\label{results}
\end{figure*}
\section{Results}
We fine tuned the pre-trained model on the augmented underwater dataset resulted using NVIDIA Quadro P5000 GPU with 16Gb of graphic memory and 80 Gb RAM. After testing with many training configurations we found that training for 6 epochs with a batch size of one gave the best result. The resulting loss graph can be seen in figure \ref{loss}.
\begin{table}
\caption{The Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measurement (SSIM) values for different methods on the UFO-120\cite{ufo120} dataset. The highest values is marked with bold.}\label{tab1}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth} {
| >{\centering\arraybackslash}X
| >{\centering\arraybackslash}X
| >{\centering\arraybackslash}X | }
\hline
Method & PSNR & SSIM\\
\hline
DCP \cite{DCP} & 18.20 & 0.71 \\
IBLA \cite{IBLA} & 17.50 & 0.65 \\
WaterNet \cite{WaterNet} & 22.46 & 0.79 \\
U-GAN \cite{U_GAN} & 23.45 & 0.80 \\
FUnIE-GAN \cite{FUnIE-GAN} & 25.15 & 0.82 \\
Deep SESR \cite{ufo120} & \textbf{27.15} & 0.84 \\
Our approach & 23.14 &\textbf{0.90} \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{table}
We report some qualitative results in figure \ref{results}.
The top row represents the input images, the middle row represents the output images and the bottom row represents the ground truth. We noticed that the trained model works best with images that contain green tint where it removes most of the color distortion. In addition to that, we have noticed that the output images have slightly less details compared to the input images. This slight loss of details is due to the smoothing effect of the base model that was used for training. The pre-trained transformer network came with up-scaling model which could be used to restore some of the details in the image. However, that will almost double the processing time which reduce the ability of implementing it in a real-time system. On average, processing one image (320*240) took around 12 to 13 seconds which is not practical for real-time processing. In a future work, we will try different approached to reduce the processing time to for real-time applications.
For a quantitative comparison with other approaches for underwater imaging enhancing, we tested our algorithm on UFO-120 dataset. We selected two measurements: Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measurement (SSIM). Table \ref{tab1} shows the PSNR and SSIM values for the most relevant approaches found in the literature compared to our work.
It is evident that our approach outperforms the others in terms of SSIM, and came in fourth place in terms of PSNR. We believe that the difference if performance between SSIM and PSNR is due the fact that the trained model perform well in restoring the structure and color of the image. However, the smoothing effect reduced the details on the image hence the relatively low PSNR value.
\section{Conclusions}
Underwater operations, such as exploration, monitoring and recovery, performed by autonomous or semiautonomos robots strongly rely on computer vision. However, the underwater environment is specifically challenging, due to poor visibility induced by relevant light absorption and scattering caused by suspended particles that make the images blurry, bluish and with wide opaque background. For all these reasons, image enhancement of underwater images play a critical role for any mission of marine robotics. Many techniques have been proposed in the literature, mostly based on convolutional neural networks.
In this work, we propose a different solution for image enhancement of underwater images, based on the image transformer network (IPT) \cite{ipt}.
The underwater imaging dataset UFO-120 \cite{ufo120} has been selected for this study. A process of data augmentation allowed to increase the original size of 1500 i
mages to 7500 images. The augmented dataset has been used for training the transformer.
We evaluated our results using two measurements (peak-signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structure similarity index measurement (SSIM). This allowed us to compare the results with the same indexes reported in similar works using different approaches. We find that our approach outperforms the previous methodologies proposed in the literature in terms of SSIM and it is fourth in terms of PSNR.
In the future work we will test our approach on different datasets from the underwater environments and we will also evaluate the effects on specific operative tasks, like object recognition and object tracking, when applying these technologies in an operative scenario, based on the use of semi-autonomous/autonomous robots.
\section*{Acknowledgment}
This work acknowledges the support provided by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology under awards No. RC1-2018-KUCARS, and CIRA-2019-047. The second author, Sajid Javed, of this publication is supported by the FSU -2022-003 Project under Award No. 000628-00001.
\bibliographystyle{splncs04}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,392 |
{"url":"https:\/\/physics.stackexchange.com\/questions\/609826\/drawing-feynman-diagrams-including-pi0-mesons","text":"# Drawing Feynman diagrams including $\\pi^0$-mesons\n\nI am struggling with drawing a Feynman diagram for particle physics processes including $$\\pi^0$$ mesons and hope you can help my clarifying my confusion.\n\nTake, for example, the following process $$D^+ \\rightarrow \\pi^0 + e^+ + \\nu.$$ I know that $$D^+ = |c\\bar{d}\\rangle$$ and $$\\pi^0 = \\frac{1}{\\sqrt{2}}(|u\\bar{u} \\rangle - |d\\bar{d}\\rangle)$$.\n\nOn the left side of the process, we have a charm-quark but not on the right hand-side. Thus, we deal with weak interaction. My problem is that I do not know how to deal with the \"superposition\" of $$u\\bar{u}$$ and $$d\\bar{d}$$ in the $$\\pi^0$$-meson.\n\nI've attached my attempt of a Feynman diagram, but there I only describe the conversion of the charm to a down quark, but not how to create the $$u\\bar{u}$$ part (so, in fact, I explain only \"half\" of the pion). I would imagine that we need another Z-Boson that might create the $$u\\bar{u}$$, but I do not know where I should get this Z-boson from.\n\nI am grateful for any hint\/tip\/idea that helps to clarify my confusion. Thank you in advance!\n\nThe fact that the particle is described by a superposition of states, does not mean that one has to measure both states at once. That's how superposition works, one one makes a measurements and then the wavefunction collapses on one of the possible superimposing states. This means that the neutral pion, when measured, can be found in the $$|d\\bar{d}\\rangle$$ state or the $$|u\\bar{u}\\rangle$$ state, not both.\nThis implies that the Feynman diagram you draw is the right tree-level Feynman diagram for the process you are studying $$D^+\\to\\pi^0\\,e^+\\nu_e$$.\nMore complex Feynman diagrams can be drawn were you find a $$|u\\bar{u}\\rangle$$ state. But this surely would comprise of more than one weak decay.","date":"2021-07-27 05:35:31","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 13, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.7147789001464844, \"perplexity\": 226.9962810505558}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-31\/segments\/1627046152236.64\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210727041254-20210727071254-00006.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
is designed to meet your network needs.
Wave's expanding footprint provides concentrated network coverage areas across the United States. We provide wholesale partners with alternate access options beyond our existing fiber footprint, and we specialize in building into underserved markets and expanding network to meet specific client needs.
Our internal engineering and construction experts collaborate to build and maintain our leading edge, high capacity, 100% fiber network.
Our dense fiber network currently covers 22,000+ route miles across the United States; and we will add up to 1,500 more miles every year.
Our backbone has nearly one Terabit of external connectivity and we're adding more virtually every day. We can scale to meet any need as easily as turning up additional ports.
Interested in a career at Wave Wholesale? See all of our available positions.
Learn more about Wave Wholesale. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 3,465 |
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec0}
\end{boldmath}
Correlation functions in QCD, at sufficiently large energy, can be
calculated starting from the gluon and quark degrees of freedom,
using perturbation theory, augmented by the operator product
expansion (OPE). Many of these correlators, such as the Adler
function of the vector current two-point function, can also be expressed,
through dispersion relations,
in terms of experimentally accessible spectral functions. These
spectral functions reveal the presence of multiple hadronic
resonances, whose spectral contributions are not reproduced
when perturbative and higher-dimension OPE contributions are evaluated
on the Minkowski axis.
In spite of this difference, a complete
description in terms of Lagrangian or physical degrees of
freedom should be equivalent, a notion which is referred to as quark-hadron
duality. It is, however, generally accepted that even at
large energies, resonance effects, and hence contributions beyond
the OPE, are present in QCD correlators in the Minkowski
region.\footnote{In this paper, we will consider the purely
perturbative contribution as the leading term in the OPE.}
These additional contributions, which by definition violate
quark-hadron duality, are usually referred to as duality
violations (DVs). Their origin, and possible models for their
form, have been the subject of many earlier papers
\cite{PQW}-\cite{Peris}, but a more formal derivation of their
form has not been achieved thus far. It is clear that DVs have
to exist, as the OPE is, at best, an asymptotic series. This is
intuitively obvious from the fact that the imaginary part of
the OPE for the Adler function does not look anything like the
physical spectral function, except for asymptotically large energies.
In this paper, we present a more systematic investigation of
the form DVs may take, limiting ourselves to the case of the
Adler function for simplicity. Since DVs are a consequence
of the appearance of resonances in the spectrum,
the properties of the resonance spectrum must represent
a starting point for our analysis. Of course, very little
is known analytically about spectral functions beyond
perturbation theory. But, if we can show, starting from
a general and physically motivated assumption about the form
of the resonance spectrum, that this assumption is compatible
with the known form of the OPE for large Euclidean momenta,
we expect the form of DVs for Minkowski momenta implied by
this same assumption to also represent a good approximation to
the form of DVs in QCD.\footnote{We note
that the matching of an assumed form of the resonance spectrum
in large-$N_c$ to the OPE has been considered before in
Ref.~\cite{Pineda}.}
We begin by working in the limit $N_c\to\infty$
(where $N_c$ is the number of colors), where the spectral
function is known to be given by an infinite sum of
Dirac $\delta$-functions, consistent with asymptotic
freedom \cite{Wittenbaryons}. We will make assumptions
about the form of the resonance spectrum in this limit
that lead us to the known form of the OPE for Euclidean
momenta, and then use this information to derive the form
of the associated duality-violating contributions to the Adler
function on the Minkowski axis. It turns out that with some
additional assumptions, this analysis can then be generalized
to large, but finite $N_c$. For simplicity, we will work
in the chiral limit, so that the Adler function depends only on one
variable, which can be taken to be the ratio of the
momentum to the QCD scale.
Technically, our task will be to analytically continue the Adler
function in the complex $q^2$ (momentum-squared) plane from the
Euclidean to the Minkowski region. Our starting point is an
assumption for the form of the spectral function, which defines
the Adler function through a dispersion relation. It turns out
to be advantageous to reformulate the problem as one where we
write the Adler function $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ as a Borel-Laplace
transform involving a new function, $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$, which is itself the
Laplace transform of the spectral function. In
hyperasymptotics \cite{Math}, the appearance of duality-violating
terms, {\it i.e.}, terms beyond the OPE, as a result of
analytic continuation in the Borel plane is understood in terms
of the concept of a ``transseries," for which the OPE represents
the first term, with exponential corrections \cite{AU,MStrans}.
We will see how singularities in the Borel plane lead to various
terms in the transseries, with singularities at the origin
corresponding to the OPE, and those at non-zero distance
from the origin to higher-order transseries terms. In fact,
the OPE itself can be viewed as a transseries which goes
beyond perturbation theory, and the singularities in the Borel
plane associated with perturbation theory are nothing else
than the well-known renormalons \cite{tHooft}-\cite{ Beneke}.
Higher-order terms in the OPE appear as the effect of renormalon
singularities in the Borel plane.\footnote{We will recover this
result in the course of our study of the Adler function in this
paper.} Much less is known about the non-perturbative singularities,
but it is clear that their physical origin is in the non-perturbative
physics of the spectral function. It follows that we will need
physical input, which will be provided by means of a rather general
assumption about the form of the resonance spectrum, in combination
with the analytic continuation in the Borel plane, to arrive at an
analytic form for the duality-violating contributions to the Adler function.
This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we
give the representation of the Adler function in
terms of a Borel-Laplace transform, and show how this
representation can be used to analytically continue in the
complex $q^2$ plane, starting from the Euclidean region
Re~$q^2<0$, emphasizing the essential role played by the
singularities of the Borel transform in the complex Borel
plane. The subsequent sections investigate the
Borel-plane singularities in a sequence of models of gradually
increasing complexity and, at the same time, of increasing
resemblance to QCD as well.
We begin, in Sec.~\ref{sec2}, with a simple Regge model for the
spectrum in the large-$N_c$ limit. This allows us to demonstrate
how singularities at the origin in the Borel plane correspond
to the OPE, while DVs are associated with singularities away
from the origin. Then, in Sec.~\ref{sec1}, we generalize our
{\it ansatz} for the spectrum in the large-$N_c$ limit to a much
more general form. In Secs.~\ref{OPE} and \ref{sec1prime} we
show how we may recover perturbation theory and the OPE in
the ``large-$\beta_0$'' approximation in which all except
the first coefficient of the $\beta$-function are set equal
to zero. In particular, in Sec.~\ref{sec1prime} we discuss
how the pure perturbative series and the singularities it
generates in the Borel plane, which are relatively well
understood, fit into the general picture. This discussion
also allows us to rederive the well-known SVZ sum rules \cite{SVZ}.
In Sec.~\ref{nonpert} we show how the appearance of DVs
from singularities away from the origin in the Borel plane
generalizes from the simple model of Sec.~\ref{sec2}. In
particular, we show that the singularities away from the
origin in the Borel plane stay in the same location, but
change from simple poles to branch points.
We then expand the discussion to large, but finite $N_c$.
The new ingredient is, of course, that now the hadronic resonances
become unstable. As we will see, and as has been observed
previously, now the duality-violating corrections become
exponentially suppressed, as observed in nature. We first show
how this works in the simple Regge model in Sec.~\ref{sec3prime},
before treating the more general case in Sec.~\ref{sec4}, in
which we arrive at our main result. Sec.~\ref{sec:conclusions}
contains our conclusions, while a number of technical details
have been relegated to Apps.~\ref{dirichletapp} to~\ref{app1}.
In App.~\ref{sec:numerics}, we compare, numerically, results
for the values of the DV parameters obtained from analyses of hadronic
$\tau$-decay data in Ref.~\cite{Boito3} with those obtained
from the fits to Regge trajectories of Ref.~\cite{Masjuan},
finding remarkable agreement.
\vskip0.4cm
\begin{boldmath}
\section{Borel-Laplace transform}
\label{sec:bl}
\end{boldmath}
We recall that the Adler function is defined as\footnote{The Adler
function is sometimes denoted by $D(q^2)$. We choose a normalization
such that it is equal to one at leading order in perturbation
theory.}
\begin{equation}\label{eq:A}
\mathcal{A}(q^2)=-q^2\frac{d}{dq^2}\Pi(q^2)\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\Pi(q^2)$ is the scalar correlator of the vector
current two-point function. From causality
and unitarity, we know that $\Pi(q^2)$ is an analytic function of
real type, {\it i.e.}, it satisfies the Schwarz reflection principle
$\Pi((q^2)^*)=[\Pi(q^2)]^*$ in the complex $q^2$ plane cut along
the real axis above the lowest hadronic threshold, $4 m_\pi^2$.
The known asymptotic behavior of $\Pi(q^2)$ ensures that it
can be represented by a once-subtracted dispersion
relation,
\begin{equation}\label{eq:DR}
\Pi(q^2)=\Pi(0)+q^2 \int_0^\infty \frac{\rho(t)}
{t(t-q^2-i\epsilon)} dt\ ,
\end{equation}
in terms of the spectral function
\begin{equation}\label{eq:rho}
\rho(t)=\frac{1}{\pi}\, {\rm Im}\, \Pi(t+i\epsilon)\ .
\end{equation}
The polarization, $\Pi (q^2)$, and the Adler function depend on the
single variable, $q^2$. In practical applications of QCD, this
dependence is encapsulated in two different series expansions.
Taking $q^2<0$ Euclidean, one series is written in powers of
$\alpha_s(q^2)$ and the other in inverse powers of $q^2$ itself,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:QCD}
\mathcal{A}(q^2)_{\rm OPE}=1+ \sum_{n\ge 1} c_n\, \alpha^n_s(-q^2)
+\sum_{n\ge 1} \frac{d_n(q^2)}{(-q^2)^n}\ ,
\end{equation}
where the first and second terms correspond to the perturbative
series in powers of the running strong coupling $\alpha_s(q^2)$
and the third term may be associated with the condensate expansion
of the OPE (the coefficients $d_n(q^2)$ depend logarithmically on $q^2$).
The corresponding expansion of $\Pi(q^2)$ is obtained in a
straightforward way using Eq.~(\ref{eq:A}). The interplay between
the two series in Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD}) is at the origin of the difficulties encountered
in QCD phenomenology when trying to assess the relative importance
of perturbative {\it vs.} nonperturbative contributions.
At one loop the dependence of the strong coupling $\alpha_s(q^2)$
on $q^2$ is given by
\begin{equation}\label{eq:a1loop}
\alpha_s(-q^2)=\frac{1}{\beta_0\log (-q^2/\Lambda^2)}\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\Lambda^2$ is the QCD parameter after the renormalization
scheme is specified, and $-\beta_0<0$ is the first coefficient of
the $\beta$ function. At higher orders, the coupling exhibits a
more complicated logarithmic dependence on $q^2$ which, in fact,
depends on the precise definition chosen for this coupling.
Both series in Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD}) are divergent, and in each case,
one expects corrections to the series exponential in the inverse
of the expansion parameter. Indeed, the power corrections in
Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD}) can be interpreted in this way as corrections
to the perturbative series, since, with $\mbox{exp}[-1/
[\beta_0\alpha_s(-q^2)]] =\Lambda^2/(-q^2)$, inverse
powers of $-q^2$ are exponential in the inverse of the
strong coupling.
The objective of this paper is to see if, starting from a reasonable
form for the physical spectral function $\rho(t)$, {\it i.e.}, a spectral
function that is physically sensible, and from which one recovers
the structure of Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD}) for Euclidean $q^2$, one can
find the corrections to the OPE for $q^2>0$, {\it i.e.}, in the Minkowski
region. Again, we expect these corrections to be exponential in
the inverse of $\Lambda^2/q^2$, possibly modified by logarithms.
This would allow us to make contact between the OPE representation
for the spectral function, obtained by analytically continuing
the expansion~(\ref{eq:QCD}) to the Minkowski region, and
the additional contributions from DVs.
Combining Eqs.~(\ref{eq:A}) and~(\ref{eq:DR}), the dispersive
representation for the Adler function can be written as a
Borel-Laplace transform,
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{adler}
\mathcal{A}(q^2)
&=& -\, q^2\int_0^{\infty}dt\ \rho(t) \int_0^{\infty}
d\sigma \ \sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma\left(t-q^2\right)}\\
&=& -\, q^2 \int_0^{\infty} d\sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}
\, \sigma \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\ ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{equation}
\label{rhohat}
\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\int_0^{\infty}dt\ \rho(t)\ \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma t}
\end{equation}
is the Laplace transform of the spectral function. We note that
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is well-defined for any $\sigma$ with Re~$\sigma>0$,
since $\rho(t)$ goes to a constant for $t\to\infty$. Any
singularities of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ thus have to reside in the
half-plane Re~$\sigma\le 0$. This representation of the
Adler function in terms of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is valid for Re$\,q^2<0$.
It follows that
\begin{equation}
\label{intadler}
\Pi(q^2)= C+\int_0^{\infty} d\sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}\, \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\ ,
\end{equation}
with $C$ a regularization-dependent constant.
Provided $q^2<0$, {\it i.e.}, in the Euclidean regime, it is clear that a
series expansion in powers of $\sigma$ of the function
$\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ translates into an asymptotic expansion
of $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ in powers of $1/q^2$ that we may associate with the
OPE.\footnote{These powers are modified
by logarithmic terms; for instance, a $\log\sigma$ term in $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$
will generate a $\log(-q^2)$ correction. Such $\log(-q^2)$ corrections are
screened by at least one power of
$\alpha_s$ in the Adler function.} In particular, the function $\sigma \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ must go to a
constant as $\sigma \rightarrow 0$ for $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ to
reproduce the parton-model constant in the limit
$-q^2\rightarrow \infty$, which is the first term in the
$1/q^2$ expansion. In general, the OPE is expected to be asymptotic.
Because the OPE is not an expansion with a finite radius of
convergence, it cannot directly be used for $\mathrm{Re}\, q^2>0$,
and in particular not on the Minkowski axis. As we will see, the
analytic continuation to the Minkowski axis will produce new
contributions, the duality-violating terms. These corrections
are defined as the difference between the exact Adler function
and its quark-gluon representation in terms of the OPE,
for large energies. The central question we attempt to address
here is: what is the form of these corrections to the OPE
when we analytically continue from the Euclidean axis,
$q^2<0$, to the Minkowski axis, $q^2>0$?
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\leftline{\includegraphics*[width=3cm]{Fig1-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-2cm}$ \hspace{2cm} \text{\Huge $\Leftrightarrow$} \hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2.5cm}\rightline{ \includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig2-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{.5cm}
\leftline{\hspace{-.3cm}\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig4-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-2cm}$ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2.5cm}\rightline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig3-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{1cm}
\leftline{\hspace{-.9cm}\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig5-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-2cm}$ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-3cm}\rightline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig6-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{1cm}
\leftline{\hspace{-1cm}\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig7-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-2.2cm} $ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2.5cm}\hspace{-1cm}\rightline{\includegraphics*[width=3cm]{Fig8-crop.pdf}}
\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig9-crop.pdf}
\end{center}
\caption{Analytic extension using the generalized Borel-Laplace
transform, $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$, in the large-$N_c$ limit.
Crosses denote poles or branch points in the $\sigma$ plane and
the associated poles in the spectrum in the $q^2$ plane.}
\end{figure}
The integral~(\ref{adler}) has the form of a Borel-Laplace
transform and is defined for $\sigma$ along the positive real
axis and for $\frac{\pi}{2}< \arg q^2< \frac{3\pi}{2}$,
{\it i.e.}, for $\mathrm{Re}\,q^2<0$.\footnote{We will define the
first Riemann sheet of the $q^2$ complex plane as
$q^2=|q^2| \mathrm{e}^{i \varphi},\ 0\leq \varphi <2 \pi$.
For later use, we will define the sheet with $-2\pi\leq\varphi<0$
as the zeroth Riemann sheet, {\it etc.}} However, this definition
can be generalized by considering different rays (all starting at
the origin) in the complex $\sigma$ plane defined by varying the
angle $\arg\sigma$, as long as
$\frac{\pi}{2}< \arg \sigma + \arg q^2 <\frac{3\pi}{2}$
so that the integral in Eq.~(\ref{adler}) remains well
defined. By varying $\arg\sigma$ the generalized
Borel-Laplace transform thus defined analytically extends the
definition of $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ to larger regions in the
$q^2$ complex plane \cite{Math}.
With $\arg \sigma=\frac{\pi}{2}-\epsilon\ (\epsilon>0)$, for example,
the region in $q^2$ covered becomes $\epsilon< \arg q^2 < \pi + \epsilon$.
Note that this region partly overlaps with the the region we started with,
$\frac{\pi}{2}< \arg q^2< \frac{3\pi}{2}$, as an analytic
continuation should do. If no singularities in the $\sigma$
plane are crossed as $\arg \sigma$ rotates from $0$ to
$\frac{\pi}{2}-\epsilon$, and if the function $\sigma\, \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$
does not grow exponentially on the contour at infinity
connecting these two angles, the result of the two integrals will
be the same in the region of overlap. In order for this analytic
continuation to work, we have to assume that
$e^{\sigma q^2}\sigma\, \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ decays to zero at the
circle at infinity for $|q^2|$ arbitrarily large. We believe
that this assumption is satisfied by the representations for
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ considered in this paper.
To analytically extend the Borel-Laplace integral~(\ref{adler})
to the Minkowski axis, it is thus essential to know the location and
nature of the singularities of the function $\sigma\, \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ in the
complex $\sigma$ plane. As an example, in Fig. 1 we have
depicted the singularities in the $\sigma$ plane we will encounter in
the large-$N_c$ example of Sec.~\ref{sec2}. As $\sigma$ is
rotated from the positive to the negative real axis,
anticlockwise, for example, the presence of any such
singularity will add a contribution to the analytic
continuation of $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ for $q^2>0$. Such
extra contributions are the source of the duality-violating
contributions to $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$.
Of course, instead of rotating anticlockwise, we could also
choose to rotate clockwise in the complex $\sigma$ plane. If
we always choose the anticlockwise rotation, the resulting
Adler function would not satisfy the Schwarz reflection property,
$\mathcal{A}((q^2)^*)=[\mathcal{A}(q^2)]^*$. However, we can enforce
this property by limiting the anticlockwise rotation to $q^2$ with
Im~$q^2\ge 0$, while, instead, rotating clockwise for values of
$q^2$ with Im~$q^2< 0$. Thus, for negative values of Im~$q^2$,
the rotation at the heart of our analytic continuation should
be changed into a clockwise rotation in order to enforce the
reflection property. In the rest of this paper, we will always
use the anticlockwise rotation, and obtain the spectral function
from the Adler function at $q^2+i\epsilon$ with $q^2$ real
and positive. Generally, $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ for Im~$q^2<0$ can
be obtained from our results through the Schwarz
reflection relation.
It is clear from Eq.~(\ref{rhohat}) that the singularity
structure of $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is directly determined by
the spectrum and that, with present
technology, it is not possible to calculate this singularity
structure from first principles in the case of QCD.
However, there are important qualitative aspects of the
spectrum generally assumed to be properties of QCD and,
as we will see, these are sufficient to infer with some
confidence what type of singularities in $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ one may
expect. Furthermore, these general observations can be backed up
with explicit calculations in model examples, as we will
demonstrate below. In the next section, we will consider
a concrete example, in order to illustrate the mechanism
described qualitatively above. This concrete example will
then serve as a starting point for a much more general
discussion in Sec.~\ref{sec1}, in which we will make contact
between the assumed form of the resonance spectrum and the
OPE, before using this form to deduce the functional
dependence of DVs on $q^2$.
\vskip0.4cm
\begin{boldmath}
\section{Example: A simple Regge model for $N_c=\infty$}
\label{sec2}
\end{boldmath}
To simplify the discussion, we first consider the large-$N_c$
limit, leaving the generalization to finite $N_c$ to Secs.~\ref{sec3prime}
and \ref{sec4}. In this limit, we know that the full set of
singularities of $\Pi (q^2)$ in the complex $q^2$ plane consists
of an infinite sequence of simple poles located at ever increasing
values of $q^2$ on the positive real $q^2$ axis. The spectral function is
the corresponding sum of Dirac $\delta$ function contributions. As $\sigma$
is rotated from $\arg \sigma=0$ to $\arg \sigma=\pi/2+\epsilon$
the region of validity in $q^2$ of the representation (\ref{adler})
shifts from $\pi/2< \arg q^2 <3\pi/2$ to $-\epsilon< \arg q^2 <\pi-\epsilon$,
the latter encompassing all the poles of the spectrum.
It is clear that these singularities prevent one from performing
a naive analytic continuation in $q^2$ of the Adler
function originally defined for $q^2<0$ in Eq.~(\ref{adler}). Since $q^2$
touches the positive real axis when $\sigma$ touches the positive
imaginary axis, some singularities must exist for $\arg \sigma=\pi/2$
which reflect the singularities for $\arg q^2=0$.
To see in detail what is going on, we now consider the example
of a model in which the spectral function is given by an infinite
set of delta functions on a linear trajectory, {\it i.e.},
\begin{equation}
\label{rhotoy}
\rho(t)=\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} F(n)\delta\!\left(t-M^2(n)\right)\quad,
\quad n=1,2,3,\dots\ ,
\end{equation}
with
\begin{equation}
\label{massdecay}
M^2(n)=\Lambda^2 n\ , \qquad F(n)=F^2\ .
\end{equation}
We will use units such that $\Lambda=1$, and rescale the spectral function
such that $F=1$. This spectrum is not arbitrary. It corresponds to the
leading Regge behavior in an expansion for large $n$, where $n$ is the
resonance excitation number. In two-dimensions, this asymptotic Regge
behavior represents the actual spectrum of QCD in the large-$N_c$ limit
\cite{tHooft2d,CCG} and, although to date it has never been proved,
asymptotic Regge behavior is generally believed to be true in
large$-N_c$ QCD also in four dimensions. The string
picture \cite{string} and phenomenology \cite{Masjuan}
also provide some evidence for this behavior.
Using this spectrum, the function $\sigma \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is easily shown
to be
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{rhohattoy}
\sigma \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)= \frac{\sigma}{\mathrm{e}^{\sigma}-1}
=\sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{B(n)}{n!}\,\sigma^n
\ ,
\end{eqnarray}
where $B(0)=1, B(1)=-1/2$ and
$B(n> 1)=\frac{(-1)^{n+1} 2 (2n)!}{(2\pi)^{2n}}\, \zeta(2n)$
are the Bernoulli numbers and $\zeta(s)$ is the Riemann $\zeta$-function.
The function in Eq.~(\ref{rhohattoy}) has simple poles at $\sigma=\pm 2k\pi i\ (k=1,2,3,\dots)$,
with residues $\pm 2k\pi i$ ({\it cf.} the crosses in the left panels
of Fig. 1; the cross at $\sigma=0$ is removed by the factor $\sigma$).
As we try to extend the definition of $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ to real
$q^2>0$ by rotating $\sigma$, we of course hit these poles at
$\arg\sigma=\frac{\pi}{2}$. As before, having increased $\arg\sigma$
from $0$ to $\frac{\pi}{2}-\epsilon$, the region of validity of
Eq.~(\ref{adler}) has shifted to $\epsilon< \arg q^2<\pi+\epsilon$. The
poles of the spectrum at $n=1,2,3,\dots$ seen in Eq.~(\ref{rhotoy})
(Fig. 1, second to top panel, right) now lie just outside this new region.
Clearly, there is a correspondence between these singularities
and the singularities of the Borel function $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$. If the
correlator had no singularities on the positive real $q^2$
axis it would be possible to analytically continue $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$
to include this axis, {\it i.e.}, to move from the region
$\epsilon\leq\arg q^2<\pi+\epsilon$ to the region
$-\epsilon<\arg q^2\leq\pi-\epsilon$. However, the correlator
does have poles on the positive real axis, and this is also
reflected in the $\sigma$ plane: as $q^2$ crosses the positive
real axis, $\sigma$ crosses the positive imaginary axis on
which the poles of $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ are located (Fig. 1, third
to top panel).
Letting $\sigma$ cross the imaginary axis, {\it i.e.}, going from the
second to top to the third to top panels in Fig. 1 and reaching
$\arg\sigma=\frac{\pi}{2}+\epsilon$ produces a change in the
Borel-Laplace integral because now closing the contour at
infinity between the two rays encircles the singularities on
the positive imaginary $\sigma$ axis (Fig. 1, single panel at
the bottom).\footnote{The integral over the relevant portion of the
circle at infinity vanishes.}
No further singularities are encountered, and hence
no further contributions generated, as $\arg \sigma$
is rotated from $\frac{\pi}{2}+\epsilon$ to $\pi$ and,
with $\Gamma$ the contour depicted at the bottom of Fig.~1, one obtains
\begin{equation}
\label{adlerminkowski}
\frac{d\Pi}{dq^2}(q^2)=\int_{\arg\sigma=\pi}d\sigma\
\mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2} \sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)+\frac{d\Pi_{\rm DV}}{dq^2}(q^2)\ ,
\quad (q^2>0)\ ,
\end{equation}
where the ``duality violating'' contribution
$\frac{d\Pi_{\rm DV}}{dq^2}(q^2)$ has been defined as
\begin{equation}
\label{adlerDV}
\frac{d\Pi_{\rm DV}}{dq^2}(q^2)=\int_{\Gamma} d\sigma\
\mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\ .
\end{equation}
A straightforward use of Cauchy's theorem leads to
\begin{equation}
\label{adlerminkowskitoy}
\frac{d\Pi_{\rm DV}}{dq^2}(q^2)=2 i\pi
\frac{d}{dq^2}\sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \mathrm{e}^{i 2 k\pi q^2}
=-\pi \frac{d}{dq^2}\left(\cot \pi q^2 + i \right)\ .
\end{equation}
We remark that this result does not satisfy the Schwarz reflection property.
However, it is straightforward to check that if we use
Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowskitoy}) to define $\Pi_{\rm DV}$ for
Im~$q^2\geq 0$, but instead carry out a clockwise rotation
for the analytic continutation to the half-plane Im~$q^2<0$,
the resulting definition of $\Pi_{\rm DV}$ does satisfy the
reflection property.
Integrating Eq.\,(\ref{rhohattoy}), one obtains
\begin{equation}
\label{dpsi}
\int_{\arg\sigma=\pi}d\sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)
= - \frac{d\psi}{dq^2}(q^2)\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\psi(q^2)=d\log{\Gamma(q^2)/dq^2}$ is the digamma function.
Integrating Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowski}) with respect to $q^2$ one thus finds
\begin{equation}
\label{pitoy}
\Pi(q^2)=-\psi(q^2)-\pi \left(\cot \pi q^2 + i \right)+ c\quad ,\quad (q^2>0)
\end{equation}
where $c$ is an integration constant which can be fixed by the
condition $\mathrm{Im}\,\Pi(0)=0$ to be $i\pi$ plus an
undetermined real part.\footnote{ $\Pi(0)$ is a real constant
which depends on the renormalization scheme.}
We emphasize the emergence of the cotangent function in the
process of analytic continuation; we did {\it not} invoke the symmetry
property
\begin{equation}
\label{psifct}
\psi(z)=\psi(-z)- \pi \cot(\pi z)-\frac{1}{z}\ ,
\end{equation}
as was done in previous discussions of this model \cite{Blok,Cata1,Cata2}.
In other words, the process of analytic continuation allows us to rederive
this global property of the $\psi$ function.
Use of the representation
\begin{equation}
\label{cot}
-\pi \cot\pi q^2= -\frac{1}{q^2}- 2 q^2 \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}
\frac{1}{(q^2+n)(q^2-n)}\ ,
\end{equation}
immediately leads to
\begin{equation}
\label{checkspectrum}
\frac{1}{\pi}\,\mathrm{Im}\,\Pi(q^2+i\epsilon)
=\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \delta(q^2-n)\ , \quad (q^2>0) \ ,
\end{equation}
which reproduces the initial spectrum, as it should ({\it cf.}
Eq. (\ref{rhotoy})). We see that the information about the spectrum is
contained in the DV term of Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowski}). We will
now also show that the first term in Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowski})
is indeed the analytic continuation to $q^2>0$ of the OPE series
obtained from Eq.~(\ref{adler}), with $q^2<0$.
Denoting by $[q^{2n}]\mathcal{A}_{\rm OPE}(q^2)$ the $(q^2)^{-n}$
term in the $1/q^2$ expansion of $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ and using
the representation of Eq.~(\ref{adler}), one obtains
\begin{equation}
\label{OPE1}
[q^{2n}]\mathcal{A}_{\rm OPE}\left(q^2<0\right)=-q^2\
\frac{B(n)}{n!}\ \int_{\arg \sigma=0}\!\!\!
d\sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}\sigma^n =
\frac{B(n)}{(-q^2)^{n}}\int_0^{\infty}
\frac{dt}{n!}\ \mathrm{e}^{-t} t^n= \frac{B(n)}{(-q^2)^{n}}\ ,
\end{equation}
where the change of variables $t=-q^2\sigma>0$ has been made.
For $q^2>0$, instead, the representation to be used is the
one of Eq. (\ref{dpsi}), and one obtains
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{OPE2}
[q^{2n}]\mathcal{A}_{\rm OPE}\left(q^2>0\right)
&=&-q^2\ \frac{B(n)}{n!}\ \int_{\arg \sigma=\pi}\!\!\!\!\!
d\sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}\sigma^n\ , \\
& =&-q^2\ \frac{B(n)}{n!}\ \int_{0}^{-\infty}\!\!\!\!\!
d\sigma\ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2} \sigma^n= \frac{B(n)}{(-q^2)^{n}n!}
\int_0^{\infty}\!\! dt \, \mathrm{e}^{-t}\, t^n=\frac{B(n)}{(-q^2)^{n}}\nonumber \ .
\end{eqnarray}
Clearly the two results are the same. The factorial behavior of $B(n)$ implies that
the expansion is asymptotic.
We end this section with two comments. The first is that, even in the
Euclidean regime, Re~$q^2<0$, the series~(\ref{OPE1}) is asymptotic.
This is a consequence of the fact that the Borel transform, $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$, has a
finite radius of convergence equal to $2\pi$, the distance of the
singularity closest to the origin in the Borel plane.
The OPE is obtained by expanding $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ around $\sigma=0$ and
inserting this expansion into Eq~(\ref{adler}). Since the series
in $\sigma$ does not converge in the full integration interval, this
yields an asymptotic series for the OPE as $-q^2\to \infty$.
If one cuts off the integral at $\sigma=2\pi$, it is straightforward
to show that, at any finite order in the OPE, the remainder is
of order $\mbox{exp}(-2\pi |q^2|)$ \cite{Cata1}.
We see that, in this model, the presence of the singularities at
$\sigma=\pm 2\pi i$ has two consequences. First, it affects the nature
of the OPE for $q^2<0$, where the integral in Eq.~(\ref{adler}) is
well defined, and, second, it affects the analytic continuation
to the Minkowski regime, leading to the DV contribution to the Adler
function shown in Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowski}).
The second comment is that no logarithmic terms are present in the
asymptotic expansion of the simple model (\ref{rhotoy}). As we will see
in the following sections, such terms arise only if large-$n$ subleading
corrections are added to the model. This simple example,
however, demonstrates how the properties of the spectrum
are reflected in the singularities of the function $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$,
which, in turn, determine the form of the DVs.
We note that the singularities in $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ which correspond
to the duality violating part of $\Pi(q^2)$ lie on the
imaginary $\sigma$ axis. We will argue in the next section that
with subasymptotic corrections to Regge behavior, but still in the
large-$N_c$ limit, these singularities will stay on the
imaginary axis, though they will no longer be simple poles.
It then follows that, if large-$N_c$ is a good approximation,
they will have to stay close to the imaginary axis for finite
$N_c$, and thus will remain well separated from the cuts in
the $\sigma$ plane along the negative real axis which correspond to
the perturbative corrections to the OPE.
\vskip0.4cm
\begin{boldmath}
\section{A generalized Regge spectrum for large-$N_c$ QCD}
\label{sec1}
\end{boldmath}
In the previous section we saw the consequences of assuming a
linear trajectory for the spectrum. In this approximation,
$\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ has simple poles on the positive imaginary axis and
the OPE it generates contains no logarithms, but only powers
of $1/q^2$. How does the picture change when terms which are
subleading at large resonance excitation number $n$ are
also taken into account? As we will now see, subleading terms
change the nature of the singularities from simple poles
to branch points, without modifying their location, and
introduce logarithmic corrections into the series in
powers of $1/q^2$.
In general, the function $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$, for Re$\,\sigma>0$, is given
in large-$N_c$ QCD by a series of the form
\begin{equation}
\label{dirichlet}
\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\sum_{n=1}^\infty F(n)\, \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma M^2(n)}\ ,
\end{equation}
where the $F(n)$ can in general be complex numbers and $\{M^2(n)\}$
is a monotonically increasing sequence of non-negative real numbers
tending to infinity ({\it i.e.}, there is no accumulation point). For the
particular case of the vector-current polarization considered here,
the quantities $F(n)$ are
real and positive. Series like Eq.~(\ref{dirichlet}) are known as
Dirichlet series \cite{Dirichlet}.
The concepts of a radius, boundary and disk of convergence in a
power series are replaced for a Dirichlet series by the abscissa,
line and half-plane of convergence. The line of convergence is
the value $\sigma=\sigma_c$ such that for
$\mathrm{Re}\, \sigma >\sigma_c$ the Dirichlet series converges
while for $\mathrm{Re}\, \sigma <\sigma_c$ it diverges. The
region $\mathrm{Re}\, \sigma >\sigma_c$ is called the half-plane
of convergence. In our case the line of convergence will be
located at Re$\,\sigma=0$, {\it i.e.}, the imaginary axis. To our
knowledge, the first article to point out that Dirichlet
series are relevant to the study of large-$N_c$ QCD was
Ref. \cite{deRafael}.\footnote{This reference speculates about the connection
between a complex pole in the $\sigma$ plane and the origin of
DVs, on the basis of a purely mathematical
model.}
Inspired by two-dimensional QCD, we will assume the spectrum
to obey the following expansion at large $n$ \cite{FLZ}:
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{reggespectrum}
F(n)&=&1+\epsilon_F(n)\ ,\\
M^2(n)&=&n+ b\log n+ c+ \epsilon_M(n)\ ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where $b$ and $c$ are constants, and
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{corrections}
\epsilon_{i}(n)&=&\epsilon_{i}(0,n)+ \epsilon_{i}(\{\lambda\},n)
\ ,\quad i=F, M\quad ,\\
\epsilon_{i}(0,n)&=&\sum_{\nu_{i}>0}\frac{d^{(i)}(\nu_{i})}
{(\log n)^{\nu_{i}}}\ ,
\nonumber\\
\epsilon_{i}(\{\lambda\},n)&=&
\sum_{\lambda_{i}> 0,\nu_{i}}\frac{d^{(i)}(\lambda_{i},\nu_{i})}
{n^{\lambda_{i}} (\log n)^{\nu_{i}}}\ .
\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
We take the values of $\lambda_i$ in these expressions, and those of
the $\nu_i$ in $\epsilon_{i}(0,n)$, to be positive,
while the values of $\nu_i$ in $\epsilon_{i}(\{\lambda\},n)$
are allowed to be positive, negative or zero. The
$\epsilon_{i}(n)$ are subleading contributions in the sense that
$\epsilon_{F}(n)\rightarrow 0 $ and $\epsilon_{M}(n)/n\rightarrow 0$
as $n\to \infty$. The correction $\epsilon_{i}(0,n)$ in
Eq.~(\ref{corrections}) is, in fact, just a special case
of $\epsilon_{i}(\{\lambda\},n)$ with $\lambda =0$. We choose
to split it off because it turns out to generate the logarithms
that appear in perturbation theory, whereas the
$\epsilon_{i}(\{\lambda\},n)$ corrections with non-zero $\lambda$
contribute to the power corrections. We do not know whether subleading
terms of a different form may occur in large-$N_c$ QCD,
but the forms assumed in Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}) turn out to
be sufficient for our purpose, which is to further investigate
the relation of the detailed structure of the spectrum to
the OPE. The behavior $F(n)\to 1$ as $n\to \infty$
(up to an overall multiplicative
constant) is a consequence of the asymptotic Regge
spectrum $M^2(n) \sim n$, as $n\to \infty$, and a requirement to
obtain the leading-order parton-model result at large $-q^2$.
The rest of this section consists of three parts. First, in
Sec.~\ref{OPE}, we obtain the OPE of the Adler function at
large Euclidean momenta from Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}). In
Sec.~\ref{sec1prime} we {focus, in particular, on the first term
in the OPE, {\it i.e.}, perturbation theory. Then, in Sec.~\ref{nonpert},
we generalize the discussion of Sec.~\ref{sec2} and consider
the form DVs take in the case of the more general spectrum we assume
in this section.
\vskip0.5cm
\subsection{Expansion for large Euclidean momentum}
\label{OPE}
Let us begin with a study of the singularity structure of the
Dirichlet series~(\ref{dirichlet}) for $\sigma \to 0^+$.
The expansion around $\sigma=0$ is important because it determines,
through Eq.~(\ref{adler}), the behavior of the OPE for the Adler
function as $-q^2\to \infty$. This includes the perturbative
series, as the leading term in the OPE.
The mathematical form of the Regge expansion~(\ref{corrections})
is obviously not the most general possible. Therefore, to
ensure that limiting our attention to this form is not overly
restrictive, it is important to show that, at least in principle,
the expansion~(\ref{corrections}) allows us to generate all
the inverse powers and logarithms of $q^2$ present in the OPE.
In order to proceed, it is useful to recall the identity
\begin{equation}
\label{exp}
\mathrm{e}^{-x}=\frac{1}{2 i \pi}\int_C ds \ x^{-s}\,\Gamma(s) \ ,
\end{equation}
where $C$ is a vertical line to the right of $\mathrm{Re}\ s=0$ in
the complex $s$ plane, {\it i.e.}, to the right of all singularities of
$\Gamma(s)$. One immediately obtains
\begin{equation}
\label{rhomellin}
\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\frac{1}{2 i \pi}\int_{\widehat{C}} ds\ \sigma^{-s}
\,\Gamma(s)\, \Phi(s), \quad \mathrm{where}\quad \Phi(s)=
\sum_{n=1}^\infty F(n) \left[ M^2(n)\right]^{-s}\ ,
\end{equation}
where, as a consequence of the asymptotic behavior in
Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}), $\Phi(s)$ will have a singularity at
$s=1$, implying that now $\widehat{C}$ is a vertical line to the
right of $\mathrm{Re}\ s=1$.
As it stands, Eq.~(\ref{rhomellin}) is exact. A result, known as the
Converse Mapping Theorem \cite{Flajolet}, relates the behavior of
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ for $\sigma\to 0^+$ to the singularities of the function
$\Gamma(s) \Phi(s)$. Since the singularities of $\Gamma(s)$ are
already known to be simple poles located at non-positive integers,
our task is to determine the singularities of $\Phi(s)$.
Let us assume that there is an integer $n^*>0$ large enough such
that the expansion~(\ref{reggespectrum}) applies for $n>n^*$. We
can then split
\begin{equation}
\label{splitphi}
\Phi(s)= \Phi_<(s)+\Phi_>(s)
=\sum_{n\le n^*}F(n) \left[ M^2(n)\right]^{-s} +
\sum_{n> n^*}^\infty F(n) \left[ M^2(n)\right]^{-s}\ ,
\end{equation}
and use the expansion~(\ref{reggespectrum}) in the second sum,
$\Phi_>(s)$. Clearly, the function $\Phi_<(s)$ cannot give rise
to any singularity in $s$, hence all singularities are contained
in $\Phi_>(s)$. Let us split
\begin{equation}
\label{split}
\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\mathcal{B}_{<}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)+ \mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)
\end{equation}
where $\mathcal{B}_{<}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is the inverse Mellin transform of $\Gamma(s)\Phi_<(s)$
and $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ that of $\Gamma(s)\Phi_>(s)$. According to the Converse Mapping
Theorem, since $\Gamma(s)$ contains simple poles at non-positive
integers $s=-k$, $k\ge 0$, the function $\mathcal{B}_{<}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is of the form
\begin{equation}
\label{bl}
\mathcal{B}_{<}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\sum_{k=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^k}{k!}\,\Phi_<(-k)\, \sigma^k\ ,
\end{equation}
{\it i.e.}, it is a power series in $\sigma$. Using Eq.~(\ref{adler}), one sees
that, at least in principle, one obtains all powers of $1/q^2$, as
in the OPE. No logarithms appear yet. All logarithms have to come
from $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ through the singularities of $\Phi_>(s)$, to which we turn next.
Since $\Phi_>(s)$ is defined through a sum over $n> n^*$, we may
insert the expansions in Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}) into
Eq.~(\ref{rhomellin}), obtaining
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{singular}
\Phi_>(s)&=& \sum_{n> n^*} n^{-s}\left(1+ b\, \frac{\log n}{n}
+ \frac{c}{n}+ \frac{\epsilon_M(n)}{n}\right)^{-s}\left(1+
\epsilon_F(n)\right) \\
&= & \Phi_1(s) + \Phi_2(s)\ ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{bigsplit}
\Phi_1(s)& =& \sum_{n>n^*}n^{-s} \big( 1+ \epsilon_F(0,n)\big)
= \sum_{n>n^*}n^{-s}\left(1+\sum_{\nu>0} \frac{d^{(F)}(\nu)}
{\log^{\nu} n}\right)\ , \\
\Phi_2(s)&=& \sum_{n>n^*}n^{-s}\left(\epsilon_F(\{\lambda\},n)-
\, \frac{s}{1!} \left(b\frac{\log n}{n}+\frac{c}{n}+
\frac{\epsilon_M(n)}{n}\right) \right.\nonumber\\
&& \left. \hspace{3cm} + \frac{s(s+1)}{2!}\left(b\frac{\log n}{n}
+\frac{c}{n}+ \frac{\epsilon_M(n)}{n}\right)^2+ \dots \right) \ . \nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
The reason for grouping together in $\Phi_1(s)$ the ``1'' with the
terms contained in $\epsilon_F(0,n)$ is because these terms will give
rise to the logarithms of the perturbative series, whereas the
logarithms associated with power corrections will all be contained
in $\Phi_2(s)$.
Let us first deal with $\Phi_1(s)$. One obtains
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{phione}
\Phi_1(s) &=& \zeta_>(s) + \sum_{\nu>0} d^{F}(\nu) \int_0^\infty dt
\ \frac{t^{\nu-1}}{\Gamma(\nu)}\ \zeta_>(s+t) \\
&\asymp & \frac{1}{s-1}+ \sum_{\nu>0} d^{F}(\nu) \int_0^\infty dt
\ \frac{t^{\nu-1}}{\Gamma(\nu)}\ \frac{1}{s+t-1}\ ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where $\asymp$ means ``singular part of,'' and where
$\zeta_>(s)=\sum_{n>n^*}^\infty n^{-s}$ has the same singularity
structure as the Riemann $\zeta$-function $\zeta(s)$, whose
singular expansion is $\zeta(s) \asymp \frac{1}{s-1}$. We
substitute Eq.~(\ref{phione}) into Eq.~(\ref{rhomellin}), to obtain the
$\sigma\to 0^+$ expansion of the $\Phi_1$ part of $\sigma\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$.
Interchanging the $s$ and $t$ integrals yields
\begin{equation}
\label{bpt}
\sigma\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)|_{\Phi_1}= 1+ \sum_{\nu>0} d^{F}(\nu) \int_0^\infty dt
\ \frac{t^{\nu-1}}{\Gamma(\nu)}\ \Gamma(1-t)\,\sigma^t\
+ \mathcal{O}(\sigma^{1-\epsilon})\ ,
\end{equation}
with $\epsilon$ a parameter that can be chosen arbitrarily
close to zero.
These manipulations are formal, as the second $t$ integral in
Eq.~(\ref{phione}) diverges at $t\to\infty$ and the $t$ integral in
Eq.~(\ref{bpt}) diverges because of the poles in $\Gamma(1-t)$.
In App.~\ref{dirichletapp} we show that, nonetheless, these
manipulations are valid, specializing to the case $\nu =1$.
It is then straightforward to see that the same argument applies
also for $\nu>1$, and we show this explicitly in App.~\ref{newapp}.
As we will see in Sec.~\ref{sec1prime}, Eq.~(\ref{bpt}) is nothing
but the Borel transform of the usual perturbative series in powers
of $\alpha_s$, in the approximation in which only the first term
in the $\beta$-function is kept. In fact, the poles in $\Gamma(1-t)$
are related to the renormalon singularities associated with the
asymptotic nature of perturbation theory. The presence of the
factor $\sigma^t= \mathrm{e}^{t \log\sigma}$ shows that $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ possesses a cut
for $\mathrm{Re}\,\sigma<0$. Using Eq.~(\ref{adler}), this expression
for $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ yields for the perturbative Adler function
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{adlerpt}
\mathcal{A}(q^2)_{\mathrm{\rm PT}}&\approx& 1+ \sum_{\nu>0}
d^{F}(\nu) \int_0^\infty dt \,\frac{t^{\nu-1}}{\Gamma(\nu)}
\, \frac{\pi t}{\sin(\pi t)}\, \frac{1}{(-q^2)^{t}}\\
&\approx& 1+ \sum_{\nu>0} d^{F}(\nu) \sum_{k=0}^\infty
\frac{a_k}{\Gamma(\nu)}\ \frac{\Gamma(\nu+k)}
{\left(\log(-q^2)\right)^{\nu+k}}\ ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where the identity
\begin{equation}
\label{identity}
\Gamma(1-t) \Gamma(1+t)= \frac{\pi t}{\sin(\pi t)}
\end{equation}
has been used, and the coefficients $a_k$ are defined
by\footnote{An expression of the coefficients $a_k$ in terms of
the Bernoulli numbers may be obtained, but its precise form is not
very important here.}
\begin{equation}
\frac{\pi t}{\sin(\pi t)}= \sum_{k=0}^\infty a_k \, t^k\ ,\quad
t\rightarrow 0\ .
\end{equation}
Let us now turn to $\Phi_2(s)$. Its contribution is a linear combination
of terms of the form
\begin{equation}
\label{master}
(-1)^\nu\frac{d^\nu}{ds^\nu}\zeta_>(s+\lambda)=\sum_{n>n^*}
\frac{\log^\nu n}{n^{s+\lambda}}\ ,
\end{equation}
for $\lambda>0$ and we first consider the case $\nu \geq 0$
(we will comment on the case $\nu<0$ below). Inserting this
expression into Eq.~(\ref{rhomellin}) one obtains, after
taking $\lambda$ derivatives with respect to $\sigma$,
\begin{equation}
\label{master2}
\frac{d^\lambda}{d\sigma^\lambda}\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=^{\hspace{-0.23cm}\circ}(-1)^\lambda
\ \frac{1}{2i\pi}\int_{\widehat{C}}\ ds\ \sigma^{-s-\lambda}
\ \Gamma(s+\lambda)\ (-1)^\nu\frac{d^\nu}{ds^\nu}\zeta_>(s+\lambda)\ ,
\end{equation}
where the symbol $=^{\hspace{-0.23cm}\circ}$ indicates that the
right-hand side is just one of the tems in
$\frac{d^\lambda}{d\sigma^\lambda}\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$. Since
\begin{equation}
(-1)^\nu\frac{d^\nu}{ds^\nu}\zeta_>(s+\lambda)\ \asymp\ (-1)^\nu
\frac{\Gamma(\nu+1)}{ (s+\lambda-1)^{\nu+1}}
\end{equation}
one obtains, after using the residue theorem and integrating
$\lambda$ times over $\sigma$,
\begin{equation}
\label{masterB}
\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=^{\hspace{-0.23cm}\circ}\ -\ \frac{(-1)^\lambda}{\nu+1}
\ \frac{\sigma^{\lambda-1}}{\Gamma(\lambda)}\ (-\log \sigma)^{\nu+1}
\left(1+\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\log\sigma}\right)\right)+
\mathcal{P}_\lambda(\sigma)\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\mathcal{P}_\lambda(\sigma)$ is a polynomial of degree $\lambda$.
Substituting this expression into Eq.~(\ref{adler}), the contribution
to the Adler function is given by
\begin{equation}
\label{masteradler}
\mathcal{A}(q^2)=^{\hspace{-0.23cm}\circ} -\ \frac{\lambda}{\nu+1}
\ \frac{\log^{\nu+1}(-q^2)}{(q^2)^\lambda}\ \left(1+\mathcal{O}
\left(\frac{1}{\log(-q^2)}\right)\right)+\mathcal{P}_{\lambda+1}
\left(\frac{1}{q^2}\right)\ .
\end{equation}
As shown in App.~\ref{newapp}, it turns out that the result for
$\nu<0$ may be obtained from (\ref{masterB}, \ref{masteradler}) by
analytic continuation in $\nu$, except for the case $\nu=-1$ which,
due to the singularity at that value, is a special case. For
$\nu=-1$, one obtains (see App.~\ref{newapp})
\begin{equation}
\label{masterBone}
\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=^{\hspace{-0.23cm}\circ}\frac{(-1)^{\lambda-1}}
{\Gamma(\lambda)}\,\sigma^{\lambda-1}\,\log(-\log\sigma)\left(1+
\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\log(-\log\sigma)\log\sigma}\right)\right)
+\mathcal{P}_\lambda(\sigma)\ ,
\end{equation}
and using Eq.~(\ref{adler}),
\begin{equation}
\label{masterAone}
\mathcal{A}(q^2)=^{\hspace{-0.23cm}\circ} -\ \frac{\lambda}{(q^2)^\lambda}
\ \log\log(-q^2)\left( 1+ \mathcal{O}\left( \frac{1}{\log(-q^2)
\ \log\log(-q^2)}\right) \right)
+\mathcal{P}_{\lambda+1}\left(\frac{1}{q^2}\right)\ .
\end{equation}
This concludes our exploration of the structure of the OPE generated
by the Regge expansion (\ref{corrections}). Given the variety of
logarithmic corrections obtained, and given the adjustable
parameters $b$, $c$, and $d^{(i)}(\lambda_i,\nu_i)$ in
Eq.~(\ref{corrections}), we conclude that the expansion~(\ref{corrections})
is indeed potentially capable of producing all the necessary terms in
the OPE, including logarithmic corrections, again in the approximation
in which we keep only the leading term in the $\beta$-function. This
is confirmed by the work of Ref.~\cite{Pineda}, which considered this
matching between the spectrum and the OPE in more detail using a more
direct method, and found that the terms in both the perturbative and $1/q^2$
series of the OPE can be matched using the spectrum of
Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}). We consider these results good evidence
for the conjecture that, by adjusting the form
of the subleading corrections for $n\to\infty$ in Eqs.~(\ref{reggespectrum})
and~(\ref{corrections}), the complete structure of the OPE, as a
function of Euclidean $q^2$, can indeed be obtained.
\subsection{The perturbative series}
\label{sec1prime}
We start with a brief review of the standard Borel summation of the
divergent perturbative series in QCD. Defining the Borel transform
of the perturbative expansion in $\alpha_s$ appearing in
Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD}) by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:BAPT}
B_{\rm PT}^{[{\mathcal A}]}(u)= \sum_{n=0}^\infty b_n u^n\ ,\qquad b_n=
\frac{c_{n+1}}{\beta_0^{n+1} \,n!}\ ,
\end{equation}
the perturbative series is formally summed by the Borel-Laplace integral
\begin{equation}\label{eq:APT}
{\mathcal A}_{\rm PT}(q^2)=1+\int\limits_0^\infty du\,
\mathrm{e}^{-u /(\beta_0 \alpha_s(-q^2))} \,B_{\rm PT}^{[{\mathcal A}]}(u)\ .
\end{equation}
From renormalon calculus ({\it i.e.}, the calculation of Feynman diagrams
with bubble insertions) one generically expects
$c_{n+1}\sim \Gamma(n+1)=n!$ \cite{Mueller1992}. Therefore,
because of the $n!$ in the denominator of $b_n$, the
series~(\ref{eq:BAPT}) is expected to be convergent in a
disk $|u|<u_0$ with $u_0>0$ in the Borel plane. If the integral in
Eq.~(\ref{eq:APT}) would be well defined, the original perturbative
series~(\ref{eq:QCD}) would be Borel summable.
Criteria for Borel summability have been formulated in terms of
constraints on the expanded function ${\mathcal A}_{\rm PT}(q^2) $
in the complex $\alpha_s$ plane \cite{Watson}, but these conditions
are not fulfilled in QCD \cite{tHooft}. Borel non-summability is
also manifest because the Borel transform $B_{\rm PT}^{[{\mathcal A}]}(u)$
has singularities along the positive real axis for $u\ge 2$, the
infrared renormalons of Refs.~\cite{tHooft,Mueller1985, Beneke},
which make the integral (\ref{eq:APT}) ambiguous. Other singularities,
the ultraviolet renormalons, are located on the negative real axis
for $u\le -1$, and restrict the convergence of the series (\ref{eq:BAPT})
to the disk $|u|<1$.
It is well-known that, in the large-$\beta_0$ approximation, in which
the coupling is given by Eq.~(\ref{eq:a1loop}), there is a simple
relation between the standard perturbative Borel transform
$B_{\rm PT}^{[{\mathcal A}]}(u)$ of the Adler function and the Borel
transform of the associated spectral function. This can be easily
derived starting from the definition~(\ref{eq:rho}) of $\rho(t)$
and using the Schwarz reflection property, which allows us to write
\begin{equation}
\rho(t)=\frac{1}{2\pi i}[\Pi(t+i\epsilon)-\Pi(t-i\epsilon)]=
\frac{1}{2\pi i} \int_{C_t}dq^2\, \Pi'(q^2) \ ,
\end{equation}
where $\Pi'(q^2)$ is the derivative of $\Pi$ and $C_t$ is an open
contour in the complex plane, with end points $t- i\epsilon$ and
$t+ i\epsilon$, which does not cross the cut of $\Pi(q^2)$.
Choosing the contour as a circle of radius $t$ centered at the
origin, parametrized as $q^2=t e^{i\phi}$ for fixed $t$ and
$0\le \phi\le 2\pi$, and using the definition~(\ref{eq:A}), we obtain
\begin{equation}
\rho(t)=\frac{1}{2\pi}\int_0^{2\pi}d\phi\, {\mathcal A}(t e^{i\phi}) \ .
\end{equation}
Substituting the Borel-Laplace representation~(\ref{eq:APT}) with
the one-loop coupling~(\ref{eq:a1loop}) into this equation and
performing the integral over $\phi$ then yields
\begin{equation}
\rho_{\rm PT}(t)=1+\int\limits_0^\infty du\, \mathrm{e}^{-u \log (t/\Lambda^2)}
\,B_{\rm PT}^{[{\mathcal A}]}(u) \, \frac{\sin \pi u}{\pi u}\ .
\end{equation}
Writing a Borel-Laplace representation for the perturbative spectral
function itself,
\begin{equation}\label{eq:rhoPT}
\rho_{\rm PT}(t)=1+\int\limits_0^\infty du\,\mathrm{e}^{-u/(\beta_0 \alpha_s(t))}
\,B_{\rm PT}^{[\rho]}(u)\ ,
\end{equation}
we recover the relation
\begin{equation}\label{eq:BrhoPT}
B_{\rm PT}^{[\rho]}(u) = B_{\rm PT}^{[{\mathcal A}]}(u) \,
\frac{\sin \pi u}{\pi u}\ ,
\end{equation}
first derived in Ref.~\cite{BrownYaffe}.
For the following discussion, it is useful to establish a relation
between the standard Borel transform introduced in Eq.~(\ref{eq:BrhoPT})
and the new Borel transform $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)|_{\Phi_1}$ defined in Eq.~(\ref{bpt}).
Indeed, by substituting Eq.~(\ref{eq:rhoPT}) into Eq.~(\ref{rhohat})
and performing the integral over $t$ one finds
\begin{equation}
\label{BPT}
\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(\sigma)=1+\int_0^\infty du\,B_{\rm PT}^{[{\rho}]}(u)\
\Gamma(1-u)\ (\sigma \Lambda^2)^u\ ,
\end{equation}
where the subscript PT reminds us of the fact that this relation
holds in perturbation theory. As we will see, the expression
(\ref{BPT}) is nothing but $\sigma \mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)|_{\Phi_1}$ defined in Eq.~(\ref{bpt}).
Our discussion in the previous subsection illustrates clearly how the
OPE corresponds to the branch-point singularity at $\sigma=0$ in the
Borel plane. The purpose of this subsection is to illustrate in more
detail how, in terms of the Borel transform of the perturbative
series reviewed above, the perturbative series appears in our
representation (\ref{adler}) if a general Regge expansion of the
form (\ref{reggespectrum}) is assumed for the spectral function.
We again restrict ourselves to the simplified case in which only the
first coefficient of the $\beta$-function does not vanish.
Let us recall the expansion for the Borel function $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$
as $\sigma \to 0^+$ in Eq.~(\ref{bpt}):
\begin{equation}
\label{pt}
\sigma \mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)|_{\Phi_1} = 1 +\sum_{\nu}d^{(F)}(\nu)\int_0^\infty \!\!\!du
\, \frac{u^{\nu-1}}{\Gamma(\nu)}\, \Gamma(1-u)\, \sigma^{u}\ .
\end{equation}
This is the part which contains the perturbative series. To see this,
let us define the combination
\begin{equation}
\label{ptborel}
B^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(u)=\sum_{\nu=1}^\infty \frac{d^{(F)}(\nu)}
{\Gamma(\nu)}\ u^{\nu-1}\ ,
\end{equation}
so that
\begin{equation}
\label{pt2}
\sigma \mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)|_{\Phi_1} = 1+ \int_0^\infty du\ B^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(u)
\ \Gamma(1-u) \, \sigma^{u}\ ,
\end{equation}
where this expression is to be understood as an asymptotic expansion
in $1/\log\sigma$, {\it i.e.}, as the result of expanding the product
$B^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(u)\Gamma(1-u)$ in $u$ about $u=0$ and integrating
term by term. A comparison of Eq. (\ref{pt2}) with Eq. (\ref{BPT}),
taking into account that we have taken the QCD scale $\Lambda=1$
in (\ref{pt2}), establishes the equality of the two expressions,
as promised above.
The result (\ref{eq:APT}) can be obtained by substituting
Eqs.~(\ref{pt2}) and~(\ref{eq:BrhoPT}) into Eq.~(\ref{adler}),
and, as discussed in the introduction, is valid for
$\frac{\pi}{2}< \arg q^2< \frac{3\pi}{2}$, {\it i.e.},
for $\mathrm{Re}\,q^2<0$, which includes the Euclidean regime.
As we rotate $\sigma$ anticlockwise and reach
$\arg \sigma=\pi-\epsilon$, the integral representation
(\ref{adler}) analytically continues $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ to
the region $-\frac{\pi}{2}+\epsilon < \arg q^2 < \frac{\pi}{2}+\epsilon$.
Order by order, this continues $\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ through the
perturbative cut at $q^2>0$ into the zeroth Riemann sheet since
the function $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ in Eq.~(\ref{pt2}) is continuous, order by order,
under the corresponding rotation in $\sigma$. The cut discontinuity
of $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is located further away, at $\arg \sigma =\pi$.
Using the ray $\sigma=|\sigma| \mathrm{e}^{i(\pi-\epsilon)}$, and taking
the limit $\epsilon\to 0$, we can thus define the
perturbative version of the function
$\mathcal{A}(q^2)$ also for $q^2>0$ as
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{rotateadler}
\mathcal{A}_{\rm PT}(q^2)&=&1+ q^2\int_0^\infty d|\sigma|\
\mathrm{e}^{-|\sigma| q^2}\int_0^\infty du \ B^{[\mathcal{\rho}]}_{\rm PT}(u)
\ \Gamma(1-u)\ |\sigma|^u \ \mathrm{e}^{i u\pi}\\
&=&1+\int_0^\infty du \ B^{[\mathcal{\rho}]}_{\rm PT}(u)
\ \Gamma(1+u)\Gamma(1-u)\ \frac{\mathrm{e}^{iu\pi}}{(q^2)^u}\nonumber \\
&=&1+ \int_0^\infty du \ B^{[\mathcal{\mathcal{A}}]}_{\rm PT}(u)
\ \mathrm{e}^{-u\left(\log q^2 -i\pi\right)}\ ,\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
which is nothing else than the well-known result for the
analytic continuation to $q^2>0$ of $\log(-q^2)=\log q^2-i\pi$
in the Adler function (\ref{eq:APT}). This exercise illustrates
that the rotation in the complex $\sigma$ plane, supplemented
with the right analyticity properties of the function $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$,
produces the right analytic continuation in perturbation theory
of the Adler function in the $q^2$ complex plane.
We would like to close this section with a comment on the
so-called ``practical version'' of the SVZ sum rules \cite{SVZ},
obtained by neglecting all logarithmic corrections to the
condensates, in the specific case of the vector-channel polarization
considered here. We saw in Eq.~(\ref{adler}) that the function
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is given by
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)= \int_0^{\infty}dt\ \rho(t)\ \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma t}\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\rho(t)$ is the full spectral function defined in
Eq.~(\ref{eq:rho}). There is of course an analogous mathematical
relation between the perturbative counterparts, $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(\sigma)$ and
$\rho(t)_{\rm PT}$, order by order in powers of
$\alpha_s$.\footnote{The perturbative function $\Pi_{\rm PT}(q^2)$
may exhibit also unphysical singularities, poles or cuts \cite{CaNe},
in the infrared Landau region $-\Lambda_{\rm QCD}^2\leq q^2<0$, which
are not relevant here.} We then see that the practical version of the
SVZ sum rules arises from the assumption that the difference
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)-\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(\sigma)$ is an analytic function of $\sigma$ around the
origin, and so can be expanded in a power series in $\sigma$,
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)-\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(\sigma)=\sum_{k=0}^\infty c_k\ \sigma^k $, yielding
\begin{equation}
\sum_{k=0}^\infty c_k\ \sigma^k =\int_0^{\infty}dt\ \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma t}
\ \Big(\rho(t)-\rho(t)_{\rm PT}\Big)\ .
\end{equation}
The left hand side is the Borel-Laplace transform of a series in
powers of $1/(-q^2)$ which is also known as the condensate expansion.
In this context, it is traditional to rename the variable $\sigma\to 1/M^2$
and rewrite the above equation as \cite{SVZ}
\begin{equation}
\frac{1}{\pi}\int_0^{\infty}dt\ \mathrm{e}^{- t/M^2}
\ \mathrm{Im}\,\Pi(t) =\frac{1}{\pi}\int_0^{\infty}dt
\ \mathrm{e}^{- t/M^2}\ \mathrm{Im}\,\Pi(t)_{\rm PT}
+ \sum_{k=0}^\infty c_k\ \frac{1}{M^{2k}}\ ,
\end{equation}
where $c_k$ is related to the condensate of dimension $2k+2$.
If we assume that the coefficients $d_n$ in Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD}) are
independent of $q^2$, we obtain from Eq.~(\ref{eq:A}) the
``practical version'' of the OPE,
$\Pi_{\rm OPE}(q^2)=\sum_{n\ge 1} d_n/(n (-q^2)^n)$, from which
the standard SVZ result, $c_k=d_{k+1}/(k+1)!$, immediately follows.
The assumption of analyticity of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)-\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(\sigma)$ at the origin
should, however, be treated with some caution. Even though
this practical version of the SVZ sum rules has proved
very successful phenomenologically, and while the logarithmic corrections
to the condensate expansion are screened by at least one power of
$\alpha_s$, these logarithms do exist and render the difference
$\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)-\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}_{\rm PT}(\sigma)$ not analytic in a region around $\sigma=0$.
The phenomenological approximation of neglecting such logarithmic
corrections to the condensate expansion is not guaranteed to work
in general, and should be judged on a case-by-case basis.
\vskip0.4cm
\subsection{Beyond the OPE}
\label{nonpert}
We now turn to the singularities of $\sigma \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$
away from the origin. We saw in Sec.~\ref{sec2} that, when the
asymptotic Regge behavior is exact, {\it i.e.}, $M^2(n)=n$, $F(n)=1$,
the singularities are simple poles located at $\sigma=\pm 2 \pi ik$,
$k=1,2,3,\dots$. What is the fate of these singularities once the
corrections to the spectrum are switched on and the parameters
$b,\, c,\, \epsilon_{F,M}(n)$ in Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}) become
non-zero? To study this question, we focus on the region near
the original pole locations. Substituting
$\sigma=\widehat{\sigma}+(\sigma-\widehat{\sigma})$ into
Eq.~(\ref{dirichlet}), implementing the expansions (\ref{reggespectrum})
and (\ref{corrections}), and taking $\widehat{\sigma}=2\pi i k$, with
$k$ a non-zero integer, we find
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\frac{1}{2 i \pi}\int_{\widehat{C}} ds
\ (\sigma-\widehat{\sigma})^{-s}\ \Gamma(s) \Psi_>(s)
\end{equation}
with
\begin{equation}
\label{psi}
\Psi_>(s)=\mathrm{e}^{-\widehat{\sigma}c}\ \sum_{n>n^*}^\infty
n^{-(s+ \widehat{\sigma}\, b)} \left(1-s\left( b \frac{\log n}{n}
+ \frac{c}{n}\right)+\epsilon_F(n) -\left(\frac{s}{n}
+ \widehat{\sigma}\right)\, \epsilon_M(n)+\dots\right)\ ,
\end{equation}
where we have used that $\mathrm{e}^{-2\pi ikn}=1$. Following steps
exactly analogous to those followed before, we find
\begin{equation}
\label{psising}
\Psi_>(s)\asymp \mathrm{e}^{- \widehat{\sigma}\, c}\,\frac{1}
{s+ \widehat{\sigma}b -1}+\dots\ ,
\end{equation}
which translates into
\begin{equation}
\label{rhohatbranch}
\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\mathrm{e}^{-\widehat{\sigma} c}\,\frac{\Gamma(1-\widehat{\sigma} b)}
{(\sigma-\widehat{\sigma})^{1-\widehat{\sigma} b}}+\dots\ .
\end{equation}
The form of this result can be understood by considering the
poly-logarithm representation of the Dirichlet series in the
limit that the $\epsilon_{F,M}(n)$ corrections are neglected.
In that limit, one has
\begin{equation}
\label{polylogdirichlet}
\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma\left(n+ b\log n+c\right)}=
\mathrm{e}^{-\sigma c}\sum_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{\mathrm{e}^{-\sigma n}}{n^{\sigma b}}
=\mathrm{e}^{-\sigma c} \, \mathrm{Li}_{\sigma b}(\mathrm{e}^{-\sigma})\ .
\end{equation}
Since
\begin{equation}
\label{polylog}
\mathrm{Li}_{\sigma b}(\mathrm{e}^{-\sigma})=\Gamma(1-\sigma b)
\sum_{k=-\infty}^{k=+\infty}\frac{1}{\left(\sigma-2\pi ik\right)^{1-\sigma b}}\ ,
\end{equation}
we see that Eq.~(\ref{rhohatbranch}) corresponds precisely to the
$k$-th term in this sum, reflecting the fact that (\ref{rhohatbranch})
was obtained by expanding $\mathcal{B}_{\mathrm{>}}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ in the neighborhood of
$\sigma=\widehat\sigma=2\pi ik$.
Equation~(\ref{rhohatbranch}) shows that the simple pole at
$\widehat{\sigma}=2 \pi ik$, present in the exact Regge limit, with
$b=0$, as discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec2}, has now become a branch
point at the same location.
As we show in App.~\ref{app1}, the form of the duality-violating
contribution to the vector-channel polarization now changes from that
given in Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowskitoy}) to
\begin{equation}
\label{newresult}
\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)= 2\pi i\ \sum_{k=1}^{\infty} \mathrm{e}^{i\pi \widehat{\sigma} b}
\ (-q^2)^{-\widehat{\sigma} b}\ \mathrm{e}^{\widehat{\sigma}\left(q^2-c\right)}
+\dots\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\widehat{\sigma}=2 \pi ik$ and $q^2>0$. In Eq.~(\ref{newresult}) only the singularities
on the positive imaginary axis contribute, because we rotate
anticlockwise in the $\sigma$ plane, so that the sum is
restricted to $k>0$. Since
\begin{equation}
\label{prefactor}
(-q^2)^{-\widehat{\sigma} b}=(-q^2)^{-2\pi ik b}=
\mathrm{e}^{-2 \pi ikb \log(-q^2-i \varepsilon)}
=\mathrm{e}^{-2k \pi^2 b} \ \mathrm{e}^{- 2 \pi ikb \log|q^2|}\ ,
\end{equation}
we find that
\begin{equation}
\label{Newcorr2}
\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)= 2\pi i \sum_{k=1}^{\infty}
\mathrm{e}^{-4 k \pi^2b}\, \mathrm{e}^{ 2 \pi ik \left(q^2- b \log q^2 -c \right)}
\left(1 + \mathcal{O}\left( \frac{1}{\log q^2}\right)\right)\ .
\end{equation}
In Eq.~(\ref{Newcorr2}) we have replaced the dots in
Eqs.~(\ref{psising}) to~(\ref{newresult})
by an explicit estimate of the subleading behavior for large $q^2$.
We see how the change from simple poles to branch cuts, originating
from the logarithmic correction to the spectrum
in Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}), leads to logarithmic corrections to the
exponent appearing in the intermediate step of
Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowskitoy}). The result~(\ref{Newcorr2})
still corresponds to the limit $N_c\to\infty$, but corrections to
a pure Regge spectrum have now been taken into account. If we ignore the
$\mathcal{O}(1/\log{q^2})$ corrections, and set $b=c=0$, we
recover the result of Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowskitoy}).
We may again enforce the Schwarz reflection property by defining
$\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)$ for Im~$q^2<0$ by $\Pi_{\rm DV}((q^2)^*)=
\Pi^*_{\rm DV}(q^2)$.
Rather than discuss this particular result in more detail, we
now proceed to a discussion of how this result gets modified
when $N_c$ is taken large, but finite. We emphasize again the main
message, which is that the simple poles on the imaginary axis in
the Borel plane found in Sec.~\ref{sec2} stay in the same location,
but become branch points instead of simple poles when the spectrum
is generalized to be that of Eq.~(\ref{reggespectrum}).
\begin{boldmath}
\section{DVs for $N_c$ large but finite: A warm-up model}
\label{sec3prime}
\end{boldmath}
In Sec.~\ref{sec1} we have seen how the corrections to the asymptotic
Regge spectrum modify the nature, but not the location, of the
singularities of the Borel-Laplace transform $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ in the
$N_c\to \infty$ limit, and how these singularities determine
the form of the DVs. In the following two sections we will
discuss how $1/N_c$ corrections modify these results when
$N_c$ is taken large, but finite.
To this end, it is interesting to first study a physically
motivated model in which all calculations can be carried out
explicitly. The model in question is the one proposed in
Ref.~\cite{Blok}, and it is defined by the correlator
\begin{equation}
\label{shifman}
\Pi(q^2)=\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{z+n}+ constant\ ,
\end{equation}
where $z=(-q^2)^\zeta$, with $\zeta=1-\mathcal{O}(1/N_c)<1$. This
function has a cut in the complex $q^2$ plane for $\arg q^2=0$,
and poles on the zeroth Riemann sheet that we may associate with
resonances. Therefore, the model enjoys the analyticity properties
expected in QCD.
In terms of the Borel-Laplace transform, we may write, up to an
infinite real constant,
\begin{equation}
\label{Shifmanborel}
\Pi(q^2)=\int_0^{\infty}d\sigma \ \mathrm{e}^{-\sigma z(q^2)}\ \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\ ,
\quad \mathrm{Re}\,z>0\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is given in Eq. (\ref{rhohattoy}). Since
\begin{equation}
\label{connection}
z=|z|\mathrm{e}^{i \psi}=|q^2| \mathrm{e}^{i\zeta(\varphi-\pi)}\ ,
\quad (0\leq \varphi< 2 \pi \Leftrightarrow \mathrm{1st\ Riemann\ sheet})\ ,
\end{equation}
one finds that a full rotation by an angle $\Delta\varphi=2\pi$ in the
complex $q^2$ plane corresponds to a rotation
$\Delta\psi=\zeta\Delta\varphi=2\pi \zeta< 2\pi$ in the $z$
plane (recall $\zeta<1$), {\it i.e.}, there is a deficit angle.
The poles of the function~(\ref{shifman}) are located at $\psi=-\pi$
in the $z$ plane, which corresponds to $\varphi=\pi - \pi/\zeta <0$
in the $q^2$ plane, {\it i.e.}, to poles lying on the zeroth Riemann sheet.
Equation~(\ref{Shifmanborel}) is defined for $\arg\sigma=0$ and
$\mathrm{Re}\,z>0$. As we rotate $\sigma$ anticlockwise, going
from $\arg\sigma=0$ to $\arg\sigma=\pi/2-\pi(1-\zeta)=
\pi/2 -O(1/N_c)$,
we can simultaneously rotate $z$ and $q^2$
clockwise, going from $\psi=0$ and $\varphi=\pi$ ({\it i.e.},
Euclidean $q^2$) to $\psi=-\zeta\pi$ and $\varphi=0$ (the Minkowski
regime for $q^2$). At this point, we have not yet reached the poles
of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ on the imaginary axis in the $\sigma$ plane. Therefore,
this corresponds to a smooth transition in the $q^2$ plane from the
first to the zeroth Riemann sheet, through the cut at $\varphi=0$.
When we keep rotating $\sigma$, at $\arg\sigma=\pi/2$ we encounter
the poles on the imaginary axis of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$. This corresponds to
$\psi=-\pi$ and, through Eq.~(\ref{connection}), to
$\varphi=\pi-\pi/\zeta<0$, {\it i.e.}, to resonance poles
in $q^2$ lying on the zeroth Riemann sheet. It is this correspondence
between the location of the singularities of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ in the
$\sigma$ plane and the location of the singularities of $\Pi(q^2)$
in the $q^2$ plane that we wish to again emphasize here.
The location of the resonance poles which obstruct the analytic
continuation in $q^2$ and the location of the singularities in $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$
which obstruct the analytic continuation in $\sigma$ are linked
through the Borel-Laplace transform.
If we keep rotating $\sigma$ anticlockwise, crossing the
poles on the imaginary axis, we will again pick up the contribution
from the residues of those poles, through Cauchy's theorem,
leading to DVs having the form of the cotangent function in
Eq.~(\ref{adlerminkowskitoy}), with the variable $q^2$ replaced
by $z$. This is precisely the correct result for DVs
in this model \cite{Blok}.
\vskip0.4cm
\begin{boldmath}
\section{DVs for $N_c$ large but finite: QCD}
\label{sec4}
\end{boldmath}
Let us now discuss the effect of $1/N_c$ corrections in the case
of QCD. It is clear that the large-$N_c$ limit must be taken with
care. As we have seen in Eq.~(\ref{Newcorr2}), in the strict
large-$N_c$ limit DVs are not a small correction to the
(analytically continued) OPE. This is not surprising, since
the large-$N_c$ limit of the spectral function is
not a good approximation to the real-world spectral function.
\begin{figure}
\begin{center}
\leftline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig10-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-1cm}$ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2cm}\rightline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig17-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{2.1cm}
\vspace{-1cm}\leftline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig11-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-1.5cm}$ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2.2cm}\rightline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig18-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{2cm}
\vspace{-1.5cm}\leftline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig13-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-1.7cm} $ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2.cm} \rightline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig12-crop.pdf}\hspace{-.2cm}}
\vspace{1cm}
\leftline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig15-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{-2cm}$ \hspace{2cm} \text{ \Huge $\Leftrightarrow$}\hspace{2cm}$
\vspace{-2cm} \rightline{\includegraphics*[width=4cm]{Fig14-crop.pdf}}
\vspace{0.8cm}
\includegraphics*[width=5cm]{Fig16-crop.pdf}
\caption{Contour used to jump over the cut in the $\sigma$ plane.
Analytic extension into the zeroth Riemann sheet using the generalized
Borel-Laplace transform.}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
The spectrum of QCD is not known in any detail at large, but finite,
$N_c$, so we can no longer calculate the function $\sigma\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$
from Eq.~(\ref{rhohat}) as we did in the previous sections. Some
important qualitative features of the spectral function are
known, however. Moving away from the strict large-$N_c$ limit to $N_c$ large
but finite, it is known, for example, that the poles of $\Pi(q^2)$
on the Minkowski axis move a small distance away into the zeroth
Riemann sheet and a cut in $\mathrm{Im}\,\Pi(q^2)$ appears on this axis.
Starting from the initial representation~(\ref{adler}) with
$\arg \sigma=0$, valid for $\frac{\pi}{2}< \arg q^2< \frac{3\pi}{2}$,
as we rotate towards $\arg \sigma= \frac{\pi}{2}+ \epsilon$ and cover
the region $-\epsilon< \arg q^2 < \pi - \epsilon$, now nothing dramatic
occurs. In contrast to the case of the strict large-$N_c$ limit,
where the resonance poles are located on the Minkowski axis, now that
$N_c$ is finite, as we move from $\arg q^2= + \epsilon$ to
$\arg q^2= -\epsilon$, crossing the Minkowski axis, we move into
the zeroth Riemann sheet without encountering any singularity.
This is so because $\Pi(q^2)$, as we saw in the warm-up model model
in Sec.~\ref{sec3prime}, and in the perturbative series in
Sec.~\ref{sec1prime}, is \emph{continuous} across the
corresponding cut. It is only as $\arg q^2$ becomes more
negative, and $q^2$ moves deeper into the zeroth Riemann
sheet, that the poles corresponding to the presence of
resonances are encountered. When $N_c$ is large (but finite)
a resonance pole in the complex plane is located at
an angle $\varphi_{N_c}$ given by
\begin{equation}
\label{angle}
\tan \varphi_{N_c}\approx \varphi_{N_c} =- \frac{\Gamma}{M}= -
\frac{a}{N_c}\left(1 + \mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N_c}\right)\right)\ ,
\end{equation}
where $a\sim N_c^0>0$ and we have used that $\Gamma\sim 1/N_c$ and
$M\sim N_c^0$. A string-based model suggests that the parameter
$a$ is independent of the resonance excitation number
$n$ \cite{string}.\footnote{This feature is also observed
in two-dimensional QCD \cite{Blok}.} Thus, as $1/N_c$ corrections
cause the resonance poles to rotate clockwise by an angle
$\varphi_{N_c}\approx - \frac{a}{N_c}$ in the complex $q^2$ plane,
the singularities of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ in the complex $\sigma$ plane,
according to Eq.~(\ref{adler}), rotate anticlockwise by the same angle
past the positive imaginary axis. These singularities must therefore be
located (approximately) along the ray
$\arg \sigma \simeq \frac{\pi}{2}+ \frac{a}{N_c}\equiv\phi_0$
(see Fig.~2), where we have assumed here that $a$ does indeed not
depend on $n$. In fact, we are primarily interested in the
singularity closest to the origin, as this will be the one
that generates the leading contribution to the DVs. A mild dependence
of $a$ on $n$ will thus have no impact on our conclusions.
If the large-$N_c$ limit is a reasonably smooth one, the
distance of this closest singularity to the origin cannot be too
different from that found in the $N_c=\infty$ limit in
Sec.~\ref{sec1}, namely, $|\widehat{\sigma}(k=1)|=| 2\pi i|=2\pi$. We thus assume
that the singularity closest to the origin is located at
$\widehat{\sigma}= \sigma_0 \ \mathrm{e}^{i \phi_0}$ with
$\phi_0=\frac{a}{N_c}+ \frac{\pi}{2}$ and $\sigma_0=2\pi$,
up to subleading $1/N_c$ corrections, as depicted in Fig. 2.
In this case, as $\sigma$ is rotated from $\arg \sigma=0$ to
$\arg \sigma=\pi$, we cross the branch cut (depicted by a
blue line in Fig. 2). This generates a DV contribution given by
the integral over the contour, $\Gamma$, shown in the bottom panel
of Fig. 2, akin to that appearing in Eq.~(\ref{adlerDV}) of
Sec.~\ref{sec2}, and having the form
\begin{equation}
\label{DV}
\frac{d\Pi_{\rm DV}}{dq^2}(q^2)= \int_{\Gamma}d\sigma\
\mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2} \sigma \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\ ,
\end{equation}
where we can now take $q^2>0$. Equivalently,
\begin{equation}
\label{DVpi}
\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)=\int_{\Gamma}d\sigma\
\mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\ ,
\end{equation}
up to a constant of integration which, as in Sec.~\ref{sec2},
has no physical effect.
Let us assume that the function $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ is of the general form
\begin{equation}
\label{branch}
\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)=\frac{a_0}{(\sigma-\widehat{\sigma})^{1+\gamma}}\left[ 1+
a_1 \left (\sigma-\widehat{\sigma}\right)^{p_1}+ \frac{a_{\log}}{\log(\sigma-\widehat{\sigma})}+\dots\right]\ ,
\end{equation}
where $\gamma=-\widehat{\sigma} b + \mathcal{O}(N_c^{-1})$, and
$a_0=\mathrm{e}^{-\widehat{\sigma} c}\ \Gamma(1+\gamma)\left(1+
\mathcal{O}\left(N_c^{-1}\right)\right)$, in accordance with
Eq.~(\ref{rhohatbranch}) in Sec.~\ref{nonpert}. The generic parameters
$p_1>0$ and $a_1, \, a_{\log}$ encapsulate
the dependence on the corrections to the Regge spectrum associated
with the quantities $\epsilon_{F,M}$ in Eq. (\ref{psi}).
One then obtains for the associated duality-violating contribution
\begin{equation}
\label{DVbranch}
\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)=\int_{\sigma_0\ \mathrm{e}^{i \phi_0}}^{\infty\
\mathrm{e}^{i \phi_0}}d\sigma \ \mathrm{e}^{\sigma q^2}
\mathrm{Disc}\{ \mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)\} \ ,
\end{equation}
which yields ({\it cf.} App.~\ref{app1})
\begin{equation}
\label{result}
\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)= 2 \pi i\ \mathrm{e}^{-2\pi i\left(c+\gamma/2\right)}
\, (-q^2)^\gamma \ \mathrm{e}^{q^2\widehat{\sigma}}\left[1+ a_1 \,
\frac{\Gamma(1+\gamma)}{\Gamma(1+\gamma-p_1)}\,
\frac{\mathrm{e}^{i \pi p_1}}{(-q^2)^{p_1}} + \frac{a_{\log}}
{\log q^2}+\dots \right]\ .
\end{equation}
This result depends solely on the location of the branch point
($\widehat{\sigma}=\sigma_0 \ \mathrm{e}^{i \phi_0}$) and the nature of the
branch cut, $\gamma$. The orientation of the branch cut in the complex
plane is irrelevant, as expected.
For $N_c$ large, recalling that $\widehat{\sigma}=\sigma_0\left( - \sin(\frac{a}{N_c})
+ i \cos(\frac{a}{N_c})\right)= 2\pi (i - \frac{a}{N_c})
\left(1+\mathcal{O}(N_c^{-1})\right)$ and
$\gamma=-2\pi ib+ \mathcal{O}(N_c^{-1}) $, one obtains
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{resultNc}
\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)&=& 2 \pi i \, \mathrm{e}^{-2\pi^2 b}\, \mathrm{e}^{-2\pi ci}\,
(-q^2)^{-2\pi ib}\ \mathrm{e}^{ 2\pi q^2 \left(i-\frac{a}{N_c}\right)}\ \nonumber\\
&&\hspace{-1cm}\times \left[1+ a_1 \, \frac{\Gamma(1- 2\pi ib)}
{\Gamma(1-2\pi i b-p_1)}\, \frac{\mathrm{e}^{i \pi p_1}}{(-q^2)^{p_1}}
+ \frac{a_{\log}}{\log q^2} +\dots \right]+
\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N_c}\right)\ ,
\end{eqnarray}
from which one can extract the leading contribution
\begin{eqnarray}
\label{final result}
\hspace{-3cm}\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)&\approx & \ 2\pi i \, \mathrm{e}^{-4\pi^2 b}\,
\mathrm{e}^{-2 \pi q^2 \frac{a}{N_c}} \\
&& \times \bigg[\cos2\pi\Big(q^2- c- b \log{q^2}\Big)
+ i \sin 2\pi \Big(q^2-c - b\log{q^2}\Big)\bigg]\ \nonumber\\
&&\hspace{2cm}\left(1+ \mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{N_c};
\frac{1}{(q^2)^{p_1}};\frac{1}{\log q^2}\right)\right)\nonumber\ ,
\end{eqnarray}
where Eq.~(\ref{prefactor}) has again been used. Since
Eq.~(\ref{final result}) is valid for $q^2>0$, taking the
imaginary part yields the DV part of the spectral function. As
before, Eq.~(\ref{resultNc}) also gives $\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)$ in
the complex plane, for Re~$q^2>0$ and Im~$q^2>0$. For Im~$q^2<0$
it is defined using $\Pi_{\rm DV}((q^2)^*)=[\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)]^*$,
thus enforcing the reflection property. The new contribution
$-q^2 d\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)/dq^2$ should be added to Eq.~(\ref{eq:QCD})
in order to obtain a complete representation of the Adler function
in the Minkowski region, for large $q^2$.
As one can see, the main effect of the subleading terms in the
Regge expansion at large $n$ is the logarithmic correction
to the argument of the cosine and sine functions modulating the exponential
falloff with $q^2$. There are at least two reasons to expect these corrections to
generate only small modifications to these sinusoidal factors. First,
$|b\log q^2|\ll q^2$ for any $b$ at large $q^2$. Second,
the phenomenological knowledge which, as we have said,
supports a Regge behavior in QCD, does not yield any evidence
for a non-zero value for the $\log n$ term in the mass spectrum.
In other words, phenomenology is consistent with a small $b$ in
QCD. This result provides theoretical support for the
parametrization introduced in \cite{Cata1,Cata2}, which
was successfully tested against precise data for the non-strange
vector and axial-vector spectral functions obtained from
hadronic $\tau$ decays by the OPAL \cite{OPAL} and
ALEPH \cite{ALEPH} experiments, in a series of analyses of
the QCD coupling, $\alpha_s$ \cite{Boito1,Boito2,Boito3}.
In App.~\ref{sec:numerics} we give some numerical evidence
for the agreement between the results obtained from the fits
to Regge trajectories obtained, {\it e.g.}, in Ref.~\cite{Masjuan},
and those obtained from fits to the $\tau$ data.
Further theoretical studies using the functional analysis methods
developed in \cite{CGP14, BC2017} may also help understanding the
origin and nature of DVs in QCD.
We end this section with two comments. First, as already noted
at the end of Sec.~\ref{sec2}, even for Euclidean $q^2$, the OPE
for $\Pi(q^2)$ is asymptotic, and, at any finite order the remainder
is of order $\mbox{exp}(-R|q^2|)$, where $R$ is the distance of the
nearest non-perturbative singularity in the Borel plane. Here, up
to $1/N_c$ corrections, $R=2\pi$, and thus these exponential remainders
are much smaller than the exponential suppression factor
$\mbox{exp}(-2\pi q^2 a/N_c)$ in Eq.~(\ref{final result})
for $N_c$ large enough. This singularity thus plays two roles:
the absolute value of its position in the complex plane
sets the size of the exponential remainder for the OPE in the Euclidean
regime, while both the absolute value and its phase determine
the form of the DV contributions in the Minkowski regime. This
can be explicitly verified in the simple model of Sec.~\ref{sec2},
for example. In the more realistic approach of the subsequent
sections, also a logarithmic cut starting at $\sigma=0$ in the
Borel plane appears. However, this cut plays a different role, leading
to the logarithmic corrections in each term in the OPE,
as discussed in Sec.~\ref{OPE} above.
Second, if we
take $q^2=s+i\Delta$ in Eq.~(\ref{resultNc}),
we find that DVs are exponentially suppressed with a factor
$\mbox{exp}[-2\pi\Delta]$ away from the positive real $q^2$
axis. If we then follow the prescription of Ref.~\cite{PQW} by
taking $\Delta\propto s$, DVs are exponentially suppressed
at large $s$, even in the limit $N_c\to\infty$.
Our results are thus consistent
with the smearing method proposed in Ref.~\cite{PQW}.
\vskip0.4cm
\begin{boldmath}
\section{Conclusions}
\label{sec:conclusions}
\end{boldmath}
In this paper, we analyzed the large $q^2$ behavior of the Adler
function, with the aim of deriving its form on the Minkowski axis,
where neither perturbation theory nor its supplemented version,
represented by the full OPE, provide a reliable representation.
While the OPE is the dominant contribution at
large $q^2$, there are additional nonperturbative contributions,
which are not part of the OPE. These quark-hadron duality violating
contributions can be probed starting from fairly general assumptions
about the spectrum using the techniques of complex analysis. Our
main result is the expression for the leading duality-violating
contribution to the vacuum polarization, given in Eq.~(\ref{final result}).
For any analysis such as ours, some non-perturbative input
going beyond the OPE is needed. This non-perturbative input should
reflect the properties of the spectrum, which determines the Adler
function through the dispersion relation, Eq.~(\ref{adler}). This
relation also shows that the Adler function is a function of one
variable, $q^2$ (as long as we work in the chiral limit), expressed
in terms of the scale of QCD. However, in practice, by introducing
the perturbative coupling $\alpha_s(-q^2)$, it is usually rearranged
in terms of a double expansion in powers of $\alpha_s(-q^2)$ and $1/q^2$,
given a choice of renormalization scheme.
Our analysis is based on the fact that we can write the Adler function
as the Borel transform, in the
plane of the complex variable $\sigma$, of a function
$\sigma B^{[\rho ]}(\sigma )$, where $B^{[\rho ]}(\sigma )$ is, itself, the
Laplace transform of the spectral function, {\it cf.} Eqs.~(\ref{adler})
and~(\ref{rhohat}). The Borel-Laplace transform $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ allows us to
effectively continue the asymptotic expansion of the OPE from the
Euclidean to the Minkowski domain. This is accomplished by
taking advantage of the combination of the exact nature of the
dispersion relation~(\ref{adler}) and the powerful
techniques of analytic continuation. The Borel-Laplace representation,
moreover, allows us to relate the large Euclidean $q^2$ behavior of
the Adler function to the behavior of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ near $\sigma=0$. In
particular, the logarithmic corrections to the OPE are directly
related to the cut along the negative real axis
emanating from $\sigma=0$ in the Borel plane, as shown in
Secs.~\ref{OPE} and~\ref{sec1prime}. In Sec.~\ref{sec1prime} we
also recovered the standard renormalon picture relating the OPE
to perturbation theory, and rederived the SVZ sum rules.
There can be no singularities to the right of the imaginary axis
in the $\sigma$ plane, as follows directly from Eq.~(\ref{adler}).
However, we find that, beyond the singularity at $\sigma=0$, there
may be further singularities in the half-plane Re~$\sigma\le 0$,
with the location and nature of these singularities depending on
general properties of the spectrum.
Since the full spectrum of QCD\footnote{Here, we are of course
concerned with the channel relevant to the vector-current only.}
is not known, even in the large-$N_c$ and
chiral limits, we have had to make assumptions in order to be able to
identify the location and nature of these singularities. Our main
assumption is that, for asymptotically large energies, the spectrum
for $N_c=\infty$ lies on a Regge trajectory.\footnote{Technically,
a radial trajectory.} This assumption is supported by phenomenology,
intuitive arguments based on string theory and the solution of
large-$N_c$ QCD in two dimensions. At large but finite energies,
we parametrize the spectrum in terms of a rather general form,
with many parameters ($b$, $c$ and the parameters $d^{(F,M)}(\nu_{F,M})$
and $d^{(F,M)}(\lambda_{F,M},\nu_{F,M})$ of Eqs.~(\ref{reggespectrum})
and~(\ref{corrections})). Starting from the limit $N_c\to\infty$,
it turns out to be possible to extend the analysis to large but
finite $N_c$, with plausible additional assumptions
(see Sec.~\ref{sec4}).
While we cannot derive these assumptions from QCD, we
{\it can} show that, starting from these assumptions, it is
possible to reconstitute the OPE for large Euclidean $q^2$. Explicitly,
with the general parametrization of the spectrum given by
Eqs.~(\ref{reggespectrum}) and (\ref{corrections}), there is enough
freedom available to allow a match to the usual form of the OPE, where
inverse logarithms can be re-expressed in terms of $\alpha_s(-q^2)$ in
the large-$\beta_0$ approximation. This result can be generalized
to include also higher-order terms in the $\beta$ function affecting
the relation between $q^2$ and $\alpha_s(-q^2)$. In fact, our results
agree with those of Ref.~\cite{Pineda}, where also some contributions
beyond the large-$\beta_0$ approximation were considered.
While we have not traced the contribution
of all such needed additional Regge spectrum corrections to our
final result, Eq.~(\ref{final result}), we conjecture that such
corrections will not alter the shape of the leading expression for
$\Pi_{\rm DV}(q^2)$.
We find that for $N_c\to\infty$, the singularities of $\mathcal{B}^{[\rho]}(\sigma)$ are located
on the imaginary axis, while for finite $N_c$ they rotate anticlockwise
from the imaginary $\sigma$ axis by an amount $\sim 1/N_c$, associated
with the decay widths of resonances. The singularity closest to the
origin, at a distance approximately equal to $2\pi$ in units of the
Regge slope, yields the leading term in the duality-violating
contribution to the vacuum polarization, Eq.~(\ref{final result}).
Singularities farther away lead to exponentially subleading terms.
These singularities are unlike the cut starting at $\sigma=0$ along
the negative real axis, which is associated with the perturbative
expansion (and perturbative corrections to the higher-order terms in
the OPE), as discussed in Sec.~\ref{sec1prime}. In this sense, the
two types of singularities in the Borel plane, and, therefore, the
two expansions, are clearly separated.
We conjecture that the existence of these singularities in the Borel
plane is more general than just a consequence of the Regge behavior,
with corrections of the form assumed in this paper. These
singularities in the $\sigma$ plane are a direct consequence of the
fact that the spectral function extends all the way to infinity: if
the spectral function were to vanish beyond a finite value,
$t_{max}$, of $t$, there would be no singularities in $\sigma$, and
the OPE would be a convergent power series in $1/q^2$ (for $q^2>t_{max}$)
without any corrections logarithmic in $q^2$. Thus, the fact that
the OPE is divergent suggests that there are contributions which
are exponentially suppressed in the inverse of the expansion variable,
$1/q^2$, in accordance with the notion of a transseries, and this
is precisely what we find to be the case.
There are several questions we have not answered. One obvious question is
whether our analysis can be extended systematically beyond the class
of corrections to a Regge spectrum given by Eqs.~(\ref{reggespectrum})
and~(\ref{corrections}), and, connected to that, beyond the
large-$\beta_0$ approximation. Another physically interesting question
is how our results would change when a non-vanishing quark mass is taken
into account. These questions are beyond the scope
of the current paper.
\vskip0.4cm
\section*{Acknowledgements}
MG and SP would like to thank M. Jamin, P. Masjuan and A. Pineda
for conversations. SP would like to thank D. Greynat and S. Friot
for correspondence, and M.T. Seara in particular for discussions on
the subject of Ref.~\cite{Math}. DB, KM and SP would like to thank
the Department of Physics and Astronomy at San Francisco State
University for hospitality. The work of D.B. is supported by the S\~ao Paulo
Research Foundation
(Fapesp) grant No. 2015/20689-9 and by the Brazilian National Council
for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), grant No.
305431/2015-3.
The work of IC was supported by the
Ministry of Research and Innovation of Romania, Contract PN 16420101/2016.
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department
of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under
Award Number DE-SC0013682 (MG). KM is supported by a grant
from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada,
and SP by
CICYTFEDER-FPA2014-55613-P, 2014-SGR-1450 and the
CERCA Program/Generalitat de Catalunya.
\section*{\Large APPENDICES}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 5,837 |
>Museum
Kids' Exhibition
Technoversum
Suggest page
Deutsches Technikmuseum
A place for communication and the exchange of knowledge
The Deutsches Technikmuseum invites the visitor to take part in a fascinating and exciting discovery tour through the cultural history of technology. It is located at a central traffic junction near Potsdam Square - the "Gleisdreieck" on the historic premises of the Anhalt freight station. The spacious museum park with wind and water mills, forge and brewery is a natural oasis right in the middle of the city. A candy bomber at the front of the new building has become an internationally known landmark. The museum attracts half a million visitors annually.
With its exhibitions, the museum has made a name for itself as a recognised and independent high-profile educational establishment. It actively shapes the political and scientific debate on the role of technology and science in modern societies by organising lectures, symposia and congresses.
Due to the dramaturgical structure of neuStart - Mobil ohne Öl?, it is not only the past but also the present and the future that become "museum epochs". Moreover the exhibition theme is to be discussed and promoted both in the museum and in the scope of the supporting programme and the Internet magazine www.neustart-ausstellung.de. This neuStart - Mobil ohne Öl? an initial example of the new orientation of the Deutsches Technikmuseum and points to the future Technoversum concept as from November 2007.
In addition to standard guided tours in English and German, we also offer tours that are specially tailored to suit students age 11 and above.
Deutsches Technikmuseum · Trebbiner Str. 9 · 10963 Berlin · 030/90 254-0 · info@sdtb.de | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 3,794 |
Ouratea campos-portoi är en tvåhjärtbladig växtart som beskrevs av Herman Otto Sleumer. Ouratea campos-portoi ingår i släktet Ouratea och familjen Ochnaceae. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.
Källor
Malpigiaordningen
campos-portoi | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,902 |
\section{Introduction}
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have drawn a great deal of attentions recently as a powerful framework to generate high perceptual quality images.
Performance superiority of GANs as an alternative to train generative models has been demonstrated by many applications in a variety of areas including image-to-image translation \cite{zhu2017unpaired}, image inpainting \cite{yeh2016semantic}, style transfer \cite{li2016combining}, image restoration \cite{yu2018underwater}, and image synthesis \cite{zhang2017stackgan}.\par
In order to enhance the quality of generated images, various losses have been proposed and combined with the adversarial loss to form the overall training objective function of the GANs. With multiple losses or constraints, balancing between different losses becomes a critical issue for model performance optimization. A linear combination of losses does not guarantee optimal solutions when the objective space is non-convex. Besides, in most GAN models, weightings of various losses are defined empirically with limited explanation on how to derive the best value of weights. Fine-tuning these parameters can be very time-consuming and wasteful of computation resources. We address this problem by considering the combination of losses in the training objective function of GAN as a multi-objective optimization problem. We propose an adapted formulation based on hypervolume indicator to define the multi-objective function flexibly and efficiently. The resulting GAN is termed as HypervolGAN. \par
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews image super-resolution, GAN and multi-objective optimization. Section 3 explains the proposed HypervolGAN in detail. Section 4 presents experiment settings, results and discussions. Finally, Section 5 concludes the work and discusses possible directions of further research.
\section{Related Work}
\subsection{Image Super-resolution}
Super-resolution (SR) algorithms restore a high resolution (HR) image from one or multiple low resolution (LR) observations and have recently become an active topic of research topic due to potentials in a number of practical and real-world applications, such as ultrasound imaging \cite{errico2015ultrafast}, aerial imaging \cite{akgun2005super}, video enhancement \cite{bishop2003super}, and digital holography \cite{fournier2017pixel}. The aim is to provide fine texture details that are absent due to limited capability of the imaging devices in capturing more pixels per unit area of the sensors. Based on the number of LR observations, SR algorithms can be categorized into single image SR (SISR) and multiple images SR (MISR), and our focus here is the SISR problem.\par
Conventional SISR algorithms are based on reconstruction methods by utilizing image priors. Domain-based SISR algorithms use specific class of image priors \cite{tappen2012bayesian,sun2012super}, while generic SISR algorithms use general image priors like edges \cite{fattal2007image}, image statistics (e.g. heavy-tailed gradient distribution in \cite{shan2008fast}), patches \cite{damera2000image} and prediction models that generate HR images through predefined mathematical formula \cite{yang2014single}. In the last decade or so, learning based convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become the most popular method for SISR and have boosted performances in both accuracy and speed \cite{dong2016accelerating,wang2019end,dong2015image,kim2016accurate,ulyanov2018deep}. As CNNs are becoming to have deeper structures and more complex cost functions, SISR can be considered as an image generation problem and can be solved by GAN models. The most representative studies include SRGAN \cite{ledig2017photo} and ESRGAN \cite{wang2018esrgan}. Also there have been many efforts to develop variants of GAN models with different losses to enhance quality of generated HR images \cite{dosovitskiy2016generating,chen2017face,yu2016ultra,johnson2016perceptual}.
\subsection{Generative Adversarial Networks}
Introduced in \cite{goodfellow2014generative}, GAN is composed of a generator $G$ and a discriminator $D$, where the generator is a generative model and the discriminator is a classifier network that provides useful gradients for optimizing the generator by adversarial learning, such that generated samples can have higher quality. And the basic objective function of GAN is a min-max game written as,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:eq1}
\min_{G} \max_{D} {V(D,G)}= \mathbf{E}_{x \sim p_{data}} [\log(D(x))] +\mathbf{E}_{z \sim p_{z}} [\log(1-D(G(z)))]
\end{equation}
where $x$ represents data sampled from the data distribution $p_{data}$, $z$ represents noise variable sampled from noise distribution $p_{z}$, $D(x)$ represents the probability that input data is from $p_{data}$. Training $G$ and $D$ is simultaneous, the generator is optimized to generate fake samples with plausible details to fool the discriminator, while the goal of the adversarial discriminator is to distinguish fake samples from true samples.\par
Many variants of GAN have been developed as further investigations on adversarial loss and tackling divergence and mode collapse issues in training. Conditional GAN \cite{mirza2014conditional} includes auxiliary information to provide specific data mode. Least squared GAN \cite{mao2017least} adopts the least square function to replace sigmoid cross entropy loss function in the overall training objective function. Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) \cite{arjovsky2017wasserstein} has been proposed to minimize the Wasserstein distance between data distribution and generator distribution. Furthermore, Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) \cite{gulrajani2017improved} adds a gradient penalty in the overall loss fucntion as an improved version of WGAN. Relativistic GAN (RGAN) and Relativistic average GAN (RaGAN) have been proposed in \cite{jolicoeur2018relativistic} to use a relativistic discriminator, which estimates the probability that true data is more realistic than generated fake data.
\subsection{Multi-Objective Optimization}
Multiple objective optimization (MOO) is a common problem that exists in almost every aspect of the real world, where a compromising and practical solution needs to be derived under the constraints of conflicting objectives. It is also a highly active research topic in optimization techniques that require objective functions to be optimized simultaneously. A multi-objective optimization problem has $n$ objective functions $f(x)=( f_1(x),...,f_n(x))$ that map a solution $x \in X$ in the decision variable space $X$ to a $n$-dimensional vector $\mathbf{y}=f(x)=(y_1,...,y_n)$ in the objective space $Y$. \par
However, for complex MOO problems, no single solution is capable of realizing simultaneous optimization of several conflicting objectives. Instead, there exists a set of best possible compromising solutions that are called Pareto-optimal solutions. Pareto-optimal solutions are the solutions for which one objective cannot be improved without degrading the others. Without loss of generality, we assume maximization of a MOO problem and there are two decision variables $x_1, x_2 \in X$. $x_1$ is said to dominate $x_2$ (denoted as $x_1 \succ x_2$) if \cite{zitzler1999multiobjective}
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
&\forall \, i \in \{1,...,n\}: f_i(x_1) \geq f_i(x_2) \qquad and\\
&\exists \, j \in \{1,...,n\}: f_j(x_1) > f_j(x_2)
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
A decision variable $x$ is called a nondominated solution if it is dominated by no other variables in the set. For the entire search space, it is a Pareto-optimal solution of the Pareto-optimal set. Corresponding objective vectors are represented by points in the $n$-dimensional objective space that form the Pareto front.\par
There are many multi-objective evolutionary algorithms to derive approximations to the Pareto-optimal solutions for MOO problem \cite{deb2001multi,coello2007evolutionary}. In order to evaluate the quality of the solutions generated by different optimizers, quality indicators have been proposed to map a set of solutions to a scalar value \cite{beume2009complexity,zitzler2003performance}. The hypervolume indicator \cite{zitzler2003performance} is the most useful and representative quality indicator with many favorable properties for performance assessment of multi-objective optimizers \cite{zitzler2007hypervolume}. According to \cite{zitzler1999multiobjective}, the hypervolume indicator $\mathcal{H}$ measures the volume of dominated space bounded by an approximation of Pareto set and the reference point in the $n$-dimensional objective space. One of the ways to calculate $\mathcal{H}$ of a set of solutions $A$ is given by \cite{zitzler2007hypervolume} as follows,
\begin{equation}
\mathcal{H}(A, r) := \int_r 1[\exists x \in A: f(x) \succeq z \succeq r] \, dz
\end{equation}
where $z \in Y$ represents objective vectors that $A \succeq \{z\}$, $r$ is the reference point that is dominated by all $x$, and $1[\cdot]$ is the indicator operator referring to the attainment function \cite{zitzler2007hypervolume}.
Maximizing the hypervolume indicator converts the multi-objective optimization problem into single objective optimization, and encourages an approximation set to move towards the Pareto set, thus solutions in the approximation set have better quality values. There are many studies conducted for hypervolume indicator as performance assessment methods \cite{bringmann2013approximation,knowles2002metrics}, guidance for search algorithms \cite{knowles2003bounded,emmerich2005emo}, and fast computation of hypervolume \cite{while2005heuristics,fonseca2006improved}.
\section{Proposed Method}
There is a trend that the training objective function of GAN contains more than one adversarial loss in order to enforce certain constraints such that generated samples can have certain qualities. A convex combination of losses with regularization terms, which is frequently adopted for most of GANs, might not be an effective way to derive efficient solutions (i.e. generated samples) for GANs with multi-objective training function. We propose to solve the problem from the perspective of multi-objective optimization by maximizing the hypervolume of generated samples. And we adapt the computation of hypervolume into a negative logarithm version of the hypervolume enclosed by the objective vectors (i.e. the losses) and their respective upper bounds. Therefore the proposed HypervolGAN has the overall objective function defined as follows,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:hypervol}
\mathcal{L} = - \sum_k log(\mu_k - \mathcal{L}_k)
\end{equation}
where $\mu_k$ denotes the corresponding upper bound for loss $\mathcal{L}_k$. A normalized HypervolGAN regularizes all objective spaces to the range of [0,1], and the overall training objective function becomes,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:hypervol_norm}
\mathcal{L}_{norm} = - \sum_k log(1 - \frac{\mathcal{L}_k}{\mu_k})
\end{equation}
In our case, we implement the training objective function of the proposed HypervolGAN on ESRGAN and SRGAN, thus $\mathcal{L}_k$ includes adversarial loss $\mathcal{L}_{GAN}$, pixel loss $\mathcal{L}_{pix}$ and perceptual loss $\mathcal{L}_{fea}$. For adversarial loss $\mathcal{L}_{GAN}$, ESRGAN adopts the relativistic GAN \cite{jolicoeur2018relativistic} where $\mathcal{L}_{GAN}$ is written as,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:esrgan}
\mathcal{L}_{GAN} = - \mathbf{E} \, [log(1-D(I_{HR},G(I_{LR}))) + log(D(I_{HR},G(I_{LR})))]
\end{equation}
while SRGAN adopts the conventional adversarial loss equation as follows,
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:srgan}
\mathcal{L}_{GAN} = - \mathbf{E} \, [log(D(G(I_{LR})))]
\end{equation}
Pixel loss (Equation \ref{eq:pixelloss}) is a content loss that computes the difference between generated sample $G(I_{LR})$ and ground truth $I_{HR}$ in either L1 or L2 norm.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:pixelloss}
\mathcal{L}_{pix}= \mathbf{E} \, [\|G(I_{LR})-I_{HR}\|_p]
\end{equation}
Perceptual loss, denoted by $\mathcal{L}_{fea}$, is initially introduced by \cite{johnson2016perceptual} and then extended in SRGAN \cite{ledig2017photo}, which calculates L1 or L2 distance between feature representations of generated samples and ground truth images.
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:fealoss}
\mathcal{L}_{fea} = \frac{1}{W_{i,j}H_{i,j}} \sum_{x=1}^{W_{i,j}} \sum_{y=1}^{H_{i,j}} \| \phi_{i,j}(I_{HR})_{x,y} - \phi_{i,j}(G(I_{LR}))_{x,y} \|_p
\end{equation}
where $\phi_{i,j}$ is the feature map obtained after activation of the j-th convolution before i-th maxpooling layer in the VGG19 network. $W_{i,j}$ and $H_{i,j}$ are the dimensions of feature maps. While in ESRGAN \cite{wang2018esrgan}, authors propose to use feature maps before activation.
\section{Experiments}
\subsection{Datasets}
For training, we used DIV2K train dataset \cite{agustsson2017ntire}, which contains 800 high quality images of 2K resolution and their low resolution counterparts with $\times$4 downscaling factor. Model performance was tested on four benchmark datasets, Set5 \cite{bevilacqua2012low}, Set14 \cite{zeyde2010single}, BSDS100 \cite{martin2001database}, and DIV2K test dataset. During training, batch size was set to 16, each patch of the size 128 $\times$ 128. Training data was augmented with random horizontal flips and 90 degree rotations.
\subsection{Experiment Details}
For a fair comparison, we adopted the network architectures of baseline SRGAN and ESRGAN and the training process as introduced in \cite{wang2018esrgan}. Pre-trained PSNR-oriented model was used for initialising the training for ESRGAN, and pre-trained MSE-based super-resolution ResNet for SRGAN training initialization, in order to avoid undesired local optima for the generator \cite{wang2018esrgan,ledig2017photo}. Training took 400k iterations in total. Learning rate was set as $1 \times 10^{-4}$, and halved at 50k, 100k, 200k, and 300k iterations. For optimization, we used the Adam solver \cite{kingma2014adam} with $\beta_1=0.9$, $\beta_2=0.999$. To implement our proposed HpervolGAN, we defined upper bounds for GAN loss, pixel loss and perceptual loss respectively as $\mu_{ESRGAN}=20$, $\mu_{SRGAN}=200$, $\mu_{pix}=0.1$, $\mu_{fea}=10$. And we also investigated the impact of normalization of different objective spaces.
Training ESRGAN took around 3 days to finish, while SRGAN took around 1 day due to its light network structure.
Networks were implemented using Pytorch framework \cite{paszke2017automatic} on a NVIDIA Titan V GPU.
\subsection{Results and Analysis}
We compared our proposed HypervolGAN with the baseline GAN models on four benchmark datasets. And model performances were evaluated by four representative image quality measures, PSNR, SSIM \cite{wang2004image}, FSIMc \cite{zhang2011fsim} and GMSD \cite{xue2013gradient}. Quantitative results (averaged over three independent runs) are given in Tables \ref{tab:ESRGAN} and \ref{tab:SRGAN}. For visual comparison, exemplar results are provided in Figures \ref{fig:Resultimages} and \ref{fig:resultpatches} with quantitative measures and small patches for inspecting textural details.\par
As can be seen from Tables \ref{tab:ESRGAN} and \ref{tab:SRGAN}, the proposed HypervolGAN outperformed the baseline model in both ESRGAN and SRGAN cases. We believe this is because the training objective function defined in the HypervolGAN (Equation \ref{eq:hypervol}) provides gradient received by the generator $G$ as follows,
\begin{equation}
\frac{\partial \mathcal{L}}{\partial \theta_G} = \sum_k \frac{1}{\mu_k-l_k} \frac{\partial l_k}{\partial \theta_G}
\end{equation}
Hence the total gradient is a weighted sum of gradients of different losses, and different gradients are weighted in an automatic way instead of fixed as manually defined in the baseline model. Moreover, by this formulation, as the losses vary in every iteration during training, weights of gradients are accordingly adjusted and follow the principle that the larger the loss, the higher importance the corresponding gradient receives. Therefore, it explains the performance given by HypervolGAN is at least comparable to the baseline model, and in most cases, HypervolGAN effectively improves the model performance. On the other hand, although new parameters (upper bound $\mu_k$ for corresponding loss $l_k$) are introduced, it reduces repetitive and time-consuming work of fine-tuning the weights. And it is easier to find out a loose upper bound for respective loss through trial experiments, considering at the beginning of training when losses are usually high. Compared to the traditional way of defining weights for multiple objectives, HypervolGAN is a more efficient approach to balance the importance of various objectives. \par
\begin{table}[h]
\begin{center}
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.1}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c}
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c}{Baseline} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{HypervolGAN} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{HypervolGAN$_{norm}$} \\
\cline{2-7}
Set5 & L1 & L2 & L1 & L2 & L1 & L2 \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 28.33 & 28.47 & 28.20 & 27.78 & 28.55 & \textbf{28.58} \\
SSIM & 0.8018 & 0.8038 & 0.7945 & 0.7881 & 0.8072 & \textbf{0.8114} \\
FSIMc & 0.8779 & 0.8795 & 0.8752 & 0.8683 & \textbf{0.8813} & 0.8783 \\
GMSD & 0.0433 & 0.0426 & 0.0428 & 0.0451 & \textbf{0.0403} & 0.0413 \\
\hline
Set14 & & & & & & \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 24.72 & 24.87 & 24.63 & 24.35 & \textbf{24.94} & 24.61 \\
SSIM & 0.6642 & 0.6670 & 0.6586 & 0.6450 & \textbf{0.6701} & 0.6615 \\
FSIMc & 0.8407 & 0.8412 & 0.8373 & 0.8289 & \textbf{0.8460} & 0.8330 \\
GMSD & 0.0720 & 0.0691 & 0.0669 & 0.0725 & \textbf{0.0648} & 0.0719 \\
\hline
DIV2K Test & & & & & & \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 26.58 & 26.64 & 26.64 & 26.26 & \textbf{26.99} & 26.56 \\
SSIM & 0.7413 & 0.7401 & 0.7395 & 0.7290 & \textbf{0.7531} & 0.7394 \\
FSIMc & 0.9813 & 0.9810 & 0.9834 & 0.9752 & \textbf{0.9859} & 0.9782 \\
GMSD & 0.0624 & 0.0613 & 0.0594 & 0.0648 & \textbf{0.0565} & 0.0625 \\
\hline
BSDS100 & & & & & & \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 24.08 & 24.16 & 23.79 & 23.91 & \textbf{24.23} & 24.21 \\
SSIM & 0.6258 & 0.6288 & 0.6145 & 0.6168 & \textbf{0.6318} & 0.6276 \\
FSIMc & 0.8032 & 0.8019 & 0.7932 & 0.7938 & \textbf{0.8047} & 0.7989 \\
GMSD & 0.0814 & 0.0796 & 0.0781 & 0.0822 & \textbf{0.0745} & 0.0794 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Performances of various training objective functions for ESRGAN on Set5, Set14, DIV2K test and BSDS100 datasets.}
\label{tab:ESRGAN}
\end{table}
\begin{table}[ht]
\begin{center}
\setlength{\tabcolsep}{8pt}
\renewcommand{\arraystretch}{1.1}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c}
\hline
& \multicolumn{2}{c}{Baseline} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{HypervolGAN} & \multicolumn{2}{c}{HypervolGAN$_{norm}$} \\
\cline{2-7}
Set5 & L1 & L2 & L1 & L2 & L1 & L2 \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 28.40 & 27.76 & 29.37 & 28.18 & \textbf{29.39} & 28.21 \\
SSIM & 0.8136 & 0.7961& \textbf{0.8377} & 0.8116 & 0.8374 & 0.8116 \\
FSIMc & 0.8763 & 0.8491 & \textbf{0.8938} & 0.8772 & 0.8933 & 0.8773 \\
GMSD & \textbf{0.0387} & \textbf{0.0387} & 0.0408 & 0.0466 & 0.0406 & 0.0473 \\
\hline
Set14 & & & & & & \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 25.21 & 24.64 & 25.98 & 25.10 & \textbf{26.02} & 24.93 \\
SSIM & 0.6846 & 0.6671 & 0.7019 & 0.6754 & \textbf{0.7052} & 0.6635 \\
FSIMc & 0.8429 & 0.8268 & 0.8548 & 0.8379 & \textbf{0.8556} & 0.8364 \\
GMSD & \textbf{0.0646} & 0.0656 & 0.0693 & 0.0745 & 0.0686 & 0.0743 \\
\hline
DIV2K Test & & & & & & \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 27.20 & 26.72 & 28.13 & 26.99 & \textbf{28.15} & 26.86 \\
SSIM & 0.7630 & 0.7496 & \textbf{0.7878} & 0.7536 & 0.7873 & 0.7506 \\
FSIMc & 0.9845 & 0.9832 & 0.9859 & 0.9801 & \textbf{0.9860} & 0.9800 \\
GMSD & \textbf{0.0570} & 0.0574 & 0.0598 & 0.0659 & 0.0594 & 0.0666 \\
\hline
BSDS100 & & & & & & \\
\hline
PSNR(dB) & 24.78 & 24.43 & \textbf{25.45 }& 24.58 & 25.43 & 24.47 \\
SSIM & 0.6541 & 0.6403 & \textbf{0.6697} & 0.6370 & 0.6685 & 0.6311 \\
FSIMc & 0.7923 & 0.7634 & \textbf{0.8108} & 0.8008 & \textbf{0.8108} & 0.7992 \\
GMSD & \textbf{0.0718} & 0.0722 & 0.0787 & 0.0820 & 0.0789 & 0.0827 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption{Performances of various training objective functions for SRGAN on Set5, Set14, DIV2K test and BSDS100 datasets.}
\label{tab:SRGAN}
\end{table}
In addition, we also investigated the effects of using different GAN models, L1 or L2 norm for pixel loss and perceptual loss, and normalization of objective spaces. The overall performances can be obtained from the quantitative results (Tables \ref{tab:ESRGAN} and \ref{tab:SRGAN}) and qualitative results (Figure \ref{fig:Resultimages}). SRGAN produces better results and higher quality images with smoother details than ESRGAN, and SRGAN also has lighter network structure and requires shorter training time and less computation resources. With regard to the norm, trained ESRGAN models with losses defined in L1 norm have slightly better performances over those defined in L2 norm, while for trained SRGAN models performance is significantly improved by L1 norm. Although visual difference is not obvious to be observed, L1 norm on pixel loss and perceptual loss is beneficial for training GANs for SISR.
Lastly, normalization of objective spaces has different impacts on ESRGAN and SRGAN respectively. Quantitatively, HypervolGAN$_{norm}$ outperforms HypervolGAN by a larger margin on ESRGAN than SRGAN. Qualitatively, HypervolGAN$_{norm}$ generates more smooth details and enhances image quality as shown in Figure \ref{fig:Resultimages}. In short, normalization of multi-objective spaces is a necessary component for adopting the HypervolGAN approach.
More example patches from other datasets are provided in Figure \ref{fig:resultpatches} for further observations of textural details in generated images.
\section{Conclusions}
In this paper, we have proposed HypervolGAN for training multi-objective training functions for GAN and validated its effectiveness on improving model performance for tackling the single image super-resolution task. Networks trained by different training objective functions have been tested on four benchmark datasets for the task and generated extensive experimental results to confirm the superiority of the proposed HypervolGAN over various GANs. With HypervolGAN, multi-objective training for GANs can concentrate efforts on exploring meaningful components in the overall loss function, and it is flexible to experiment without concerning about balancing weights and wasting computation time and resources. This work provides an initial study on combining adversarial learning and multi-objective optimization, there are many potential relevant research topics to further advance the investigation and generalization. For example, upper bound value adaption for different types of GAN loss and additional constraints, applying HypervolGAN for solving other image processing topics or beyond.
\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
\begin{subfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/result1.png}
\label{fig:result1}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/result2.png}
\label{fig:result2}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/result3.png}
\label{fig:result3}
\end{subfigure}
\end{center}
\caption{Exemplar results of Head.PNG from Set5 dataset generated by trained models with various training objective functions.}
\label{fig:Resultimages}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[ht]
\begin{center}
\begin{subfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/result4.png}
\label{fig:result4}
\end{subfigure}\\
\begin{subfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/result5.png}
\label{fig:result5}
\end{subfigure}\\
\begin{subfigure}
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.95\textwidth]{images/result6.png}
\label{fig:result6}
\end{subfigure}
\end{center}
\caption{Exemplar patches of samples from Set14, DIV2K Test and BSDS 100 datasets generated by trained models with various training objective functions.}
\label{fig:resultpatches}
\end{figure}
\clearpage
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,133 |
\section{Introduction}
Since the discovery of the first pulsating white dwarf in an accreting
close binary cataclysmic variable (GW Lib; Warner \& van Zyl 1998, van
Zyl et al. 2000, 2004), photometry
of systems with similar orbital periods and optical spectra has revealed
at least 10 more (Warner \& Woudt 2004, Woudt \& Warner 2004,
Araujo-Betancor et al. 2005, Vanlandingham et al. 2005,
Patterson et al. 2005a,b, Mukadam et al. 2006,
G\"ansicke et al. 2006, Nilsson et al.
2006).
Seven of these pulsating accreting white dwarfs were found by followup work on
cataclysmic variables (CVs) that were discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
(SDSS; York et al. 2000) by Szkody et al. (2002b,2003,2004,2005,2006).
The optical clue for candidate pulsating white
dwarfs is the
presence of broad absorption lines (originating from the white dwarf)
flanking the Balmer emission lines (originating from the disk). In order
to be able to view the white dwarf, the accretion disk contribution to
the optical light has to be small, a situation that occurs at very low
mass transfer rates, and hence short
orbital periods (near 80 min). Since the SDSS provides spectra that
are about 2 magnitudes fainter than previous surveys, up to 25\% of
SDSS discovered CVs show the white dwarf presence (Szkody et al. 2005).
As the analysis of pulsation frequencies can lead to mass determination
and other aspects of the internal structure of the white dwarf
via the technique of asteroseismology, the compilation of a significant number of
pulsating CVs
provides a valuable database for probing the effects of mass transfer and
accretion on the long term evolution of white dwarfs as well as the effect
of external heat input, He enriched envelopes and fast rotation on the
location of the instability strip.
Non-interacting hydrogen atmosphere (DA) pulsating white dwarfs (DAVs or ZZ
Ceti stars)
show typical non-radial g-mode pulsations with periods of 50-1400s
and have temperatures in the narrow range of 10800-12,300K and log g$\sim$8
(Bergeron et al. 1995,2004, Koester \& Allard 2000, Mukadam et al. 2004, Gianninas et al. 2005). While the pulsation frequencies
and amplitudes of CV pulsators appear to be similar to those of ZZ Ceti systems (van Zyl et
al. 2004, Warner \& Woudt 2004, Woudt \& Warner 2004, Mukadam
et al. 2006), the temperatures of the underlying white dwarfs may be
quite different. UV observation of GW Lib (Szkody et al. 2002a) with the
Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) revealed a white dwarf with
a temperature of 14,700K (or a best fit with 63\% of the white dwarf
having a temperature of 13,300K and the remainder at 17,100K),
temperatures far outside the empirical instability strip for non-interacting
ZZ Ceti stars. Townsley, Arras \& Bildsten (2004) could match the pulsation periods
and high temperature if they assumed ${\ell }$=1 g-modes and a 1M$_{\odot}$
white dwarf with an accreted H-rich layer of 3$\times$10$^{-5}$M$_{\odot}$.
On the other hand, Araujo-Betancor et al. (2005) used a snapshot STIS
spectrum to show that the CV pulsator HS2331+3905 could be fit with a
10,500K, 0.6M$_{\odot}$ white dwarf, within the range of normal ZZ Ceti stars.
Of course, pulsating CV white dwarfs are rotating very rapidly compared to
non-interacting ZZ Ceti stars and the thermal profiles are quite different
because the surface layer is heated from above by compression and
irradiation due
to accretion. Although the accretion rates for the CV pulsating white
dwarfs are small ($\sim10^{-13}\,{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$), the thermal
profiles may still be altered and
the effective temperature
might not be the best parameter to locate the instability strip.
This
does not imply that the temperature in the driving regions is not important
in locating the instability strip, but only that the effective
temperature may not
be reflecting the temperature in the driving regions due to accretion
heating
in the surface layers.
Arras et al.
(2006) show that the temperature in the driving zone, log g and the He
abundance are all important for accreting white dwarfs.
In order to explore the physical parameter space occupied by
accreting pulsators (Arras et al. 2006),
and to attempt mode identification
through comparison of UV to optical amplitudes (Robinson et al. 1995),
we proposed further study of
three additional known pulsators with STIS.
After the proposal was
accepted, STIS was taken out of service but we were able to switch our program
to the Solar Blind Channel (SBC) which has the same wavelength coverage,
albeit much lower resolution and no TIME-TAG mode of photon counting. The
three objects are SDSSJ013132.39-090122.3 (Szkody et al. 2003; Warner \&
Woudt 2004), SDSS J161033.64-010223.3 (Szkody et al. 2002; Woudt \& Warner
2004) and SDSS J220553.98+115553.7 (Szkody et al. 2003; Warner \& Woudt 2004).
Throughout the rest of this paper, we will refer to these objects as
SDSSJ0131, SDSSJ1610 and SDSSJ2205. A summary of the orbital periods,
visual brightness and optical pulsation periods is provided for these
3 systems in Table 1. The SDSS spectra are shown in Figure 1.
\section{Observations and Reductions}
\subsection{HST Ultraviolet Observations}
The HST UV data were acquired using the prism
PR110L and the Solar Blind Channel on the Advanced Camera for
Surveys (ACS) to provide
UV spectra from approximately 1245 to 1800\AA. Due to the prism,
the dispersion varied from about 1.5\AA\ pxl$^{-1}$ at the far UV end to about
25\AA\ pxl$^{-1}$
at the longest wavelengths.
Each system was observed for 5 HST orbits using 61s integrations in ACCUM mode. The
dead time between observations was 40s so the time resolution of the spectra
are 101s. The first orbit had 26 integrations (due to the initial overhead
of setting up on a target) and the remaining 4 orbits contained 29 integrations.
Thus, the total time on each source consisted of 142 integrations of 61s
each or 8662s.
The UV data were analyzed using tools available under STSDAS and
pyraf (aXe14). The primary target was extracted using a variety of extraction
widths to optimize the S/N of the resulting spectra and light curves. For
the spectra, a wide extraction of 17 pixels was used and the resulting
142 spectra were co-added to produce a final spectrum. For the light curves,
a smaller extraction width produced the optimum (largest) pulse signal. This
optimum extraction width was determined to be 9, 12 and 4 pixels for SDSSJ0131, 1610 and
2205 respectively. The fluxes were then added across
wavelength for each
individual spectrum to produce photometric points
throughout the 5 orbits for a light curve that could be analyzed
for periodicity using Discrete Fourier transforms. For the 2 brightest
systems (SDSSJ0131 and 1610), the spectra at the peaks
and troughs of the resulting light curves were then individually combined
into
peak and trough summed spectra, as any difference in temperature between
these spectra would help constrain the change in temperature during a
pulsation cycle of the dominant mode.
\subsection{Optical Observations}
In order to prevent excessive UV light from entering the ACS detectors,
STScI required continual ground observations prior to and during the
HST observations to insure that the objects were not going into a dwarf
nova outburst. These monitoring observations were kindly provided by a large
group of worldwide amateurs and professionals (from AAVSO and
ROTSE and scientists at observatories for other programs). All 3 systems
remained at quiesence throughout the planning and execution of the
observations.
Coordinated simultaneous optical observations were achieved for
SDSSJ1610 in order to obtain the amplitude and period of the optical
pulsations. The 3.5m telescope at Apache Point Observatory (APO)
was used with a B filter on the CCD camera SPIcam
along with the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) 2.56m telescope and B filter on
the Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera (ALFOSC) on the night of
June 30/July 01. APO used an integration time of 20s while NOT used 14.1s.
Additional data were obtained on the 2m Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT)
on the nights preceding and following the HST observation. These observations
were accomplished with no filter and 30s integeration times.
To check the stability of periods for SDSSJ0131, additional APO data
were obtained on 2005 Dec 1 and 5 and also on 2006 Jan 30, using the imaging CCD on the
Dual Imaging Spectrograph (DIS) with no filters.
DIS utilizes a dichroic that splits the light at 5550\AA\ so that the blue
and red portions of the beam are then incident on two distinct CCD cameras. The
light curves obtained using the blue CCD camera are used in this paper, sensitive
in the wavelength range 3500-5550\AA. Windowing was used to read a small portion of the
CCD in order to reduce the read out time and obtain a suitable time resolution.
A standard IRAF\footnote{{IRAF (Image
Reduction and Analysis
Facility) is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, which
are operated by AURA,
Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.}}
reduction to extract sky-subtracted light curves from the CCD frames using weighted
circular aperture photometry (O'Donoghue et al. 2000) was employed.
The optical light curve of the target star was divided by a sum of one or more brighter comparison
stars and converted to the same fractional
amplitude scale and the times converted to Barycentric
Coordinated Time (Standish 1998). A Discrete Fourier
Transform (DFT) was then computed for all the optical light curves up to the Nyquist frequency.
Additional optical data for SDSSJ0131 over a longer timescale were obtained
from the 1.9m Radcliffe telescope at the Sutherland site of the South African
Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), using the University of Cape Town
CCD Photometer (UCTCCD; O'Donohue 1995) with no filter. Data were acquired during
several nights in 2003 July, August and September; 2004 September and November
and 2006 August. Fourier transforms were computed for each
night of data, as well as combined FTs for each month.
A summary of the HST and ground-based observations is given in Table 2.
\section{Light Curves and Pulsations}
The summed photometry from each HST spectrum was analyzed in a similar manner
as the DIS data.
Figure 2 shows a light curve for a single HST orbit for each
system; the pulsation is apparent in each case. The combined data from all
5 orbits were then
analyzed with DFT routines to obtain the quantitative periods and amplitudes.
Figure 3 shows the amplitude plots and Table 3 summarizes the resulting periods
and amplitudes. The APO, NOT, and HCT data were analyzed in the same way and
the results shown in Table 3 and Figure 4.
The optimum dataset exists for SDSSJ1610 since we can compare periods and
amplitudes from simultaneous UV and
optical data observations.
Figure 2 shows that the UV pulse is most clearly resolved for this system.
Table 3 shows that the observed UV and optical
periods are identical, while the UV amplitudes are
increased by 2-6 times over those of the optical. Our optical results are
consistent in period and amplitude with the 2 independent periods
that were evident in the
past data of Woudt \& Warner (2004) as listed in Table 1. The observed
304s period is a harmonic of the 608s period.
For pulsating white dwarfs, the identification of the excited
non-radial g-modes
can provide the total mass of the star as well as the
mass of the H layer (Kawaler \& Hansen 1989).
Each of the eigenmodes that can be excited in the star is described by a set of indices:
$k$ is the radial quantum number that gives the number of nodes between the
surface and the center of the star,
$\ell $ is the azimuthal quantum number that gives the number of nodes on the surface,
and $m$ is the number of nodes along the meridian; it is used to describe the
frequency if the spherical symmetry is lost due to rotation or a magnetic field.
We use spherical harmonics (${{\mathrm{Y}}^{\ell }}_m$) to describe these eigenmodes.
This identification
of the quantum numbers $k$, $\ell $,
and $m$ for each observed period
is not easy, as it involves matching observed periods with predictions from
models (with many free parameters). Robinson et al. (1995)
pioneered a method of determining the $\ell $ value
based on the change in amplitude as a function of wavelength
due to limb darkening and the modified geometric cancellation (Robinson,
Kepler \& Nather 1982).
Limb darkening effectively reduces the viewing area of the stellar disk,
and this reduction in area depends on wavelength.
At UV wavelengths, the increased limb darkening
decreases the contribution of zones near
the limb, and modes of $\ell $=3 are canceled less effectively in the UV
compared to $\ell $=1 or 2.
However, this does not hold true for $\ell $=4 modes, which do not show a significant
change in amplitude as a function of wavelength.
Robinson et al. (1995), Nitta et al. (2000) and Kepler et al. (2000)
calculated
amplitudes in the UV for different values of $\ell $. To attempt to
constrain the $\ell $ value for the 608s period observed in SDSSJ1610, we
determined the amplitudes for this period
for four different wavelength regions: 1245-1360\AA,
1360-1500\AA, 1500-1640\AA, and 1640-1800\AA. The effective wavelengths
of these regions were computed using the best-fit white dwarf model
(section 4). We also computed the amplitudes for 20 individual wavelength bins
but the
resulting error bars were too large to be useful. Figure 5 shows the
observed pulse amplitude ratios for our four wavelength regions
along with the theoretical
amplitude ratio for single DA white dwarf stars using Koester's atmosphere
models (Finley, Koester \& Basri 1997). The top panel shows the model
calculations for $\ell $=1 to 4 modes for log g=8, T$_{eff}$=14,500K (top) and 12,500K
(bottom).
While neither plot can
fit all the wavelengths, the $\ell $=1 mode with T$_{eff}$=12,500K is a
good fit to all but the shortest wavelength and it appears that high
order modes ($\ell $=3,4) can be ruled out.
However, since
the temperatures for accreting white dwarfs are quite different than for DAVs
(see below), the simple non-interacting DA
model may not be applicable. In addition, since the disk may
cast a shadow on the equatorial regions of the white dwarf, the limb
darkening and geometric cancellation may be different than that for single
white
dwarfs.
It is also interesting that the peaks in the FT of SDSSJ1610 show
no splitting (Figure 4), even though the resolution is $\sim$10$^{-5}$ Hz
(vsini$\sim$0.5 km s$^{-1}$),
whereas fitting of line widths in HST spectra
have shown velocities about 50-100 km s$^{-1}$ (Sion et al. 1994) for accreting
white dwarfs. However, there may be some process that is suppressing some of the modes.
Long
term monitoring of GW Lib (van Zyl et al. 2004) showed clusters of
periods separated only by about 1 $\mu$Hz whose origin is not clear. It
will take a much longer combined run on SDSSJ1610 to tell if this is also
the case in this system.
For the other two objects, where simultaneous optical light curves could not be
obtained, we can only compare the observed UV periods and amplitudes with
available optical values. For SDSSJ2205, the single observed
UV period of 576s matches one of the previously observed optical periods
noted by Warner
\& Woudt (2004), and the UV amplitude is about 6 times the optical value. The
strongest period (330s) observed in the optical by Warner \& Woudt is
not visible in the UV.
The brightest system (SDSSJ0131) shows no UV pulsation at the
highest amplitude period (595s) previously evident in the optical
data published in Warner \& Woudt
(2004). Their other 2 optical periods (260s and 335s) are also not
apparent in the SBC data.
Instead, a shorter period of 213 s near the Nyquist frequencey
is evident in the HST data
with an amplitude near 80 mma.
The 213s period
is obvious, although just barely resolved, in the SBC light curve (Figure 2).
This is the shortest period yet seen in an accreting pulsator.
Our extended optical coverage on this object with APO in the months following the HST
observation and with SAAO in the years preceding and following the HST
(Table 2) provides a handle on the stability of the observed periods.
Figure 6 shows the DFT of the 2006 January data while Figure 7 shows all
the monthly combined runs from the SAAO (Table 4 lists the observed
frequencies and periods from the SAAO runs). It is clear that the pulsation
spectra are highly variable, with longer periods most prominent in the
runs of 2003 (Warner \& Woudt 2004 use data from 2003 September), while
the 2004 runs show only the short period seen in the 2005 HST data. Then, in
2006 January (Figure 6) both the long period (near 600s) and the short (213s)
period are evident, and in 2006 August (Figure 7), these are both still
present, along with an even longer period (1130s) that is similar to one
seen in 2003 Aug.
While
changes in pulsation spectra are common in cool non-interacting ZZ Ceti
stars on timescales of months and even days,
it is not obvious what is to be
expected with these hotter pulsators. Long term monitoring of GW Lib
(van Zyl et al. 2004) does show that its pulsation amplitudes are unstable
as well. The 2 periods near 650 and 370s remain visible
in all runs (including the HST data), while other periods appear and become
invisible in other runs.
In SDSSJ0131, it appears that
all periods show large amplitude variations. Comparing the amplitude of the 213s period in
the UV with that seen in the optical gives a ratio of about 6, similar to
that of SDSSJ1610 and 2205.
\section{Spectral Fits}
The UV spectra of low mass transfer rate CVs are a combination of
the underlying white dwarf, the accretion disk and a source of emission
lines (likely an accretion disk chromosphere). To model the observed
SBC spectra, we employed a procedure similar to our analysis of STIS
data on similar systems (e.g. G\"ansicke et al. 2005). This involved using
Hubeny white dwarf LTE models TLUSTY195 and SYNSPEC46 (Hubeny \& Lanz 1995)
in a grid
of temperatures, gravities and abundances to create a best fit to the
spectrum. Due to the low resolution of the SBC and the past results which were
all consistent with log g=8, we fixed the log g at this value and used 0.01
solar abundance to fit the best temperature white dwarf. The constraints on
the fit include that the white
dwarf must provide the best match to the UV continuum shape, especially the broad
Ly$\alpha$ line, and its optical flux must fall below the observed optical
fluxes. Figure 8
shows the model results for a range of white dwarf temperatures (10,000K to
20,000K) compared to the observed HST and SDSS spectra of the brightest
system SDSSJ0131. It is immediately clear that the temperature typical
of non-interacting
ZZ Cet pulsators ($\sim$12000K) is too cool to fit the UV spectrum. A temperature
of 14,500K is derived from the best fit. This temperature white dwarf extrapolated to
optical wavelengths produces a $\it g$ magnitude of 19.2, well below the
observed SDSS $\it g$
mag of 18.3. In addition to the white dwarf, there is some continuum source
(the disk) that produces about 30\% of the light across the spectrum. This
is especially evident in the core of Ly$\alpha$ which should be zero for
a high gravity white dwarf.
As there is no good model of a non-steady
state disk at these low mass transfer rates, we added this continuum
component as a simple black body (power laws were tried with similar results),
used simple Gaussians to fill in the emission lines and redid the fits with
the two components. The resulting best fit for SDSSJ0131 is shown in Figure
9 and the results summarized in Table 5. A similar procedure produced the
best fits for SDSSJ1610 and SDSSJ2205 (Figures 10 and 11 and Table 5).
The spectra that produced the largest amplitude pulse were also added and fit
with
this procedure. These spectra had higher S/N but less overall flux. Thus,
the shape of the spectrum may be better defined but the total fluxes are
not correct for distances, etc. We also list these temperature fits as
T$_{optext}$ in Table 5
as a measure of the error of our temperature fits.
We also attempted to fit the difference between the peaks of the
pulsations and the troughs for the two brightest sources SDSSJ0131 and
SDSSJ1610. The spectra of the peak points in the light curves were summed
to produce one total peak spectrum
and then the troughs were summed to produce a total trough spectrum.
The resulting fits to the peak and trough spectra showed
no change in the white dwarf temperatures in either case,
which is not surprising
given that the uncertainties of our fits are on the order of
1000K.
The temperatures of the white dwarf in all 3 systems are similar,
close to 15,000K and much hotter than the temperatures of the DAV
pulsators. These temperatures are also very similar to that derived for
GW Lib (Szkody et al. 2002). Because we had used a two-temperature white dwarf
fit for GW Lib, rather than a white dwarf + BB, we redid the
fits to the STIS data of GW Lib using the approach here. The result
produces a best fit with T$_{wd}$=15,400K and T$_{BB}$=12,000K but
this fit is not as good as our past fit with 2 white dwarf components of
13,300K and 17,100 covering 63\% and 37\% respectively
of the white dwarf surface. Further confirmation that the two temperature white dwarf
is correct for GW Lib comes from inspection of its STIS spectrum. This
shows that the core
of Ly$\alpha$ does go down to zero flux, indicating that the white dwarf, rather
than a second component such as the disk, contributes all the UV flux. A
comparison of the single temperature white dwarf fit (14,700K) with that of
the WD+BB also shows that adding in a second component only changes the
derived temperature of the white dwarf by less than 1000K.
Thus, we now have secure results that four of the accreting ZZ Ceti stars
in CVs are hotter than single pulsators. On the other hand, HS2331+3905
is also secure in having a white dwarf temperature of 10,500K (see
Fig. 13 in Araujo-Betancor et al. 2005). While the UV emission lines in
HS2331+3905 are much stronger than in the four objects that have hot white
dwarfs (likely partly due to the weak white dwarf continuum), and
there are continuum variations which might imply a higher
inclination, the fact remains that the white dwarf pulsations are visible
in HS2331+3905 so the white dwarf light is prominent and it is cool.
In contrast to our three SDSS sources, all of which have UV fluxes greater
than the optical as in Figure 8, HS2331 has larger optical than UV fluxes,
and a distinct rise in flux longward of 1600\AA\ which pins down the
white dwarf temperature to its cool value.
Since accreting white dwarfs are known to show UV absorption lines of
Si, C and other metals, it is clear they do not have pure H atmospheres
(Sion 1999). Thus, perhaps it is not unexpected that the instability strip
is not the same as for ZZ Ceti stars. For accreting model white dwarfs
with a high He abundance ($>$0.38), Arras, Townsley \& Bildsten (2006)
find an additional hotter instability strip at $\sim$15,000K for low mass
white dwarfs due to \ion{He}{2} ionization.
Thus, they
infer that HS2331+3905 has a low mass white dwarf while GW Lib (and hence
SDSSJ0131, SDSSJ1610 and SDSSJ2205) should have highly evolved donor stars and more massive
white dwarfs.
\section{Conclusions}
Our low resolution light curves throughout five HST orbits for our
three white dwarf accreting pulsators all have increased pulsation amplitudes
in the UV compared to the optical, consistent with $\ell $=1 modes.
The simultaneous optical/UV data
for SDSSJ1610 showed identical periods in both wavelength regions, while
SDSSJ0131 and SDSSJ2205 showed one of three periods evident in the optical
at other times. The long term monitoring of SDS0131 shows that all pulsation
periods come and go, indicating a high level of instability for this system.
The summed UV spectra reveal hot white dwarfs in all three systems, similar
to past results on GW Lib but contrary to the lone cool accreting white dwarf
pulsator HS2331+3905. Based on just these five systems with well-determined
white dwarf temperatures from the UV, it appears that there is a wide
range in the instability strip for accreting systems, with most accreting
pulsators in a
regime that is hotter than for non-accreting ZZ Ceti stars. Whether this is due to
a difference in the white dwarf mass and/or He composition provided by an
evolved donor as proposed by
Arras, Townsley \& Bildsten 2006 can be confirmed if the white dwarf
masses and/or the
composition of the donor can be determined. As there is no evidence of
a donor star out to 9000\AA\ in the SDSS spectra and the systems are
generally faint, the donor will be difficult to characterize. Since the
absorption lines of the white dwarf are difficult to measure in the optical
with the contaminating Balmer emission, the best approach may be the use of
high resolution UV (the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph) time-resolved data
in the future to obtain the mass of the white dwarf, although the unknown inclinations will
create some uncertainty.
\acknowledgments
We are very grateful to the many observers who monitored our objects
to insure the safety of the UV detectors and allow our
observations to take place, including Ms. Bama, Dick Campbell, Dean Chandler, Katy Garmany
(and TLRBSE teachers), Bill Goff, Bernard Heathcote, Arne
Henden, Santosh Joshi, Seung-Lee Kim, Mercedes Lopez-Morales, David Mary,
John W. McAnally, Aaron Price, Chuck Pullen, ROTSE observers,
Patrick Schmeer, and D. E. Winget. We also kindly acknowledge Denise Dale and Ewald
Zietsman for the observations of SDSS J0131 taken at the SAAO.
This research was supported by NASA grant GO-10233.01A and through the
Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF-01175.01-A, both awarded from the Space
Telescope Science Institute which is operated
by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA,
under contract NAS 5-26555.
BTG was supported by a PPARC Advanced Fellowship.
The NOT data were taken using the ALFOSC, which is owned by
the Institute de Astrofisica de Andelucia (IAA) and operated by the Nordic
Optical Telescope under agreement between IAA and the NBIfAFG of the
Astronomical Observatory of Copenhagen.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 1,472 |
Dome Lids | Detroit Forming, Inc.
DFI possess one of the largest number of dome lid tool inventories in the industry. If it is made from foil, plastic or paper, shaped round, square or oval, DFI probably has a dome lid to fit on top of it.
Whether you are packaging deli trays at a supermarket, applying dome lids to meals in a hospital or applying lids on a food processing production line, DFI will likely be able to meet your needs.
Please allow DFI, and our experienced sales team, the opportunity to find the item that will meet your dome lid requirements. If DFI does not already have the item you seek, our experienced design staff can custom build the item you need. Either way, DFI clearly has you covered. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,087 |
Get the set that pretty much sums up our lives! We love our alternative way of twinning and its a case of definitely winning!
Adult T-shirt made using 100% semi combed ringspun cotton (for a softer more durable feel), this is great for all mums. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,459 |
Mercedes-Benz Vans presents first camper van concepts based on the X-Class
V-ClassVitoX-Class0 Comments
From 13 to 21 January 2018 Mercedes-Benz Vans exhibits camper van concepts based on its new pickup, the X-Class, for the first time in hall 7 (booth 7C11) at the Caravan, Motor, Touristik (CMT) show: a demountable cabin from bodybuilder Tischer as well as a conversion concept with integrated kitchen system by VanEssa mobilcamping. Furthermore, the brand with the three-pointed star shows the complete Marco Polo family at what is the world's largest public exhibition for tourism and leisure: the compact Marco Polo travel van as well as the recreational vehicles Marco Polo ACTIVITY and Marco Polo HORIZON, a right-hand drive version of which will be coming on to the market in 2018.
"It is important to us that our vehicles appeal to camper van bodybuilders as well, of course, to end customers. The X-Class fits seamlessly into our established product range. We are proud to introduce first camper van solution approaches together with Tischer and VanEssa at the CMT, just two months after the vehicle's launch", says Volker Mornhinweg, Head of Mercedes-Benz Vans.
"We are also continuing to develop our own travel vans and recreational vehicles – with positive customer feedback. Our newest arrival in particular, the Marco Polo HORIZON, is proving very popular and has played a decisive role in the growth of the Marco Polo family. Which is why we have now decided to launch the newcomer in a right-hand drive version, too", continues Volker Mornhinweg.
Pickup camper vans: the department for adventure in a booming market
Simply to set off and to stop and stay where the fancy takes you: flexibility and independence are the most powerful motives for customers deciding to purchase a camper van. Between January and October 2017 almost 38,000 new vehicles were registered across all classes of camper vans, according to the German Caravanning Industry Association (Caravaning Industrie Verband). That is some 5,000 more than in the same period of the previous year.
Customers these days also tend to use their homes on wheels for trips to remoter regions that lie off the beaten track. From the Scottish Highlands to remote passes through Romania's Carpathian Mountains to sunrises at the Plage Blanche in Morocco: camping has become an adventure and a chance to enjoy nature to the fullest. Campers need two things for this: a vehicle with off-road capability, which is also comfortable for long journeys cross-country, and a living area with all vital essentials. Pickups with camper van solutions on board meet these requirements, and thus find their fanbase. In many cases the mobile home section can be demounted in a few easy steps, leaving the pickup to function as a straightforward vehicle for everyday use.
Camper van concepts based on the X-Class from Tischer and VanEssa mobilcamping at the CMT
The Mercedes-Benz booth at the CMT 2018 sees the debut of some first camper van concepts based on the X-Class.
Despite its compact size, the demountable cabin from bodybuilder Tischer offers a comfortable sleeping system in an alcove 150 cm wide, headroom of almost two metres, a kitchen with a 3-burner gas stove and three cosy seats. The latter can be converted into a second bed in just a few simple steps. With its large, fold-away wash basin and swivelling toilet unit, the integrated bathroom manages to offer enough space to take a shower. The sandwich design of the cabin sections ensures reliable stability and excellent insulation properties.
A different concept on the basis of the X-Class has been developed by VanEssa mobilcamping: a heavy-duty pull-out module weighing around 250 kg with a fully equipped kitchen – including such features as a coolbox, cooking and washing-up facilities as well as space for crockery and supplies. A second pull-out module offers even more space for further items. VanEssa protects the load compartment with a cover made out of yacht-deck-look teak wood, a water-resistant material particularly characterised by its strength and durability. Special pneumatic struts allow the cover to be propped up at an angle of 45 degrees. For trips over several days, VanEssa advises the fitting of a roof tent with rear-facing entrance.
Get-together at the CMT: the complete Marco Polo family on display
Also on display on the Mercedes booth at the CMT, alongside the X-Class, is the complete Marco Polo family – in each case as an EDITION model with a host of extras as standard, all at an attractive price: a Marco Polo EDITION in mountain crystal white metallic, a Marco Polo HORIZON EDITION in brilliant silver metallic and a Marco Polo ACTIVITY EDITION in flint grey metallic.
New for the compact Marco Polo travel van from April 2018 is a sound system with nine speakers, including a subwoofer and a 5-channel DSP amplifier, for the perfect audio experience. What is particularly interesting for campers: the Jehnert sound system offers a choice of two sound set-ups. With the "Driving" set-up, the music is specifically aimed in the direction of the driver and front passenger; with the "Living" set-up, the sound is additionally extended to the rear of the vehicle. Thanks to a Bluetooth port, the Jehnert sound system can be controlled from a smartphone – without the need for the head unit to be switched on. As a consequence, the new sound system can be operated from any of the seats, from the roof bed or from beneath the awning of the Marco Polo.
In 2018 Mercedes-Benz Vans will also be continuing to expand its international presence in the camper van market with the Marco Polo HORIZON. From the spring of this year onwards, the Marco Polo HORIZON, which celebrated its premiere in 2017, will also be available in a right-hand drive version. It will be launched in the two major right-hand drive markets of Great Britain and Japan. This also means that, for the first time, a Marco Polo model will be available in the Land of Smiles.
CaravanMarco polo
Previous ArticleMercedes-Benz in 2017: Number 1 in the premium segment
Next ArticleWorld premiere at CES 2018: MBUX: A completely new user experience for the new compact cars
The new Marco Polo from Mercedes-Benz
Mercedes-Benz Vans at Caravan Salon 2018
Mercedes-Benz Vans presents Sprinter with electric drive and fuel cell
Mercedes-Benz Vans at the CMT 2016: Numerous new features in the camper van market
Mercedes-Benz at the Düsseldorf Caravan Salon: Marco Polo and Marco Polo ACTIVITY – the new compact camper vans and recreational vehicles
Mercedes-Benz Viano Marco Polo: Tuscany Tour 2011 – another star in a perfect setting
Mercedes-Benz Vito captures the U.S. Vanlife scene
2019 Caravan Salon Düsseldorf: The new Sprinter is on success in the motorhome market | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 7,610 |
Finnish invasion of East Karelia may refer to:
Two operations during the Heimosodat ("Irredentist Wars") following World War I:
Viena expedition (1918)
Aunus expedition (1919)
Finnish invasion of East Karelia (1941) during World War II | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 6,369 |
Septesinus is a genus of monopisthocotylean monogeneans which currently comprises a single species, Septesinus gibsoni
References
External links
South Australian Museum: Catch of the day in Borneo uncovers new species
Monopisthocotylea
Monogenea genera | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 9,351 |
Koksownia Radlin – koksownia należąca do JSW KOKS S.A. Oddział Radlin, będącego częścią grupy kapitałowej JSW. Jest trzecią koksownią w Polsce pod względem rocznej produkcji koksu. Położona w Radlinie koło Wodzisławia Śląskiego.
Historia
Zakład powstał w 1911 r. jako oddział Kopalni Węgla Kamiennego "Emma", uruchomiono wtedy dwie baterie 45-komorowe, szamotowe typu Otto – Hoffman I i II o łącznej mocy 40 tys. ton rocznie. W 1913 r. wybudowano baterie III, typ Koppers, była ona szamotowa i opalana bocznie z produkcją 7 ton koksu z komory. W 1920 r. koksownia usamodzielniła się zachowując nazwę "Koksownia Kopalni Emma". W 1951 r. przekształcona w przedsiębiorstwo państwowe zmieniła nazwę na "Zakład Koksochemiczny Radlin". Baterię II rozebrano w 1953 r., a I w 1957 r. Trzecią baterie wycofano w 1966 r. Dwa lata później uruchomiono baterię IV, krzemionkową typu Collin. Dwie następne baterie nr V i VI wybudowano w latach 1928/29. Były to baterie krzemionkowe, typu Otto. W 1938 r. na roczną zdolność produkcyjną wszystkich baterii w Polsce wynoszącą ok. 2,3 mln ton, koksownia w Radlinie produkowała 540 tysięcy ton koksu. W latach 1952–1953 zmodernizowano baterie IV, V i VI, oraz wybudowano nową węglownię.
W 1966 r. wybudowano baterię typu PTU-57 o 56 komorach. Jako ostatnią wyłączono w 1981 r. baterię nr V. Wybudowanie instalacji odsiarczania gazu w Koksowni "Radlin" pozwoliło na eliminację dwutlenku siarki z kominów baterii koksowniczych w ilości ok. 80 – 90%. Uruchomienie w 1995 r. biologicznej oczyszczalni ścieków pozwoliło na zamknięcie wszystkich obiegów wodnych w zakładzie. W latach 1975–1997 zakład nosił nazwę "Koksownia Radlin w Wodzisławiu Śląskim".
Dzisiaj Koksownia "Radlin" eksploatuje dwie baterie koksownicze typu PTU – 57 oraz posiada jedną z najnowocześniejszych w Europie instalacji do odsiarczania gazu koksowniczego. W Koksowni Radlin produkowany jest wysokiej jakości koks wielkopiecowy i odlewniczy. Odbiorcą tego koksu jest hutnictwo żelaza i stali w Europie Zachodniej i Środkowej (np. w Austrii).
Obecne zdolności koksowni to 750 tys. ton koksu oraz 12 tys. ton benzolu rocznie. W połowie 2015 r. produkcja w zakładzie prowadzona była na poziomie 700–750 tys. ton koksu na rok, a zakład wykorzystuje praktycznie całą zdolność produkcyjną.
W 2011 r. kombinat przejęła Jastrzębska Spółka Węglowa.
Koksownia w 2015 r. zatrudniała 233 pracowników, a ze spółkami zależnymi ok. 400 osób.
Przypisy
Linki zewnętrzne
Radlin
Przedsiębiorstwa w Radlinie
Obiekty budowlane w Radlinie | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,382 |
Claude Petit, né le à Sidi Bel Abbès (Algérie) et mort le , est un homme politique français.
Il est député d'Oran de 1919 à 1928.
Références
Sources
Liens externes
Député de l'Algérie française (Troisième République)
Personnalité du Parti républicain-socialiste
Naissance en janvier 1871
Naissance à Sidi Bel Abbès
Décès en novembre 1966
Lieu de décès inconnu
Décès à 95 ans | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 1,658 |
\section{Introduction}
This article revisits an integral where the integrand takes the form of radical trigonometric functions.
A general form of radical trigonometric integrands in the context of this article refers to $\sqrt{a \pm b \sin x}$ or $\sqrt{a \pm b \cos x}$, for $a, b > 0$.
The integral of these functions is expressed in terms of elliptic integral and are available in mathematical handbooks and tables of integrals.
For example, the latter integral is given in Section 2.5 (see 2.576) of a famous mathematical handbook by Gradstyen and Ryzhik~\cite{gradshteyn}.
For a particular case of $a = b$, after removing the constant factor, the integrand reduces to radical trigonometric functions $\sqrt{1 \pm \sin x}$ or $\sqrt{1 \pm \cos x}$. Interestingly, it seems that explicit expressions for the integral of these functions have not been specifically listed in any tables of integrals and handbooks, including, but not limited to,~\cite{abramowitz,bronshtein,gradshteyn,table,mathar,polyanin,spiegel}.
The focus of this article is to consider the special case when $a = 1 = b$, where several techniques of integration are discussed in a more detail.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time when such a compilation for particular integrands is presented.
The motivation of this article springs from an encounter from one of the coauthors' in teaching Calculus~2 course during the Spring 2014 semester in
Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan.
Particularly, the content of this article is related to the topic on the integral calculus of polar curves, and one of the examples is calculating the length of a cardioid. We adopt the Calculus textbook written by Anton, Bivens and Davis~\cite{anton} where the polar curves are discussed in Section 10.3. Another recommended textbook reading for this course is the one written by Stewart~\cite{stewart12}. An example [Example 4, Section 10.4, page 692] from the latter textbook mentions that finding the length of cardioid $r = 1 + \sin \theta$ can be evaluated by multiplying both the numerator and the denominator of the integrand by $\sqrt{2 - 2 \sin \theta}$ or alternatively, using the Computer Algebra System (CAS). Yet, evaluating this integral by hand is apparently not so obvious to many students since they have to do further manipulation on the obtained expression. The screenshot of the example from Stewart's textbook has been excerpted and displayed in Figure~\ref{example}.
After rationalizing the numerator and implementing the Pythagorean trigonometric identity, the numerator simplifies to $\sqrt{\cos^2\theta} = |\cos \theta|$, but it has to be in absolute value form, instead of simply $\cos \theta$.
This is a common mistake found among students since they may forget or tend to ignore the absolute value sign.
From an instructor's perspective, it is imperative to remind the students to be aware of this fact. Referring to Bloom's taxonomy of learning domains~\cite{bloom}, the educational activity of this learning process is the {\sl cognitive domain}. The process covers {\sl knowledge}, {\sl comprehension} and {\sl application}. In this example, students possess the knowledge that any value of the square root must be non-negative and an absolute value of any quantity is always non-negative too. A comprehension of these facts is essential to conclude (application of knowledge) that the square root of a quantity squared is indeed equal to the absolute value of that quantity.
Referring to the revised Bloom taxonomy~\cite{anderson}, a connection between learning activities and learning objectives can further be established.
The knowledge dimension covers the {\sl factual} and {\sl conceptual} aspects.
In this context, students must know the definition of an absolute value and be able to make an interrelationship between the property of a square root and the absolute value.
The cognitive dimension includes {\sl remember, understand, apply} aspects. Possessing the knowledge of absolute value, it is crucial to investigate whether the students can retrieve this knowledge from their memory, whether they understand why absolute value has to be non-negative and whether they are able to simplify and conclude that $\sqrt{\cos^2 \theta} = |\cos \theta|$.
\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=0.99\textwidth]{Ex4.eps}
\end{center}
\caption{An example from a textbook on calculating the length of cardioid $r = (1 + \sin \theta)$ where the calculation details are omitted.} \label{example}
\end{figure}
Another educational aspect of the integral involving radical trigonometric functions is related to the {\sl synthesis} skill of {\sl cognitive domain} in Bloom's taxonomy. In the revised Bloom's taxonomy, the educational content involves {\sl factual} and {\sl conceptual} aspects of the {\sl knowledge} dimension, where students attempt to make interrelationships among the basic elements of trigonometric functions. The {\sl cognitive process} dimension covers {\sl remember, understand, apply} and {\sl analyze} aspects. When this example is posed to the classroom for the students to work on, it turns out that some excellent students come up with different techniques by manipulating the integrand expression. This shows that different students approach the problem distinctly, they attempt to integrate with the method which is most convenient to them. For instance, for some students, the technique of trigonometric substitution is a more comfortable approach, others implement a variable shift method to solve the problem successfully. Thus, there are several ways by which students can approach the problem.
For many Calculus instructors, however, the interest in integration techniques has waned.
With the introduction of CAS, many of them now give only cursory attention to such techniques.
Nevertheless, the methods of integration covered in this article are still interesting from educational perspective.
They provide a valuable pedagogical tool to assist and improve the students' learning skills, which are beneficial to both the instructors and the students themselves alike.
In particular, by introducing several methods during class sessions, the techniques covered in this article become useful in the sense that it does not only expose the students to various techniques of integration but also makes them review and strengthen their knowledge of trigonometry and trigonometric functions.
As can be observed later, this article recalls some important properties of trigonometric functions of sine, cosine and tangent as well as a significant application of trigonometric substitution in solving particular types of integration.
This article is organized as follows.
The following section covers the integral of radical sine function $\sqrt{1 \pm \sin x}$.
Section~\ref{cosine} briefly covers the integral of radical cosine function $\sqrt{1 \pm \cos x}$.
Several techniques of integration are covered and more detailed derivations are discussed in Section~\ref{sine},
including rationalizing numerator, combining trigonometric identities, twice trigonometric substitutions and variable shift methods.
All of these methods require some variations of integrating absolute value function, which will be presented accordingly in the corresponding subsections. Section~\ref{cardioid} presents an application where the integrals of radical sine and cosine functions appear, particularly in calculating the length of a cardioid. The final section draws conclusions and provides remark to our discussion.
\section{Integral of radical sine function} \label{sine}
This section deals with the integral of a radical sine function where the integrand takes the form $\sqrt{1 \pm \sin x}$.
There are a number of methods to obtain the result, and four techniques are covered in this section.
The first method is by rationalizing the numerator. From here, one may depart either to use the Pythagorean identity or to employ a trigonometric substitution.
The second method is by combining several trigonometric identities. We observe that double-angle formula and the identity relating $\sin x$ and $\tan x/2$
follow different paths of calculation and yet arrive at identical expression.
The third technique is by implementing trigonometric substitutions two times, mainly using tangent function.
Finally, the fourth technique is conducted by shifting the variable by $\pi/2$. Two options can be developed from this path, where
both of them alter the integral from radical sine function into radical cosine function.
The four methods covered in this section are summarized in the following tree diagram.
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}[level distance=6cm,sibling distance=0.5cm,scale=.8]
\tikzset{edge from parent/.style=
{thick, draw, edge from parent fork right},
every tree node/.style = {draw = blue!80, shape = rectangle, rounded corners =.8ex, fill = cyan!30,
minimum width=5cm,text width=5cm, align=center},grow'=right}
\Tree
[. {Integration techniques}
[.{Rationalizing numerator}
[.{Pythagorean identity} ]
[.{Trigonometric substitution} ]
]
[.{Combining identities}
[.{Double-angle formula} ]
[.{$\sin x$ and $\tan (x/2)$} ]
]
[.{Twice trigonometric\\ substitutions} ]
[.{Variable shift}
[.{$x = y - \pi/2$} ]
[.{$x = \pi/2 - y$} ]
]
]
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{center}
\subsection{Rationalizing numerator} \label{ratnum}
The following integral will be used in this subsection.
Let $f$ be a function which has at most one root on each interval on which it is defined, and $F$ an antiderivative of $f$, i.e. $F'(x) = f(x)$, then
\begin{equation}
\int \frac{\left| f(x)\right|}{\sqrt{F(x)}} \,dx = -2 \sgn[f(x)] \, \sqrt{F(x)} + C \label{av1}
\end{equation}
where $\sgn(x)$ is the sign function, which takes the values $-1, 0$ or $1$ when $x$ is negative, zero or positive, respectively.
\subsubsection*{Pythagorean identity}
Let $I$ be an indefinite integral of the radical sine function
${\displaystyle I = \int \sqrt{1 \pm \sin x}\, dx}$,
then rationalizing the numerator by multiplying both the numerator and the denominator with $\sqrt{1 \mp \sin x}$, applying the Pythagorean trigonometric identity and utilizing the definition of the absolute value, it yields:
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& \int \sqrt{1 \pm \sin x} \cdot \frac{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin x}}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin x}} \, dx
= \int \frac{\sqrt{1 - \sin^2 x}}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin x}} \, dx
= \int \frac{\sqrt{\cos^2 x}}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin x}} \, dx \\
&=& \int \frac{|\cos x|}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin x}} \, dx
= -2 \sgn(\cos x) \sqrt{1 \mp \sin x} + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where the last expression is readily obtained by implementing~\eqref{av1}.
\subsubsection*{Trigonometric substitution}
A similar solution can also be obtained using the trigonometric substitution of $u = \sin x$.
Differentiating with respect to $u$, we get $dx = du/\cos x = du/(\pm \sqrt{1 - u^2})$, where the positive and negative signs are related to the sign of $\cos x$. Thus for $u = \sin x \neq \pm 1$
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& \int \frac{\sqrt{1 \pm u}\, du}{\pm \sqrt{1 - u^2}}
= \int \frac{du}{\pm \sqrt{1 \mp u}}
= \mp 2 \sqrt{1 \mp u} + C \\
&=& \mp 2 \sqrt{1 \mp \sin x} + C
= -2 \sgn(\cos x) \sqrt{1 \mp \sin x} + C.
\end{eqnarray*}
\subsection{Combining identities}
A general, explicit form of an integral involving an absolute value of a function will be used in this section.
Let $f$ be a function which has at most one root on each interval on which it is defined, and $F$ an antiderivative of $f$ that is zero at each root of $f$ (such an antiderivative exists if and only if the condition on $f$ is satisfied), then
\begin{equation}
\int \left| f(x)\right| \,dx = \sgn[f(x)] \, F(x) + C, \label{av2}
\end{equation}
where sgn$(x)$ is the sign function defined previously.
\subsubsection*{Double-angle formula}
We manipulate the integrand by combining the Pythagorean trigonometric identity and the double-angle formula.
Using the Pythagorean trigonometric identity, writing $1 = \cos^2 (x/2) + \sin^2 (x/2)$ and using the double-angle formula for $\sin x$: $\sin x = 2 \sin (x/2) \cos(x/2)$, the integral of the radical sine becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& \int \sqrt{\cos^2\frac{x}{2} \pm 2 \cos \frac{x}{2} \sin \frac{x}{2} + \sin^2\frac{x}{2}} \, dx
= \int \sqrt{\left(\cos \frac{x}{2} \pm \sin \frac{x}{2} \right)^2}\, dx \\
&=& \int \left|\cos \frac {x}{2} \pm \sin \frac{x}{2} \right| \, dx
= 2 \sgn \left(\cos \frac{x}{2} \pm \sin \frac{x}{2} \right) \left(\sin \frac{x}{2} \mp \cos \frac{x}{2} \right) + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where the last expression is quickly obtained after implementing~\eqref{av2}.
\subsubsection*{Identity relating $\sin x$ and $\tan (x/2)$}
A similar result will also be obtained if one employs another trigonometric identity that relates $\sin x$ and $\tan (x/2)$.
Using the double-angle formula for $\sin x$ at the numerator and the Pythagorean trigonometric identity at the denominator, dividing both sides by $\cos^{2} (x/2)$, we obtain
\begin{equation*}
\sin x = \frac{2 \sin (x/2) \cos(x/2)}{\cos^2 (x/2) + \sin^2 (x/2)} = \frac{\frac{2 \sin (x/2) \cos (x/2)}{\cos^2(x/2)}}{1 + \frac{\sin^2 (x/2)}{\cos^2 (x/2)}} = \frac{2 \tan (x/2)}{1 + \tan^2 (x/2)}.
\end{equation*}
Thus, the integral of the radical sine function $I$ turns to
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& \int \sqrt{1 \pm \frac{2 \tan x/2}{1 + \tan^2 x/2}} \, dx
= \int \sqrt{\frac{1 + \tan^2 x/2 \pm 2 \tan x/2}{1 + \tan^2 x/2}} \, dx \\
&=& \int \sqrt{\frac{(1 \pm \tan x/2)^2}{\sec^2 x/2}} \, dx
= \int \left|\frac{1 \pm \tan x/2}{\sec x/2} \right| \, dx \\
&=& \int \left|\cos \frac {x}{2} \pm \sin \frac{x}{2} \right| \, dx
= 2 \sgn \left(\cos \frac{x}{2} \pm \sin \frac{x}{2} \right) \left(\sin \frac{x}{2} \mp \cos \frac{x}{2} \right) + C.
\end{eqnarray*}
\subsection{Twice trigonometric substitutions}
A similar expression of the solution as that of the previous section can also be obtained by the trigonometric substitution $u = \tan x/2$.
This implies $dx = 2 \, du/(1 + u^2)$ and writing $\sin x = 2 \sin (x/2) \cos (x/2)$ the integral of the radical sine function becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& \int \sqrt{1 \pm \frac{2u}{1 + u^2}} \, \frac{2du}{1 + u^2}
= 2 \int \frac{|1 \pm u| \, du}{(1 + u^2)^{3/2}} \\
&=& 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \left(\int \frac{du}{(1 + u^2)^{3/2}} \pm \int \frac{u \, du}{(1 + u^2)^{3/2}} \right).
\end{eqnarray*}
Employ another trigonometric substitution $u = \tan y$ and $v = 1 + u^2$ for the first and the second integrals, respectively.
Thus,
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \left(\int \frac{\sec^2 y\, dy}{(1 + \tan^2 y)^{3/2}} \pm \frac{1}{2} \int \frac{dv}{v^{3/2}} \right)
= 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \left(\int \frac{\sec^2 y\, dy}{\sec^3 y} \mp v^{-1/2} \right) \\
&=& 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \left(\int \frac{1}{\sec y} \, dy \mp \frac{1}{\sqrt{v}} \right)
= 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \left(\int \cos y \, dy \mp \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}} \right) \\
&=& 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \left(\sin y \mp \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}} \right) + C
= 2 \sgn(1 \pm u) \sgn\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}} \right) \left(\frac{u \mp 1}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}} \right) + C\\
&=& 2 \sgn\left(1 \pm \tan\frac{x}{2} \right) \sgn \left(\cos \frac{x}{2} \right) \; \cos \frac{x}{2} \left(\tan \frac{x}{2} \mp 1 \right) + C \\
&=& 2 \sgn \left(\cos \frac{x}{2} \pm \sin \frac{x}{2} \right) \left(\sin \frac{x}{2} \mp \cos \frac{x}{2} \right) + C.
\end{eqnarray*}
\subsection{Variable shift}
The following integrals of the absolute value of trigonometric functions $\sin{\alpha x}$ and $\cos{\alpha x}$, $\alpha \neq 0$, will be used in this subsection, where $\lfloor x \rfloor$ denotes the floor function:
\begin{eqnarray}
\int \left|\sin{\alpha x} \right|\,dx &=& {2 \over \alpha} \left\lfloor \frac{\alpha x}{\pi} \right\rfloor - {1 \over \alpha} \cos{\left(\alpha x - \left\lfloor \frac{\alpha x}{\pi} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \label{av3}\\
\int \left|\cos{\alpha x} \right|\,dx &=& {2 \over \alpha} \left\lfloor \frac{\alpha x}{\pi} + \frac12 \right\rfloor + {1 \over \alpha} \sin{\left(\alpha x - \left\lfloor \frac{\alpha x}{\pi} + \frac12 \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C. \label{av4}
\end{eqnarray}
\subsubsection*{Variable shift $x = y - \pi/2$}
Applying this variable shift, the integral $I$ becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& \int \sqrt{1 \pm \sin (y - \pi/2)} \, dy
= \int \sqrt{1 \mp \cos y} \, dy \\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{ll}
{\displaystyle \int} \sqrt{2 \sin^2 y/2} \, dy, & \hbox{for $-$ sign ($+$ sign original $I$)} \\
{\displaystyle \int} \sqrt{2 \cos^2 y/2} \, dy, & \hbox{for $+$ sign ($-$ sign original $I$)}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{ll}
\sqrt{2} {\displaystyle \int} \left| \sin y/2 \right| \, dy, & \hbox{for $-$ sign ($+$ sign original $I$)} \\
\sqrt{2} {\displaystyle \int} \left| \cos y/2 \right| \, dy, & \hbox{for $+$ sign ($-$ sign original $I$)}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
-2 \sqrt{2} \sgn(\sin y/2) \cos(y/2) + C, & \hbox{for $-$ sign ($+$ sign original $I$)} \\
2 \sqrt{2} \sgn(\cos y/2) \sin(y/2) + C, & \hbox{for $+$ sign ($-$ sign original $I$)}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
-2 \sqrt{2} \sgn\left[\sin \left(\frac{x}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right] \cos \left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} \right) + C, & \hbox{for $-$ sign ($+$ sign original $I$)} \\
2 \sqrt{2} \sgn\left[\cos \left(\frac{x}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right] \sin \left(\frac{x}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) + C, & \hbox{for $+$ sign ($-$ sign original $I$)}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=& -2 \sqrt{2} \sgn\left[\sin \left(\frac{x}{2} \pm \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right] \cos \left(\frac{x}{2} \pm \frac{\pi}{4} \right) + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where the last three expressions are readily obtained by implementing~\eqref{av2}, returning back the original variable and combining results corresponding to the positive and negative signs into a single expression, respectively.
Alternatively, implementing~\eqref{av3}, we obtain the integral for $\sqrt{1 + \sin x}$:
\begin{eqnarray*}
I_1 &=& 4 \sqrt{2} \left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} \right\rfloor - 2 \sqrt{2} \cos{\left({y \over 2} - \left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \\
&=& 4 \sqrt{2} \left\lfloor \frac{x}{2\pi} + \frac14 \right\rfloor - 2 \sqrt{2} \cos{\left({x \over 2} + \frac{\pi}{4} - \left\lfloor \frac{x}{2\pi} + \frac{1}{4} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C.
\end{eqnarray*}
Implementing~\eqref{av4}, we obtain the integral for $\sqrt{1 - \sin x}$:
\begin{eqnarray*}
I_2 &=& 4 \sqrt{2} \left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} + \frac12 \right\rfloor + 2 \sqrt{2} \sin{\left({y \over 2} - \left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} + \frac12 \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \\
&=& 4 \sqrt{2} \left\lfloor \frac{x}{2\pi} + \frac34 \right\rfloor + 2 \sqrt{2} \sin{\left({x \over 2} + \frac{\pi}{4} - \left\lfloor \frac{x}{2\pi} + \frac{3}{4} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where subscripts 1 and 2 correspond to the positive and negative signs in the original integral $I$, respectively.
\subsubsection*{Variable shift $x = \pi/2 - y$}
Applying this variable shift, the integral $I$ becomes
\begin{eqnarray*}
I &=& -\int \sqrt{1 \pm \sin (\pi/2 - y)} \, dy
= -\int \sqrt{1 \pm \cos y} \, dy \\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
- \sqrt{2} {\displaystyle \int} \left| \cos y/2 \right| \, dy, & \hbox{for $+$ sign} \\
- \sqrt{2} {\displaystyle \int} \left| \sin y/2 \right| \, dy, & \hbox{for $-$ sign}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
-2 \sqrt{2} \sgn(\cos y/2) \sin(y/2) + C, & \hbox{for $+$ sign} \\
2 \sqrt{2} \sgn(\sin y/2) \cos(y/2) + C, & \hbox{for $-$ sign}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=&
\left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
2 \sqrt{2} \sgn\left[\cos \left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right] \sin \left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} \right) + C, & \hbox{for $+$ sign} \\
-2 \sqrt{2} \sgn\left[\sin \left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right] \cos \left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} \right) + C, & \hbox{for $-$ sign}
\end{array}
\right.\\
&=& 2 \sqrt{2} \sgn\left[\cos \left(\frac{x}{2} \mp \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right] \sin \left(\frac{x}{2} \mp \frac{\pi}{4} \right) + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where the last three expressions are readily obtained by implementing~\eqref{av2}, returning back the original variable and combining two results into a single expression, respectively.
Alternatively, implementing~\eqref{av4}, we obtain the integral for $\sqrt{1 + \sin x}$:
\begin{eqnarray*}
I_1 &=& -4 \sqrt{2}\left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} + \frac12 \right\rfloor - 2 \sqrt{2} \sin{\left(\frac{y}{2} - \left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} + \frac12 \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \\
&=& -4 \sqrt{2}\left\lfloor \frac34 - \frac{x}{2\pi} \right\rfloor + 2 \sqrt{2} \sin{\left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} + \left\lfloor \frac34 - \frac{x}{2\pi} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \\
&=& 4 \sqrt{2}\left\lceil \frac{x}{2\pi} - \frac34 \right\rceil + 2 \sqrt{2} \sin{\left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} - \left\lceil \frac{x}{2\pi} - \frac34 \right\rceil \pi \right)} + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where $\lceil x \rceil$ is the ceiling function and the relationship between the floor and the ceiling functions are utilized to obtain the last expression, i.e. $\lfloor x \rfloor + \lceil -x \rceil = 0$. Implementing~\eqref{av3}, we obtain the integral for $\sqrt{1 - \sin x}$:
\begin{eqnarray*}
I_2 &=& -4 \sqrt{2}\left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} \right\rfloor + 2 \sqrt{2} \cos {\left(\frac{y}{2} - \left\lfloor \frac{y}{2\pi} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \\
&=& -4 \sqrt{2}\left\lfloor \frac14 - \frac{x}{2\pi} \right\rfloor + 2 \sqrt{2} \cos{\left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} + \left\lfloor \frac14 - \frac{x}{2\pi} \right\rfloor \pi \right)} + C \\
&=& 4 \sqrt{2}\left\lceil \frac{x}{2\pi} - \frac14 \right\rceil + 2 \sqrt{2} \cos{\left(\frac{x}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} - \left\lceil \frac{x}{2\pi} - \frac14 \right\rceil \pi \right)} + C
\end{eqnarray*}
where the subscripts 1 and 2 correspond to the positive and negative signs in the expressions of $I$, respectively.
\section{Integral of radical cosine function} \label{cosine}
This section compiles a number of techniques to integrate the radical cosine function in the form $\sqrt{1 \pm \cos x}$.
Let $J$ be an indefinite integral of radical cosine function
${\displaystyle J = \int \sqrt{1 \pm \cos x} \, dx.}$
Since the derivations are similar to the ones in Section~\ref{sine}, only the final results will be presented.
Employing the variable shift method either by $x = \pi/2 - y$ or $x = y - \pi/2$ will alter the cosine function into the sine function and vice versa.
Thanks to this redundancy, the coverage of this technique will be omitted in this section.
The integration techniques presented in this section basically can also be summarized with a similar tree diagram presented in Section~\ref{sine}.
\subsection{Rationalizing numerator}
Implementing two techniques of rationalizing numerator and by trigonometric substitution $u = \cos x$,
we obtain a similar result to the one in the previous section:
\begin{equation*}
J = -2 \sgn(\sin x) \sqrt{1 \mp \cos x} + C.
\end{equation*}
\subsection{Combining identities}
This technique deals with combining the Pythagorean trigonometric identity with the double-angle formula and the identity of $\cos x$ and $\tan (x/2)$.
The double-angle formula used here is $\cos x = \cos^2(x/2) - \sin^2(x/2)$.
The identity of $\cos x$ in terms of $\tan (x/2)$ reads
\begin{equation*}
\cos x = \frac{1 - \tan^2 (x/2)}{1 + \tan^2 (x/2)}.
\end{equation*}
Employing these identities the integral $J$ now reads
\begin{equation}
J = \left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
2\sqrt{2} \sgn \left[\cos (x/2)\right] \, \sin (x/2) + C, & \hbox{for $+$ sign} \\
-2\sqrt{2} \sgn \left[\sin (x/2)\right] \, \cos (x/2) + C, & \hbox{for $-$ sign}.
\end{array}
\right. \label{combi}
\end{equation}
\subsection{Twice trigonometric substitutions}
Employing the substitution $u = \tan (x/2)$, we have
\begin{equation*}
J = \left\{
\begin{array}{rl}
{\displaystyle \int \frac{2\sqrt{2} \, du}{(1 + u^2)^{3/2}} = \sgn\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}}\right) \frac{ 2 \sqrt{2} u}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}} + C}, & \hbox{for $+$ sign} \\
{\displaystyle \int \frac{2\sqrt{2} |u| \, du}{(1 + u^2)^{3/2}} = \sgn\left(\frac{u}{\sqrt{1 + u^2}}\right) \frac{-2 \sqrt{2} }{\sqrt{1 + u^2}} + C}, & \hbox{for $-$ sign}.
\end{array}
\right.
\end{equation*}
After returning to the initial variable $x$, identical expressions with the ones in~\eqref{combi} will be obtained.
\section{Application: Cardioid} \label{cardioid}
The integral discussed above appears as calculation of the arc length of a cardioid.
The length of cardioids $r = a(1 \pm \sin \theta)$, $a > 0$ is given by
\begin{equation*}
L = a \sqrt{2} \int_0^{2\pi} \sqrt{1 \pm \sin \theta}\, d\theta.
\end{equation*}
The sketches of the cardioids are presented in Figure~\ref{plot}.
The properties of the curve have been investigated in a classical paper by Yates more than half a century ago~\cite{yates59}.
The author also compiled a handbook on many kinds of curves, including cardioid, and discussed their properties~\cite{yates47}.
Another approach of calculating an area of cardioid and other shapes of closed curves is presented using the surveyor's method~\cite{braden}.
A road-wheel relationship by rolling a cardioid wheel on an inverted cycloid is discussed in~\cite{hall}.
Cardioid finds various applications in fractals, complex analysis, plant physiology and engineering.
In fractals, it appears in Douady cauliflower, which is a decoration formed via numerous small cardioids of the Mandelbrot set~\cite{pastor,romera}.
In plant physiology, the seed shape of {\slshape Arabidopsis} (rock cress) can be modelled using cardioid~\cite{cervantes}.
The model based on the comparison of the outline of the seed's longitudinal section with a transformed cardioid,
where the horizontal axis is scaled by a factor equal to the Golden Ratio.
An envelope of rays either reflected or refracted from the surface, known as caustic, from a cup of coffee or milk exhibits the shape of a cardioid~\cite{caustic}.
In the field of electronics and electrical engineering, a cardioid directional pattern in a microphone provides a relatively wide pick-up zone~\cite{marshall}.
It is stated but not shown in a Calculus textbook authored by Stewart~\cite{stewart10, stewart12} that one can calculate this integral using the techniques described in this article or by technology, amongst others, are {\sl Integral Calculator}~\cite{calculator}, {\sl Sage}~\cite{sage}, {\sl Symbolab}~\cite{symbolab} and {\sl Wolfram Alpha}~\cite{wolfram}. The author uses the cardioid $r = 1 + \sin \theta$ as an example, as shown in Figure~\ref{example} mentioned earlier in the introduction of this article.
In general, evaluating a definite integral involving an absolute value, one must find the zeros of the function in the absolute value and divide the range of integration into pieces by toggling the sign within each of the intervals.
\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=2]
\draw[->] (-1,0) -- (1,0);
\draw[->] (0,-0.4) -- (0,1.3);
\draw node [blue] at (-1,1) {\scriptsize{$r = a(1 + \sin \theta)$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.5,-0.1) {\scriptsize{$a$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.6,-0.1) {\scriptsize{$-a$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.1,1.1) {\scriptsize{$2a$}};
\draw node [black] at (1.1,0) {\scriptsize{$x$}};
\draw node [black] at (0,1.4) {\scriptsize{$y$}};
\draw[color=blue,domain=0:6.28,samples=200,smooth] plot (xy polar cs:angle=\x r,radius = {.5+.5*sin(\x r)});
\begin{scope}[shift={(3,1)}]
\draw[->] (-1,0) -- (1,0);
\draw[->] (0,-1.3) -- (0,0.4);
\draw node [red] at (-1,.25) {\scriptsize{$r = a(1 - \sin \theta)$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.5,0.1) {\scriptsize{$a$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.6,0.1) {\scriptsize{$-a$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.15,-1.1) {\scriptsize{$-2a$}};
\draw node [black] at (1.1,0) {\scriptsize{$x$}};
\draw node [black] at (0,0.5) {\scriptsize{$y$}};
\draw[color=red,domain=0:6.28,samples=200,smooth] plot (xy polar cs:angle=\x r,radius = {.5-.5*sin(\x r)});
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Sketches of cardioids $r = a(1 + \sin \theta)$ (left) and $r = a(1 - \sin \theta)$ (right), $a > 0$.} \label{plot}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Rationalizing numerator}
Since $\cos \theta \geq 0$ for $0 \leq \theta \leq \pi/2$ and $3\pi/2 \leq \theta \leq 2\pi$ and $\cos \theta < 0$ for $\pi/2 < \theta < 3\pi/2$,
we need to split the integral into three intervals.
See the top panel of Figure~\ref{zeros}. Thus, using the result from Subsection~\ref{ratnum}, the length of the cardioids $r = a(1 \pm \sin \theta)$ is given by
\begin{eqnarray*}
L &=& a \sqrt{2} \int_{0}^{2\pi} \frac{|\cos \theta|}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta}} \, d\theta \\
&=& a \sqrt{2} \left( \int_0^{\pi/2} \frac{\cos \theta}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta}} \, d\theta - \int_{\pi/2}^{3\pi/2} \frac{\cos \theta}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta}} \, d\theta
+ \int_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \frac{\cos \theta}{\sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta}} \, d\theta \right) \\
&=& 2 a \sqrt{2} \left(\left. \mp \sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta} \right|_{0}^{\pi/2} \pm \left.\sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta} \right|_{\pi/2}^{3\pi/2} \mp \left. \sqrt{1 \mp \sin \theta} \right|_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \right)
= 8a.
\end{eqnarray*}
\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw[->] (-1,0) -- (7,0);
\draw[->] (0,-0.4) -- (0,1.3);
\draw [color=red] plot[domain=0:2*pi] (\x,{abs(cos(\x r))});
\draw node [black] at (0,1.5) {\scriptsize{$|\cos \theta|$}};
\draw node [black] at (7.1,0) {\scriptsize{$\theta$}};
\draw node [black] at (1.5,-0.2) {\scriptsize{$\pi/2$}};
\draw node [black] at (4.7,-0.2) {\scriptsize{$3\pi/2$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.2,1) {\scriptsize{$1$}};
\begin{scope}[shift={(0,-3)}]
\draw[->] (-1,0) -- (7,0);
\draw[->] (0,-0.4) -- (0,1.3);
\draw [color=blue] plot[domain=0:2*pi] (\x,{abs(cos(\x/2 r) + sin(\x/2 r))});
\draw node [black] at (0.5,1.7) {\scriptsize{$|\cos \theta/2 + \sin \theta/2|$}};
\draw node [black] at (7.1,0) {\scriptsize{$\theta$}};
\draw node [black] at (4.7,-0.2) {\scriptsize{$3\pi/2$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.2,1) {\scriptsize{$1$}};
\end{scope}
\begin{scope}[shift={(0,-6)}]
\draw[->] (-1,0) -- (7,0);
\draw[->] (0,-0.4) -- (0,1.3);
\draw [color=blue] plot[domain=0:2*pi] (\x,{abs(cos(\x/2 r) - sin(\x/2 r))});
\draw node [black] at (0.5,1.7) {\scriptsize{$|\cos \theta/2 - \sin \theta/2|$}};
\draw node [black] at (7.1,0) {\scriptsize{$\theta$}};
\draw node [black] at (1.5,-0.2) {\scriptsize{$\pi/2$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.2,1) {\scriptsize{$1$}};
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Plots of $|\cos \theta|$ (top panel), $\left|\cos (\theta/2) + \sin (\theta/2) \right|$ (middle panel)
and $\left|\cos (\theta/2) - \sin (\theta/2) \right|$ (bottom panel) for $0 \leq \theta \leq 2\pi$ with the indicated zeros.} \label{zeros}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Twice trigonometric substitutions}
We know that (see the middle panel of Figure~\ref{zeros})
\begin{equation*}
\cos \frac{\theta}{2} + \sin \frac{\theta}{2} = \sqrt{2} \cos \left(\frac{\theta}{2} - \frac{\pi}{4} \right)
\left\{
\begin{array}{ll}
\geq 0, & \hbox{for \; \;} 0 \leq \theta \leq 3\pi/2 \\
< 0 , & \hbox{for \; \;} 3\pi/2 < \theta \leq 2\pi
\end{array}
\right.
\end{equation*}
Thus, implementing this method, the length of the cardioid $r = a(1 + \sin \theta)$ reads
\begin{eqnarray*}
L &=& a \sqrt{2} \int_{0}^{2\pi} \left|\cos \frac{\theta}{2} + \sin \frac{\theta}{2} \right| \, d\theta \\
&=& a \sqrt{2} \left( \int_0^{3\pi/2} \left( \cos \frac{\theta}{2} + \sin \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \, d\theta -
\int_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \left( \cos \frac{\theta}{2} + \sin \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \, d\theta \right) \\
&=& 2 a \sqrt{2} \left(\left. \sin \frac{\theta}{2} - \cos \frac{\theta}{2} \right|_{0}^{3\pi/2} -
\left. \left( \sin \frac{\theta}{2} - \cos \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \right|_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \right)
= 8a.
\end{eqnarray*}
Similarly, splitting the integral at $\theta = \pi/2$, we also obtain the length $L = 8a$ corresponding to the cardioid $r = a(1 - \sin \theta)$.
See the bottom panel of Figure~\ref{zeros} to observe that the zero of $\cos (\theta/2) - \sin (\theta/2)$ for $0 \leq \theta \leq 2 \pi$ is at $\pi/2$.
\subsection{Variable shift}
These integrals involve the absolute value functions $|\cos (y/2)|$ and $|\sin (y/2)|$, for which in the original variable $\theta$,
both functions are non-negative for $0 \leq \theta \leq 3\pi/2$ and negative for $3\pi/2 < \theta < 2\pi$.
Thus, the length of the cardioid $r = a(1 + \sin \theta)$ reads
\begin{eqnarray*}
L &=& 2 a \int_0^{2\pi} \left| \sin \left(\frac{\theta}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right| \, d\theta \\
&=& 2 a \left(\int_0^{3\pi/2} \sin \left(\frac{\theta}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \, d\theta -
\int_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \sin \left(\frac{\theta}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \, d\theta\right) \\
&=& 4 a \left(- \left. \cos \left(\frac{\theta}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right|_{0}^{3\pi/2} + \left. \cos \left(\frac{\theta}{2} + \frac{\pi}{4} \right) \right|_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \right)
= 8a
\end{eqnarray*}
or
\begin{eqnarray*}
L &=& 2 a\int_0^{2\pi} \left| \cos \left(\frac{\pi}{4} - \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \right| \, d\theta \\
&=& 2 a \left(\int_0^{3\pi/2} \cos \left(\frac{\pi}{4} - \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \, d\theta -
\int_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \cos \left(\frac{\pi}{4} - \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \, d\theta\right) \\
&=& 4 a\left(\left. -\sin \left(\frac{\pi}{4} - \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \right|_{0}^{3\pi/2} + \left. \sin \left(\frac{\pi}{4} - \frac{\theta}{2} \right) \right|_{3\pi/2}^{2\pi} \right)
= 8a.
\end{eqnarray*}
Employing a similar technique, identical result of $L = 8a$ is also obtained for the corresponding cardioid $r = a(1 - \sin \theta)$.
An expression $r = a(1 \pm \cos \theta)$, $a > 0$ produces cardioids too.
When comparing this expression with the one with sine term, the effect is a 90-degree rotation, either clockwise (for the same sign) or counterclockwise (for the opposite sign), of the corresponding cardioids with the sine term.
The sketch of the corresponding cardioid is presented in Figure~\ref{plot2}.
The length of cardioids $r = a(1 \pm \cos \theta)$, $a > 0$ is given by
\begin{equation*}
L = a \sqrt{2} \int_0^{2\pi} \sqrt{1 \pm \cos \theta}\, d\theta.
\end{equation*}
Using similar techniques discussed in Section~\ref{cosine}, one can find that the length of these cardioids is also~$8a$.
\begin{figure}[h]
\begin{center}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=2]
\draw[->] (-0.4,0) -- (1.3,0);
\draw[->] (0,-1) -- (0,1);
\draw node [blue] at (1,0.75) {\scriptsize{$r = a(1 + \cos \theta)$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.1,0.5) {\scriptsize{$a$}};
\draw node [black] at (-0.15,-0.6) {\scriptsize{$-a$}};
\draw node [black] at (1.1,0.1) {\scriptsize{$2a$}};
\draw node [black] at (0,1.1) {\scriptsize{$y$}};
\draw node [black] at (1.4,0) {\scriptsize{$x$}};
\draw[color=blue,domain=0:6.28,samples=200,smooth] plot (xy polar cs:angle=\x r,radius = {.5+.5*cos(\x r)});
\begin{scope}[shift={(4,0)}]
\draw[->] (0,-1) -- (0,1);
\draw[->] (-1.3,0) -- (0.4,0);
\draw node [red] at (-1,0.75) {\scriptsize{$r = a(1 - \cos \theta)$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.1,0.5) {\scriptsize{$a$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.1,-0.6) {\scriptsize{$-a$}};
\draw node [black] at (-1.2,0.1) {\scriptsize{$-2a$}};
\draw node [black] at (0.5,0) {\scriptsize{$x$}};
\draw node [black] at (0,1.1) {\scriptsize{$y$}};
\draw[color=red,domain=0:6.28,samples=200,smooth] plot (xy polar cs:angle=\x r,radius = {.5-.5*cos(\x r)});
\end{scope}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{Sketches of cardioids $r = a(1 + \cos \theta)$ (left) and $r = a(1 - \cos \theta)$ (right), $a > 0$.} \label{plot2}
\end{center}
\end{figure}
A number of Calculus textbooks use this type of cardioid as an example for calculating its length.
For instance, Anton {et al.}~\cite{anton} uses the cardioid $r = 1 + \cos \theta$. After some manipulations, one needs to integrate $|\cos (\theta/2)|$ from $\theta = 0$ to $\theta = 2\pi$. Although general readers will attempt to split the boundary integrations at $\theta = \pi$, the authors explain that since the cardioid is symmetry about the polar axis, the integral from $\theta = \pi$ to $\theta = 2\pi$ is equal to the one from $\theta = 0$ to $\theta = \pi$. Thus, the integral can be calculated by twice integrating from $\theta = 0$ to $\theta = \pi$ of the positive integrand $\cos (\theta/2)$ (without the absolute value). Calculus' Thomas textbook~\cite{thomas} adopts the cardioid $r = 1 - \cos \theta$. The integrand reduces to $|\sin (\theta/2)|$. Fortunately, $\sin (\theta/2) \geq 0$ for $0 \leq \theta \leq 2\pi$ and thus by removing the absolute value and evaluating the integral, one can quickly obtain the length of the cardioid.
\section{Conclusion and Remark}
This article presents the integral with radical sine and cosine functions where its application appears in the length of a cardioid.
It turns out that several techniques of integration exist to solve the problem, which is interesting from the perspective of teaching and learning mathematics.
Despite the current trend of using CAS, the collection of integration techniques presented in this article is a valuable pedagogical tool.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a compilation for this particular type of integrands is presented.
We are convinced that this article contains useful educational contents that will be beneficial for both instructors and students alike.
We also consider our contribution as a complement to existing Calculus textbooks which discuss a topic on calculating the length of a polar curve, particularly cardioid.
\begin{acknowledgment}
{\small \normalfont The authors wish to thank Dr. Ulrich Norbisrath (Faculty of Computer Science, Communication and Media, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria),
Dr. Richard J. Mathar
(Max-Planck Institut f\"{u}r Astronomie, Heidelberg, Germany), Professor Victor Hugo Moll (Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA),
Professor Chris Sangwin (Mathematics Education Centre, Loughborough University and School of Mathematics, The University of Edinburgh, UK),
the anonymous reviewers whose comments and remarks helped the improvement of this article,
Murat Yessenov (Class 2017 of Physics major, SST, NU)
and other students from SST and SHSS (School of Humanities and Social Sciences)
who enrolled in Section~3 of MATH-162 Calculus~2 during Spring~2014 at NU, Astana, Kazakhstan.
\par}
\end{acknowledgment}
{\small
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 1,261 |
Московский Писатель — дачный посёлок, не имеющий статуса населённого пункта. Расположен на территории поселения Внуковское в Новомосковском административном округе Москвы.
Ближайшие населённые пункты — Абабурово, посёлок Минвнешторга и посёлок детского дома «Молодая гвардия».
На некоторых ресурсах с данным посёлком ошибочно объединяется другой посёлок Дачи Писателей, расположенный между посёлком Абабурово, посёлком Внуково и деревней Внуково. Дачи Писаталей, в свою очередь, расположены невдалеке от ж/д станции Внуково.
История
Дачный посёлок был основан в 1930-е годы в окрестностях усадьбы Внуково и на берегах пограничного пруда. Были построены дачи поэтов Александра Твардовского и Михаила Исаковского, поэтов-песенников Василия Лебедева-Кумача и Василия Соловьёва-Седого, певца Леонида Утёсова, режиссёра и театрального деятеля Сергея Образцова, танцовщицы Ольги Лепешинской, кинорежиссёра и сценариста Григория Александрова и актрисы Любови Орловой.
Позднее в посёлке жили актёры Игорь Ильинский, Ольга Аросева, Василий Лановой, Александр Абдулов, Лия Ахеджакова.
В настоящее время функционирует как ДНТ, ДНП, ДСК.
Примечания
Источники
Внуково
Писательские дачи в Абабурово (Внуково)
Поселение Внуковское | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 4,720 |
{"url":"https:\/\/proofwiki.org\/wiki\/Closure_of_Pointwise_Operation_on_Algebraic_Structure","text":"# Closure of Pointwise Operation on Algebraic Structure\n\n## Theorem\n\nLet $S$ be a set such that $S \\ne \\O$.\n\nLet $\\struct {T, \\circ}$ be an algebraic structure.\n\nLet $T^S$ be the set of all mappings from $S$ to $T$.\n\nLet $f, g \\in T^S$, that is, let $f: S \\to T$ and $g: S \\to T$ be mappings.\n\nLet $\\oplus: T^S \\to T^S$ be the pointwise operation on $T^S$ induced by $\\circ$.\n\nThen $\\oplus$ is closed on $T^S$ if and only if $\\struct {T, \\circ}$ is closed.\n\n## Proof\n\n### Necessary Condition\n\nLet $\\struct {T, \\circ}$ be closed.\n\nLet $x \\in S$ be arbitrary.\n\nThen:\n\n $\\ds \\forall f, g \\in T^S: \\,$ $\\ds \\map {f \\oplus g} x$ $=$ $\\ds \\map f x \\circ \\map g x$ Definition of Pointwise Operation $\\ds$ $\\in$ $\\ds T$ as $\\struct {T, \\circ}$ is closed\n\nSo $\\oplus$ is closed on $T^S$.\n\n$\\Box$\n\n### Sufficient Condition\n\nLet $\\oplus$ is closed on $T^S$.\n\nAiming for\u00a0a contradiction, suppose $\\struct {T, \\circ}$ is not closed.\n\nThen:\n\n$(1): \\quad \\exists s, t \\in T: s \\circ t \\notin T$\n\nBy definition, $T^S$ is the set of all mappings from $S$ \\to $T$.\n\nAs $S \\ne \\O$ it follows that $\\exists x \\in S$.\n\nThus, let $x \\in S$ be arbitrary.\n\nLet $f, g \\in T^S$ such that:\n\n$(2): \\quad \\map f x = s, \\map g x = t$\n\nThen:\n\n $\\ds \\map {f \\oplus g} x$ $=$ $\\ds \\map f x \\circ \\map g x$ Definition of Pointwise Operation $\\ds$ $=$ $\\ds s \\circ t$ from $(2)$ $\\ds$ $\\notin$ $\\ds T$ from $(1)$\n\nThat is, $\\oplus$ is not closed on $T^S$.\n\nFrom that contradiction it follows that $\\struct {T, \\circ}$ is closed.\n\n$\\blacksquare$","date":"2023-04-02 05:54:55","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 2, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9933945536613464, \"perplexity\": 187.4311422737337}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2023-14\/segments\/1679296950383.8\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20230402043600-20230402073600-00339.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
A menacing green-fanged spider with a painful bite which is becoming more common in the UK has been spotted in a wall outside a shop.
The 'cannibal' spider is said to have a 'bite like a deep injection' - and their natural habitat are houses.
It is one of the Segestria Florentina species. Some common names include tube web spider or cellar spider, although neither are exclusive to this species.
And experts say they are becoming a more common sight across southern England.
Matthew Sutherland found the creature outside a chcolate shop in Folkestone, Kent, on Tuesday.
The 34-year-old said: "I wouldn't want any contact with it - but I have never seen such an interesting looking spider.
Theresa O'Connor, 40, took some photos of the menacing-looking spider before it crawled into a hole in a wall.
According to nature expert, Owen Leyshon, the spiders thrive off living inside brick work.
He said: "These spiders are dotted around the county and with hotter summers and warmer winters, there may be more.
Owen, who works for the Romney Marsh Countryside Partnership, added: "The spiders live in gaps of very old and dry traditional brick walls. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 321 |
<?php
namespace SpotOnLive\Navigation\Services;
use SpotOnLive\Navigation\Exceptions\ContainerException;
use SpotOnLive\Navigation\Navigation\Container;
class NavigationService implements NavigationServiceInterface
{
/** @var array */
protected $config;
/** @var string */
protected $assertionClass = 'SpotOnLive\Assertions\Services\AssertionService';
/** @var null */
protected $assertionService = null;
/**
* @param array $config
*/
public function __construct(array $config)
{
$this->config = $config;
}
/**
* Render navigation
*
* @param string $name
* @return string
* @throws ContainerException
*/
public function render($name)
{
$container = $this->getContainer($name);
return $container->render();
}
/**
* Get container from name
*
* @param $name
* @return Container
* @throws ContainerException
*/
public function getContainer($name)
{
foreach ($this->config['containers'] as $containerName => $container) {
if ($name == $containerName) {
return new Container($container, $this->getAssertionService());
}
}
throw new ContainerException(
sprintf(
'The container \'%s\' does not exist',
$name
)
);
}
/**
* @return string
*/
public function getAssertionClass()
{
return $this->assertionClass;
}
/**
* @param string $assertionClass
*/
public function setAssertionClass($assertionClass)
{
$this->assertionClass = $assertionClass;
}
/**
* Get assertion service
*
* @return null
*/
protected function getAssertionService()
{
if (!$this->assertionService) {
if (class_exists($this->assertionClass)) {
$this->assertionService = app($this->assertionClass);
}
}
return $this->assertionService;
}
/**
* @return array
*/
public function getConfig()
{
return $this->config;
}
/**
* @param array $config
*/
public function setConfig($config)
{
$this->config = $config;
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,888 |
I heard the same as CO HOPEFUL.
Yes I'm sure. It's not a rumor . I did my pre medical today so oca told me the date is still feb 29.
Pre-medical consisted of blood pressure and drug test .
Last edited by jane.sm; 02-24-2016, 01:11 PM.
So they had you take one more medical? How did they notify you?
yes one last pre -medical , but it's only blood pressure and drug test . They call you and tell you what time to report to affiliate physicians .
Ok. When did you take your final medical?
Hey there, any here from the Buffalo area shooting for the upcoming NYC academy?
Last edited by Frank1988; 01-26-2016, 09:21 PM.
Never say never , you never know how many people they are looking to put in the academy .
There are currently 8007 users online. 384 members and 7623 guests. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 1,606 |
/****************************************************************************
History
$Log$
Revision 1.9 2007/12/11 16:20:40 corsini
minor changes
Revision 1.8 2007/12/10 15:16:02 corsini
code restyling
Revision 1.7 2007/12/03 11:10:26 corsini
code restyling
****************************************************************************/
#include <iostream>
#include "glstateholder.h"
using namespace std;
#define BASE_COLOR_ATTACHMENT GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT1_EXT
// texture unit initialization
int UniformValue::textureUnit = 0;
static void checkGLError(char *location)
{
GLuint errnum;
const char *errstr;
while (errnum = glGetError()) {
errstr = reinterpret_cast<const char *>(gluErrorString(errnum));
if (errstr)
cout << "Error " << errstr;
else
cout << "Error " << errnum;
if (location)
cout << " at " << location;
cout << endl;
}
}
UniformValue::UniformValue(UniformVar &v)
{
type = v.type;
name = v.name;
typeString = v.typeString;
memcpy(mat4, v.mat4, 4 * 4 * sizeof(int));
representerTagName = v.representerTagName;
textureName = v.textureName;
QFileInfo finfo(v.textureFilename);
textureFilename = finfo.fileName();
textureGLStates = v.textureGLStates;
textureLoaded = false;
// if it's a texture, try to load it from the standard path
if (!textureFilename.isEmpty()) {
QDir textureDir = QDir(qApp->applicationDirPath());
#if defined(Q_OS_WIN)
if (textureDir.dirName() == "debug" ||
textureDir.dirName() == "release" ||
textureDir.dirName() == "plugins")
textureDir.cdUp();
#elif defined(Q_OS_MAC)
if (textureDir.dirName() == "MacOS") {
for (int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) {
textureDir.cdUp();
if (textureDir.exists("textures"))
break;
}
}
#endif
textureDir.cd("textures");
updateUniformVariableValuesFromDialog(0, 0, QVariant(textureDir.absoluteFilePath(textureFilename)));
}
}
UniformValue::~UniformValue()
{
if (textureLoaded)
glDeleteTextures(1, &textureId);
}
void UniformValue::updateUniformVariableValuesFromDialog(int rowIdx, int colIdx, QVariant newValue)
{
switch (type) {
case INT:
ivalue = newValue.toInt();
break;
case FLOAT:
fvalue = newValue.toDouble();
break;
case BOOL:
bvalue = newValue.toBool() != 0;
break;
case VEC2:
case VEC3:
case VEC4:
vec4[colIdx] = newValue.toDouble();
break;
case IVEC2:
case IVEC3:
case IVEC4:
ivec4[colIdx] = newValue.toInt();
break;
case BVEC2:
case BVEC3:
case BVEC4:
bvec4[colIdx] = newValue.toBool() != 0;
break;
case MAT2:
mat2[rowIdx][colIdx] = newValue.toDouble();
break;
case MAT3:
mat3[rowIdx][colIdx] = newValue.toDouble();
break;
case MAT4:
mat4[rowIdx][colIdx] = newValue.toDouble();
break;
case SAMPLER1D:
case SAMPLER2D:
case SAMPLER3D:
case SAMPLERCUBE:
case SAMPLER1DSHADOW:
case SAMPLER2DSHADOW: {
QString newPath;
// * choose the filename with a dialog (55 by convention)
if (rowIdx == 5 && colIdx == 5) {
QFileDialog fd(0, "Choose new texture");
QDir texturesDir = QDir(qApp->applicationDirPath());
#if defined(Q_OS_WIN)
if (texturesDir.dirName() == "debug" ||
texturesDir.dirName() == "release")
texturesDir.cdUp();
#elif defined(Q_OS_MAC)
if (texturesDir.dirName() == "MacOS") {
for (int i = 0; i < 4; ++i) {
texturesDir.cdUp();
if (texturesDir.exists("textures"))
break;
}
}
#endif
texturesDir.cd("textures");
fd.setDirectory(texturesDir);
fd.move(500, 100);
if (fd.exec()) {
QStringList sels = fd.selectedFiles();
newPath = sels[0];
}
} else
newPath = newValue.toString();
// Load the new texture from given file
if(textureLoaded)
glDeleteTextures(1, &textureId);
QImage img, imgScaled, imgGL;
QFileInfo finfo(newPath);
if(!finfo.exists()) {
qDebug() << "Texture" << name << "in"
<< newPath << ": file do not exists";
} else if (!img.load(newPath)) {
QMessageBox::critical(0, "Meshlab",
newPath + ": Unsupported texture format");
}
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
// image has to be scaled to a 2^n size. We choose the first 2^N <= picture size.
int bestW = pow(2.0, floor(::log(double(img.width())) / ::log(2.0)));
int bestH = pow(2.0, floor(::log(double(img.height())) / ::log(2.0)));
if (!img.isNull())
imgScaled = img.scaled(bestW, bestH, Qt::IgnoreAspectRatio, Qt::SmoothTransformation);
imgGL = QGLWidget::convertToGLFormat(imgScaled);
glGenTextures(1, &textureId);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureId);
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, 3, imgGL.width(),
imgGL.height(), 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE,
imgGL.bits());
textureLoaded = true;
break;
}
case OTHER:
assert(0);
}
}
bool UniformValue::updateValueInGLMemory()
{
switch (type) {
case INT:
glUniform1iARB(location, ivalue);
break;
case FLOAT:
glUniform1fARB(location, fvalue);
break;
case BOOL:
glUniform1iARB(location, bvalue);
break;
case VEC2:
glUniform2fARB(location, vec2[0], vec2[1]);
break;
case VEC3:
glUniform3fARB(location, vec3[0], vec3[1], vec3[2]);
break;
case VEC4:
glUniform4fARB(location, vec4[0], vec4[1], vec4[2], vec4[3]);
break;
case IVEC2:
glUniform2iARB(location, ivec2[0], ivec2[1]);
break;
case IVEC3:
glUniform3iARB(location, ivec3[0], ivec3[1], ivec3[2]);
break;
case IVEC4:
glUniform4iARB(location, ivec4[0], ivec4[1], ivec4[2], ivec4[3]);
break;
case BVEC2:
glUniform2iARB(location, bvec2[0], bvec2[1]);
break;
case BVEC3:
glUniform3iARB(location, bvec3[0], bvec3[1], bvec3[2]);
break;
case BVEC4:
glUniform4iARB(location, bvec4[0], bvec4[1], bvec4[2], bvec4[3]);
break;
case MAT2:
glUniformMatrix2fvARB(location, 1, GL_FALSE, (GLfloat*)mat2);
break;
case MAT3:
glUniformMatrix3fvARB(location, 1, GL_FALSE, (GLfloat*)mat3);
break;
case MAT4:
glUniformMatrix4fvARB(location, 1, GL_FALSE, (GLfloat*)mat4);
break;
case SAMPLER1D:
case SAMPLER2D:
case SAMPLER3D:
case SAMPLERCUBE:
case SAMPLER1DSHADOW:
case SAMPLER2DSHADOW:
if(!textureLoaded)
return false;
if (textureUnit >= GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS) {
QMessageBox::critical(0, "Meshlab",
"Number of active texture is greater than max number supported"
" (which is" + QString().setNum(GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS) + ")");
return false;
}
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glActiveTexture(GL_TEXTURE0 + textureUnit);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, textureId);
glUniform1iARB(location, textureUnit);
textureUnit++;
#ifdef DEBUG
qDebug() << "Updating sampler2D " << name << " to texId="
<< textureId << "[textureUnit=" << UniformValue::textureUnit << "]";
#endif
break;
case OTHER:
qDebug() << "Type " << UniformVar::getStringFromUniformType(type) << " not updated in arb memory";
return false;
}
return true;
}
void UniformValue::VarDump()
{
switch(type) {
case INT:
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): " << ivalue;
break;
case FLOAT:
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): " << fvalue;
break;
case BOOL:
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): " << bvalue;
break;
case OTHER:
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): OTHER";
break;
case SAMPLER1D:
case SAMPLER2D:
case SAMPLER3D:
case SAMPLERCUBE:
case SAMPLER1DSHADOW:
case SAMPLER2DSHADOW:
if (representerTagName == "RmRenderTarget")
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): RENDER TARGET";
else
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): " << textureFilename;
break;
case VEC2:
case VEC3:
case VEC4: {
int n = type == VEC2 ? 2 : (type == VEC3 ? 3 : 4);
QString val;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
val += " " + QString().setNum(vec4[i]) + (i + 1 == n?" ":",");
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): {"
<< val.toLatin1().data() << "}";
break;
}
case IVEC2:
case IVEC3:
case IVEC4: {
int n = type == IVEC2 ? 2 : (type == IVEC3 ? 3 : 4);
QString val;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
val += " " + QString().setNum(ivec4[i]) + (i+1==n?" ":",");
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): {" << val.toLatin1().data() << "}";
break;
}
case BVEC2:
case BVEC3:
case BVEC4: {
int n = type == BVEC2 ? 2 : (type == BVEC3 ? 3 : 4);
QString val;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++)
val += " " + QString().setNum(bvec4[i]) + (i+1==n?" ":",");
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): {" << val.toLatin1().data() << "}";
break;
}
case MAT2:
case MAT3:
case MAT4: {
int n = type == MAT2 ? 2 : (type == MAT3 ? 3 : 4);
QString val;
for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
val += "[";
for (int j = 0; j < n; j++)
val += " " + QString().setNum(vec4[i*n+j]) + (j+1==n?" ":","); val += "]";
}
qDebug() << " " << name << "(" << location << "): { " << val.toLatin1().data() << " }";
break;
}
}
}
// ************** GL STATE PASS HOLDER *************** //
GLStatePassHolder::GLStatePassHolder(RmPass &pass)
{
passName = pass.getName();
modelName = pass.getModelReference();
QString &vprog = pass.getVertex();
QString &fprog = pass.getFragment();
glewInit();
if (vprog.isNull()) {
setVertexProgram = false;
} else {
setVertexProgram = true;
vhandler = glCreateShaderObjectARB(GL_VERTEX_SHADER_ARB);
QByteArray *c = new QByteArray(vprog.toLocal8Bit());
const char *vvv = c->data();
glShaderSourceARB(vhandler, 1, &vvv, NULL);
delete c;
}
if (fprog.isNull()) {
setFragmentProgram = false;
} else {
setFragmentProgram = true;
fhandler = glCreateShaderObjectARB(GL_FRAGMENT_SHADER_ARB);
QByteArray *c = new QByteArray(fprog.toLocal8Bit());
const char *fff = c->data();
glShaderSourceARB(fhandler, 1, &fff, NULL);
delete c;
}
for (int i = 0; i < 2; i++)
for (int j = 0; j < (i == 0 ? pass.vertexUniformVariableSize() : pass.fragmentUniformVariableSize() ); j++ ) {
UniformVar v = pass.getUniform(j, i == 0 ? RmPass::VERTEX : RmPass::FRAGMENT);
if (!uniformValues.contains(v.name))
uniformValues.insert(v.name, new UniformValue(v));
}
program = glCreateProgramObjectARB();
}
GLStatePassHolder::~GLStatePassHolder()
{
glDeleteObjectARB(program);
glDeleteObjectARB(vhandler);
glDeleteObjectARB(fhandler);
QMapIterator<QString, UniformValue*> it(uniformValues);
while (it.hasNext()) {
it.next();
delete it.value();
}
}
bool GLStatePassHolder::compile()
{
GLint statusV = 1;
GLint statusF = 1;
if (hasVertexProgram()) {
glCompileShaderARB(vhandler);
glGetObjectParameterivARB(vhandler, GL_OBJECT_COMPILE_STATUS_ARB, &statusV);
}
if (hasFragmentProgram()) {
glCompileShaderARB(fhandler);
glGetObjectParameterivARB(fhandler, GL_OBJECT_COMPILE_STATUS_ARB, &statusF);
}
GLsizei length;
if (!statusV) {
char shlog[2048];
glGetShaderInfoLog(vhandler, 2048, &length, shlog);
lastError = "Pass \"" + passName + "\" Vertex Compiling Error (" +
QString().setNum(glGetError()) + "):\n" + QString(shlog);
return false;
}
if (!statusF) {
char shlog[2048];
glGetShaderInfoLog(fhandler, 2048, &length, shlog);
lastError = "Pass \"" + passName + "\" Fragment Compiling Error (" +
QString().setNum(glGetError()) + "):\n" + QString(shlog);
return false;
}
return true;
}
bool GLStatePassHolder::link()
{
if (hasVertexProgram())
glAttachObjectARB(program, vhandler);
if (hasFragmentProgram())
glAttachObjectARB(program, fhandler);
glLinkProgramARB(program);
GLint linkStatus;
glGetObjectParameterivARB(program, GL_OBJECT_LINK_STATUS_ARB, &linkStatus);
if (!linkStatus) {
GLsizei length;
char shlog[2048];
glGetInfoLogARB(program, 2048, &length, shlog);
lastError = "Pass \"" + passName + "\" Linking Error (" +
QString().setNum(glGetError()) + "):\n" + QString(shlog);
return false;
}
QMapIterator<QString, UniformValue*> it(uniformValues);
while (it.hasNext()) {
it.next();
it.value()->location = glGetUniformLocationARB(program,
it.key().toLocal8Bit().data());
if (it.value()->location == -1) {
lastError = "Pass \"" + passName + "\" Linking Error (" +
QString().setNum(glGetError()) + "): Unknown memory location for some variable";
return false;
}
}
return true;
}
void GLStatePassHolder::updateUniformVariableValuesFromDialog(QString varname, int rowIdx, int colIdx, QVariant newValue)
{
UniformValue *var = uniformValues[varname];
if (var)
var->updateUniformVariableValuesFromDialog(rowIdx, colIdx, newValue);
}
bool GLStatePassHolder::updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory()
{
checkGLError("BEGIN: updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory");
bool ret = true;
UniformValue::textureUnit = 0;
glUseProgramObjectARB(program);
QMapIterator<QString,UniformValue*> it(uniformValues);
while (it.hasNext()) {
it.next();
if (!it.value()->updateValueInGLMemory())
ret = false;
}
checkGLError("END: updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory");
return ret;
}
bool GLStatePassHolder::adjustSampler2DUniformVar(QString varname, GLuint texId)
{
QMapIterator<QString,UniformValue*> it(uniformValues);
while (it.hasNext()) {
it.next();
if (it.value()->type == 16 && it.value()->name.compare(varname) == 0) {
it.value()->textureId = texId;
it.value()->textureLoaded = true;
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
void GLStatePassHolder::VarDump()
{
QMapIterator<QString,UniformValue*> it(uniformValues);
while (it.hasNext()) {
it.next();
it.value()->VarDump();
}
}
void GLStatePassHolder::useProgram()
{
glUseProgramObjectARB(program);
}
void GLStatePassHolder::execute()
{
/* pseudocode:
* if (model == screenAlignedQuad) then
* take the previous pass and put it in a texture
*
* useProgram();
*/
useProgram();
if (modelName.compare("ScreenAlignedQuad") == 0) {
checkGLError("BEGIN: screenAligned");
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glPushMatrix();
glLoadIdentity();
glOrtho(-1,1,-1,1,-1,1);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glPushMatrix();
glLoadIdentity();
glPushAttrib(GL_ENABLE_BIT);
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glVertex2f(-1, -1);
glVertex2f( 1, -1);
glVertex2f( 1, 1);
glVertex2f(-1, 1);
glEnd();
glPopAttrib();
glPopMatrix();
glMatrixMode(GL_PROJECTION);
glPopMatrix();
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
checkGLError("END: screenAlignedd");
}
}
// ***************** GL STATE HOLDER ****************** //
GLStateHolder::GLStateHolder()
{
fbo = NULL;
needUpdateInGLMemory = true;
supported = false;
currentPass = -1;
}
GLStateHolder::GLStateHolder(QList<RmPass> &passes)
{
fbo = NULL;
setPasses(passes);
needUpdateInGLMemory = true;
supported = false;
}
GLStateHolder::~GLStateHolder()
{
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
delete passes[i];
delete fbo;
}
void GLStateHolder::setPasses(QList<RmPass> &_passes)
{
// delete all passes
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
delete passes[i];
passes.clear();
//delete passTextures;
for (int i = 0; i < _passes.size(); i++)
passes.append(new GLStatePassHolder(_passes[i]));
passTextures = new GLuint[passes.size()];
if (!fbo)
delete fbo;
fbo = new QGLFramebufferObject(FBO_SIZE, FBO_SIZE);
genPassTextures();
// Now it's time to adjust sampler2D textures
UniformVar currUniformVar;
for (int i =0; i < passes.size(); i++) {
for (int j = 0; j < _passes[i].fragmentUniformVariableSize(); j++) {
currUniformVar = _passes[i].getUniform(j, RmPass::FRAGMENT);
if (!currUniformVar.type == UniformVar::SAMPLER2D)
break;
for (int k=0; k < _passes.size(); k++) {
if (_passes[k].getRenderTarget().name.compare(currUniformVar.name) == 0) {
if (!passes[i]->adjustSampler2DUniformVar(currUniformVar.name, passTextures[k])) {
//...TODO...
}
}
}
}
}
}
bool GLStateHolder::compile()
{
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
if (passes[i]->compile() == false) {
lastError = passes[i]->getLastError();
supported = false;
return false;
}
return true;
}
bool GLStateHolder::link()
{
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
if (!passes[i]->link()) {
lastError = passes[i]->getLastError();
supported = false;
return false;
}
supported = true;
return true;
}
void GLStateHolder::updateUniformVariableValuesFromDialog(QString passname, QString varname, int rowIdx, int colIdx, QVariant newValue)
{
needUpdateInGLMemory = true;
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
if (passes[i]->passName == passname) {
passes[i]->updateUniformVariableValuesFromDialog(varname, rowIdx, colIdx, newValue);
break;
}
}
bool GLStateHolder::updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory()
{
needUpdateInGLMemory = false;
bool ret = true;
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
if(!passes[i]->updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory())
ret = false;
return ret;
}
bool GLStateHolder::updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory(int pass_idx)
{
if (pass_idx >= passes.size())
return false;
return passes[pass_idx]->updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory();
}
void GLStateHolder::VarDump()
{
qDebug() << "Passes:" << passes.size();
for (int i = 0; i < passes.size(); i++)
passes[i]->VarDump();
}
void GLStateHolder::genPassTextures()
{
checkGLError("BEGIN: genpasstextures");
glGenTextures(passes.size(), passTextures);
passTextures[0] = fbo->texture();
for(int i = 1; i < passes.size(); i++) {
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, passTextures[i]);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_CLAMP);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_CLAMP);
//create the texture
glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA8, FBO_SIZE, FBO_SIZE, 0, GL_RGB, GL_FLOAT, NULL);
}
// I decided to use a GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT for each pass
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST);
fbo->bind();
for (int j = 1; j<passes.size(); j++)
glFramebufferTexture2DEXT( GL_FRAMEBUFFER_EXT,BASE_COLOR_ATTACHMENT+j, GL_TEXTURE_2D, passTextures[j], 0);
fbo->release();
checkGLError("END: genpasstextures");
}
void GLStateHolder::usePassProgram(int i)
{
passes[i]->useProgram();
}
bool GLStateHolder::executePass(int i)
{
#ifdef DEBUG
qDebug() << "Executing pass " << i+1 << " of " << passes.size();
#endif
if (i >= passes.size())
return false;
checkGLError("BEGIN: executepass");
if (currentPass == 0) { /* First pass */
glGetIntegerv(GL_DRAW_BUFFER, ¤tDrawbuf);
fbo->bind();
glDrawBuffer(GL_COLOR_ATTACHMENT0_EXT);
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
passes[i]->updateUniformVariableValuesInGLMemory();
passes[i]->useProgram();
checkGLError("END:executepass");
return true;
} else if (currentPass == passes.size() - 1) { /* Last pass */
glDrawBuffer(BASE_COLOR_ATTACHMENT+currentPass);
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
passes[i]->execute();
fbo->release();
#ifdef DEBUG
QImage img(fbo->toImage());
QString img_name("render_pass.png");
if (!img.save(img_name,"PNG"))
qDebug() << " error while saving" << img_name;
else
qDebug() << " Image " << img_name << " saved";
#endif
/* Display the result */
glDrawBuffer(currentDrawbuf);
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, passTextures[passes.size() - 1]);
glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT);
glMatrixMode(GL_MODELVIEW);
glPushMatrix();
glLoadIdentity();
glOrtho(-1, 1, -1, 1, -1, 1);
glBegin(GL_QUADS);
glTexCoord2f(0, 0); glVertex3f(-1, -1, -0.5f);
glTexCoord2f(1, 0); glVertex3f( 1, -1, -0.5f);
glTexCoord2f(1, 1); glVertex3f( 1, 1, -0.5f);
glTexCoord2f(0, 1); glVertex3f(-1, 1, -0.5f);
glEnd();
glDisable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
glPopMatrix();
} else { /* I assume that every pass except the 1st use a ScreenAlignedQuad */
glDrawBuffer(BASE_COLOR_ATTACHMENT + currentPass);
glEnable(GL_TEXTURE_2D);
passes[i]->execute();
}
checkGLError("END: execute pass");
return true;
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,281 |
interested in, concerned with, or based on what is real or practical: a realistic estimate of costs; a realistic planner.
pertaining to, characterized by, or given to the representation in literature or art of things as they really are: a realistic novel.
resembling or simulating real life: a duck hunter skilled at making realistic decoys.
Philosophy. of or relating to realists or realism.
1. pragmatic, common-sense, hard-headed, sensible.
Expectations, reasonable or unrealistic, remain so even if we impose them on ourselves.
It's not unrealistic to think they might have had a love affair if he had wanted it or known how to ask.
He made only one unrealistic request as he sought to keep others from becoming infected and began a fight for his life.
Such deviations were as unrealistic and sterile as Blanquism, against which the nineteenth century Marxists inveighed so heavily.
So I decided to explore his unrealistic beliefs about the state of affairs in Europe.
They are not as small as unrealistic persons claiming superior private information would demand.
1865, from un- (1) "not" + realistic. Related: Unrealistically.
"true to reality" (of art, literature, etc.), 1829; "involving a practical view of life" (opposed to idealistic), 1831; from realist + -ic. Related: Realistically. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 2,859 |
Nell'arte il termine supporto è impiegato per indicare la natura della materia su cui viene eseguito un disegno.
I supporti tradizionali più frequenti sono: carta, cartoncino, tavola, muro, tela, rame, vetro.
I supporti più moderni sono variazioni di questi appena elencati: la tavola di legno in compensato, la tela di lino o cotone in poliestere, con variazioni anche della loro preparazione (nuove colle e nuovi pigmenti).
A questi vanno aggiunti quelli in sostanze completamente nuove quali: plastica, fibre sintetiche e laminati particolari.
Il primo supporto dell'artista è stata la pietra. Gli uomini primitivi trovavano nelle pareti delle grotte il supporto indispensabile per la loro arte primitiva. Gli Egizi svilupparono questa maniera effettuando affreschi murali sulle pareti lisce dei loro templi e delle loro case. L'uso del legno come supporto si sviluppò all'incirca nel 2000 a.C.
In Europa, fin dall'alto Medioevo gli artisti utilizzano il legno. Le sue qualità di leggerezza e di solidità e la sua abbondanza, lo fecero a lungo preferire rispetto a un supporto più leggero e che comincia a far parlare di sé: la tela.
Nel 1390 nella sua opera Libro dell'Arte Cennino Cennini descrive la fabbricazione di tele e il loro impegno in pittura. Nel corso del XV secolo, la tela sostituirà a poco a poco il legno anche per i quadri d'ispirazione religiosa per i quali il legno restava il supporto preferito. Come per la tecnica della pittura a olio si può dire che sono i pittori del nord nel rinascimento a favorire l'uso della tela.
La tela è preparata con una sostanza speciale che ha favorito l'applicazione dei colori. La composizione di questa sostanza, varia secondo i tipi di tela, l'uso e la tradizione. La composizione è composta da un appretto e da un legante di colla di pelle di coniglio e olio.
Gli italiani utilizzavano il gesso così come gli olandesi.
Altra novità, che rivoluzionerà il mondo artistico agli inizi degli anni'80, l'invenzione del telaio a tensione costante che poneva un termine ai problemi di tensione delle tele.
Voci correlate
Pittura murale
Pittura su tela
Pittura su tavola
Tecniche artistiche | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,125 |
CHANGELOG
=========
1.3
---------
* Removed goToUrl method
* Improvements to SingletonTrait
1.0.0-RC1
---------
* Initial version | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 3,647 |
Q: Load/Run external code at runtime I am attempting to update components of my c++ QT application as opposed to updating the whole application.
What are my options to load in code/new components at runtime? My application is for Linux and Windows. Is my only option a Dynamically Loaded Library file? Are there other options in C++ to do this?
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,768 |
{"url":"https:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/2352190\/on-long-exact-sequence-of-homotopy-groups-and-splitting","text":"# On long exact sequence of homotopy groups and splitting\n\nLet $F\\hookrightarrow E\\xrightarrow pB$ be a fibre bundle. Consider the long exact sequence in homotogy groups :\n\n$$\\cdots\\rightarrow \\pi_n(F)\\xrightarrow{i_*}\\pi_n(E)\\xrightarrow{p_*}\\pi_n(B)\\xrightarrow{\\partial_*}\\pi_{n-1}(F)\\rightarrow\\cdots$$\n\nSuppose $p:E\\to B$ has a section $s:B\\to E$ , $p\\circ s=id_B$ then $s_*$ gives a right inverse for $p_*$.\n\nCan we say that $\\pi_n(E)=\\pi_n(F)\\oplus\\pi_n(B)$?\n\nClearly if $\\pi_n(F)=\\pi_{n-1}(F)=0$ then this is true. But what about otherwise?\n\nThank you.\n\n\u2022 If $p$ admits a section then all the maps $p_*$ are onto, so the maps $\\partial_*$ are identically zero and hence the $\\iota_*$ are injective. This gives short exact sequences for $n>1$ that split by virtue of the splitting lemma. \u2013\u00a0Pedro Tamaroff Jul 9 '17 at 7:15\n\nIf $p$ admits a section then all the maps $p_\u2217$ are onto, so the maps $\u2202_\u2217$ are identically zero and hence the $i_\u2217$ are injective. This gives short exact sequences for $n>1$ that split by virtue of the splitting lemma.","date":"2019-08-19 21:19:20","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.952483594417572, \"perplexity\": 184.58260276388782}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-35\/segments\/1566027314959.58\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190819201207-20190819223207-00368.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
<div class="sky-sort">
<sky-dropdown
buttonType="sort"
[title]="'sort_button_label' | skyResources"
[messageStream]="dropdownController">
<sky-dropdown-menu (click)="dropdownClicked()">
<div class="sky-sort-menu-heading sky-subsection-heading">
{{'sort_menu_heading' | skyResources}}
</div>
<div class="sky-sort-heading-divider">
</div>
<ng-content></ng-content>
</sky-dropdown-menu>
</sky-dropdown>
</div>
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 2,165 |
{"url":"https:\/\/chaoxuprime.com\/posts\/2014-02-25-is-the-gas-enough.html","text":"# Is the gas enough?\n\nI have been trying to use the more general frameworks when I encounter dynamic programming questions, so I can demonstrate the power of abstraction later on.\n\nProblem1\n\nLet D=(V,A) be a directed acyclic graph. w(e) is the weight of an arc. A s-t path e_1,\\ldots,e_m is called a \\alpha-deficient path if \\sum_{i=1}^k w(e_i) + \\alpha \\geq 0 for all 1 \\leq k\\leq m. Find the smallest \\alpha, such that there is a \\alpha-deficient s-t path.\n\nOne can view this problem as how much gas would one require to travel from s to t. If one knows how much gas one can gain or lose between arcs.\n\nLet D(v) be the value of the minimum deficiency path from v to t, and D(t)=0.\n\n\\displaystyle D(v) = \\min_{(v,u)\\in A} \\max(D(u)-w((v,u)),0)\n\nBecause the graph is acyclic, there is a nice ordering allowing us to compute this nicely.\n\nNote this is exactly the best weight problem[1] under the semiring (\\mathbb{R}\\cup \\{\\infty\\},\\min,\\otimes,\\infty,0), where a \\otimes b = \\max(a-b,0).\n\nOne should prove it's a semiring before using it. Everything seems obvious except the distributive property of the \\otimes operation. Here is a proof for one of the two distributive laws, the other is left as an exercise to the reader.\n\n\\displaystyle \\begin{aligned} (a\\oplus b) \\otimes c &= \\max(\\min(a,b)-c,0)\\\\ &= \\max(\\min(a-c,b-c),0)\\\\ &= \\min(\\max(a-c,0),\\max(b-c,0))\\\\ &= (a \\otimes c) \\oplus (b \\otimes c) \\end{aligned}\n\nCan we extend the problem to directed graph with cycles? Yes. This semiring has the property that it is k-closed for any graph G for k depending on G and w. It means we can't keep going though a cycle and keep producing better solutions. We can run a generic single source shortest distance algorithm[2].\n\n# References\n\n[1] L. Huang, Advanced dynamic programming in semiring and hypergraph frameworks, (2008).\n\n[2] M. Mohri, Semiring frameworks and algorithms for shortest-distance problems, J. Autom. Lang. Comb. 7 (2002) 321\u2013350.\n\nPosted by Chao Xu on 2014-02-25.\nTags: .","date":"2019-01-24 00:37:02","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.990318238735199, \"perplexity\": 1167.8385645682465}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2019-04\/segments\/1547584431529.98\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20190123234228-20190124020228-00264.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\section{Introduction}
In this paper we study the dynamics of the probability density function $\rho(t,\omega)$, as one-particle distribution at time $t$ with direction $\omega\in\mathbb S^{d-1}$ (unit sphere of $\mathbb R^{d}$), which satisfies the system
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{main}
&\partial_{t}\rho= \Delta_{\omega}\rho-\nabla_{\omega}\cdot\Big(\rho\,\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega_{\rho}\Big),\\
&\Omega_{\rho}=\frac{J_{\rho}}{|J_{\rho}|}, \quad J_{\rho}=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\,\rho\, d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
Here the operators $\nabla_{\omega}$ and $\Delta_{\omega}$ denote the gradient and the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the sphere $\mathbb S^{d-1}$, respectively. The term $\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega$ denotes the projection of the vector $\Omega$ onto the normal plane to $\omega$, describing the mean-field force that governs the orientational interaction of self-driven particles by aligning them with the direction $\Omega$ determined by the flux $J$.
Notice that $\Omega$ is not defined when $J=0$, and this singularity in the vector field is one of the main difficulties
when studying the system \eqref{main}.\\
The equation \eqref{main} is the spatially homogeneous version of the kinetic Kolmogorov-Vicsek model, which was formally derived by Degond and Motsch \cite{D-M} as a mean-field limit of the discrete Vicsek model \cite{A-H, C-K-J-R-F, G-C, Vicsek} with stochastic dynamics. Recently, the stochastic Vicsek model has received extensive attention in the mathematical topics such as the mean-field limit, hydrodynamic limit, and phase transition. Bolley, Ca$\tilde{\mbox{n}}$izo and Carrillo \cite{B-C-C} have rigorously justified the mean-field limit
when the unit vector $\Omega$ in the force term of \eqref{main} is replaced by a more regular vector-field,
and Degond, Frouvelle and Liu \cite{D-F-L-1} provided a complete and rigorous description of phase transitions when $\Omega$
is replaced by $\nu(|J|)\Omega$, and there is a noise intensity $\tau(|J|)$ in front of $\Delta_{\omega}\rho$, where the functions $\nu$ and $\tau$ satisfy
\[
|J|\mapsto \frac{\nu(|J|)}{|J|}\quad\mbox{and}\quad |J|\mapsto \tau(|J|)\quad\mbox{are Lipschitz and bounded.}
\]
Indeed, this modification leads to the appearance of phase transitions such as the number and nature of equilibria, stability, convergence rate, phase diagram and hysteresis, which depend on the ratio between $\nu$ and $\tau$. It is important to observe that the assumptions of $\nu$ remove the singularity of $\Omega$ because $\nu(|J|)\Omega\to 0$ as $|J|\to 0$.
This phase transition problem has been studied as well in \cite{A-H, C-K-J-R-F, D-F-L-1, D-F-L-2, F-L, G-C}.
Concerning studies on hydrodynamic descriptions of kinetic Vicsek model we refer to \cite{D-F-L-1, D-F-L-2, D-M, D-M-2, D-Y, F},
see also \cite{Bo-Ca, D-D-M, H-J-K} for other related studies.
For the well-posedness of the kinetic Kolmogorov-Vicsek model, Frouvelle and Liu \cite{F-L} have shown the well-posedness in the spatially homogeneous case with the ``regular'' force field $\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}J$ instead of $\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega$. Moreover they have provided the convergence rates towards equilibria by using the Onsager free energy functional and Lasalle's invariance principle, and their results have been applied in \cite{D-F-L-1}.
On the other hand, Gamba and Kang \cite{Ga-Ka} recently proved the existence of weak solutions to the kinetic Kolmogorov-Vicsek model with the singular force field $\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega$ under the a priori assumption of $|J|>0$, without handling the stability issues, whose difficulty is mainly coming from the facts that the momentum is not conserved and no dissipative energy functional. As a study for its numerical scheme, we refer to \cite{G-H-M}. \\
The purpose of this paper is to present the global well-posedness and large time behavior of weak solutions to the spatially homogeneous problem \eqref{main}. In order to prevent the singularity of $\Omega_{\rho}$, we shall consider initial probability densities $\rho_0$ satisfying $|J_{\rho_0}|>0$. Nonetheless, since the momentum $J$ is not conserved, the condition $|J_{\rho_0}|>0$ may not immediately ensure that $|J_{\rho}|>0$ for all time.
As we shall see, a formal computation actually does show that $|J_{\rho(t)}|\geq |J_{\rho_0}|e^{-2(d-1)t}$
(see Lemma \ref{lem-moment}).
However, since it does not seem obvious how to justify this estimate, we shall rather argue by approximation.
More precisely,
we first regularize the equation \eqref{main} by adding a small constant $\varepsilon >0$ to the denominator of
$\Omega_{\rho}$. This allows us to look at \eqref{main} as the gradient flow with respect to Wasserstein distance of a $\varepsilon $-perturbed free energy functional,
and we will be able to prove the well-posedness of the regularized equation using the time-discrete scheme by Jordan, Kindeleherer, and Otto \cite{JKO}. Finally, using a compactness argument, we will obtain the global well-posedness of \eqref{main}.
For the large time behavior, we observe that,
as a consequence of \eqref{formula-2}, the system \eqref{main} can be written as the nonlinear Fokker-Planck equation:
\begin{equation}\label{main-0}
\partial_{t}\rho= \Delta_{\omega}\rho-\nabla_{\omega}\cdot\Big(\rho\,\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho})\Big).
\end{equation}
We can easily see that the equilibrium states of \eqref{main-0} have the form of the Fisher-von Mises distribution: for any given $\Omega\in\mathbb S^{d-1}$,
these are given by
\[
M_{\Omega}(\omega):=C_M e^{\omega\cdot\Omega},
\]
where $C_M$ is the positive constant given by
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:CM}
C_M=\frac{1}{\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}e^{\omega\cdot\Omega}\,d\omega},
\end{equation}
so that $M_{\Omega}$ is a probability density function. Notice that the normalization constant $C_M$ does not depend on $\Omega$,
and can be easily computed when $d=3$ (see Appendix). In this paper we prove that any weak solution of \eqref{main} converges
exponentially to a stationary Fisher-von Mises distribution.\\
The paper is organized as follows.
In the next section, we briefly present some useful results and estimates in the optimal transportation theory, and then state our main results. Section 3 is devoted to the proof of existence of weak solutions. In Section 4, we prove the convergence of weak solutions towards the equilibrium in $L^1$ distance. In Section 5, we show that weak solutions are locally stable with respect to the Wasserstein distance, and as a consequence we obtain the uniqueness of the weak solution.
\section{Preliminaries and Main results}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
\subsection{Probability measures on the sphere}
Here we summarize useful results from optimal transportation theory that will be used throughout the paper.
We consider the embedded Riemannian manifold $\mathbb S^{d-1}\subset\mathbb{R}^{d}$ endowed with the ambient metric and geodesic distance given by
\[
d(x,y):=\inf\bigg\{\sqrt{\int_{0}^{1}\mid\dot{\gamma}\mid^{2}dt}~\Big|~ \gamma\in C^{1}((0,1),\mathbb S^{d-1}),\gamma(0)=x,\gamma(1)=y\bigg\}.
\]
We define the 2-Wasserstein distance (or transportation distance) with quadratic cost between two probability measures $\mu$
and $\nu$ as
\begin{equation}
W_{2}(\mu,\nu):=\sqrt{\inf_{\lambda\in\Lambda(\mu,\nu)}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}\times \mathbb S^{d-1}}d(x,y)^{2}\,d\lambda(x,y)},
\label{distance}
\end{equation}
where $\Lambda(\mu,\nu )$ denotes the set of all probability measures $\lambda$ on $\mathbb S^{d-1}\times \mathbb S^{d-1}$ with marginals $\mu$ and $\nu$,
i.e,
\[
\pi_{1\#}\lambda = \mu,\quad \pi_{2\#}\gamma = \nu,
\]
where $\pi_1: (x,y)\mapsto x$ and $\pi_2 : (x,y)\mapsto y $ are the natural projections from $\mathbb S^{d-1}\times \mathbb S^{d-1}$ to $\mathbb S^{d-1}$, and $\pi_{1\#}\lambda$ denotes the push forward of $\lambda$ through $\pi_1$.\\
Whenever $\mu$ is absolutely continuous with respect to the volume measure of $\mathbb S^{d-1}$, it follows by McCann's Theorem \cite{MC} that there exists a unique optimal plan $\lambda_0\in\Lambda(\mu,\nu)$ which minimizes \eqref{distance},
and such a plan is induced by an optimal transport map $T: \mathbb S^{d-1}\rightarrow \mathbb S^{d-1}$, i.e., $\lambda_0
=(Id,T)_{\#}\mu$ (thus, $T_{\#}\mu=\nu$). In addition, $T$ can be written as
\[
T(\omega)=\exp_{\omega}(\nabla \varphi(\omega)),
\]
for some $d^2/2$-convex function $\varphi : \mathbb S^{d-1} \to \mathbb R$
(see for instance \cite[Theorem 2.33]{user}).
We shall denote by $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1}),W_{2})$ the metric space of probability measures on the sphere endowed with the Wasserstein distance.
We recall that $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1}),W_{2})$ is a complete separable compact
metric space, and a sequence $\mu_{n}$ converges to $\mu$ in $W_{2}$ if and only if it converges weakly in duality with functions in $C(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ (see for example \cite[Theorem 3.7 and Remark 3.8]{user}).
The following proposition provides a useful estimate on the directional derivative of the map
$\mu\mapsto W_{2}^{2}(\mu,\nu)$, which is used in Section 3.
\begin{proposition}\label{prop-W}
Let $\mu,\nu\in \mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$, assume that $\mu$ is absolutely continuous,
let $X: \mathbb S^{d-1}\rightarrow T\mathbb S^{d-1}$ be a $C^{\infty}$ vector field, and define $\mu_{t}:=\exp(tX)_{\#}\mu$.
Then we have
\[
\limsup_{t\rightarrow0}\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\mu_{t},\nu)-W_{2}^{2}(\mu,\nu)}{t}\leq-2\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}\varphi (\omega)\cdot X(\omega)\,d\mu,
\]
where $\varphi:\mathbb S^{d-1}\to \mathbb R$ is a $d^2/2$-convex function such that
$\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega}\varphi)$ is the optimal map sending $\mu$ onto $\nu$.
\end{proposition}
\begin{proof}
Let $\lambda_0\in\Lambda(\mu,\nu)$ be the optimal plan, i.e., $(Id,\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega} \varphi))_{\#}\mu=\lambda_0$. Since the measure
\[
\lambda_{t}:=\big((\exp(tX)\circ \pi_{1},\pi_{2} \big)_{\#}\lambda_0
\]
belongs to $\Lambda(\mu_t,\nu)$, it follows by the definition of $W_2$ (see \eqref{distance}) that
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
W_{2}^{2}(\mu_{t},\nu) &\leq \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}\times \mathbb S^{d-1}}d(\omega,\bar\omega)^{2}\,d\lambda_t\\
&=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}\times \mathbb S^{d-1}} d(\exp_{\omega}(tX),\bar\omega)^2 \,d\lambda_0\\
&=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} d\bigl(\exp_{\omega}(tX),\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega} \varphi)\bigr)^2 \,d\mu.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
We now recall that the following formula about the squared distance function (see for instance \cite[Section 1.9]{F-V}):
\begin{equation}\label{taylor}
d\bigl(\exp_{\omega}(tX(\omega)),\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega} \varphi (\omega))\bigr)^2 \leq d\bigl(\omega,\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega} \varphi (\omega))\bigr)^2 -2tX({\omega})\cdot \nabla_{\omega} \varphi (\omega)+C\, t^{2}.
\end{equation}
Thus
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
W_{2}^{2}(\mu_{t},\nu)&\leq\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}d\bigl(\omega,\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega} \varphi (\omega))\bigr)^2 \,d\mu
-2t\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}X({\omega})\cdot \nabla_{\omega} \varphi (\omega)\,d\mu+C\,t^2\\
&=W_{2}^{2}(\mu,\nu)-2t\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}X({\omega})\cdot \nabla_{\omega} \varphi (\omega)\,d\mu+C\,t^2,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
and the result follows.
\end{proof}
Throughout the paper, we mainly deal with absolutely continuous measures. Hence, by abuse of notation, we will use sometimes $\rho$ to denote the absolutely continuous measure $\rho \,d\omega$ on the sphere $\mathbb S^{d-1}$.
\subsection{Formulas for the calculus on the sphere}
\label{secf:formulas}
We present here some useful formulas on sphere $\mathbb S^{d-1}$, which are used throughout the paper.\\
Let $F:\mathbb S^{d-1}\to \mathbb R^d$ be a vector-valued function and $f:\mathbb S^{d-1}\to \mathbb R$ be scalar-valued function. Then we have the following formulas related to the integration by parts:
\begin{equation}\label{formula-0}
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} f\,\nabla_{\omega}\cdot F \,d\omega = -\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} F\cdot(\nabla_{\omega}f -2\omega f)\, d\omega,
\end{equation}
and
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned} \label{form-0}
&\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} \omega \,\nabla_{\omega} \cdot F \,d\omega = -\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} F\, d\omega,\\
&\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} \nabla_{\omega} f \,d\omega = (d-1)\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} \omega\, f \,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
Since $\nabla_\omega f$ is a tangent vector-field,
it follows immediately by the definition of the projection $\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}$ that
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{formula-1}
&\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\omega = 0,\\
&\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\nabla_{\omega} f =\nabla_{\omega} f.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
Moreover, for any constant vector $v\in\mathbb R^d$ we have
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{formula-2}
&\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot v) = \bbp_{\omega^{\perp}} v,\\
&\nabla_{\omega}\cdot(\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}v) = -(d-1) \,\omega\cdot v.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
We refer to \cite{O-T} for the derivations of the above formulas.
\subsection{Main results}
We now state our main existence, uniqueness, and convergence results.
In the sequel we shall restrict to the case $d \geq 3$ since
we will need to use the logarithmic Sobolev inequality on the sphere (see the proof of Lemma \ref{lem-equili}).
We point out that Lemma \ref{lem-equili} is not used in the existence part,
hence our approach allows one to get existence of solutions even in the case $d=2$.
\begin{theorem} (Existence and Uniqueness) \label{thm-exist}
Assume $d \geq 3$. Let $\rho_{0}\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ be an initial probability measure satisfying
\begin{equation}\label{ini-assume}
|J_{\rho_{0}}|>0,\quad \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0 \,d\omega<\infty.
\end{equation}
Then the equation \eqref{main} has a unique weak solution $\rho \in L_{loc}^{2}([0,\infty),W^{1,1}(\mathbb S^{d-1}))$ starting from $\rho_0$, which is weakly continuous in time, and satisfies \eqref{main} in the weak sense: for all $\varphi\in C^{\infty}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ and $0\leq t<s$,
\[
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi\,(\rho(s)-\rho(t))\,d\omega=\int_{t}^{s}\bigg(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho(r)})\big]\,\rho(r)\,d\omega\bigg)\,dr.
\]
Moreover for all $t>0$,
\[
|J_{\rho}|^{2}\geq |J_{\rho_{0}}|^{2}e^{-2(d-1)t}.
\]
\end{theorem}
\begin{theorem} (Convergence to steady state) \label{thm-converge}
Assume $d \geq 3$. Let $\rho_{0}\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ be an initial probability measure satisfying \eqref{ini-assume}.
Then there exist a constant vector $\Omega_{\infty} \in \mathbb S^{d-1}$ and a constant $C>0$,
depending only on $\rho_0$ and the dimension $d$, such that
\[
\|\rho(t) - M_{\Omega_{\infty}}\|_{L^1(\mathbb S^{d-1})} \le C\Big(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0\, d\omega+1\Big) e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t}.
\]
\end{theorem}
\begin{remark}
Notice that, since the momentum $J_{\rho(t)}$ is not conserved in time, it is not clear how to determine the vector $\Omega_{\infty}$ from the initial data $\rho_0$.
\end{remark}
The following theorem provides a short time stability in Wasserstein distance when two initial probability measures are close to each other.
In particular it implies uniqueness of solutions.
\begin{theorem} (Stability in Wasserstein distance) \label{thm-stable}
Assume $d \geq 3$. Let $\rho_{0}, \bar\rho_0\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ be probability measures satisfying \eqref{ini-assume} and
\[
W_{2}(\rho_{0},\bar{\rho}_{0})\leq \frac{|J_{\rho_{0}}|}{16},
\]
and let $\rho(t)$ and $\bar \rho(t)$ denote the solutions of \eqref{main} starting from $\rho_0$ and $\bar\rho_0$, respectively.
Then there exist constants $C>0$ and $\delta>0$, depending on $\rho_{0}, \bar\rho_0$, such that
\[
W_{2}(\rho(t),\bar{\rho}(t))\le e^{\lambda t}\,W_{2}(\rho_0,\bar{\rho}_0)\qquad \forall\,t<\delta,
\]
where $\lambda:=(1+2/|J_{\rho_0}|)-(d-2)$.
\end{theorem}
\section{Existence}\label{sec-e}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In this section, we prove the existence part in Theorem \ref{thm-exist}. For this, we first regularize the equation \eqref{main} using a parameter $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$ to prevent the singularity of $\Omega_{\rho}$, and then take $\varepsilon \to0$ using standard compactness argument.
It is worth noticing that the existence of solutions to the regularized system could be proved also by more standard
PDE arguments. However, we prefer to use this alternative approach since it will also provide us with some useful estimates for the limiting system.
\subsection{Regularized equation}
We first regularize \eqref{main} by adding $\varepsilon >0$ to the denominator of $\Omega_{\rho}$ as follows:
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{eqrob}
&\partial_{t}\rho^{\varepsilon }=\nabla_{\omega}\cdot\Big(\rho^{\varepsilon }\,\nabla_{\omega}\,(\log\rho^{\varepsilon}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}})\Big),\\
&\rho^{\varepsilon }(0)=\rho_{0},\\
&\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}=\frac{J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}},\quad J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}=\int_{S^{d-1}}\omega\,\rho^{\varepsilon } \,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
In the next subsections, we show the existence of weak solutions to the regularized equation \eqref{eqrob} as a gradient flow with respect to Wasserstein distance of the $\varepsilon $-perturbed free energy functional
\[
\mathcal{E}^\varepsilon(\mu):=\begin{cases}
&\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} \rho\log \rho \,d\omega -\sqrt{| J_{\rho}|^{2}+\varepsilon}\quad\mbox{if}~\mu=\rho ~d\omega \\
&+\infty,\quad \mbox{otherwise}.\\
\end{cases}
\]
Notice that since $\rho\mapsto J_{\rho}$ is continuous with respect to $W_{2}$, the functional $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}$ is lower semicontinious with respect to $W_{2}$.
The next lemma provides some useful properties on derivatives of the functional $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon }$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem-E}
For a given $\rho\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$, the following results hold.\\
(1) For any $d^2/2$-convex function $\varphi :\mathbb S^{d-1}\to\mathbb R$, the second derivative of $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}$ along
the geodesic $\rho_{t} \,d\omega:=\exp(t\nabla\varphi)_{\#}\rho \,d\omega$ at $t=0$ is given by
\begin{equation}
\begin{aligned}
\label{Hessian}
&\quad\frac{d^2}{dt^{2}}\bigg|_{t=0}\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{t})=\int {\rm tr}([D^{2}\varphi]^{T}D^{2}\varphi)\,\rho \,d\omega+(d-2)\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla\varphi|^{2}\rho \,d\omega\\
&\qquad+\int\nabla\varphi \,D^{2}(\Omega^{\varepsilon}_\rho\cdot\omega)\,\nabla\varphi\,\rho \,d\omega
- \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\bigg(\Big|\int\nabla\varphi\,\rho \,d\omega\Big|^{2}
-\Big(\int\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho}\cdot\nabla\varphi\,\rho \,d\omega\Big)^{2} \bigg).\\
\end{aligned}
\end{equation}
(2) For any smooth vector field $X: \mathbb S^{d-1}\rightarrow T\mathbb S^{d-1}$, the directional derivative of $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}$ along $\mu_{t}:=\exp(tX)_{\#}\rho \,d\omega$ at $t=0$ is given by
\begin{equation}\label{direct-E}
\lim_{t\rightarrow0}\frac{\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\mu_{t})-\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho)}{t}=
\int_{S^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_\rho)\cdot X(\omega)\,\rho\,d\omega.
\end{equation}
(3) The slope of $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}$ is given by
\begin{equation}\label{E-slope}
|\nabla\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho)|:=\limsup_{\bar\rho\rightarrow\rho}\frac{(\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\bar\rho)-\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho))_{+}}{W_{2}(\bar\rho,\rho)}
=\sqrt{\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_\rho)|^{2}\rho ~d\omega}.
\end{equation}
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Once we prove \eqref{Hessian}, since the Hessian of the map $\omega \mapsto \Omega^{\varepsilon}_\rho\cdot\omega$ has norm bounded
by $1$ and $\mbox{tr}([D^{2}\varphi]^{T}D^{2}\varphi)\ge 0$,
we get
\begin{equation}\label{see}
\frac{d^2}{dt^{2}}\bigg|_{t=0}\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{t}) \ge - \lambda \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla\varphi|^{2}\rho \,d\omega,
\end{equation}
with $\lambda=(1+\varepsilon ^{-1/2})-(d-2)$.
This means that the functional $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}$ is $(-\lambda)$-convex,
and it follows by standard theory (see for instance \cite[Chapter 10]{Ambrosio-Gigli-Savare}) that \eqref{direct-E} and \eqref{E-slope}
hold.
Thus the remaining part is devoted to the proof of \eqref{Hessian}.
We begin by noticing that, since $\rho_{t} \,d\omega:=\exp(t\nabla\varphi)_{\#}\rho \,d\omega$ is a geodesic in $W_2$,
the couple ($\rho_t,\varphi_t$) solves the following system of continuity/Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the distributional/viscosity sense
(see for instance \cite[Chapter 13]{Villani}):
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned} \label{system}
&\partial_{t}\rho_{t}+\nabla\cdot(\rho_{t}\nabla\varphi_{t})=0,\\
&\partial_{t}\varphi_t+\frac{|\nabla\varphi_{t}|^{2}}{2}=0,
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
where $\rho_0=\rho$ and $\varphi_0=\varphi$.\\
Then, using first the continuity equation above, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt}\Big(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_t\log\rho_t \,d\omega-\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}\Big)&=\int\log\rho_t\,\partial_{t}\rho_t \,d\omega-\frac{J_{\rho_t}}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\cdot\int\omega\,\partial_{t}\rho_t \,d\omega\\
&=-\int\log\rho_t\,\nabla\cdot (\rho_t\nabla\varphi_t) \,d\omega+\int\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot \omega\,\nabla\cdot (\rho_t\nabla\varphi_t) \,d\omega\\
&=\int\nabla\varphi_t\cdot\nabla\log\rho_t \,\rho_t \,d\omega-\int\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega\\
&=-\int\Delta\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega -\int\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Thus,
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d^2}{dt^2}\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{t})
&=-\frac{d}{dt}\int\Delta\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega
-\frac{d}{dt}\int\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega\\
&=: I_1 +I_2.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Using \eqref{system}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_1 &=\int \Delta\frac{|\nabla\varphi_t|^{2}}{2}\,\rho_t\,d\omega +\int\Delta\varphi_t\nabla\cdot(\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t)\,d\omega\\
&=\int \Delta\frac{|\nabla\varphi_t|^{2}}{2}\,\rho_t\,d\omega -\int\nabla\Delta\varphi_t\cdot\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t\,d\omega\\
&= \int \mbox{tr}([\nabla^{2}\varphi_t]^{T}\nabla^{2}\varphi_t)\,\rho_t \,d\omega+\int \mbox{Ric}(\nabla\varphi_t,\nabla\varphi_t)\,\rho_t \,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
where in the last equality we used the Bochner formula
\[
\Delta\frac{\mid\nabla\varphi\mid^{2}}{2}-\nabla\varphi\cdot \nabla\Delta\varphi
=\mbox{tr}([\nabla^{2}\varphi]^{T}\nabla^{2}\varphi)+\mbox{Ric}(\nabla\varphi,\nabla\varphi).
\]
Since the Ricci curvature tensor of $\mathbb S^{d-1}$ is $(d-2)I_{d-1}$, we have
\[
I_1=\int \mbox{tr}([\nabla^{2}\varphi_t]^{T}\nabla^{2}\varphi_t)\,\rho_t \,d\omega+(d-2)\int |\nabla\varphi_t|^2\, \rho_t \,d\omega.
\]
For $I_2$, we use \eqref{formula-1} and \eqref{formula-2} to get
\begin{equation}\label{equ-1}
\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\varphi_t = \bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot\nabla\varphi_t = \bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\nabla\varphi_t\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t} = \nabla\varphi_t\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t},
\end{equation}
which yields
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_2 &=-\frac{d}{dt}\int\nabla\varphi_t\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\,\rho_t \,d\omega\\
&=-\int\partial_t\rho_t \,\nabla\varphi_t\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t} \,d\omega-\int\rho_t \,\nabla\partial_t\varphi_t\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t} \,d\omega-\int\rho_t \,\nabla\varphi_t\cdot \partial_t\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t} \,d\omega\\
&=: I_{21} + I_{22} + I_{23}.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Using \eqref{system} and \eqref{equ-1}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_{21}&= \int \nabla\cdot (\rho_t\nabla\varphi_t) \,\nabla\varphi_t\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t} \,d\omega\\
&= \int \nabla\cdot (\rho_t\nabla\varphi_t) \,\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\varphi_t \,d\omega\\
&= -\int \rho_t\,\nabla\varphi_t\cdot \nabla\bigl(\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\varphi_t \bigr) \,d\omega\\
&=-\int\rho_t\,\nabla\varphi_t \,D^{2}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\,\nabla\varphi_t \,d\omega+\int\rho_t \,\nabla(\omega\cdot \Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\Big(\frac{|\nabla\varphi_t|^2}{2}\Big)\,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Similarly we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_{22}&= \int\rho_t\, \nabla\Big(\frac{|\nabla\varphi_t|^2}{2}\Big)\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t} \,d\omega\\
&= \int\rho_t \, \nabla(\omega\cdot \Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\cdot\nabla\Big(\frac{|\nabla\varphi_t|^2}{2}\Big)\,d\omega,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
thus
\[
I_{21}+I_{22} = -\int\rho_t\,\nabla\varphi_t \,D^{2}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t})\,\nabla\varphi_t \,d\omega.
\]
Concerning $I_{23}$, since
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\partial_t\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}&= \frac{\partial_{t}J_{\rho_t}}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}
- \frac{\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\,\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot \partial_{t}J_{\rho_t}\\
&= \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}} \Big( -\int \omega\,\nabla\cdot(\rho_t\nabla\varphi_t) \,d\omega + \Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\int\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot\omega\,\nabla\cdot(\rho_t\nabla\varphi_t) \,d\omega \Big)\\
&= \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}} \Big( \int \rho_t\,\nabla\varphi_t \,d\omega -\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\int \nabla(\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot\omega)\cdot\nabla\varphi_t \,\rho_t\, d\omega \Big)\\
&= \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}} \Big( \int \rho_t\,\nabla\varphi_t \,d\omega -\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\int \Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot\nabla\varphi_t\, \rho_t\, d\omega \Big),\\
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_{23}&=- \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\int\rho_t \, \nabla\varphi\cdot\Big( \int \rho_t\,\nabla\varphi_t \,d\omega - \Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\int\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot\nabla\varphi_t \,\rho_t \,d\omega \Big) \,d\omega\\
&=- \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\bigg|\int\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega\bigg|^{2}
+ \frac{1}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho_t}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\bigg(\int\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_t}\cdot\nabla\varphi_t\,\rho_t \,d\omega\bigg)^{2}.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Recalling that $\rho_0=\rho$ and $\varphi_0=\varphi$, this completes the proof of \eqref{Hessian}.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Minimizing movements for the free energy}
To prove existence of solutions to the regularized problem,
we use the time-discrete scheme by Jordan, Kindeleherer and Otto \cite{JKO} (see also \cite{Figalli-Gigli}).
Hence, in all this section, $\varepsilon >0$ is fixed and, to simplify the notation, we shall not explicitly show the dependence on it.
Given a time step $\tau>0$, for a given initial data $\rho_{0}\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ we set
\[
\rho_{0}^{\tau}=\rho_{0},
\]
and then recursively define $\rho_{n}^{\tau}$ as a minimizer of
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{scheme-W}
\sigma\mapsto \frac{W_{2}^{2}(\sigma,\rho_{n-1}^{\tau})}{2\tau}+\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\rho).
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
The existence of a minimizer to \eqref{scheme-W} is guaranteed as follows.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem-step} For a given $\tau>0$ and $\rho\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$, there exists
a minimum $\rho_{\tau}\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ of
\[
\sigma\rightarrow\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\sigma,\rho)}{2\tau}+\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\sigma)\label{minmov}.
\]
Furthermore, the optimal transport map $T$ sending $\rho_\tau\,d\omega$ onto $\rho\,d\omega$ is given by
\begin{equation}\label{T-map}
T(\omega)=\exp_{\omega}\big[\tau\nabla_{\omega}\big(\log\rho_{\tau}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_{\tau}}\big)\big].
\end{equation}
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
First of all, the existence of a minimum $\mu_{\tau}=\rho_{\tau}\,d\omega$ follows from the fact that
$\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}$ is lower semicontinous and bounded from below thanks to
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{E-lower}
\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{t})&\geq \min_{x>0}x\log x \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} \,d\omega -\sqrt{\Big|\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_t \,d\omega \Big|^2+\varepsilon}\\
&\geq |\mathbb S^{d-1}|\, e^{-1}\log e^{-1} -\sqrt{1+\varepsilon}.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
To show \eqref{T-map}, let $\varphi$ be a $d^2/2$-convex function such that $\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega}\varphi)$ is the optimal map
sending $\rho_\tau\,d\omega$ onto $\rho\,d\omega.$
For any smooth vector field $X$ on $\mathbb{S}^{d-1}$, we set
\[
\mu_t:=\exp(tX)_{\#}\rho_{\tau} \,d\omega.
\]
Using the minimality of
$\rho_{\tau}$, we get
\[
\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\mu_t)-\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{\tau})+
\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\mu_t, \rho)-
W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{\tau}, \rho)}{2\tau}\geq0.
\]
Then we use Proposition \ref{prop-W} and \eqref{direct-E} to obtain
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
&\int_{\mathbb{S}^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}\big(\log\rho_{\tau}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_{\tau}}\big)\cdot X(\omega)\,\rho \,d\omega
-\frac{1}{\tau}\int_{\mathbb{S}^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot
X(\omega)\,\rho \,d\omega\\
&\quad\geq \limsup_{t\rightarrow0}\Big( \mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\mu_t)-\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{\tau})+
\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\mu_t, \rho)-
W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{\tau}, \rho)}{2\tau} \Big)\ge 0.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Exchanging $X$ with $-X$, this yields
\[
\int_{\mathbb{S}^{d-1}}\tau\,\nabla_{\omega}\big(\log\rho_{\tau}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_{\tau}}\big)\cdot X(\omega)\,\rho \,d\omega = \int_{\mathbb{S}^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot
X(\omega)\,\rho \,d\omega,
\]
and since $X$ is arbitrary we get
\[
\nabla_{\omega}\varphi=\tau\,\nabla_{\omega}\big(\log\rho_{\tau}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho_{\tau}}\big),
\]
which proves \eqref{T-map}.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Existence of the regularized equation \eqref{eqrob}}
Using the sequence of minimizers defined in the previous section, we define the discrete solution $t\mapsto \rho^{\tau}(t)$ by
$$
\rho^{\tau}(t):=\rho_{n}^{\tau},\qquad \text{for } t\in[n\tau,(n+1)\tau).
$$
We show now the existence of weak solutions to \eqref{eqrob} as a limit of the discrete solutions $\rho^{\tau}$ as $\tau\to 0$.
\begin{proposition} \label{prop-exist}
Assume $\rho_0\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ with $\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log \rho_0 \,d\omega<\infty$. Then, for any sequence $\tau_{k}\downarrow0$,
up to a subsequence $\rho^{\tau_{k}}(t)$ converges to some limit $\rho(t)$ locally uniformly in time. The limit $t\mapsto\rho(t)$
belongs to $L_{loc}^{2}([0,\infty),W^{1,1}(\mathbb S^{d-1}))$ and is a weak solution of \eqref{eqrob}.
\end{proposition}
\begin{proof}
Throughout the proof, we will use the following inequality for the sequence of minimizers $\rho_n^{\tau}$ of \eqref{scheme-W},
\begin{equation}
\label{e-ineq}
\frac{1}{2}\sum_{i=n}^{m-1}\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{i+1}^{\tau},\rho_{i}^{\tau})}{\tau}+\frac{\tau}{2}\sum_{i=n}^{m-1}|\nabla \mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{i}^{\tau})|^{2}\leq \mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{m}^{\tau})-\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{n}^{\tau}),\qquad \mbox{for any}~ n< m,
\end{equation}
referring to \cite[Lemma 3.2.2]{Ambrosio-Gigli-Savare} for its proof.\\
Since $\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{m}^{\tau})\le \mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_0)$ for all $m$ and
$\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{n}^{\tau})$ bounded from below due to \eqref{E-lower}, we have
\begin{equation}\label{e-1}
\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{m}^{\tau})-\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{n}^{\tau})\leq {\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{0})}+\sqrt{1+\varepsilon }.
\end{equation}
Let $\{\tau_{k}\}_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ be a sequence converging to $0$. Then, for any $n< m$,
\begin{equation}\label{useful}
\frac{1}{2}\sum_{i=n}^{m-1}\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{i+1}^{\tau_{k}},\rho_{i}^{\tau_{k}})}{\tau_k}\leq {\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{0})}+\sqrt{2}
\end{equation}
(recall that $\varepsilon \leq 1$).
Notice that
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:Eeps}
\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{0}) \le \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log \rho_0\,d\omega<\infty.
\end{equation}
Also, it follows by Jensen's inequality that
\[
\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{m}^{\tau},\rho_{n}^{\tau})}{(m-n)^2}\le \Big(\frac{\sum_{i=n}^{m-1}W_{2}(\rho_{i+1}^{\tau},\rho_{i}^{\tau})}{m-n}\Big)^2 \le \frac{\sum_{i=n}^{m-1}W_{2}^2(\rho_{i+1}^{\tau},\rho_{i}^{\tau})}{m-n}\le 2\tau ({\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{0})}+\sqrt{2}).
\]
Hence, setting $n=[\frac{s}{\tau}]$ and $m=[\frac{t}{\tau}]$ for any $0\le s<t$, we have
\begin{equation}
\label{d-equicont}
W_{2}(\rho^{\tau_{k}}(t),\rho^{\tau_{k}}(s))\leq\sqrt{2(\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho_{0})+\sqrt{2})\,[t-s+\tau_{k}]}.
\end{equation}
This equicontinuity estimate combined the compactness of $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1}),W_{2})$ implies that, up to a subsequence,
\begin{equation}\label{converge}
\rho^{\tau_{k}}(t)~\mbox{converges to some limit}~\rho(t)~\mbox{in} ~(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{S}^{d-1}),W_{2})~\mbox{ locally uniformly in} ~t\ge0.
\end{equation}
We now show that $t\mapsto\rho(t)$ is a weak solution of
\eqref{eqrob}. For $n\in\mathbb{N}$, by \eqref{scheme-W} and Lemma \ref{lem-step}, we have
\[
\Big(\exp_{\omega}\big(\tau_{k}\nabla_{\omega}\big(\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}}\big)\big)\Big)_{\#}\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}\,d\omega = \rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n}\,d\omega.
\]
Thus, for any $\varphi\in C^{\infty}(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$,
\[
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi(\omega)\,(\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}}-\rho_{n}^{\tau_{k}})\,d\omega
=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\Big(\varphi(\omega)
-\varphi \big(\exp_{\omega}(\tau_{k}\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}}))\big)\Big)
\,\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1} \,d\omega.
\]
Using, for each $\omega \in \mathbb S^{d-1}$, the Taylor formula along the geodesic $s\mapsto\exp_{\omega}(s\tau_{k}\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}}))$, we have
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{sum-eq}
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi(\omega)\,(\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}}-\rho_{n}^{\tau})\,d\omega
&=-\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\tau_{k}\,\nabla_{\omega}\varphi(\omega)\cdot
\nabla_{\omega}\big[\log\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}}
-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}}\big]\,
\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega
+R(n,\tau_{k})\\
&=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\tau_{k}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot \nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}})\big]
\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega+R(n,\tau_{k}),
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
where the remainder term $R(n,\tau_k)$ can be estimated by
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{remainder}
R(n,\tau_k)&\leq\|D_{\omega}^{2}\varphi\|_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb S^{d-1})}\int_{S^{d-1}} d^{2}\Big(\omega,\exp_{\omega}(\tau_{k}\nabla_{\omega}\big[\log\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}}-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}}\big]\Big)\,\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}}\,
d\omega\\
&=\|D_{\omega}^{2}\varphi\|_{L^{\infty}(\mathbb S^{d-1})}\,
W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}},\rho_{n}^{\tau_k}),
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
For any $0\leq t<s $, we sum up \eqref{sum-eq} from $l:=[\frac{t}{\tau_{k}}]$ to $m:=[\frac{s}{\tau_{k}}]$ to get
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi\,(\rho^{\tau_{k}}(s)-\rho^{\tau_{k}}(t))\,d\omega
&\le \sum_{n=l}^{m}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\tau_{k}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot \nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}_{n+1}})\big]\,
\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega \\
&\quad +\sum_{n=l}^{m}R(n,\tau_k)\\
&=\int_{(l+1)\tau_k}^{(m+2)\tau_k}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot \nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r)})\big]\,
\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r) \,d\omega \,dr \\
&\quad +\sum_{n=l}^{m}R(n,\tau_k).
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Letting $\tau_{k}\to0$, \eqref{converge} implies
\[
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi\,(\rho^{\tau_{k}}(s)-\rho^{\tau_{k}}(t))\,d\omega \to \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi\,(\rho(s)-\rho(t))\,d\omega.
\]
Since $J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}\to J_{\rho}$, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
|\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}-\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho}| &\le \frac{\Big| J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}(\sqrt{|J_{\rho}|^2+\varepsilon }- \sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}|^2+\varepsilon })+ \sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}|^2+\varepsilon }(J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}-J_{\rho}) \Big|}
{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}|^2+\varepsilon }\sqrt{|J_{\rho}|^2+\varepsilon }}\\
& \le \frac{1}{\varepsilon }\Big(|J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}-J_{\rho}|+\Big|\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}|^2+\varepsilon }- \sqrt{|J_{\rho}|^2+\varepsilon }\Big| \Big)\\
&\to 0,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
which implies that, for all $r$,
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
&\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r)})\big]\,
\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r) \,d\omega\\
&\quad\to \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho(r)})\big]\,
\rho(r) \,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Moreover since $\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot \nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r)})\big]\,
\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r) \,d\omega$ is uniformly bounded, the dominated convergence theorem yields
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
&\int_{(l+1)\tau_k}^{(m+2)\tau_k}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r)})\big]\,
\rho^{\tau_{k}}(r) \,d\omega \,dr\\
&\quad\to \int_{t}^s \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot \nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho(r)})\big]\,
\rho(r) \,d\omega \,dr.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
On the other hand, since \eqref{remainder} and \eqref{useful} give
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\sum_{n=l}^{m}R(n,\tau_k) &\leq C\,\sum_{n=l}^{m} W_{2}^{2}(\rho_{n+1}^{\tau_{k}},\rho_{n}^{\tau_k})\\
&\leq C(\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon }(\rho_{0})+\sqrt2)\tau_{k} \to 0,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
we have shown that $0\leq t<s $,
\[
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\varphi\,(\rho(s)-\rho(t))\,d\omega =\int_{t}^s \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\big[\Delta_{\omega}\varphi
+\nabla_{\omega}\varphi\cdot \nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho(r)})\big]\,
\rho(r) \,d\omega \,dr,
\]
which provides the weak formulation of $\eqref{eqrob}$. Moreover, thanks to \eqref{d-equicont} and \eqref{eq:Eeps},
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:equicont}
W_2(\rho(t),\rho(s)) \leq \sqrt{2 \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log \rho_0\,d\omega}\,\sqrt{t-s},
\end{equation}
hence
$t\mapsto \rho(t)$ is weakly continuous and $\rho$ is a weak solution to $\eqref{eqrob}$.
It remains to show that $\rho\in L_{loc}^{2}([0,\infty),W^{1,1}(\mathbb S^{d-1}))$. Using again \eqref{e-ineq} and \eqref{e-1} we see that, for any $0\le t<s$,
\[
\int_t^s |\nabla\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho^{\tau_{k}}(t))|^{2}dt\leq 2(\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon }(\rho_{0})+\sqrt2),
\]
which together with \eqref{E-slope} yields
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{e-com}
2(\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon }(\rho_{0})+\sqrt2)&\ge \int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}-\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}})|^{2}\rho^{\tau_{k}} ~d\omega \,dt \\
&\ge \int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}|^2\rho^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega \,dt
-2\int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}\cdot\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}})\,\rho^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega \,dt\\
&\ge \frac{1}{2}\int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}|^2\rho^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega \,dt
-2\int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\tau_{k}}})|^2\rho^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega \,dt.
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
Since $|\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon})|=|\bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega|\le 1$, we have
\begin{align*}
\int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}\sqrt{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}|^2 d\omega \,dt
&=\frac{1}{2}\int_t^s\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}\log\rho^{\tau_{k}}|^2\rho^{\tau_{k}} \,d\omega \,dt\\
&\le 2(\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon }(\rho_{0})+\sqrt2) + 2(s-t),
\end{align*}
which implies that $\sqrt{\rho^{\tau_{k}}}$ is uniformly bounded in $L^{2}_{loc}([0,+\infty),H^{1}(\mathbb S^{d-1}))$.\\
Therefore, letting $\tau_k \to 0$, we get
\begin{equation}\label{sqrt}
\sqrt{\rho}\in L^{2}_{loc}([0,+\infty),H^{1}(\mathbb S^{d-1})),
\end{equation}
that combined with H\"older inequality implies that
${\rho}\in L^{2}_{loc}([0,+\infty),W^{1,1}(\mathbb S^{d-1}))$.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Uniqueness}
The following results provide the stability estimates for weak solutions to \eqref{eqrob}, thus their uniqueness. We shall revisit the arguments of the proof to show the stability and uniqueness of weak solutions to \eqref{main} in Section 5.
\begin{proposition}\label{prop-unique} (Uniqueness and stability).
Assume $\rho_0,\bar\rho_0\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ satisfy \eqref{ini-assume}. Let $\rho^{\varepsilon}, \bar{\rho}^{\varepsilon}$ be solutions of \eqref{eqrob} with corresponding initial datas $\rho_0,\bar\rho_0$. Then for all $t>0$,
\begin{equation}\label{eps-uni}
W_{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar{\rho}^{\varepsilon}(t))\leq e^{\lambda t}W_{2}(\rho_{0},\bar{\rho}_{0}),
\end{equation}
where $\lambda:=(1+\varepsilon^{-1/2})-(d-2)$.
\end{proposition}
\begin{proof}
For a fixed time $t>0$, let $\varphi_0$ be a $d^2/2$-convex function such that $\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_0)$ is the optimal map
sending $\rho^\varepsilon (t)\,d\omega$ onto $\bar\rho^\varepsilon (t)\,d\omega$, and
consider the curve $[0,1]\ni r\mapsto\alpha_{r}\,d\omega$ of absolutely continuous measures defined by
\[
\alpha_{r} \,d\omega=\exp_{\omega}(r\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_{0})_{\#} \rho^{\varepsilon}(t)\,d\omega
\]
(the absolute continuity of $\alpha_r$ follows, for instance, from \cite[Section 5]{F-F}).
Then the curve $r\mapsto\alpha_{r} \,d\omega$ is the unique geodesic in $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1}),W_{2})$ connecting $\alpha_{0}=\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)$ to $\alpha_{1}=\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)$ (see for example \cite[Corollary 3.22]{user}).\\
For each $r\in[0,1]$, let $\varphi_r$ be a $d^2/2$-convex function such that $\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_r)$ is the optimal map
sending $\alpha_{r} \,d\omega$ onto $\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)\,d\omega.$
Similarly, the curve $s\mapsto\alpha_{r,s} \,d\omega$ defined by
\begin{equation}\label{exp-alpha}
\alpha_{r,s} \,d\omega = \exp_{\omega}(s\nabla\varphi_{r})_{\#}\alpha_{r} \,d\omega,
\end{equation}
and it is the unique geodesic in $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1}),W_{2})$ connecting $\alpha_{r,0}=\alpha_{r}$ to $\alpha_{r,1}=\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)$. Notice that it follows from the uniqueness of the geodesics that, for all $r,s\in[0,1]$,
\[
\alpha_{r+(1-r)s}=\alpha_{r,s}.
\]
Now, applying \eqref{Hessian} in Lemma \ref{lem-E} to \eqref{exp-alpha}, we estimate the second derivative of $\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}$ by Wasserstein distance as
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{second-1}
\frac{d^{2}}{dh^{2}}\bigg|_{h=r}\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{h})&=\frac{d^{2}}{dh^{2}}\bigg|_{h=0}\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{r,\frac{h}{1-r}})\\
&=\frac{1}{(1-r)^2}\frac{d^{2}}{ds^{2}}\bigg|_{s=0}\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{r,s})\\
&\geq-\frac{\lambda}{(1-r)^{2}}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla\varphi_{r}|^{2}\alpha_{r} \,d\omega\\
&=-\lambda\,\frac{W_{2}^{2}(\alpha_{r},\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t))}{(1-r)^{2}}\\
&=-\lambda\, W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)),
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
where $\lambda:=(1+\varepsilon^{-1/2})-(d-2)$ (see \eqref{see}).\\
Since, by Taylor formula along the geodesic $r\mapsto\alpha_{r} \,d\omega$,
\[
\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{1})=\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{0})+\frac{d}{dr}\bigg|_{r=0}\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{r})+\int_{0}^{1}(1-r)\frac{d^{2}}{dr^{2}}\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\alpha_{r})\,dr,
\]
we use \eqref{direct-E} and \eqref{second-1} to have
\[
\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t))\geq\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t))+\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla\varphi_{0}\cdot\nabla(\log\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)})\,\rho^{\varepsilon}(t) \,d\omega-\frac{\lambda}{2}\,W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)).
\]
Similarly, applying the above arguments to the $d^2/2$-convex function $\overline{\varphi}_{0}$ satisfying
\[
\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)\,d\omega=\exp_{\omega}(\nabla\overline{\varphi}_{0})_{\#}\overline{\rho}^{\varepsilon}(t)\,d\omega,
\]
we have
\[
\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t))\geq\mathcal{E^{\varepsilon}}(\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t))+\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla\bar\varphi_{0}\cdot
\nabla(\log\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)})\,\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t) \,d\omega-\frac{\lambda}{2}\,W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)),
\]
therefore
\begin{multline}
\label{eq:lambda}
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla\varphi_{0}\cdot\nabla(\log\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)})\,\rho^{\varepsilon}(t) \,d\omega\\
+ \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla\bar\varphi_{0}\cdot\nabla(\log\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)})\,\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t) \,d\omega
\le \lambda \,W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)).
\end{multline}
We now claim that
\begin{equation}
\label{eq:claim}
\begin{split}
\frac{d}{dt}W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t))&= \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla\varphi_{0}\cdot\nabla(\log\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)})\,\rho^{\varepsilon}(t) \,d\omega\\
&\quad+ \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla\bar\varphi_{0}\cdot\nabla(\log\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)})
\,\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t) \,d\omega.
\end{split}
\end{equation}
Indeed, $\rho^{\varepsilon }$ and $\bar\rho^{\varepsilon }$ solve the continuity equation
\[
\partial_{t}\rho+\nabla_{\omega}\cdot(v[\rho]\rho)=0,
\]
where $v[\rho]:=\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_\rho-\log\rho)$ is a locally Lipschitz vector field. Moreover it follows
from \eqref{sqrt} that, for all $t<s$,
\[
\int_t^s \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}} |v[\rho]|\,\rho \,d\omega\le C\,(s-t)\Big(1+\|\nabla\sqrt{\rho}\|_{L^2(\mathbb S^{d-1})}\Big)<\infty.
\]
Hence the hypotheses of \cite[Theorem 23.9]{Villani} are satisfied implying \eqref{eq:claim},
and combining it with
\eqref{eq:lambda} yields
\[
\frac{d}{dt}W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)\le \lambda\,W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)),
\]
which completes the proof.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Properties of solutions to \eqref{eqrob}}
In the next lemma, we show that the momentum does not vanish for any finite time $t\in(0,\infty)$,
with an estimate independent of $\varepsilon $.
\begin{lemma} \label{lem-moment}
Let $\rho^{\varepsilon}$ be a solution of \eqref{eqrob}. Then, for all $t>0$,
\[
| J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}(t)} |^{2}\geq | J_{\rho_{0}}|^{2}e^{-2(d-1)t}.
\]
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
It follows from \eqref{eqrob} that
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt}\frac{1}{2}| J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}|^{2}&=J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot\partial_{t}J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\\
&=J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot \bigg(\int\omega\,\Delta\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega-\int\omega\, \nabla\cdot(\rho^{\varepsilon }\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}))\,d\omega\bigg)\\
&=J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot \int\omega\,\Delta\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega-\int J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot \omega\,
\nabla\cdot(\rho^{\varepsilon }\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}))\,d\omega \\
&=: I_1 + I_2.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
We use \eqref{form-0} to get
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_1 &= -J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot \int\nabla\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega\\
&= -(d-1)J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot \int\omega \,\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega\\
&=-(d-1)|J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}|^2.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Also, using \eqref{formula-0}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
I_2 &= \int \nabla(J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}\cdot \omega) \cdot\nabla(\omega\cdot\Omega_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}})\,\rho^{\varepsilon }
d\omega\\
&= \int \frac{\rho^{\varepsilon }}{\sqrt{|J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\, |\nabla(\omega\cdot J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}})|^2\, d\omega\\
&\ge 0.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Thus
\[
\frac{d}{dt}| J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}|^{2} \le -2(d-1)|J_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}|^2,
\]
which completes the proof.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Proof of the existence in Theorem \ref{thm-exist}}
Let $\{\varepsilon _{k}\}_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ be a sequence converging to $0$.
As a consequence of \eqref{eq:equicont} it follows
that the sequence $\{\rho^{\varepsilon _k}\}_{k\in\mathbb{N}}$ is equicontinous, so the compactness of $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1}),W_{2})$ imply that up to a subsequence, $\rho^{\varepsilon _{k}}(t)$ converges to some limit $\rho(t)$ in $(\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{S}^{d-1}),W_{2})$ uniformly in $t\ge0$. Then since $J_{\rho^{\varepsilon _k}}\to J_{\rho}$, it follows from Lemma \ref{lem-moment} that for all $t>0$,
\begin{equation}\label{J-0}
| J_{{\rho}(t)} |^{2}\geq | J_{\rho_{0}}|^{2}e^{-2(d-1)t}.
\end{equation}
Therefore by the same arguments as the proof of Proposition \ref{prop-exist}, the limit $\rho$ is a weak solution to \eqref{main}. Moreover since a straightforward computation yields
\begin{align*}
\frac{d}{dt}\mathcal{E}^{0}(\rho)& =-\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho})|^2 \rho\,d\omega,
\end{align*}
the analogue of \eqref{e-com} with $\varepsilon =0$ combined with \eqref{eq:Eeps} provide
\[
{\rho}\in L^{2}_{loc}([0,+\infty),W^{1,1}(\mathbb S^{d-1})).
\]
\qed
\section{Convergence towards equilibrium}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In this section, we prove Theorem \ref{thm-converge}. We start with the following estimates on the difference between $\rho^{\varepsilon}$ and $M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}}$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem-equili}
Let $C_M$ be as in \eqref{eq:CM}, and let $\rho^{\varepsilon}$ be a solution of \eqref{eqrob}
starting from $\rho_0$. Then, for all $t>0$,
\[
\|\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)-M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)}}\|_{L^{1}(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})}\leq e^{-C_1t}\Big(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0\,d\omega +1-\log C_M\Big)+\sqrt{\varepsilon }.
\]
where
\[
C_1:=\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}
\]
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
First of all, for each measure $\rho^{\varepsilon }$, we denote its relative entropy with respect
to the probability measure $M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}}(\omega)\,d\omega =C_M e^{\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}}d\omega$ by
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}} )=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho^{\varepsilon }\log\Big(\frac{\rho^{\varepsilon }}{M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}} }\Big)\,d\omega,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
which can also be rewritten as
\[
H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}} )=\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho^{\varepsilon }\log\rho^{\varepsilon } \,d\omega-\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}
\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon }}\,\rho^{\varepsilon } \,d\omega- \log C_M.
\]
Since
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{{\rho}^{\varepsilon }}\,\rho^{\varepsilon } \,d\omega &=
\frac{J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\cdot\int\omega\,\rho^{\varepsilon } \,d\omega=\frac{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\\
&=\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}-\frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}},
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
we have
\begin{equation}\label{relation-1}
\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho^{\varepsilon })=H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}})-\frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}} + \log C_M.
\end{equation}
We now set $\alpha:=|\mathbb S^{d-1}|^{-1}$, and
regard the measure $M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}} \,d\omega$ as a bounded
perturbation of the constant probability measure $\alpha \,d\omega$, i.e.,
\[
M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}} = e^{\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}- \log C_M}=e^{\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}- \log C_M-\log\alpha}\alpha,
\]
where
\begin{equation}\label{osc}
{\rm osc}(\omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}- \log C_M-\log\alpha)\leq2.
\end{equation}
Since the Ricci curvature tensor of $\mathbb S^{d-1}$ is $(d-2)I_{d}$ and $d \geq 3$, the logarithmic Sobolev inequality \cite{B-E} implies
\[
H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid \alpha)\leq\frac{1}{2(d-2)}\int\bigg|\nabla\log\frac{\rho^{\varepsilon }}{\alpha}\bigg|^{2}\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega.
\]
Thus,
since the logarithmic Sobolev inequality is stable under bounded perturbations (see for instance \cite{H-S, Otto-Villani}),
it follows from \eqref{osc} that
\begin{equation}\label{ineq-1}
H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}})\leq\frac{e^{2}}{2(d-2)}\int\bigg|\nabla\log\frac{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}{M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}}}\bigg|^{2}\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega.
\end{equation}
Therefore, since \eqref{relation-1} yields
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt}\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}(\rho^{\varepsilon })=\frac{d}{dt}H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}})-\frac{d}{dt}\frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}},
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
and we see
\begin{align}
\begin{aligned}\label{ineq-2}
\frac{d}{dt}\mathcal{E}^{\varepsilon}({\rho}^{\varepsilon})& =-\int |\nabla(\log{\rho}^{\varepsilon}- \omega\cdot\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}})|^2 {\rho}^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega\\
&=-\int\bigg|\nabla\log\frac{{\rho}^{\varepsilon}}{M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho^{\varepsilon}}}}\bigg|^{2}\rho^{\varepsilon} \,d\omega,
\end{aligned}
\end{align}
it follows from \eqref{ineq-1} and \eqref{ineq-2} that
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt}H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}})\leq-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}\,H(\rho^{\varepsilon }\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}})
+\frac{d}{dt}\frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Integrating this inequality, we get
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
H(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon}_{\rho^{\varepsilon }(t)}})&\leq e^{-C_1t}H(\rho_{0}\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho_0}})
+ e^{-C_1t}\int_0^t e^{C_1s}\,\frac{d}{ds}\frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }(s)}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\,ds\\
&=e^{-C_1t}H(\rho_{0}\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho_0}})
+ \frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{\mid J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }(t)}\mid^{2}+\varepsilon}} - e^{-C_1t} \frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{\mid J_{\rho_0}\mid^{2}+\varepsilon}}\\
&\quad -C_1 e^{-C_1t}\int_0^t e^{C_1s}\frac{\varepsilon}{\sqrt{|J_{\rho^{\varepsilon }(s)}|^{2}+\varepsilon}}\,ds\\
&\leq e^{-C_1t}H(\rho_{0}\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho_0}})+\sqrt{\varepsilon }.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Hence, thanks to the Csiszar-Kullback-Pinsker inequality (see for example \cite[Theorem 1.4]{entropy-inequality}) and the bound
\[
H(\rho_{0}\mid M_{\Omega^{\varepsilon }_{\rho_0}})\le \int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0\,d\omega +1-\log C_M,
\]
we have the desired inequality.
\end{proof}
The above estimates immediately imply that our weak solutions of \eqref{main} looks more
and more as a Fisher-von Mises distribution as $t \to \infty$.
\begin{proposition} \label{prop-expo}
Let $\rho$ be a solution of \eqref{main}. Then for all $t>0$,
\[
\|\rho(t)-M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}}\|_{L^{1}(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})}
\leq e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t}\Big(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0\,d\omega +1-\log C_M\Big).
\]
\end{proposition}
\begin{proof}
The desired inequality follows by taking $\varepsilon \to 0$ in Lemma \ref{lem-equili} for each $t>0$.
\end{proof}
The above proposition only tells us that our solution $\rho(t)$ resembles to $M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}}$ for $t \gg 1$,
but it does not say whether the vector $\Omega_{\rho(t)}$ stabilizes to a fixed vector as $t\to \infty$.
To prove this fact, we first use the above result to obtain the uniform positivity of $|J_{\rho}|$ in time, which improves the estimate \eqref{J-0}. The following result ensures that if there is a limit $J_{\infty}$ of $J_{{\rho}(t)}$ as $t\to\infty$, then $J_{\infty}$ has to be a nonzero vector.
\begin{lemma} \label{lem-positive}
Let $\rho$ be a solution of \eqref{main} with initial data $\rho_{0}\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ satisfying \eqref{ini-assume}. Then there exists a positive constant $C(\rho_0)$ only depending on $\rho_{0}$ such that for all $t>0$,
\[
|J_{{\rho}(t)}|>C(\rho_0).
\]
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
Using Proposition \ref{prop-expo}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\bigg| J_{\rho(t)}-\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\cdot M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}} \,d\omega \bigg|
&
= \bigg|\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\,(\rho(t)-M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}})\,d\omega\bigg|
\\
&\leq \|\rho(t)-M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}}\|_{L^{1}(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})}\\
&\leq e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t}\Big(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0\,d\omega +1-\log C_M\Big),
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
which yields
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
|J_{\rho(t)}|
&
\geq \bigg|\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\cdot M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}} \,d\omega\bigg|-\bigg| J_{\rho(t)}-\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\cdot M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}} \,d\omega \bigg|
\\
&\geq \bigg|\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\cdot M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}} \,d\omega\bigg|-e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t}\Big(\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\rho_0\log\rho_0\,d\omega +1-\log C_M\Big)\\
&=:R(t).
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
By \eqref{J-equ}, $C(d):=\big|\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\omega\cdot M_{\Omega_{\rho}} \,d\omega\big|$ is a positive constant independent of ${\Omega_{\rho}}$, thus
\[
R(t)\to C(d)\quad\mbox{as}~t\to \infty.
\]
Recalling \eqref{J-0}, this completes the proof.
\end{proof}
\subsection{Proof of Theorem \ref{thm-converge}}
We begin with
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt} J_{\rho}&=\int \omega\, \nabla_{\omega}\cdot\big(\rho \nabla_{\omega}(\log \rho-\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho}))\big) \,d\omega\\
&=-\int \rho\, \nabla_{\omega}\log \rho \,d\omega +\int \rho\,\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho}) \,d\omega.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
If we regard the above terms as functionals on $\rho$, that is,
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
&\mathcal{I}_1(\rho):=\int \rho\, \nabla_{\omega}\log \rho \,d\omega,\\
&\mathcal{I}_2(\rho):=\int \rho\,\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho}) \,d\omega,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
then we see that
\[
\mathcal{I}_1(M_{\Omega_{\rho}})=\mathcal{I}_2(M_{\Omega_{\rho}}).
\]
Also, noticing that $\mathcal{I}_1(\rho)$ and $\mathcal{I}_1(\rho)$ can be written as (see Section \ref{secf:formulas})
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
&\mathcal{I}_1(\rho)=\int \nabla_{\omega} \rho \,d\omega=(d-1)\int \omega\, \rho \,d\omega,\\
&\mathcal{I}_2(\rho)=\int \rho\, \bbp_{\omega^{\perp}}\Omega_{\rho} \,d\omega,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
|\mathcal{I}_1(\rho)-\mathcal{I}_1(M_{\Omega_{\rho}})|&\le (d-1)\Big| \int \omega \,(\rho-M_{\Omega_{\rho}}) \,d\omega \Big|\\
&\le C \|\rho - M_{\Omega_{\rho}}\|_{L^1(\mathbb S^{d-1})},
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
and
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
|\mathcal{I}_2(\rho)-\mathcal{I}_2(M_{\Omega_{\rho}})|&\le C \|\rho - M_{\Omega_{\rho}}\|_{L^1(\mathbb S^{d-1})}
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
for some dimensional constant $C$.
Thus, thanks to Proposition \ref{prop-expo}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\Big|\frac{d}{dt} J_{\rho}\Big|&=\Big| -\mathcal{I}_1(\rho) + \mathcal{I}_1(M_{\Omega_{\rho}}) -\mathcal{I}_2(M_{\Omega_{\rho}}) + \mathcal{I}_2(\rho) \Big|\\
&\le C \|\rho - M_{\Omega_{\rho}}\|_{L^1(\mathbb S^{d-1})}.\\
&\le C \,e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t}.
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Together with Lemma \ref{lem-positive}, this implies that there exist a nonzero constant vector $J_{\infty}\in\mathbb R^d$ such that
\[
|J_{\rho(t)} - J_{\infty}| \le C e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t}.
\]
Therefore, setting $\Omega_{\infty}=\frac{J_{\infty}}{|J_{\infty}|}$, we have
\[
\|M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}}-M_{\Omega_{\infty}}\|_{L^1(\mathbb S^{d-1})}\le C\,|\Omega_{\rho(t)} -\Omega_{\infty}|\le C\, e^{-\frac{2(d-2)}{e^{2}}t},
\]
that combined with Proposition \ref{prop-expo} completes the proof.
\qed
\section{Uniqueness and Stability}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In this section we present a stability estimate in Wasserstein distance, which provides as a corollary the uniqueness result in Theorem \ref{thm-exist}. First of all, notice that the stability estimate \eqref{eps-uni} does not imply the stability for \eqref{main}, because of the dependence
on $\varepsilon $ in
\eqref{eps-uni}.
We obtain here a stability estimate for short time when the two initial data $\rho_{0},\bar{\rho}_{0}$ are close to each other as
\begin{equation}\label{close}
W_{2}(\rho_{0},\bar{\rho}_{0}) \le \frac{|J_{\rho_0}|^2}{16}.
\end{equation}
To get the stability estimate, we use the following lemma on the continuity of the momentum $J_\rho$
with respect to the density $\rho$.
\begin{lemma}\label{lem-mc}
Let $\rho,\bar\rho\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb S^{d-1})$ be any measures satisfying $|J_{\bar{\rho}}|>0$. Then,
\[
\big| |J_{\bar{\rho}}|-|J_{\rho}| \big|\leq \frac{2\,W_{2}(\bar\rho,{\rho})}{|J_{\bar{\rho}}|} .
\]
\end{lemma}
\begin{proof}
We follow the same arguments in the proof of Proposition \ref{prop-unique}. Let $\varphi_0$ be a $d^2/2$-convex function such that $\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_0)$ is the optimal map sending $\rho\,d\omega$ onto $\bar\rho\,d\omega$, and
consider the unique geodesic $r\mapsto\alpha_{r} \,d\omega$ connecting $\alpha_{0}=\rho$ to $\alpha_{1}=\bar\rho$.\\
Similarly for each $r\in[0,1]$, let $\varphi_r$ be a $d^2/2$-convex function such that $\exp_{\omega}(\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_r)$ is the optimal map
sending $\alpha_r\,d\omega$ onto $\bar\rho\,d\omega$,
and consider the geodesic $s\mapsto\alpha_{r,s} \,d\omega$ connecting $\alpha_{r,0}=\alpha_{r}$ to $\alpha_{r,1}=\bar\rho$. Notice that $s\mapsto\alpha_{r,s} \,d\omega$ satisfies the continuity equation in the sense of distributions:
\[
\frac{\partial}{\partial s}\bigg|_{s=0}\alpha_{r,s} = -\nabla_{\omega}\cdot(\alpha_{r,s}\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_r ).
\]
Using the same computations as in \eqref{second-1}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{\partial}{\partial h}\bigg|_{h=r}\alpha_{h}=\frac{1}{1-r}\frac{\partial}{\partial s}\bigg|_{s=0}\alpha_{r,s} = -\frac{1}{1-r}\nabla_{\omega}\cdot(\alpha_{r}\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_r ),
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
thus
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt}\bigg|_{h=r}| J({\alpha_{h}})|^2 &= 2J({\alpha_{h}})\cdot \frac{d}{dt}\bigg|_{h=r}J({\alpha_{h}})\\
&=\frac{2}{1-r}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot J(\alpha_{r}))\nabla_{\omega}\varphi_{r}\alpha_{r} \,d\omega\\
&\leq\frac{2}{1-r}\sqrt{\int_{S^{d-1}}\mid\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot J(\alpha_{r}))
\mid^{2}\alpha_{r} \,d\omega}\sqrt{\int_{S^{d-1}}\mid\nabla_{\omega}
\varphi_{r}\mid^{2}\alpha_{r} \,d\omega}\\
&\leq \frac{2}{1-r} W_{2}(\alpha_{r},\bar\rho)\\
&\leq 2\,W_{2}(\rho,\bar\rho).\\
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
Integrating the above inequality from $r=0$ to $r=1$ we get
\[
| J_{\bar{\rho}} |^2- |J_{\rho}|^2 \leq 2\,W_{2}(\rho,\bar\rho).
\]
Similarly applying the above arguments to another $d^2/2$-convex function $\overline{\varphi}_{0}$ sending
$\overline{\rho} \,d\omega$ onto ${\rho} \,d\omega$
we get
\[
|J_{\rho} |^2- |J_{\bar{\rho}}|^2 \leq 2\,W_{2}(\rho,\bar\rho),
\]
hence
\[
\Big| |J_{\bar{\rho}}|-|J_{\rho}| \Big|\leq \frac{2\,W_{2}(\bar\rho,{\rho})}{|J_{\bar{\rho}}|+|J_{\rho}|} \leq \frac{2\,W_{2}(\bar\rho,{\rho})}{|J_{\bar{\rho}}|}.
\]
\end{proof}
\subsection{Proof of Theorem \ref{thm-stable}}
Since $\rho$ solves the continuity equation
\[
\partial_{t}\rho+\nabla_{\omega}\cdot(\rho\,\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho}-\log\rho))=0,
\]
it follows from the Benamou and Brenier formula \cite{Benamou-Brenier} that, for any $t>0$,
\[
W_{2}^2(\rho(t),\rho_0)
\leq t\int_{0}^{t}\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}(\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho(\tau)}-\log\rho(\tau))|^2 \rho(\tau) \,d\omega \,d\tau.
\]
In addition, since
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
\frac{d}{dt}\mathcal{E}^{0}(\rho)& =-\int_{\mathbb S^{d-1}}|\nabla_{\omega}(\log\rho-\omega\cdot\Omega_{\rho})|^2 \rho\,d\omega,
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
we have
\[
W_{2}^2(\rho(t),\rho_0)
\leq t\int_{0}^{t} \Big(-\frac{d}{d\tau}\mathcal{E}^{0}(\rho) \Big) \,d\tau.
\]
Recalling \eqref{relation-1}, we see that
\[
\frac{d}{dt}\mathcal{E}^0(\rho)=\frac{d}{dt}H(\rho\mid M_{\Omega_{\rho}}).
\]
Thus, for all $t>0$,
\[
W_{2}^2(\rho(t),\rho_0)\le t\,\Bigl(H(\rho_0\mid M_{\Omega(\rho_0)})-H(\rho(t)\mid M_{\Omega_{\rho(t)}})\Bigr)
\le t \,H(\rho_0\mid M_{\Omega(\rho_0)}).
\]
Analogously
\[
W_{2}^2(\bar\rho(t),\bar\rho_0)\le t\,H(\bar\rho_0\mid M_{\Omega(\bar\rho_0)}).
\]
Therefore, setting
\[
\delta:=\frac{|J_{\rho_0}|^4}{2^8 \max \{H(\rho_0\mid M_{\Omega(\rho_0)}),H(\bar\rho_0\mid M_{\Omega(\bar\rho_0)})\}}
\]
we have that, for all $t\le \delta$,
\begin{equation}\label{instant}
W_{2}(\rho(t),\rho_0)\leq \frac{|J_{\rho_0}|^2}{16},\qquad W_{2}(\bar\rho(t),\bar\rho_0) \leq \frac{|J_{\rho_0}|^2}{16}.
\end{equation}
For each time $t\le\delta$,
we consider the unique geodesic $r\mapsto\alpha_{r} \,d\omega$ connecting $\alpha_{0}=\rho(t)$ to $\alpha_{1}=\bar\rho(t)$.\\
Then, using \eqref{close} and \eqref{instant}, we have
\begin{align*}
\begin{aligned}
W_{2}(\rho_{0},\alpha_{r})&\leq W_{2}(\rho_{0},\rho({t}))+W_{2}(\rho({t}),\alpha_{r})\\
&\leq W_{2}(\rho_{0},\rho({t}))+W_{2}(\rho({t}),\bar{\rho}({t}))\\
&\leq2\,W_{2}(\rho_{0},\rho({t}))+W_{2}(\rho_{0},\bar{\rho}({t}))\\
&\leq2\,W_{2}(\rho_{0},\rho({t}))+W_{2}(\rho_{0},\bar{\rho}_{0})+W_{2}(\bar{\rho}_{0},\bar{\rho}({t}))\\
&\leq\frac{|J_{\rho_0}|^2}{4},
\end{aligned}
\end{align*}
and applying Lemma \ref{lem-mc} to $\rho_0$ and $\alpha_r$ we get
\[
\big| |J_{\rho_0}|-|J_{\alpha_r}| \big|\leq \frac{2\,W_{2}(\rho_0,\alpha_r)}{|J_{\rho_0}|}\le \frac{|J_{\rho_0}|}{2},
\]
thus
\begin{equation}\label{alpha-r}
|J_{\alpha_r}|\geq \frac{|J_{\rho_0}|}{2}.
\end{equation}
We now compute the second derivative of $\mathcal{E}^{0}$ using \eqref{second-1} and \eqref{Hessian}
with $\varepsilon =0$, and thanks to
\eqref{alpha-r} we have
\[
\frac{d^{2}}{dh^{2}}\bigg|_{h=r}\mathcal{E}^0(\alpha_{h})\ge -\lambda\, W_{2}^{2}(\rho^{\varepsilon}(t),\bar\rho^{\varepsilon}(t)),
\]
where $\lambda:=(1+2/|J_{\rho_0}|)-(d-2)$.\\
Hence,
using the same arguments in the proof of Proposition \ref{prop-unique}, we deduce that
\begin{equation}\label{w-stability}
W_{2}(\rho(t),\bar{\rho}(t))\le e^{\lambda t}W_{2}(\rho_0,\bar{\rho}_0)\qquad \forall\,t \in [0,\delta],
\end{equation}
as desired.
\qed
\subsection{Proof of the uniqueness in Theorem \ref{thm-exist}}
The short time stability estimate \eqref{w-stability} implies the uniqueness of weak solutions to \eqref{main}. Indeed, if $W_{2}(\rho_0,\bar{\rho}_0)=0$, then $W_{2}(\rho(t),\bar{\rho}(t))=0$ for all $t\le\delta$. Thanks to Lemma \ref{lem-positive} and
\[
\frac{d}{dt}H(\rho\mid M_{\Omega_{\rho}})\leq 0,
\]
a continuation argument implies
$W_{2}(\rho(t),\bar{\rho}(t))=0$ for all $t\ge 0$.
\qed
\begin{appendix}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
\section{}
We here present how to compute explicitely the momentum $J_{M_{\Omega}}$ of the Fisher-von Mises distribution
in the case $d=3$.
Let us fix a reference Cartesian coordinate system with $e_3=\Omega$, and then consider the spherical coordinate system $(\theta,\phi)$ associated with the orthonormal basis $(e_1,e_2,\Omega)$. Then a straightforward compution yields
\[
C_M^{-1}=\int_{\mathbb S^2}e^{\omega\cdot\Omega} \,d\omega=\int_0^{2\pi} d\phi \int_0^{\pi} e^{\cos\theta} \sin\theta \,d\theta =2\pi (e-e^{-1}).
\]
Moreover, since
\[
\omega=\sin\theta\cos\phi \,e_1 + \sin\theta\sin\phi \,e_2 +\cos\theta \,\Omega,
\]
we have
\[
J_{M_{\Omega}}= \int_{\mathbb S^2}\omega \,M_{\Omega}(\omega) \,d\omega=C_M\Omega \int_0^{2\pi} d\phi \int_0^{\pi} \cos\theta \,e^{\cos\theta} \sin\theta
\,d\theta =\frac{2e^{-1}}{e-e^{-1}}\, \Omega.
\]
Similarly using the generalized spherical coordinate system on $\mathbb S^{d-1}$, we have
\begin{equation}\label{J-equ}
J_{M_{\Omega}}=\frac{\int_0^{\pi} \cos\theta\, e^{\cos\theta} \sin^{d-2}\theta \,d\theta}{\int_0^{\pi} e^{\cos\theta} \sin^{d-2}\theta \,d\theta} \,\Omega.
\end{equation}
Notice that $C_{M}$ and $|J_{M_{\Omega}}|$ are constants only depending on dimension $d$, but independent of $\Omega$.
\end{appendix}
\bibliographystyle{amsplain}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,691 |
Go toolkit for the Campfire API
**This wrapper is in a very experimental status, and very likely to change.
Feel free to hop in and propose an improvement though.**
## Usage
* [Say something on a room](examples/say.go)
* [Listen for messages in a room](examples/listen.go)
* [Search in rooms](examples/search.go)
## Contributing
1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (`git checkout -b my-new-feature`)
3. Commit your changes (`git commit -am 'Add some feature'`)
4. Push to the branch (`git push origin my-new-feature`)
5. Create new Pull Request
## License
gofire is released under the MIT license. See [LICENSE](LICENSE)
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,859 |
Q: UICollectionView custom FlowLayout where to specify I want to add a UIKitDynamics effect to my collectionView (which is not managed by a normal UIViewController). I am using Storyboard.
I am using this tutorial but I am not able to integrate the code with my project: http://www.objc.io/issue-5/collection-views-and-uidynamics.html
I have created the CollectionViewFlowLayout subclass but then I don't know where to set it as custom subclass. I tried in my storyboard file but it doesn't work.
In the tutorial there is also this line that refers to this code:
-(void)viewDidAppear:(BOOL)animated
{
[super viewDidAppear:animated];
[self.collectionViewLayout invalidateLayout];
}
Notice that it's invalidating the layout when the view first appears. That's a consequence of not using Storyboards (the timing of the first invocation of the prepareLayout method is different when using Storyboards – or not – something they didn't tell you in the WWDC video).
This sentence is not clear to me. What do I need to do if I am using storyboard?
Thanks!
A: If you select your UICollectionView in your Storyboard, you should be able to change the layout to "Custom" then choose your subclass from the list.
A: Override init(coder aDecoder: NSCoder) and it should solve the problem.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 8,638 |
Above: Julian Day, Cold Front, 2018. Reflective paper, subwoofer, amplifier, audio. Courtesy of the artist.
Columbia University has been at the helm of sound innovation for over fifty years, with faculty specializing in composition, improvisation, music theory, musicology, installation, sculpture, instrument building, acoustics, music cognition, and software development. Faculty from the Computer Music Center, along with colleagues from Composition, Visual Arts, and Engineering, led the development of the new interdisciplinary area in Sound Art that leads to the Master of Fine Arts degree awarded by the School of the Arts. The Sound Art program is the only graduate sound art program in New York City.
Sound Art students pursue creative work in a variety of genres and focus on the integration of sound with other media. Sound Art is a studio-based program in conjunction with the Visual Arts Program. As such, it gives the students the freedom to explore work in sculpture, video, and wood as well as computer programming, performance, and conceptual strategies. Students develop their practice in a multi-perspectival, interactive, and supportive environment and learn to conceive and discuss their own work, articulate their artistic ideas, and develop a self awareness of how their work is situated within the context of various histories, disciplines, and practices. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 4,472 |
Liga de Fútbol Profesional Boliviano este primul eșalon din sistemul competițional fotbalistic din America de Sud.
Echipele din sezonul 2010
Serie A
Aurora (Cochabamba)
Blooming (Santa Cruz de la Sierra)
San José (Oruro)
Guabirá (Santa Cruz de la Sierra , Montero)
The Strongest (La Paz)
Universitario (Sucre)
Serie B
Bolívar (La Paz)
Jorge Wilstermann (Cochabamba)
La Paz F.C. (La Paz)
Oriente Petrolero (Santa Cruz de la Sierra)
Real Mamoré (Trinidad)
Real Potosí (Potosí)
Lista golgeterilor
Din februarie 2009
Legături externe
Site oficial
RSSSF Lista Campioanelor
RSSSF Golgeteri
Bolivia
Fotbal în Bolivia | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 2,758 |
\section{Introduction}
In a recent paper (\cite{milagro}), the Milagro collaboration reports the
detection of an excess of cosmic rays from the general direction of
the heliotail, also close to the Galactic anticenter. The excess is
diffuse but confined (in the following we assume a solid
angle of 0.3 steradians to account for both hot spots A and B),
is composed of hadrons (photons and electrons
are excluded to a highly significant level) and has a harder spectrum
than the general cosmic ray background up to about 10 TeV.
The authors discuss some possible explanations and conclude that none of
them is viable. In particular, because of the positional coincidence of the excess
with the heliotail, they consider a local origin of the phenomenon,
but discard it on the ground that several--TeV particles could not be
easily generated or confined by the heliosphere.
In this Note, we revisit the hypothesis of a heliospheric origin
of the hot spots and provide an additional quantitative argument
against it. Then we point out that the closest plausible extra solar
source is the supernova that produced the Geminga pulsar, and show
that there is a region in the parameter space where this alternative
hypothesis is valid.
\section{The heliospheric scenario}
All known effects of the heliosphere on the cosmic rays (solar
modulation, anomalous cosmic rays) are detected at energies of about
1~GeV per nucleon (e.g., \cite{helio}), much lower than the
several TeV observed by Milagro. On top
of this, one can give a direct counter argument based on the energy budget.
In the following, we take data about the cosmic rays from Longair (1981)
and data about the Very Local InterStellar Medium (VLISM) from Axford and
Suess (1994).
From the Milagro paper (their Fig. ~4) one deduces that the excess flux
at 10~TeV --measured as a fraction of the background cosmic ray flux--
amounts to $15~10^{-4}$ in region A and $6~10^{-4}$ in region B. These
values refer to the cores of the two regions, which have a relatively
small angular extent (for instance, the core of region A is only 0.02
steradians). To account for the lower level excess that is visible
around the cores, we add two times the core counts in a solid angle of 0.3
steradians. Under these assumptions the average fractional excess is
$5~10^{-4}$, and the excess flux turns out to be
\begin{equation}
\Phi\sim 5~10^{-4} \times 0.3 \times 6.7~10^{-6}\sim 1.0~10^{-9}~\rm erg~cm^{-2}~s^{-1}.
\end{equation}
\noindent The acceleration region must be at least as large as one gyration radius,
which for a 10~TeV proton in a 1~$\mu$G magnetic field is $r_L = 0.01~\rm parsec$.
Given the angular extent of the excess, the distance to the acceleration region
must also be at least as much as $r_L~$, i.e., at least 20~times the distance
to the heliopause. In the heliospheric hypothesis, the acceleration region is
powered by the converging flows of the solar wake, and, at the inferred distance,
the convergence angle must be $\sim1/20$~radians. Finally, the power dissipated
in the acceleration region (for a local velocity $v$ of 25~km~s$^{-1}$ and a local
density $n$ of 0.1~cm$^{-3}$), is approximately
\begin{equation}
P \sim r_L^2 n m_H \left(\frac{v}{20}\right)^3 \sim 3.1~10^{23}~\rm erg~s^{-1}.
\end{equation}
\noindent This corresponds to a maximum flux at Earth equal to
\begin{equation}
\Phi \sim \frac{P}{4\pi r_L^2} \sim 2.6~10^{-11}~\rm erg~cm^{-2}~s^{-1},
\end{equation}
\noindent which is much too low with respect to the measured one.
\section{The supernova scenario, part one}
The basis of the supernova scenario is twofold. First, the Milagro excess
flux comes from the right direction in the sky: hot spots A and B are
about 50 degrees apart, and nicely encompass Geminga (e.g., \cite{geminga}).
The pulsar has a non--negligible proper motion (125~km~s$^{-1}$ at a distance
of 155 parsec) so that its position at birth was different from the present one,
the more so if the birthplace was close to the Sun. For the cases of interest,
the displacement is around 20--30 degrees towards the south of
region A. Such angular distances do not seem implausible in view of the effect
of the magnetic field on the arrival direction.
Second, a 10~TeV proton diffusing in a 1~$\mu$G magnetic field
in the Bohm regime (i.e., $ D \sim c \times r_L $) reaches an $e$--folding distance of
65 parsec in the time elapsed since the Geminga supernova explosion
($t_{exp} = 3.4~10^{5}$~yr, if the pulsar spin down age is adopted):
\begin{equation}
R = \sqrt{4 D t_{exp}} = \sqrt{4 c r_L t_{exp}} = \rm 65~pc.
\end{equation}
The diffusion of cosmic rays in the Galaxy (e.g., \cite{blasi}) is
described with two diffusion coefficients,
$D_{\parallel}$ and $D_{\perp}$, parallel and orthogonal to the magnetic
field, respectively. The coefficients may be written as
\begin{equation}
D_{\parallel} \sim c \times \lambda, \quad D_{\perp} \sim c \times
\frac{r_L^2}{\lambda}
\end{equation}
\noindent where $\lambda$ is the mean free path along the magnetic field.
Usually $\lambda$ is taken much greater than $r_L$, so that $D_{\parallel}$
is much larger than $D_{\perp}$ and the diffusion is strongly anisotropic.
However, there are circumstances where the two become equal to each other
and the diffusion is isotropic in the Bohm regime: this happens
in the limiting case of a very chaotic magnetic field, with $({\delta B}/{B})
\sim 1$ over distances $\sim r_L$, so that $\lambda \sim r_L$.
It might be argued that the explosion of the Geminga supernova in the
relatively recent past has stirred the local interstellar magnetic
field up to the required level of chaos. We pursue this hypothesis
as a zeroth order assumption, useful for simple calculations, and a more
articulated scenario will be presented in the next section.
The present distance to Geminga is estimated to be $155^{+60}_{-35}\rm~pc$,
so we must assume a non negligible velocity of the pulsar in the
positive radial direction, equal to at least 160~km~s$^{-1}$. On
the one hand, such a radial velocity is discordant with
the morphology of the Geminga trail (\cite{bow}), which suggests a velocity
vector within 30 degrees from the plane of the sky. Based on this result,
Pellizza et al. (2005) put a lower limit of 90 pc on the distance from
the Sun at which the supernova explosion might have occurred. On the other
hand, a radial velocity as high as assumed here does not seem implausible with
respect to the measured transverse velocity; moreover, an even higher value
has been suggested (\cite{neil}) in an attempt to relate the Geminga
supernova to the formation of the Local Bubble. In any case, the scenario
proposed in the next section can accomodate a distance at the lower limit
of Pellizza et al. (2005).
The density distribution of particles diffusing with a constant
coefficient in a 3--dimensional region is
\begin{equation}
n(r,t) = N \frac{2}{3\sqrt{\pi}} \frac{e^{-\left(\frac{r^2}{4Dt}\right)}}
{\frac{4\pi(4Dt)^{3/2}}{3}}
\end{equation}
\noindent where $N$ is the total number injected in a small volume at
$r=0, t=0$. If $\epsilon$ is the energy of the particles, the net
flux at radius $r$ and time $t$ is
\begin{equation}
\Phi = -\epsilon D \frac{\partial n(r,t)}{\partial r} =
\epsilon n(r,t) \frac{r}{2t}\, .
\end{equation}
\noindent If we set $t=t_{exp}$, $\epsilon = 10$~TeV, and $r=R$ and require agreement
with the right hand side of Eq.(1), we deduce $n$ from Eq.(7) and $N$ from
Eq.(6). Finally, we assume that the excess cosmic rays have the same spectrum
as the background cosmic rays, and obtain the following estimate for the
cosmic ray output $E$ of the Geminga supernova
\begin{equation}
n(R,t_{exp}; \epsilon) = 6.7~10^{-18}~\rm cm^{-3}, \quad \it N(\epsilon) \rm = 1.7~10^{45}
\end{equation}
\begin{equation}
\it E \rm = 1.5~10^{49}~erg.
\end{equation}
\noindent This estimate is perfectly in line with the commonly required
efficiency (about 1\%) with which a supernova energy output must be
channeled into cosmic rays if indeed supernovae are to maintain the
Galactic cosmic ray reservoir.
The irregular distribution of the excess flux, and especially the
presence of two disjoint hot spots, is perhaps a consequence of
large--scale irregularities in the background medium and background
magnetic field: the shape of the diffusing cloud must be
much more complex than a perfect sphere.
A final comment is in order about assuming a spectrum of the excess
cosmic rays similar to the one of the background cosmic rays, while
the Milagro data indicate a much flatter slope (1.5 versus 2.6) and
a cutoff above several TeV. The qualitative explanation that we
propose has to do with the dependence of $r_L$ and $D$ on the particle energy.
If at about 10~TeV the $e$--folding point of the diffusing cloud profile
has reached the Sun, at much higher (lower) energies the $e$--folding
point is much beyond (before) the Sun position. The ratio of the excess
flux at a generic energy to the one at the fiducial energy (10~TeV)
can be expressed as a function of the ratio of the relevant diffusion
coefficients $D$ and $D_{10}$
\begin{equation}
\left(\frac{D_{10}}{D}\right)^{3/2} e^{\left(1-\frac{D_{10}}{D}\right)}\, ,
\end{equation}
\noindent so that in both limits the excess flux is diminished with respect
to the fiducial case.
\section{The supernova scenario, part two}
Drury and Aharonian (2008) have raised two important objections to the
scheme presented above. First, a diffusing cloud of cosmic rays would
produce a very wide signal in the sky, instead of the relatively narrow
hot spots detected by Milagro. Second, while diffusion in the Bohm regime
is thought to occur in peculiar regions, it cannot be the general process
governing the
propagation of cosmic rays across large distances. They suggest that
the hot spots might be due to excess cosmic rays streaming almost freely
from a magnetic nozzle along a diverging field; the source of excess
cosmic rays should be relatively nearby (100 pc or less), located at
the nozzle or behind it, and its energy content should be a fraction of a
supernova output.
We note that the cosmic rays cannot stream freely all the way from the
source to the Sun, because the propagation time would be too short, less than
a thousand years, and such a young supernova remnant could not remain
unnoticed. Moreover, the scenario of Drury and Aharonian (2008) does not
provide an explanation for the peculiar spectral shape of the Milagro
signal. One must assume that propagation occurs by diffusion from the source
to the magnetic nozzle, over a time long enough to allow the dissipation
of the SNR. This initial part of the propagation process is very similar
to what we discussed in the previous section. In particular,
diffusion would again act as a ``passband'' filter in energy, producing
a hard spectrum with a high energy cutoff, analogous to the observed one.
In the new scheme we can relax the Bohm assumption $\lambda \sim r_L$,
$\rm D_{\parallel} \sim D_{\perp}$, and can accomodate a wider range of
values for the distance of the supernova: indeed, at variance with the
previous scheme, now the diffusing cloud of cosmic rays does not need to propagate
from the supernova to the Sun, but only from the supernova to the magnetic nozzle.
More precisely, diffusion is only needed from the rim of the supernova remnant
to the magnetic nozzle, and across--field diffusion (which is the slowest
process of all) is needed only from the rim of the SNR to the first
``useful'' magnetic line (see Fig.~1).
We conclude by arguing that it is unlikely that the supernova responsible
for the excess cosmic rays was not the same that produced Geminga.
In a cone with vertex on the Sun, axis in the direction of Geminga,
height 150, and base radius 50 pc, we expect less than 0.01 supernovae
in 3.4~10$^5$ years for a Galactic rate of 0.01~yr$^{-1}$.
\begin{figure}[h!]
\resizebox{\hsize}{!}{\includegraphics{milagroAB.eps}}
\caption{Projection of the anticenter region on the meridian
plane at Galactic longitude 195$^{\circ}$ (upper panel) and on the
Galactic plane (lower panel). See text for details.}
\end{figure}
In Fig.~1 we schematize the proposed geometry. The upper panel is the
projection of the anticenter region on the plane that, being orthogonal
to the Galactic plane, contains the present positions
of the Sun and Geminga (the latter at the ``close'' value of 120~pc).
The lower panel is the projection of the same region on the Galactic plane
itself. The directions of the Milagro hot spots are indicated, with the
exception of hot spot B, which is not drawn in the lower panel since it is
very wide in Galactic longitude and would cover all other elements.
The two stars mark two possible positions of the supernova explosion, placed
at distances of 90 and 65 pc from the present position of the Sun,
respectively. The circles have radii of 10 pc, and indicate the volume
occupied by fully developed supernova remnants. A possible magnetic nozzle
is sketched with heavy lines: one sees that the cosmic
rays, after leaving the remnant, need only diffuse across the field for
very few parsecs before catching the right field line and propagating
to the Sun.
Region B is 50 degrees away from Region A and could have a different origin.
However, this hypothesis would entail several additional {\it ad hoc}
assumptions and would, in any case, conflict with the low probability of
multiple nearby supernova explosions. It is still more economical to
attribute both regions to the same source. Then the large angular separation
should be ascribed to large irregularities of the magnetic field in the Solar
vicinity: some of the field lines diverging from the ``primary" magnetic nozzle
intersect the line of sight to region B, as shown in the upper panel, and could
fuel a ``secondary" magnetic nozzle in that position. Admittedly, this is
another epicycle in the model, but it would have to be invoked in any case,
even if region B were fueled by a source independent of region A.
\section{Conclusions}
Our discussion does not {\it prove} that the Milagro anticenter hot
spots are a transient relic of the explosion of the Geminga supernova.
However, it does provide a consistent framework for
an experimental result that would otherwise remain unexplained.
If our proposed picture were indeed true, one would conclude that
after all supernovae do produce cosmic rays with an efficiency of
about 1\%. We could see this transient relic only because the supernova
that gave birth to the Geminga pulsar exploded very nearby, and not very
long ago. Because of such lucky circumstances, the long sought
``smoking gun" connecting cosmic rays with supernovae would finally
be at hand. Indeed, it could be said that while looking for the
``smoking gun" we were hit by the bullets themselves.
\begin{acknowledgements}
We would like to thank the friends and colleagues who read our manuscript,
almost equally divided between strongly supportive and
strongly skeptical. They are Pasquale Blasi, Gabriele Ghisellini,
Franco Pacini, Malcolm Walmsley and Lodewijk Woltjer, but we
will not disclose who said what.
We also thank the referee, Patrizia Caraveo, for her patience, accuracy, and
open--mindedness in dealing with our wild ideas.
\end{acknowledgements}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 647 |
Near Tiruvallur, so future development in and around the area is strong leading to good appreciation.
Well connected by Road & Rail means of transport.
Situated on industrial corridor with more than 150 industries running, among which many of them are fortune 500 Companies (Oragadam Auto Street, Sriperumbudur & Irungattukottai Sipcot, Ambattur Industrial estate).
Return on Investment is good as need for rental houses are very high in the area due to proximity to industrial development.
Integrated community with all amenities & facilities.
DTCP approved property with wide tar top road coming with a clear title.
"Suncity" is located amidst existing residential habitat on the state highway.
Surrounded by educational institutions, government offices & hospitals.
Sure shot multi-fold appreciation in 5 years time.
Rental Guaranteed. As the location is booming up with many MNC's having their corporate branches rooted in, there is a huge demand for quality residential community which AMARPRAKASH'S "Suncity" fulfills.
Safety of the asset is assured being a gated community and all facilities like Underground Drainage & STP, Storm Water Drainage, Water connection & well laid roads are at par with the corporation standards.
Just 5 Km from Near Rajiv Gandhi Memorial Dry Port, Mappedu. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 9,198 |
{"url":"http:\/\/www.last.fm\/music\/McLaughlin+John\/+similar","text":"# Similar Artists\n\n1. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n2. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n3. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n4. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n5. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n6. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n7. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n8. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n9. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n10. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n11. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n12. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n13. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n14. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n15. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n16. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n17. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n18. We don't have a wiki here yet...\n19. Formed in 1986, the Monks of Doom are Victor Krummenacher (vocals, bass), David Immergluck (guitar, backing vox), Greg Lisher (guitar), Chris\u2026","date":"2016-06-29 05:16:22","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.9431243538856506, \"perplexity\": 4560.87593232681}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 20, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2016-26\/segments\/1466783397565.80\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20160624154957-00091-ip-10-164-35-72.ec2.internal.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
ANTARCTICA SKI TOURING
Guided Backcountry Skiing Trips To Antarctica
-It is hard to really describe what it is like to be in Antartica, let alone ski there. It is the ultimate negative space in nature and being there to ski really exemplifies who we are as people-
Ski down pristine Antarctic slopes while enjoying breathtaking views of the dark blue ocean. The journey starts in Ushuia, Argentina, on the southern tip of South America. From there, we board a ship and set sail for the Antarctic Peninsula crossing the Drake Passage. Albatross and pods of whales give way to penguins and seals who welcome us to this skier's paradise. Shielded peaks of snow and ice stretch out in all directions as the ship navigates a tortuous passage of icebergs and fiords. The ship is our lavish base for day touring. It maneuvers to a new location each evening to provide a new venue for skiing each morning. Boat life is good on this Antarctic ski cruise; meals are expertly prepared by course and services abound. The ship life is a stark contrast to the natural void that surrounds the ship. After a week of backcountry skiing in Antarctica, we return north and meet back up with the reality of normal life.
Come springtime, the Antarctic Peninsula has a relatively moderate climate. Temperatures are similar to late winter in the mountains of the American West. Daylight abounds as it extends through the majority of the hours of the night. It is common to ski new powder snow after storms and soft corn during clear weather. The terrain is comprised of big, glaciated peaks that fall precipitously into the cold, salty ocean.
This Antarctic ski cruise is run in conjunction with Ice Axe Expeditions.
Join us in November for the backcountry skiing experience of a lifetime! Space is still available but is filling fast.
Early November
Please contact for details
For more details see: www.iceaxe.tv
Departing South America
Livingston Island skiing | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 5,914 |
{"url":"https:\/\/homework.cpm.org\/category\/CCI_CT\/textbook\/pc3\/chapter\/10\/lesson\/10.1.5\/problem\/10-100","text":"### Home > PC3 > Chapter 10 > Lesson 10.1.5 > Problem10-100\n\n10-100.\n\nA large picture weighing 40 pounds is being suspended as shown in the diagram at right. How much tension is on one side of the cable?\n\nThe sum of the vectors in the diagram must be $0$ since the picture is not moving.\nUse this information to solve for F, the force that is distributed into the cable vectors.\n\nThe tension in a cable is the length of its force vector.","date":"2021-10-16 00:09:21","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 1, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.6188026666641235, \"perplexity\": 653.0581238333698}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-43\/segments\/1634323583087.95\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20211015222918-20211016012918-00470.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Q: cURL header problems when posting JSON I'm in the process of building an API, but ran into some problems when testing with cURL.
My code looks like this:
$people = array( array('name' => urlencode('casper'),
'shoesize' => urlencode(41)
),
array('name' => urlencode('charlotte'),
'activated' => urlencode(1)
)
);
$data = http_build_query(array('data' => json_encode($people)));
$url = '...';
$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array(
'Accept: application/json',
'Content-Type: application/json',
'Connection: Keep-Alive'
));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $result;
The method at the URL endpoint just returns the $_POST['data'].
This works all the way until i set my headers in cURL. Without them set, the data is passed through with no problems.
A: If you are using json header then send json data
replace
$data = http_build_query(array('data' => json_encode($people)));
with
$data = json_encode($people);
and fetch it in target file using fopen('php://input','r');
or either dont send header at all.
you can see may blog
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 2,922 |
Q: PHP 7 - Alternative Syntax else if that has HTML inside? my apologies if there's an answer to this on SO somewhere. I searched around with no avail.
I'm wondering if there's alternative syntax for else if with HTML inside exists. I know there's such alternative syntax for if and else, but couldn't find anything in the PHP documentation for else if.
Right now I have this code:
<?php if($err) : ?>
<div class="alert-failure"><?php echo "Error: " . $err; ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php if ($success): ?>
<div class="alert-success"><?php echo "Success: " . $success; ?></div>
<?php endif; ?>
But this seems illogical since my app won't be having an error if it's successful. Is there a way to use else if here? Thanks in advance!
A: You could use Ternary it is simple, easy to read, and would look like this:
$value = ($condition) ? 'Truthy Value' : 'Falsey Value';
What Are The Advantages of Ternary Logic?
There are some valuable advantages to using this type of logic:
*
*Makes coding simple if/else logic quicker
*You can do your if/else logic inline with output instead of breaking
your output building for if/else statements
*Makes code shorter
*Makes maintaining code quicker, easier
A: Another way would be -
<?php ($err) ? '<div class="alert-failure">Error: ' . $err . '</div>' :
(($success) ? '<div class="alert-success">Success: ' . $success . '</div>' : '') ?>
It is somewhat similar like -
if($err) { //... }
elseif($success) { //... }
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 7,976 |
Q: Array.from(string) method not working in Google Script I'm trying to do a very simplified Caesar Cipher, but for this, I need to convert a string to an array. I used
var i = Array.from('string')`
but google does not recognize this as a valid method.
Is there a way around this? I want to make it so a string
'Hello World'
becomes an array of each character
[H, e, l, l, o, , W, o, r, l, d]
Google doesn't recognize the .toCharArray() method either, nor the split("") or split("(?!^)")
RESOLVED I used var ui = DocumentApp.getUi(); var input = ui.prompt(""); var array = input.getResponseText().split("");
A: You can run split directly on the string.
var i = "hello world".split("");
A: If you're using a .prompt to ask user for input you need to store it into a variable.
var ui = DocumentApp.getUi();
var input = ui.prompt('') //...
// Then if you want to access the input text
var array = Array.from(input.getResponseText());
Take a look at google's documentation for Google Apps Script https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/base/prompt-response
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 4,375 |
Richard Read Sr. (ca. 1765 - ca. 1829) was a British-born artist who was sent to Australia as a convict. He is known as Richard Read senior to differentiate him from another Richard Read, thought to be his son, who painted in Sydney at the same time.
Early life
Little is known of Richard Read's early life. Richard Read is said to have been born in London circa 1765. Recent sources suggest that his middle name was Daniel and that his parents were Richard Read and Lydia, née Ames. London business directories for 1805 and 1808 show Read as an animal painter. In July 1812 he was sentenced to fourteen years' transportation for knowingly possessing forged banknotes. He was transported to Sydney on the Earl Spencer, arriving in Sydney on 9 October 1813. Just eight weeks later, Read received his ticket of leave. Sarah and their daughter Elizabeth Lydia arrived on the ship Kangaroo in January 1814. His son, also named Richard and later a noted painter himself, arrived in Sydney as a free settler in 1819. The younger Richard Read was already estranged from his father, and did not acknowledge their relationship.
Career
Read established a drawing school at 37 Pitt Street, Sydney, in 1814. There he taught the art of drawing, and also sold his own drawings, embroideries and paintings. Two Read paintings survive from this time: Portrait of John Buckland and Portrait of Elizabeth Isabella Broughton. Though Read claimed to have been taught by the noted British artist Sir Joshua Reynolds, no evidence has been found for this claim. He benefited from the patronage of New South Wales governor Lachlan Macquarie. Read advertised in the Sydney Gazette in 1823, saying that he had recently completed a number of portraits of Macquarie. A watercolour portrait of Macquarie acquired by the State Library of New South Wales is thought to be one of these. On the reverse, the portrait is labelled 'Take notice that none are original pictures of Governor Macquarie but what has got the name of Read marked in Latin with the seal annext Governor Macquarie never sat to any artist in this colony but Read Snr.'
Read continued to operate at several studios in Sydney before receiving an absolute pardon in July 1826. Shortly thereafter, no further trace is found of Read. As he is not listed in the 1828 census of new South Wales, it is possible that he returned to England.
Legacy
Read painted portraits of notable Sydney identities including the Macquarie family, Barron Field and Elizabeth Marsden, wife of Samuel Marsden. These, along with several of Read's Sydney landscapes and paintings of birds and animals, are located at the State Library of New South Wales.
See also
List of convicts transported to Australia
References
19th-century Australian artists
Australian portrait painters
Australian bird artists
Convicts transported to Australia
Year of birth unknown
Year of death unknown
Year of birth uncertain | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 3,455 |
{"url":"https:\/\/cascadiarconf.com\/faq\/","text":"\u2022 Do you have a Code of Conduct?\n\u2022 YES! See the COC page.\n\n\u2022 When\/where will it be?\n\u2022 3 June 2017 - at OHSU Collaborative Life Science Building, 2730 SW Moody Ave, Portland, OR 97201. Directions: Please enter CLSB through the South entrance and go to the 3rd floor via the South Elevators. 3A001\/3A002 (the main conference location) is across the short bridge. See location for a map\n\n\u2022 What kind of talks are you looking for?\n\u2022 We're looking for talks generally around R - but can include a focus on science, data, data science, even other programming languages, etc.\n\n\u2022 Are there discounts for students?\n\u2022 Yes! Tickets for students are only $5. But don't worry if you're not a student - tickets for everyone else are only$30.\n\n\u2022 What about tickets?\n\u2022 Tickets are on sale on Eventbrite right now.\n\n\u2022 What about food?\n\u2022 We'll have coffee and snacks during breaks. For lunch, there's many options in the building and very near the building. You can also bring your lunch :)\n\n\u2022 Will you provide lunch?\n\u2022 No. Tickets are cheap and so we're having everyone do their own lunch.\n\n\u2022 Will you provide a private place to nurse\/pump breastmilk?\n\u2022 Yes! This was raised by an attendee, and now we have a room. Please get in touch with us beforehand or at the event if you want access.\n\n\u2022 What about next year?\n\u2022 Probably, we'll see.\n\n\u2022 Will talks be recorded?\n\u2022 Yes. We'll ask each of the speakers if they give permission for us to record. Talks will be available shortly after the conference.\n\n\u2022 What about parking?\n\u2022 See the Getting There section below.\n\n## Transportation\n\n### Bike\n\nThe location we're at is the meeting point of a few major bike routes: one going East-West, and one going North-South. So whether you're coming from downtown, North Portland, or East Portland or elsewhere, it should be convenient to get here. Here's some bike maps. Also, Google maps obs.\n\n### Train\n\nThe location is also a nexus for a few train routes. Here's an interactive map. Also, Google maps obs.\n\n### Walking\n\nyay! Walking along the river is very nice if it's on your way.\n\n### Car\n\nParking is free at Schnitzer Lot - printable map. However, we encourage people to carpool if possible since there are a couple of other events that day in the building.\n\n### Flying\n\nWe imagine most people will be local-ish, but if you are flying, we have a great airport, though it's not super big so not a ton of direct flights. You can grab a train from the airport and get all the way here. See above links for trains. Or cab\/etc.\n\nshow off\n\njealous","date":"2017-09-22 08:01:26","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.1918671429157257, \"perplexity\": 4669.846584453354}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": false}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2017-39\/segments\/1505818688926.38\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20170922074554-20170922094554-00680.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Gwyn Arch MBE (4 May 1931 – June 2021) was a British musical arranger, composer, and choir director.
Early life
Arch was born in Southampton on 4 May 1931, to a Welsh father. He was raised in Birmingham and then Ipswich, where he attended secondary school. After national service he studied English at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He played in jazz bands there and at University of Oxford, where he took a postgraduate diploma in education.
Career
Arch taught English at Rickmansworth Grammar School for nine years, studying musical composition at Trinity College London in his spare time. He was Director of Music at Bulmershe College from 1964 to 1985. In the 1960s he arranged music for BBC Home Service radio programmes for schools, and in the 1970s, he made several appearances, as a conductor, on the BBC Television programme Seeing and Believing.
He was musical director of the South Chiltern Choral Society for almost 50 years, retiring in 2014. In 1971 he established the Reading Male Voice Choir and served as the choir's musical director until 2015. He was a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music, a Composition Fellow of Trinity College London, and for ten years an Associated Board examiner. His oeuvre includes many arrangements of choral works and songs, in a wide variety of genres, for mixed (SATB), male (TTBB), and female (SSA) choirs. He marketed many of his arrangements for male voice choirs as sheet music via his company Grove Music.
Honours
Arch was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours, for services to music in Berkshire.
The Gwyn Arch Foundation was launched in his memory on 9 April 2022 at a celebration concert featuring several of the choirs he founded. It aims "to support the development and performance of choral music by and for young people within the Thames Valley".
Personal life
Arch met Jane, subsequently a head teacher, when he was at Oxford University, where he was musical director of the Experimental Theatre Club and she was in the choir. They married two years later, and moved to Sonning Common in 1964. Their elder son David Arch is also a conductor, arranger and composer and is the musical director on the BBC Television show Strictly Come Dancing. Their younger son Jonathan has a daughter Lucy who is a professional cellist, playing regularly with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra.
Arch's death was announced on 8 June 2021.
Notes
References
1931 births
2021 deaths
British choral conductors
20th-century British composers
21st-century British composers
Musicians from Birmingham, West Midlands
Musicians from Ipswich
Members of the Order of the British Empire
Teachers of English
Alumni of Trinity College of Music
Alumni of Selwyn College, Cambridge
Alumni of the University of Oxford
People from Berkshire (before 1974) | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 9,226 |
after they get to some extent the place they'll not take care of themselves with out help. Residence care companies are additionally seen as a less expensive choice. Residential care houses will be fairly a pricey choice – on common they'll price upwards of £30,000 on an annual foundation. And for individuals with out huge private financial savings or saleable belongings, it is a large amount of cash. It is nonetheless a considerable amount of money in regular circumstances Home Care Providers.
Being confronted with a very new setting is hard; when affected by an sickness it is made significantly harder. The upheaval of transferring right into a residential care dwelling can show to be hectic for somebody receiving care. It isn't at all times essential both. Residence care allow sufferers to stay in a spot they know – their very own dwelling. It additionally permits them to be surrounded by their possessions and recollections – which may show to be comforting throughout a tough time. There might come a time when a residential care facility, with its specialist care gear is an absolute necessity. However throughout the early days, it is properly price trying into dwelling care companies.
When affected by an sickness or life-limiting situation, a go to from family and friends can imply an terrible lot. Seeing these acquainted faces frequently can present an amazing enhance to somebody after they're in poor health. These companies allow them to proceed visiting frequently – at any time of the day. Residential care houses, however, have set visiting hours, that means that arranging an on-the-fly go to simply is not doable. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 5,140 |
\section{Introduction}\label{s:intro}
Asymptotic giant branch stars are sources of slow, massive winds, which affect the observable properties and final fate of these cool luminous giants. The outflows are commonly assumed to be driven by radiative pressure on dust grains, that form in the extended stellar atmospheres \citep[for a review on mass loss of AGB stars see, e.g.,][]{Hoefner2018A&ARv..26....1H}. In recent years, the on-going progress in high-angular-resolution techniques has given increasingly detailed insights into the layers of the dynamical atmospheres where the dust grains form and where the outflows have their origin. Spatially resolved observations of nearby AGB stars span wavelengths from the visual and near-IR, which give indications about grain sizes \citep[][]{Norris2012Natur.484..220N, Ohnaka2016A&A...589A..91O, Ohnaka2017A&A...597A..20O}, to the mid-IR region, where lattice modes make it possible to identify the chemical composition of the dust particles \cite[e.g.,][]{Zhao-Geisler2012A&A...545A..56Z, Karovicova2013A&A...560A..75K, Khouri2015A&A...577A.114K}, and the sub-mm regime, where the gas kinematics and temperatures in the circumstellar environment can be traced \citep[e.g.,][]{Ramstedt2014A&A...570L..14R, Vlemmings2017NatAs...1..848V, Khouri2016MNRAS.463L..74K, Khouri2018A&A...620A..75K}. Such observations provide critical constraints on the mass loss mechanism and the unprecedented possibility of testing models of convection and pulsations, atmospheric dynamics, dust formation, and wind acceleration.
Dust-forming dynamical atmospheres and dust-driven winds of AGB stars have mostly been studied with 1D hydrodynamical models \cite[e.g.,][]{Winters2000A&A...361..641W, Wachter2002A&A...384..452W, Hoefner2003A&A...399..589H, Jeong2003A&A...407..191J, Hoefner2008A&A...491L...1H, Mattsson2010A&A...509A..14M, Bladh2015A&A...575A.105B, Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}. Assuming spherically symmetric flows, such simulations describe the varying radial profiles of densities, temperatures, velocities, and dust properties, accounting for shock waves, which are triggered by pulsations and propagate outward through the atmospheres.
Earlier, these 1D wind models tended to focus on C-type AGB stars (with C/O $>1$ in the atmosphere, due to dredge-up of newly-produced carbon from the interior), where amorphous carbon grains are the main wind-driving dust species. The resulting mass loss rates, wind velocities, spectral energy distributions, and photometric variations are in good agreement with observations \citep[e.g.,][]{Nowotny2011A&A...529A.129N, Nowotny2013A&A...552A..20N, Eriksson2014A&A...566A..95E}. However, due to the strong absorption by carbon dust, the stellar photospheres and inner atmospheres are often obscured, and detailed comparisons with spatially resolved observations can be difficult \cite[e.g.,][]{Paladini2009A&A...501.1073P, Stewart2016MNRAS.455.3102S, Sacuto2011A&A...525A..42S, Wittkowski2017A&A...601A...3W}.
The dusty envelopes of M-type AGB stars (C/O $<1$) tend to be more transparent in the visual and near-IR regime, giving a better view of the innermost dust-forming atmospheric layers, and allowing for more detailed tests of dynamical atmosphere and wind models \citep[e.g.,][]{Sacuto2013A&A...551A..72S, Aronson2017A&A...603A.116A, Bladh2017A&A...607A..27B}. The latest generation of DARWIN models for M-type AGB stars produces visual and near-IR spectra, light curves, variations of photometric colors with pulsation phase, and wind properties that are in good agreement with observations \citep{Bladh2013A&A...553A..20B, Bladh2015A&A...575A.105B, Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}, supporting a scenario where the radiative pressure, which triggers the outflows, is caused by photon scattering on Fe-free silicate grains \citep[][]{Hoefner2008A&A...491L...1H}. Such particles are highly transparent at visual and NIR wavelengths, which results in significantly less radiative heating and smaller condensation distances than for Fe-bearing silicate grains \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Woitke2006A&A...460L...9W, Bladh2012A&A...546A..76B}. In order to provide sufficient radiative pressure by scattering, however, the grains need to be of a size comparable to the wavelengths where the stellar flux peaks, in other words, grain radii should fall in the range of 0.1 -- 1$\,\mu$m. Earlier, it was considered controversial if such large grains could form in the close vicinity of AGB stars. In recent years, however, several observational studies have found dust grains with radii of about 0.1 -- 0.5$\,\mu$m, at distances below 2-3 stellar radii \citep[][]{Norris2012Natur.484..220N, Ohnaka2016A&A...589A..91O, Ohnaka2017A&A...597A..20O}.
Observations of scattered stellar light in the visual and near-IR regime can give indications of grain sizes, but they provide only indirect constraints on the chemical composition of the dust particles. Mid-IR spectro-interferometric studies of characteristic dust features, on the other hand, suggest that the formation of silicate dust may be preceded by the condensation of corundum, forming a thin gravitationally bound dust layer close to the stellar photosphere \cite[e.g.,][]{Zhao-Geisler2012A&A...545A..56Z, Karovicova2013A&A...560A..75K, Khouri2015A&A...577A.114K}. The radiative pressure on corundum grains is insufficient to cause noticeable dynamical effects, but condensation of silicate mantles on top of corundum cores may speed up grain growth to the critical size regime, and make wind acceleration more efficient \citep[][]{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}.
Recent high-resolution imaging of nearby AGB stars at visual and infrared wavelengths has revealed complex, non-spherical distributions of gas and dust in the close circumstellar environment \cite[e.g.,][]{Ohnaka2016A&A...589A..91O, Stewart2016MNRAS.457.1410S, Wittkowski2017A&A...601A...3W}. Temporal monitoring shows changes in both atmospheric morphology and grain sizes over the course of weeks or months \cite[e.g.,][]{Khouri2016A&A...591A..70K, Ohnaka2017A&A...597A..20O}.
Such phenomena cannot be investigated with the 1D atmosphere and wind models mentioned above, which simulate time-dependent radial structures, but assume overall spherical symmetry of the atmosphere and wind. In the 3D ``star-in-a-box'' models by \cite{Freytag2008A&A...483..571F} and \cite{Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F}, on the other hand, an inhomogeneous distribution of atmospheric gas emerges naturally, as a consequence of large-scale convective flows below the photosphere and the resulting network of atmospheric shock waves. The exploratory models of \cite{Freytag2008A&A...483..571F} also indicated that the dynamical patterns in the gas should be imprinted on the dust in the close stellar environment, due to the density- and temperature-sensitivity of the grain growth process. However, these early 3D simulations included amorphous carbon dust, while most of the recent high-angular observations concern M-type AGB stars, which primarily produce silicate and corundum dust with very different micro-physical properties.
In this paper, we present first global 3D RHD simulations of dust formation in the atmosphere of an M-type AGB star, featuring new physical input and improved numerics compared to our earlier work. We focus on the innermost, gravitationally bound dust layers, mainly consisting of corundum (Al$_2$O$_3$), and use silicate formation to indicate where a radiatively-driven outflow may be triggered, marking the likely outer edge of the gravitationally bound dust shell. In Sect.~\ref{s:setup}, we give a brief overview of the basic physical assumptions and numerical methods. The results are presented in Sect.~\ref{s:results}, and compared to observations in Sect.~\ref{s:discussion}. Finally, a summary and conclusions are given in Sect.~\ref{s:conclusions}.
\section{Setup of global AGB star models}\label{s:setup}
\begin{table*}[htb]
\begin{center}
\caption{Basic model parameters and derived quantities
\label{t:ModelParam}}
\begin{tabular}{l|lrrrrrrr|rrrr}
\hline
model & opacities & \!$n_\mathrm{band}$ & $M_\star$ & $M_\mathrm{env}$ & $L_\star$ & \!\!\!$n_x$$\times$$n_y$$\times$$n_z$\! & $x_\mathrm{box}$ & $t_\mathrm{avg}$ & $R_\star$ & $T_\mathrm{eff}$ & $\log g$ \\
& & & $M_\sun$ & $M_\star$ & $L_\sun$ & & $R_\sun$ & yr & $R_\sun$ & K & (cgs) \\ \hline
st28gm06n25 & {\footnotesize\verb|phoenix_opal_greynodust01|}\!\! & 1 & 1.0 & 0.182 & 6890 & 401$^3$ & 1970 & 23.77 & 372 & 2727 & -0.71 \\
st28gm06n038 & {\footnotesize\verb|t2800gm050mm00_coma_opal|}\!\! & 3 & 1.0 & 0.182 & 7049 & 401$^3$ & 1970 & 26.94 & 478 & 2417 & -0.92 \\
st28gm06n039 & {\footnotesize\verb|t2800gm050mm00_coma_opal|}\!\! & 1 & 1.0 & 0.182 & 7027 & 401$^3$ & 1970 & 26.98 & 386 & 2690 & -0.74 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
{The table shows the model name;
the name of the opacity file;
the number $n_\mathrm{band}$ of frequency bands or bins, used in the radiation transport (1\,=\,gray);
the mass $M_\star$, used for the external potential;
the envelope mass $M_\mathrm{env}$, derived from integrating the mass density of all grid cells within the computational box;
the average emitted luminosity $L_\star$;
the model grid dimensions $n_x$$\times$$n_y$$\times$$n_z$;
the edge length of the cubical computational box $x_\mathrm{box}$;
the time $t_\mathrm{avg}$, used for averaging the remaining quantities in this table;
the average approximate stellar radius $R_\star$;
the average approximate effective temperature $T_\mathrm{eff}$;
the logarithm of the average approximate surface gravity $\log g$.
The pulsation period of model st28gm06n25 is 1.388 years (507 days), the other models have similar periods.
}
\end{table*}
Below, we give a short summary of the physical and numerical properties of the CO5BOLD code, relevant for the new simulations presented in this paper. More details can be found in our earlier papers on global AGB star models \citep{Freytag2008A&A...483..571F, Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F}. The newly-implemented routines describing the condensation of corundum and silicate grains are based on the dust model discussed in \cite{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}.
\subsection{Properties of the CO5BOLD code}
The CO5BOLD code \citep{Freytag2012JCP...231..919F} numerically integrates the coupled non-linear equations of compressible hydrodynamics and non-local radiative energy transfer. The hydrodynamics scheme is based on an approximate Riemann solver of Roe-type \citep[see also][]{Freytag2013MSAIS..24...26F}, modified to account for the effects of ionization and gravity. The non-local radiative energy transfer in the global models is solved with a short-characteristics scheme.
The numerical grid is Cartesian. In all models presented here, the computational domain and all individual grid cells are cubical. All outer boundaries are open for the flow of matter and for radiation
\citep[see][for some details about boundary conditions in CO5BOLD]{Freytag2017MmSAI..88...12F}.
Gravitation is included as an external potential, with a general $1/r$ profile, that is smoothed in the central region of the star. In this volume, heat is added as a constant source term to produce the desired stellar luminosity, since the tiny central region where nuclear reactions take place cannot possibly be resolved with grid cells of constant size. A drag force is active in this core region only,
to prevent dipolar flows traversing the entire star. The tabulated equation of state (assuming solar abundances) takes the ionization of hydrogen and helium and the formation of H$_2$ molecules into account.
Our earlier global 3D RHD simulations of AGB stars used tabulated gray opacities merged from Phoenix \citep{Hauschildt1997ApJ...483..390H} and OPAL \citep{Iglesias1992ApJ...397..717I} data
(see Table\,\ref{t:ModelParam}). This is sufficient for studies of interior properties like convection and pulsations and to give a qualitative picture of the shock-dominated atmospheric dynamics \citep[see][]{Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F}. The new dust-forming simulations discussed in this paper, on the other hand, require a refined modeling of the atmospheric temperature structure
using a frequency-dependent table. \citet[][]{Chiavassa2011A&A...535A..22C} presented such non-gray models for the case of red supergiants. The frequency dependence of the opacities is treated in an approximate way by an opacity-binning technique based on a method presented by \citep{Nordlund1982A&A...107....1N} and refined later on \citep[see][and references therein]{Freytag2012JCP...231..919F}. The binning scheme for the new tables does not use a prescribed set of sorting rules \citep[as, e.g., in][]{Nordlund1982A&A...107....1N}. Instead, it employs an iterative procedure to minimize the error in the overall heating and cooling rate for a representative one-dimensional temperature-pressure stratification. The error is computed from the differences between solutions of the radiative transfer equation based on the binned and on the full opacities. The new tables for atmospheric gas opacities are based on COMA data \citep[see][]{Aringer2000DissAri, Aringer2016MNRAS.457.3611A} extended with OPAL data at temperatures above approximately 12\,000\,K. Scattering is treated as true absorption. Dust opacities and radiation pressure are not taken into account at present (see below).
\subsection{Dust species: corundum and silicates}\label{s:dust_spec}
To account for the effects of dynamical processes in the stellar atmosphere on dust formation,
we use a time-dependent kinetic treatment of grain growth, as described in detail by \cite{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}. The grains grow by addition of abundant atoms and molecules from the gas phase, and they may shrink due to thermal evaporation from the grain surface. Corundum (Al$_2$O$_3$) is assumed to form according to the net reaction
\begin{equation}
{\rm 2 \, Al + 3 \, H_2 O } \,\, \longrightarrow \,\, {\rm Al_2 O_3 + 3 \, H_2 } \, .
\end {equation}
Since O is much more abundant than Al in a solar mixture, the grain growth rate and the maximum amount of corundum that can form will be limited by the abundance of Al. The condensation of Fe-free olivine-type silicates (Mg$_2$SiO$_4$) is assumed to proceed according to the net reaction
\begin{equation}\label{e_path_ol}
{\rm 2 \, Mg + SiO + 3 \, H_2 O } \,\, \longrightarrow \,\, {\rm Mg_2 SiO_4 + 3 \, H_2 } \, . \end{equation}
In a solar element mixture, the abundance of Si and Mg are comparable, and the abundance of SiO will be determined by the abundance of Si in the gas phase. Since two Mg atoms are required for each SiO molecule added to the dust particles, Mg will be the limiting factor for grain growth under these circumstances. Due to less efficient radiative heating (lower NIR absorption) Fe-free silicates can exist closer to the star than their Fe-bearing counterparts, thereby marking the inner edge of the silicate formation zone.
The kinetic treatment of grain growth summarized above does not describe nucleation, that is, the formation of the very first solid condensation nuclei (often referred to as seed particles) out of the gas phase. Since the chemical formation pathways and nucleation rates for seed particles in M-type AGB stars are still a matter of debate \citep[e.g.,][and references therein]{Gail2016A&A...591A..17G, Gobrecht2016A&A...585A...6G, Kaminski2018arXiv180910583K}, the abundance of seed particles relative to hydrogen is treated as an input parameter, and set to a value of $3 \cdot 10^{-15}$ \citep[see the discussion in][]{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}. It is assumed that these seed particles are readily available whenever conditions permit the condensation of corundum or silicate dust according to the kinetic grain growth scheme outlined above. With a radius of about $2 \cdot 10^{-7}$\,cm (corresponding to 1000 monomers) the seed particles are tiny compared to the resulting dust grains, and they have no effect other than providing an initial condensation surface for grain growth in the context of the models presented here. The growth of grains is triggered by temperature falling below a critical value \citep[see Fig.\,1 in][]{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}, which causes the gas to be supersaturated. Reversely, when the temperature rises above this value, the grains start to shrink due to evaporation from the surface. The critical temperature for a given dust species depends on the prevailing densities, as does the grain growth rate. At the relatively low densities in the stellar atmosphere, grain growth typically takes weeks to months. This is comparable to the timescales of gas dynamics and radiative flux variations, and grain growth may therefore proceed far from equilibrium.
At present, both corundum and silicate dust are considered as ``passive'' components in the 3D models. In other words, they react to the conditions in the gas, but their opacities are not fed back into the radiative transfer, and their temperatures are set by the gas temperature. Future studies of dust-driven outflows based on global 3D simulations with CO5BOLD will require considerable work on the code. Dust opacities have to be accounted for and a treatment of radiative pressure has to be implemented. In addition, a significantly larger computational domain will be required to include
at least the critical inner part of the wind-driving zone. The development is in progress but not finished, yet. Consequently, radiative pressure is not taken into account in the simulations presented here, and they focus on the innermost, gravitationally bound part of the circumstellar envelope where the dust clouds emerge. This region is dominated by corundum dust, which should not directly affect the local dynamics due to its low flux-mean opacity and negligible radiative pressure \citep[see discussion in][]{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}.
Since corundum can condense at higher temperatures than Mg-Fe silicates, it has been discussed in the literature if these species will occur in composite grains, with a silicate mantle condensing on top of a corundum core formed closer to the star \citep[e.g.,][]{Kozasa1997Ap&SS.255..437K, Kozasa1997Ap&SS.251..165K}. This scenario is consistent with recent findings in meteoritic grains \citep[e.g.,][]{Leitner2018GeCoA.221..255L}. In the models presented here, however, the two types of dust are treated as forming separate grains, each growing on tiny pre-existing seed particles (see above). This allows us to study the complex effects of 3D atmospheric dynamics and a variable radiative flux on dust condensation and evaporation, without the added complication of the two dust species being interdependent. \citet [][]{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H} demonstrated that condensation of silicate mantles on top of corundum cores may speed up grain growth to the critical size regime for effective photon scattering, and make wind acceleration more efficient. In future 3D models which take radiation pressure on dust into account, the possible formation of core-mantle grains should therefore be considered. In the present study, however, a separate treatment of the two dust species will neither affect dynamics, nor the basic cloud formation mechanism, which operates near the inner edge of the dusty envelope, preceding silicate formation.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seqavgstat_st28gm06n038_log10_T_xc}\vspace{-2mm}
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seqavgstat_st28gm06n038_log10_rho_xc}\vspace{-2mm}
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seqavgstat_st28gm06n038_rdust002_xc}\vspace{-2mm}
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seqavgstat_st28gm06n038_rdust001_xc}
\caption{Mean structures of the non-gray model st28gm06n038 (continuous red curves)
and the gray model st28gm06n039 (dashed black curves). Shown are
temperature,
gas density,
corundum grain radius, and
silicate grain radius,
averaged over spherical shells and time, and plotted against the distance from the stellar center.
\label{f:st28gm06n038_TimeAvgx}}
\end{figure}
\subsection{3D models: Input parameters and resulting quantities}
The new dust-forming 3D models discussed in this paper use a snapshot of the dust-less model st28gm06n25 of \cite{Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F} as a starting point, but they are based on different tabulated gas opacities, as discussed above, in order to take effects of non-gray radiative transfer into account. The properties of the models are summarized in Table\,\ref{t:ModelParam}. While the mass $M_\star$ (controlling the gravitational potential), as well as the resolution and the extent of the numerical grid, are pre-chosen fixed parameters, other model properties are determined after a simulation is finished. The stated stellar luminosity is a time average of the total luminosity emitted at the surface (very close but not identical to the inserted luminosity of 7000\,$L_\sun$ in the core). The envelope mass $M_\mathrm{env}$ is calculated from the integrated density of all grid cells, averaged over time. The radius is more difficult to determine and less well defined due to the complex morphology of the extended atmosphere. It is chosen as the point $R_\star$ where the spherically and temporally averaged temperature and luminosity fulfill $\langle L \rangle_{\Omega,t}$\,=$\,4\pi\sigma R_\star^2 \langle T \rangle_{\Omega,t}^4$.
The parameter $n_\mathrm{band}$ listed in Table\,\ref{t:ModelParam} specifies the number of frequency bins used in the computation of the radiative energy transfer (1\,=\,gray). The new non-gray model st28gm06n038 is characterized by a larger stellar radius and lower effective temperature than its gray parent model st28gm06n25. To check that this is an effect of non-gray radiative transfer, and not caused by the differences in the underlying gas opacity data, we also computed a gray version of the new model, st28gm06n039, based on the same new opacities. As can be seen, the resulting stellar radius and effective temperature are close to the values of the original gray model st28gm06n25, and differ considerably from the corresponding non-gray model st28gm06n038.
In Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_TimeAvgx}, we compare the mean radial structures of the new non-gray and gray models, showing temperatures, densities, and dust grain radii, averaged over spherical shells and time. While the models are almost identical in the convective, optically thick stellar interior
(above $T$\,$\gtrsim$\,8000\,K), they differ noticeably in the atmosphere. The inner atmosphere of the non-gray model st28gm06n038 is slightly hotter than that of its gray counterpart st28gm06n039. However, the models differ strongly in the outer atmospheric layers, where molecular opacities affect the radiative flux. Here, the non-gray model is considerably cooler than the gray model, leading to a much more efficient growth of silicate grains. Corundum, forming closer to the star where the differences are smaller, is less affected, but also shows a higher maximum degree of condensation in the non-gray case. Tests varying the number of frequency bins indicate that three bins are already sufficient to include the essential features of a non-gray stratification, for example, low temperatures in the outer atmosphere and short radiative time scales. A larger number of bins has only a minor impact on the temperature and density stratification, while further increasing the already considerable CPU time.
\begin{figure*}[hbtp]
\begin{center}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rho_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rho_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_v_radial_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_v_radial_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_s_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_s_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_T_T-contour_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_T_T-contour_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_Int3r_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_Int3r_mean_colorbar}\vspace{0.3cm}
\end{center}
\caption{Time sequences of density, radial velocity, entropy, and temperature for slices through the center of model st28gm06n038 (rows 1--4), and the variation of relative surface intensity (bottom row).
The snapshots are about 2 months apart (see the counter in the top of the panels).
Colored lines in the middle row indicate the radial ray used in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay},
following the emergence of a new dust cloud. The contour lines in the temperature panels at 1500\,K and 1150\,K roughly correspond to the inner edges of the corundum and silicate dust layers, respectively (see Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}).
\label{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}}
\end{figure*}
\begin{figure*}[hbtp]
\begin{center}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_quc002_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_quc002_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust002_rdust001-contour_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust002_rdust001-contour_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_quc001_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_quc001_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust001_mean}\includegraphics[width=1.9125cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust001_mean_colorbar}
\hspace*{0.9cm}\includegraphics[width=15.3cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_s_str_mean}\hspace*{1.9125cm}\vspace{0.3cm}
\end{center}
\caption{Time sequences of corundum density, corundum grain radius, silicate density, and silicate grain radius for slices through the center of model st28gm06n038 (rows 1--4). The dashed circle marks the estimated stellar radius of 478\,R$_\odot$. The over-plotted contour in the corundum grain size panels (row 2) marks where silicate grains (row 4) have reached a radius of 0.2\,$\mu$m, probably indicating the outer edge of the gravitationally bound dust layers (see text). Row 5 visualizes the dynamics with pseudo-streamlines (integrated over 10$^6$\,s; the colored lines indicate the radial ray used in Fig.~\ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay}).
Shock fronts appear as regions where flows with different directions collide. The snapshots are about 2 months apart.
\label{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}}
\end{figure*}
\section{Results}\label{s:results}
In this section we give a detailed description of the non-gray model st28gm06n038. The emphasis is on atmospheric dynamics, the dust formation process and the emergence of large-scale structures in the close vicinity of the star.
\subsection{Convective flows, pulsations, and atmospheric waves}
Global AGB star models are characterized by giant convection cells, which can span 90 degrees or more in cross sections, as discussed in detail in our earlier papers \citep{Freytag2008A&A...483..571F, Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F}. The cells are outlined by non-stationary downdrafts, which reach from the surface of the convection zone deep down toward the center. While the flow time from the surface to the center is around half a year, the convective cells can have a lifetime of many years. The photospheric layers have a complex, variable appearance due to smaller, more short-lived cells, which form close to the surface of the convection zone. In addition to the convective flows, the 3D RHD models show more or less pronounced radial pulsations, with typical periods of about a year or more, accompanied by variations in luminosity.
These dynamical processes generate waves of various frequencies and spatial scales, which quickly develop into shock waves as they propagate outward through the atmosphere with its steeply declining density. The shocks give rise to ballistic gas motions, which typically peak around 2 stellar radii. As the shock waves interact and merge, they produce large-scale regions of enhanced densities in their wakes.
The dynamics of the convective stellar interior and of the atmosphere is illustrated in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}, showing time series of gas density, radial velocity, entropy, and temperature for slices through the center of the non-gray model (rows 1--4). The surface of the convection zone is characterized by a sharp drop in both entropy and temperature, coinciding with a transition from mostly overturning gas flows in the interior to large-scale shock waves in the atmosphere. A pronounced example of a shock propagating outward through the atmosphere is visible in the upper right quadrant of the velocity plots. In the dense wake of the shock (blue area in the velocity plot, orange in the gas density panels), gas is temporarily lifted to distances where dust formation may occur. The temperature panels feature over-plotted isotherms at 1500 and 1150\,K, roughly corresponding to the expected inner edges of the corundum and silicate dust shells, respectively. It should be noted here that the temperatures in the atmosphere, which are set by non-local radiative processes, show a rather smooth, almost spherical pattern, in contrast to the gas densities, which are strongly affected by the local dynamics.
Finally, the bottom row of panels in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} shows the relative surface intensity, illustrating changes of brightness and apparent stellar radius over the course of several months. The variations of photo-center location caused by giant convection cells and their impact on Gaia results for AGB stars have been discussed in detail in a recent paper by \cite{Chiavassa2018A&A...617L...1C}.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seq1d_st28gm06n038_v1_xc3_fula}\vspace{-2mm}
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seq1d_st28gm06n038_rho_xc3_fula}\vspace{-2mm}
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seq1d_st28gm06n038_T_xc3_fula}\vspace{-2mm}
\includegraphics[width=8.8cm]{aaagb3_seq1d_st28gm06n038_quc002_xc3_fula}
\caption{One-dimensional radial profiles of velocity, gas density, temperature, and corundum density, showing the formation of a new dust cloud (appearing in the upper right quadrant of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}). The colors (red, orange, green, blue) mark the four time steps selected in Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}, the black lines show intermediate snapshots, 1.75$\cdot$10$^6$\,s (20.3\,d) apart. The sharp drop in temperature from 10\,000\,K to about 4000\,K marks the transition from the convection-dominated interior to the shock-dominated atmosphere.
\label{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay}}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Formation of dust clouds}
As outlined in Sect.\,\ref{s:dust_spec}, dust formation is sensitive to atmospheric temperatures and gas densities: Temperature acts as a threshold for the onset of grain growth or evaporation, while gas densities affect the grain growth rates, and therefore the efficiency of dust formation in a dynamical atmosphere. In the following, we demonstrate how the combined effects of temperature and density can produce inhomogeneous dust layers around AGB stars.
Rows 1--4 of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2} show time sequences of selected dust properties, plotted for slices through the center of the non-gray model, similar to the gas quantities in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}. The first and third row represent the dust densities (defined as total number of monomers condensed into grains, per volume of atmosphere) for corundum and silicates, respectively. The second and fourth row show the corresponding dust grain radii. To simplify the comparison of patterns in the corundum and silicate distributions, the over-plotted contour in the corundum grain size panels (second row) marks where silicate grains have reached a radius of 0.2 microns. This is a size where radiation pressure should be sufficient to trigger a wind, indicating the possible outer edge of the gravitationally bound dust layers (see below). Row 5 in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2} visualizes the dynamics with pseudo-streamlines (integrated over 10$^6$\,s; the colored lines indicate the radial ray used in Fig.~\ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay}). Shock fronts appear as regions where flows with different directions collide.
In the panels showing the density and grain size of corundum (first and second row of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}), the formation of a new dust cloud can be traced in the upper right quadrant. The first (leftmost) images of the time sequence show grains from previous dust formation events in the upper right quadrant, located mostly in regions of in-falling material (indicated by red color in the radial velocity plot, Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}, second row). In the next snapshot (second column), an outward-propagating shock wave (marked by a sharp red-blue transition in radial velocity, or a region of colliding flows in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}, row 5) is just reaching distances where temperatures are low enough for corundum condensation to take place. In the wake of the shock (blue region in the radial velocity plot, Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}, second row), new grains are starting to grow. A small bright spot
appears in both the corundum density and grain size plots (Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}, second column, row~1 and 2). At the third instance, corundum condensation has occurred over a larger region in the wake of the shock. The dusty gas is moving outward on ballistic trajectories, forming an expanding, crescent-shaped structure. In the fourth snapshot, the new corundum cloud has reached distances where silicate dust can exist (third and fourth row of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}). Beyond this point, a transition from the gravitationally bound dust layers to a dust-driven outflow can be expected.
Figure\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay} presents the emergence of the new corundum cloud in a form which is more easy to compare to existing spherically symmetric atmosphere and wind models \citep[e.g.][]{Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}. The panels show radial structures of velocity, gas density, temperature, and corundum density, along a radial ray from the stellar center outward in the direction of the forming cloud. Each curve plotted represents an instant in the evolution of the structures. The colored lines (red, orange, green, blue) mark the four time steps also shown in Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}, the black lines correspond to intermediate snapshots. In the radial velocity structures (Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay}, top panel) the propagation of a strong shock front through the atmosphere, from about 600 $R_{\odot}$ to about 800 $R_{\odot}$, is clearly visible, leading to a compression of the gas by about two orders of magnitude (see gas density, second panel). In the first three snapshots (red and two black lines), the temperatures (third panel) in the wake of the shock are still above the condensation limit for corundum. In the next snapshot (orange line), however, the temperature in the compressed gas behind the shock has dropped sufficiently, and a new corundum cloud is starting to form, indicated by the appearance of a spike in the dust density plot (bottom panel). In about a month, the grains grow to their final size (seen as an increase in dust density; next black line), and already two snapshots later the dust density in the cloud is decreasing, similar to the gas density, due to the general expansion of the outward-moving layers.
When comparing the dust layers plotted in Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay} to observations or 1D atmosphere and wind models, two points should be kept in mind: First, the dust densities shown in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2} (row~1 and 3) are values for a central slice through the model, not column densities integrated along the line of sight, or synthetic images. In those cases, the superposition of layers along the line of sight would probably make the clouds appear more extended. Examples of synthetic scattered light images based on radial profiles of DARWIN models have been presented by \citet{Aronson2017A&A...603A.116A}, illustrating these effects. Secondly, the linear scale in the dust density plots of the 3D model was chosen to clearly show the emergence of inhomogeneities in the innermost, gravitationally bound dust layers. It emphasizes regions of high density, making the dust layers appear narrow in the radial direction, due to rapidly falling densities with increasing distance from the star. This is in particular true for regions where grain growth is occurring in the dense wakes of shocks, which expand outward into much less dense material. As can be seen in the grain size plots in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2} (row~2 and 4), which are also a measure of the amounts of materials condensed into grains, the dusty layers extend all the way to the outer limits of the computational domain.
\subsection{Overall morphology of the dusty atmosphere}
The development of structures shown in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_1DRay}, tracing the formation of a new dust layer in the wake of a strong shock, that propagates outward through the atmosphere, is reminiscent of results obtained with 1D atmosphere and wind models. However, 1D models assume spherical symmetry, implying that atmospheric structures and dynamics are identical in all radial directions. The large-scale shock fronts propagating through the atmospheres of 3D models, on the other hand, are not spherically symmetric. While a given shock wave may cover a significant fraction of the stellar surface, leading to local conditions in its wake that are comparable to 1D models, the velocities at the shock front are not uniform, and the direction of gas motion is not purely radial. In addition, there are usually several of these large-scale shocks, propagating through the atmosphere in different directions at the same time. Sometimes they collide with each other, creating high density filaments, that appear as bright, almost radial spikes in the density plots in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}. Occasionally, this results in a corresponding localized structure of strongly enhanced dust density, formed in a process that cannot be treated with 1D simulations. Differences between 1D and 3D models regarding atmospheric dynamics have recently been discussed in detail by \cite{Liljegren2018A&A...619A..47L}.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\includegraphics[width=7.04cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rho_str_single_mean}
\includegraphics[width=1.745cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rho_str_single_mean_colorbar}
\includegraphics[width=7.04cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_quc002_str_single_mean}
\includegraphics[width=1.745cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_quc002_str_single_mean_colorbar}
\vspace{5mm}
\caption{Snapshots of logarithmic gas mass density (top) and corundum density (number density of monomers condensed into grains; bottom) with overplotted pseudo-streamlines integrated over 10$^6$\,s, for a slice through the center of model st28gm06n038, for the same instant as the rightmost column in Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}.
\label{f:st28gm06n038_rhoAndStreamlines}}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[hbtp]
\includegraphics[width=7.04cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust002_T-contour_single_mean}
\includegraphics[width=1.745cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust002_T-contour_single_mean_colorbar}
\includegraphics[width=7.04cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust001_T-contour_single_mean}
\includegraphics[width=1.745cm]{aaagb3_st28gm06n038_rdust001_T-contour_single_mean_colorbar}
\vspace{5mm}
\caption{Snapshots
of corundum grain radius (top) and silicate grain radius (bottom), with over-plotted isotherms at 1500\,K and 1150\,K (same as in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}, row 4), for a slice through the center of model st28gm06n038, at the same instant as in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_rhoAndStreamlines}. The dashed circle marks the average stellar radius.
\label{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}}
\end{figure}
The non-spherical shock fronts in the 3D models, triggered by convection and pulsations, lead to a patchy distribution of dust in the atmosphere. Grain growth is more efficient in high-density regions, and new dust is therefore concentrated in the wakes of outward-propagating shocks, apparent as arc-like structures in the central cross-sections shown in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2} (row~1 and 3). Seen face-on, these structures correspond to partial dust cloud layers, covering an area of the stellar surface similar to the shock.
Figure\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_rhoAndStreamlines} illustrates the interplay between dynamics, gas densities, and dust condensation. The upper panel shows gas density with overplotted pseudo-streamlines for a central slice of the non-gray model, while the lower panel combines a plot of corundum density with pseudo-streamlines for the same snapshot. The shock fronts, apparent as regions where flows with different directions collide, correspond to abrupt changes in gas density (upper panel). The newly-formed dust cloud in the upper right quadrant (lower panel) is located in the dense wake of the outward-propagating shock, as described above. A second dust cloud, visible in the upper left quadrant, is the result of a separate dust formation event. Overall, like the gas density, the dust density decreases strongly with increasing distance from the star, resulting in a limited radial range of observable structures.
In contrast to the dust density distributions, the grain radii plots (Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}, rows~2 and 4; Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}) do no simply reflect the current atmospheric structures and dynamics (density, velocity, location of shock fronts, etc.). This is illustrated in more detail by a comparison of Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_rhoAndStreamlines} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}. The complex spatial patterns in grain sizes result from local grain growth rates, that vary during the condensation process, spanning timescales that are comparable to those of atmospheric dynamics (typically weeks to months). In other words, dust grain properties are not set instantaneously; instead they preserve, to some degree, a record of the changing ambient conditions during the condensation process.
The inner edges of the corundum and silicate layers are largely defined by temperature, acting as a threshold for the onset of grain growth and evaporation. We note, again, that the atmospheric temperature distribution (Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1}, row 4), is set by non-local radiative processes and tends to be more smooth and quasi-spherical than the densities, which are dominated by local dynamics and shocks. As shown in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}, the inner edges of the corundum and silicate dust shells correspond almost perfectly to isotherms. Taking a closer look at the corundum grain sizes (upper panel), however, some small, but systematic, deviations can be detected: In the lower right quadrant, gas and dust are falling toward the star (see streamlines in Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_rhoAndStreamlines}), and the grains start to shrink due to thermal evaporation when temperatures exceed a critical value (see Sect.\,\ref{s:dust_spec}). Since the dust does not evaporate instantaneously, the blue region extends a little bit beyond the 1500\,K isotherm to higher temperatures. The opposite situation is seen in the upper left quadrant. There, the flow is directed outward toward regions of lower temperature, but it takes time for the grains to grow and reach their full size. Consequently, the blue zone starts somewhat outside the 1500\,K contour line. In summary, the deviations of the inner edges of the corundum and silicate layers from isotherms demonstrate the time-dependent, non-equilibrium nature of the dust condensation and evaporation processes. The effects on the dust distribution will tend to be stronger at lower densities, and they also depend on the flow velocities. For the edge of the silicate shell, some more pronounced deviations from the 1150\,K isotherm, located further out at lower densities, can be noticed in the lower panel of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}.
\begin{figure*}[hbtp]
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=16.0cm]{aaagb3_seq2d_st28gm06n038_lumr_T-contour_time_xc}\includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{aaagb3_seq2d_st28gm06n038_lumr_T-contour_time_xc_colorbar}
\includegraphics[width=16.0cm]{aaagb3_seq2d_st28gm06n038_quc002_time_xc}\includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{aaagb3_seq2d_st28gm06n038_quc002_time_xc_colorbar}
\includegraphics[width=16.0cm]{aaagb3_seq2d_st28gm06n038_quc001_time_xc}\includegraphics[width=2.0cm]{aaagb3_seq2d_st28gm06n038_quc001_time_xc_colorbar}\vspace{0.4cm}
\end{center}
\caption{Spherical averages of luminosity (integrated radiative flux), corundum density, and silicate density in model st28gm06n038, as a function of radial distance and time. In the top panel, two isotherms with temperatures representative of corundum and silicate condensation are shown (at 1500\,K and 1150\,K, respectively, same as in Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}), to demonstrate the interplay between variable radiative heating and the inner edges of dust layers. The dark area in the lower part of the top panel represents the deep stellar interior, where most of the energy flux is transported by convection. The colored vertical lines in the bottom panel mark the instants selected for Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq2}.
\label{f:st28gm06n038_QuOvertimeAndx}}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Time-dependence of global quantities}
Long-period variability of global properties like luminosity and effective temperature is a characteristic feature of AGB stars, which realistic dynamical models need to reproduce. The large-amplitude variations observed in Mira stars are commonly attributed to radial pulsations. To extract information about radial pulsations from 3D models with their complex large-scale convective flows, \citet{Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F} used averages of radial velocities and other quantities, taken over spherical shells. An analysis of the variations with time and depth revealed radial pulsations with more or less pronounced dominant frequencies, that are in general agreement with the observed period-luminosity relation of \cite{Whitelock2009MNRAS.394..795W}.
Here, we are interested in a similar global view of the dusty atmospheric layers and their variability, in order to facilitate a comparison with 1D dynamical models and unresolved observations (photometry, spectroscopy). Figure\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuOvertimeAndx} shows spherical averages of luminosity (frequency-integrated radiative flux; top panel), corundum density (middle), and silicate density (bottom panel), changing with radial distance and time.
In the top panel of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuOvertimeAndx} (showing radiative luminosity), the dark area in the lower part, representing the deep stellar interior, indicates where most of the energy flux is transported by convection. Further out, in the stellar atmosphere, the energy is mostly carried by the radiative flux, which shows pronounced variations on timescales of about a year, consistent with the radial pulsations. Atmospheric temperatures are mostly set by radiative processes, dominated by photons emitted from the stellar surface. The strong coupling between radiative flux and temperature is reflected by two over-plotted isothermal lines (same temperatures as in Figs.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuSeq1} and \ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}, indicating thresholds for the formation and destruction of corundum and silicate dust). Tracing the depth of layers with given temperature, the lines move outward for increasing luminosity and inward for decreasing luminosity, reflecting changing levels of radiative heating.
The relatively well-defined mean inner edges of the corundum and silicate shells (middle and bottom panels of Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_QuOvertimeAndx}) follow the same trend as the isothermal lines in the top panel. This is expected, since the onset of dust formation and destruction is largely defined by temperature (see Fig.\,\ref{f:st28gm06n038_RdustTandrhoContour}). Further out, the variations in the dust densities show indications of outward-propagating shock waves, that is, high-density areas moving upward as time progresses, representing the wakes of the shocks. This picture is consistent with the spherical averages of radial velocities studied in \citet{Freytag2017A&A...600A.137F}, and reminiscent of 1D dynamical atmosphere models. The mean radial dynamics of the 3D model follows qualitatively similar patterns as the motions of spherical mass shells in 1D models \citep[see, e.g.,][]{Liljegren2017A&A...606A...6L, Liljegren2018A&A...619A..47L}. However, while there is a clear periodicity in the spherically-averaged properties the 3D model, related to the radial pulsation, they also show pronounced cycle-to-cycle variations, reflecting the large-scale asymmetries in the dynamical atmosphere.
\section{Discussion: Models and observations}\label{s:discussion}
Observational evidence for non-spherical dynamical structures in atmospheres of AGB stars has been accumulating over the past few decades, following improvements in high-angular resolution techniques. In recent years, direct imaging in the visual and near-IR, as well as image reconstruction from IR interferometric data, have given an increasingly more detailed picture of the dynamical atmospheres and, in particular, the dust-forming layers.
An object, that has been observed frequently using various techniques, is the nearby C-type AGB star IRC+10216 (CW~Leo). Recently, \cite{Stewart2016MNRAS.455.3102S} studied the dynamical evolution of dust clouds, using images reconstructed from aperture-masking interferometric observations obtained with Keck and VLT, and from occultation measurements by the Cassini spacecraft. They find changes on timescales of years, and a completely different circumstellar morphology compared to observations by \citet{Kastner1994ApJ...434..719K}, \citet{Haniff1998A&A...334L...5H} and \citet{Weigelt1998A&A...333L..51W} about 20 years earlier.
In this star, the stellar surface and atmosphere are obscured by the optically thick envelope of carbon dust, making it difficult to relate the observed structures to processes in the dust-forming layers. Even in carbon stars with more moderate mass loss, however, IR images can be difficult to interpret, as demonstrated by the recent example of R Scl, see \citet{Wittkowski2017A&A...601A...3W}.
The usually more transparent dusty envelopes of M-type and S-type AGB stars, on the other hand, give better access to the stellar atmospheres, improving the possibilities to identify the physical mechanisms that produce inhomogeneous dust layers. \citet[][]{Paladini2018Natur.553..310P} recently presented H-band images of the star {$\pi$}$^{1}$ Gruis, reconstructed from VLTI/PIONIER data, which show evidence of large granulation cells on the stellar surface. The sizes of the observed surface structures agree well with extrapolations of local 3D models for less evolved stars, and with qualitative predictions of global 3D AGB star models. As discussed in Sect.\,\ref{s:results}, the large-scale convective flows result in a strongly dynamical, inhomogeneous atmosphere, which, in turn should lead to the formation of clumpy dust clouds in the close stellar environment. Such dust clouds have recently been detected in scattered light observations of R~Dor and W~Hya in the visual and near-IR range with VLT/SPHERE-ZIMPOL, showing changes in morphology on timescales of weeks to months \citep[][]{Khouri2016A&A...591A..70K, Ohnaka2017A&A...597A..20O}, as well as changes in dominant grain size, from 0.1\,$\mu$m at minimum light to 0.5\,$\mu$m at pre-maximum light in the SRa variable W\,Hya \citep{Ohnaka2016A&A...589A..91O, Ohnaka2017A&A...597A..20O}. The dynamical timescales implied by changes in circumstellar morphology, the timescales of grain growth, and the grain sizes, are in good agreement with the 3D model presented here and DARWIN models for M-type AGB stars \citep[][]{Hoefner2008A&A...491L...1H, Bladh2013A&A...553A..20B, Bladh2015A&A...575A.105B, Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H, Aronson2017A&A...603A.116A, Liljegren2017A&A...606A...6L}. The observed spatial scales, that is, the sizes of clouds and the distances from the stellar surface, compare well with the 3D model results. Recent sub-mm continuum and line observations of W Hya with ALMA \citep[][]{Vlemmings2017NatAs...1..848V} give further evidence of a dynamical atmosphere with a complex morphology, featuring a hot spot presumably due to local shock heating, as well as extended inhomogeneous layers of warm and cool gas. The cool gas component (about 900\,K) can be traced out to around 2.5 stellar radii, reaching well into the dust formation zone. It shows both infall and outflow velocities, similar to our 3D models.
In summary, the picture presented in Sect.\,\ref{s:results} is in good agreement with recent high-angular resolution observations. This indicates that the formation of inhomogeneous dust layers due to large-scale atmospheric shocks, triggered by convection and pulsations, is a likely scenario. This mechanism operates in the innermost, gravitationally bound region of the dust envelope, which is probably dominated by corundum grains \cite[see, e.g.,][]{Karovicova2013A&A...560A..75K, Khouri2015A&A...577A.114K, Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}, before an outflow is triggered by radiation pressure on silicate dust.
At present, one can only speculate how the onset of a stellar wind would affect the results, since no global 3D RHD models of AGB stars with dust-driven outflows exist so far. Since the basic cloud-formation mechanism seems to precede wind acceleration, it should not be changed qualitatively by the presence of a stellar wind. Judging from DARWIN models, a likely quantitative difference could be a lower fraction of silicon condensation, compared to the almost complete condensation found in model st28gm06n038. When the dust grains reach sizes where the outward-directed radiative force exceeds stellar gravity, triggering an outflow, condensation slows down drastically due to rapidly decreasing densities. As a consequence, significant fractions of the condensible chemical elements may remain in the molecular gas. Typical condensation degrees of Si in DARWIN models are about 20--30\,\% \citep[][]{Bladh2015A&A...575A.105B, Hoefner2016A&A...594A.108H}.
\section{Conclusions}\label{s:conclusions}
In this paper, we have presented new 3D radiation-hydrodynamical simulations, performed with the CO5BOLD code, which explore the formation of clumpy dust clouds in M-type AGB stars. The models cover the outer convective envelope and the atmosphere of the star, including the dust formation region. They account for frequency-dependent gas opacities and include a time-dependent description of grain growth and evaporation for corundum and olivine-type silicates.
The dust formation process in atmospheres of AGB stars is sensitive to ambient temperatures and gas densities, which both leave observable imprints:
\begin{itemize}
\item
Atmospheric temperatures are mostly determined by the strongly variable radiative flux emitted by the pulsating star. Temperature acts as a threshold for the onset of dust condensation and evaporation, thereby defining the inner edge of the dusty envelope, which is roughly spherically symmetric, in contrast to the dust distribution within the envelope.
\item
Gas densities are strongly dependent on atmospheric dynamics and, in particular, on shock waves triggered by large-scale convective flows and pulsations. They affect the grain growth rates and, consequently, the efficiency of dust condensation. The non-spherical shock fronts in the 3D models lead to a patchy distribution of dust in the atmosphere, similar to recent high-angular-resolution images. Grain growth is mostly occurring in the wakes of outward-propagating shocks.
\end{itemize}
The mechanism of cloud formation primarily operates at the inner edge of the dusty envelope, which is dominated by corundum (Al$_2$O$_3$). The formation of silicate dust (Mg$_2$SiO$_4$), at somewhat larger distances from the star, probably indicates the outer limit of the gravitationally bound layers, where radiation pressure may trigger a stellar wind. In this context, it should be noted that the first exploratory 3D models of dust cloud formation in M-type AGB stars presented here do not account for radiative pressure, which would require a computational effort well beyond the scope of this paper. However, with cloud formation preceding wind acceleration, the basic scenario
described here should also hold in the presence of an outflow.
In addition to the 3D structures emerging in the models, we have also analyzed spherical means of dust densities and other quantities, which can be more easily compared to unresolved observations and 1D atmosphere and wind models. These quantities show a pronounced periodicity, related to radial pulsations and variable radiative heating of the atmosphere, as well as cycle-to-cycle variations. The latter reflect both, a range of ballistic timescales in the atmosphere, similar to results of 1D models, and the variable 3D morphology of the dusty envelope. Observed cycle-to-cycle variations in photometric and spectroscopic data hold information on both, radial dynamics and non-spherical effects, but monitoring of nearby objects with high-angular-resolution techniques is essential for disentangling them.
\begin{acknowledgements}
This work has been supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsr{\aa}det). The computations were performed on resources (``rackham'') provided by SNIC through Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX) under Projects snic2017-1-41 and snic2018-3-74. We thank Bernhard Aringer for providing input data for the frequency-dependent gas opacity tables used in the new 3D models, Sofia Ram\-stedt for helpful comments concerning the manuscript, and the referee, Jan Martin Winters, for constructive suggestions.
\end{acknowledgements}
\bibliographystyle{aa}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 50 |
Finds are what helps to date a site and provide an idea of the activities that took place. You should be able to recognise various types of finds and sub types within artefact groups. Select the correct process and organise in a structured way that allows cataloguing. Washing, drying, storage and listing finds is dependant on the type of find. Learn the basics.
PRINCIPLE: Carry out careful supervised sorting, initial cleaning (only if appropriate), recording and storage of recovered artefacts.
Novice – Can recognise differences in major artefact groups and can sort the finds into groups and as part of a supervised team can assist the finds officer.
Proficient – Will carefully sort and organise the finds which requires no further checking by the finds officer and can recognise patterns and anomalies within an assemblage and may inform the progressing excavation.
Think about what you are cleaning – don't scrub old glass or painted wall plaster – as the finds that go into the water will be fewer than went in.
Keep all your labels with your finds – this is the only way to know where they are from. If you lose the label, then you may as well throw the finds away!
Only work on one context at a time, and have a clean label to go with the drying and clean finds, which can then be rebagged once dry. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 8,426 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.askiitians.com\/forums\/Wave-Optics\/ultraviolet-light-of-wavelength-280-nm-is-used-in_186057.htm","text":"# Ultraviolet light of wavelength 280 nm is used in an experiment on photoelectric effect with lithium (\uf06a = 2.5 eV) cathode. Find(a) the maximum kinetic energy of the photoelectrons and(b) the stopping potential.\n\nArun\n25758 Points\n4 years ago\n(a) K.E. = (hc \/\u00a0$\\lambda$)\u00a0 \u2013\u00a0$\\phi$0\n= (1242 ev-nm\/ 280 nm) \u2013 2.5 ev\n= 1.9 ev\n(b) stopping potential is given by\nev = K.E.max\nV = 1.9 ev \/ e\n= 1.9 Volt","date":"2022-08-17 01:39:54","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 2, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.4989124834537506, \"perplexity\": 7441.162503722597}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.3, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2022-33\/segments\/1659882572833.78\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20220817001643-20220817031643-00030.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Linda Williams Jackson
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
Hand-lettering and art by Sarah L. Coleman
Cover illustration © 2017 by Sarah J. Coleman
Cover design by Sharismar Rodriguez
_Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available._
ISBN: 978-0-544-78510-6
eISBN 978-0-544-86820-5
v1.1216
> _This book is dedicated to:_
> _My husband—Jeff—for always believing._
>
> _My children—Olivia, Chloe, and Benjamin—for_ almost _always listening._
>
> _My mom—Ernestine Scott Williams_
> _(May 18, 1928–April 26, 2011)—_
> _for always showing, and not just telling._
>
> _And to my longtime writing buddy—Alice Faye Duncan Thompson—for always cheering._
# Stillwater, Mississippi
1955
# July
# Chapter One
## SATURDAY, JULY 23
PAPA USED TO SAY I HAD A MEMORY LIKE AN ELEPHANT'S. According to him, an elephant never forgets. I'm not sure how my self-educated, tenant-farming grandfather knew what an elephant's memory was like, but he sure was right about mine. Most folks didn't believe me, but I could remember all the way back from when I was only a year and a half old, when my brother Fred Lee was born. That was June 1943.
I remember Mama stretched out on the bed, flat on her back, her body stiff like a board.
A blue and white patchwork quilt covered the bed.
Sweat covered Mama.
What I thought was a watermelon tucked beneath her faded yellow dress looked as if it had sucked all the fat from her spindly arms and legs and placed it in her stomach. Since her lips were so dry and crusty, I thought the watermelon had sucked all the life from her face, too.
With her head swaying from side to side, Mama moaned and whispered, "Y'all, hurr'up and fetch Miss Addie."
My grandmother, Ma Pearl, standing as tall as a mountain, her thick arms crossed over her heavy bosom, shushed Mama from the doorway. "Hush, chile," she said. "Save yo' strength for pushing."
Other than the tiny room reeking of mothballs and rubbing alcohol, that's all I remember, because Ma Pearl shooed me to the front porch to watch for the toothless, bent-to-the-ground Miss Addie. After Miss Addie came hobbling along on that crooked stick she called a cane, I wasn't allowed back into the house. But even from the porch I could hear Mama screaming. I thought the watermelon was eating her.
That night, I cried when I couldn't sleep with Mama. She had the watermelon wrapped in a blanket and wedged against her bosom. From that day on, whenever I wanted her to hold me, she held that watermelon instead. I was convinced she loved the watermelon more than she loved me.
Twelve years and one month after listening to Mama give birth to what I thought was a watermelon, I was halfway through my six-mile trek to Miss Addie's—not to fetch her for Mama, but to deliver eggs to her from Ma Pearl—when I heard a pickup rattling up the road, crunching rocks behind me.
Without looking, I knew the pickup belonged to Ricky Turner. And without a doubt, I knew Ricky was looking for trouble. He had a reputation for trying to run over colored folks just because he had a notion. He'd chased a nine-year-old boy named Obadiah Malone straight into the woods and all the way to Stillwater Lake with that rusted-out piece of junk only a few days before. So when the rock crunching grew louder and the engine clanking more intense, I flew one way and the egg crate another as I dove toward the grass. Not a second later, the pickup rumbled by, pelting me with rocks as I crouched near a tree. The eggs I was to deliver to Miss Addie lay scattered on the road, cracked, ready to sizzle in the midday heat.
As the truck rattled up the road, Ricky and his buddies leaned out the windows. They guffawed and hollered obscenities at me. Without thinking, I ran to the middle of the road, picked up the biggest rock I could find, and slung it at the disappearing truck.
That was a mistake.
I don't know how they saw me. But when the truck stopped, I froze.
Ricky shifted in reverse.
In a cloud of dust, the truck roared back my way.
I scrambled toward the grass.
When the truck stopped right in front of me, my heart sputtered worse than the pickup's engine.
Ricky poked his angry red face out the window and yelled, "Gal, don't you know better'n to chuck a rock at a gentleman's truck?" His face tightened like a fist as he released a stream of tobacco juice from his twisted mouth.
I wiped the brown spit from my legs and tried to stare at the ground like I knew I should. But I couldn't take my eyes off Ricky's scowling face. He snorted and spat again. This time at the ground.
"You could've broke my back winder," he said. "Now, how you 'spect to pay for that?"
For the record, the back window of his dented-up Chevy was already cracked six ways. But my stomach was twisted in so many knots that I couldn't have uttered that response even if I'd wanted to. Besides, three other boys sat crammed in the cab of that pickup. I recognized only one by name. Jimmy Robinson. The youngest son of the man whose place we lived on. And even _I_ had sense enough to know that his fourteen-year-old self had no business riding around with the likes of twenty-year-old Ricky.
A freckled boy with a thin mustache and sweated-out orange hair leaned across Ricky. A grin revealed his tobacco-yellowed teeth. "What's the matter, darkie?" he asked. "Cat got your tongue?"
Ma Pearl always said that one day my foolish tongue would get me into trouble. Without my permission, it poked itself right out of my mouth to assure the freckled boy that the cat didn't have it. I bit it. But not before the freckled boy noticed.
He frowned, then leaned over and felt around on the floor of the pickup. When his hand came up, it held a beer bottle filled with black liquid.
"Uppity nigra!" he yelled, and hurled the bottle toward my head.
I ducked as it whistled past me and crashed against a tree.
Tobacco juice spewed in every direction.
The quartet in the pickup hooted, and Ricky gunned the engine. "Next time it'll be a bullet, you coon!" he shouted over the clanking.
Shaking like a beanstalk in a windstorm, I huddled near that tree until the sound of the pickup disappeared. When I was sure they wouldn't return, I grabbed my egg crate from the side of the road and scampered home. Miss Addie would have to make do without eggs this month, as I wasn't about to make a second trip and take a chance on Ricky returning for more of his devilment.
Folks said that Ricky wouldn't actually run over anybody. He just liked to give colored folks a good scare so we'd remember our place. Well, he'd given me, Rose Lee Carter, a pretty good scare. I vowed to never walk alone again, especially on a Saturday, when fools like him had just bloated their bellies with beer.
I'd been surprised to see Jimmy Robinson riding around with the likes of Ricky. His folks were what Ma Pearl labeled "good white peoples." And he always seemed friendly when I went to the Robinsons' house with Ma Pearl while she worked. He had once even been friends with Fred Lee, back when we were real little. He used to come over and play all the time. But at around age nine or so, Jimmy cut Fred Lee off like a bad ear of corn, barely even speaking to him anymore. As I passed their house, standing stately and white among the brown and green of their vast pecan grove, I couldn't help but wonder what his mama thought of him running around with a peckerwood like Ricky Turner.
Unlike the Robinsons' grand house, our unpainted house—with the two front doors and the rusted tin roof—paled gray against the lush green of the long rows of cotton in the surrounding fields. But as I kicked up dust along the path to the weatherworn front porch, I was happy to see Mr. Pete's shiny black car parked in the yard, adding a bit of sunshine to the scene.
Mr. Pete was my mama's husband, and he had only recently bought himself a shiny new car. A DeSoto is what he called it. That car seemed as long as a train and was niftier than any fifty-dollar suit. No one in Stillwater had ever seen anything like it. And seeing that none of the white folks in Stillwater—other than Mr. Robinson—even owned a car that fancy, Papa, my grandfather, said that Mr. Pete could get himself killed just by driving the darn thing.
Whether it was a danger for him to drive or not, my heart leaped with joy every time I heard Mr. Pete's car pull into the yard. That Saturday, I was surprised to see his car waiting when I got back. We didn't see Mama often, and we weren't expecting to see her for another two weeks.
As soon as I reached the ancient oak in the front yard, Mr. Pete's children, Sugar and Li' Man, bolted out of the screen door from the parlor. They moved so fast that their little feet barely touched the porch before they bounced down the front steps.
Sugar, her two braids flying high behind her, crashed right into me. It was the second time my egg crate went flying out of my hand that day.
Li' Man came right behind her. His crash sent us all to the ground.
Both of them sat on top of me, grinning.
"Aunt Rose! Guess what!" Sugar said, her eyes shining brighter than a noonday sun.
"First, y'all get up off of me," I said. "Then I'll guess."
They both scrambled up, but not before Sugar hugged my neck and kissed me on the cheek.
Sugar was seven and Li' Man six. They were Mr. Pete's children with his wife who died before he married Mama. Their real names were Callie Jean and Christopher Joe. It was Mama who started calling them Sugar and Li' Man. It was also Mama who insisted that they refer to me and Fred Lee as Aunt Rose and Uncle Fred. I thought the idea was stupid. But Mama and Mr. Pete thought it was cute.
I pushed myself off the ground and dusted my dress. Sugar picked up my egg crate and hugged it to her chest. I was so happy to see them that I almost stopped worrying about that trouble with Ricky. Besides, nothing was bruised but my pride, and I was already used to folks beating away at that.
"Okay, now y'all tell me what's going on," I said as we headed toward the steps.
Sugar shook her head. "Nuh-uh. You gotta guess."
Because she was grinning so, I squinted at her and asked, "You lose another tooth?"
She giggled and said, "Nah, that ain't it."
Before I could guess again, Li' Man blurted out, "We finn'a go to Chi-caaaa-go."
Sugar's bright smile dimmed quicker than a candle with a short wick. She slammed the egg crate to the ground and stalked off, yelling, "Li' Man, you jest spoiled the surprise!" She stomped back up the steps and stormed across the porch. When she snatched open the screen door and yelled, "Papaaa! Li' Man jest spoiled my surprise to Aunt Rose," Li' Man's eyes bucked bigger than the moon. When the screen door slammed shut, he charged up the steps and raced into the house, ready to defend himself. He knew better than anyone that Sugar was as rotten as a bushel of bad apples, and it wouldn't take much of her whining for Mr. Pete, or even Mama, to take a switch to him.
But I stood at the front steps, too stunned to move.
Chicago.
Colored folks didn't go to Chicago to visit. Colored folks went to Chicago to live. In the last few years it seemed everybody had been leaving. Folks were fleeing Mississippi so fast it was like birds flying south for the winter, except they were going north, or out west to California. "Migrating" is what my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, called it. "A great colored migration," she'd said. "Like a flock of black birds." Except, unlike birds who returned in the spring, these folks rarely came back.
I picked up my egg crate and tossed it across the porch. Plunking myself down on the top step, I glowered at Mr. Pete's big black car—the car that would take my mama to Chicago. Li' Man had said "we," and of course that had to include Mama. She was Mr. Pete's wife. But I already knew it didn't include me and Fred Lee, because it never did. We were Mama's children, but we had never been invited to be a part of her new family. Nor had we ever set foot in their house. It was bad enough we never saw our daddy, Johnny Lee Banks, even though he lived right there in Stillwater. Now we would never know when we'd see our mama's face, either. Some folks who'd migrated up north made the South an annual visit. Others, it seemed, never came back. Seeing how they rarely came to see us anyhow, I wasn't so sure in which category Mama and Mr. Pete would fit.
I was seven when Mama left us the first time. Six years had passed, but they felt as fresh as six months. At the time, Sugar was a year old and Li' Man was still a lap baby. Their mama's heart simply gave out, folks said, and Mr. Pete found a replacement so quickly that it seemed as if he held the funeral for his first wife and the courthouse wedding to his second wife on the same day. And it didn't seem to bother him one bit that Mama already had me and Fred Lee but had never married our daddy.
Folks said that Mr. Pete was interested in only one thing—a pretty face. And that, Mama certainly had. I remember how she stood before Ma Pearl's dresser mirror that chilly March morning and smeared red lipstick on her pouting lips. Among the dullness of Ma Pearl's bedroom, she looked out of place wearing a silky beige dress trimmed in lace. So I asked her, "Where you goin', Mama?"
She grinned and said, "Rose Lee, honey, yo' mama 'bout to marry a fine man. And I'm go'n take care o' his babies for him."
"What about me and Fred Lee? Ain't we yo' babies?"
Mama giggled like a silly schoolgirl. "You and Fret'Lee big now," she said, waving her hand at me. "Callie and Christopher is the babies. Besides, y'all got Papa and Ma Pearl. Callie and Christopher don't have a soul but Pete. And Pete ain't got time to raise no babies," she said, smiling. "He got all that land to farm."
"Can me and Fred Lee come too?"
"Nuh-uh," Mama said, frowning, as she leaned toward her reflection. "Two babies is more'n enough for me to care for."
After making sure that she was as lovely as a spring morning, she bent down and placed her soft hands on my shoulders. Kissing my forehead, she said, "You be a good girl for Ma Pearl and Papa. Don't make Ma Pearl have to whup you."
That was the last thing she said to me before she became a mama to Sugar and Li' Man and a memory to me and Fred Lee.
When the screen door to the parlor creaked open that Saturday, I jumped. But I didn't turn around.
"Sister?" Mama called softly.
Reluctantly, I turned and faced her.
Mama was tall, shapely, caramel complexioned, and movie-star beautiful. Except for the height, I looked nothing like her. I was string-bean skinny and as black as the ace of spades, as Ma Pearl liked to say. In her crisp green dress, Mama looked fancier than some of the ladies in Mrs. Robinson's fashion magazines. As pretty as an angel, some folks said. Even the afternoon sun seemed to form a halo around her freshly pressed and curled hair.
But according to Ma Pearl, her daughter was definitely no angel. Having had me at fifteen and Fred Lee at sixteen, Mama was what the old folks labeled "ruint". And Ma Pearl never let me forget it. She was so strict on me that I was allowed around only two boys—Fred Lee and Hallelujah Jenkins, the preacher's boy.
Mama smoothed a curl from her pretty face and said, "Sister, why you ack'n shameface?"
She'd begun calling me Sister when I was ten, and calling Fred Lee Brother when he was nine. We hated those pet names more than we hated the old-folksy names, Aunt Rose and Uncle Fred.
I shielded my face from the sun with my hand. "I ain't acting shameface," I said, squinting at Mama. "I just don't wanna come in right now."
With a wide grin plastered on her face, Mama gestured toward the door. "Well, you better git on in here and say bye to us 'fore we leave."
I cringed. Those were the exact words she'd used the day she pranced off to the courthouse in Greenwood and married Mr. Pete. I had stayed awake all that night, lying in the bed we shared, worried. Waiting for her to come home. Of course, she never did. Now she was heading to Chicago, and she'd probably never come back from there, either.
Instead of following her through that squeaking screen door, I wanted badly to make a run out back to the toilet to settle my gurgling stomach. Plus, with Ma Pearl's cheerful chatter flowing from the parlor, I knew I didn't want to go in there and watch her awe over Mama's new family as if they were a collection of Mrs. Robinson's fine china.
Yet somehow I managed to stand and stumble toward the screen door. Then I stopped, my stomach flipping, my heart pounding, as I hesitated before Mama.
She smiled. Her brown eyes, warm, glowing like a welcome fire on a cold night, beckoned me, as always, to do what I didn't want to do. But before I took two steps inside the parlor, Ma Pearl, with her ample frame crammed in the chair right next to the door, took one look at me and frowned. "Gal, what the heck jest happened to you?"
# Chapter Two
## SATURDAY, JULY 23
THE CHATTERING STOPPED. AND EVERYONE—Mr. Pete, Sugar, Li' Man, Fred Lee, Papa, and Mama—all stared at me. They knew Ma Pearl wasn't one to reckon with. She'd as soon give any one of her fourteen grandchildren a taste of the backside of her hand if we just smiled too long.
"Why is you so dirty?" she demanded.
When my eyes shifted to my stained beige dress, handcrafted by Ma Pearl herself from old croker sacks that had once held flour, my mouth fell into an O. The tobacco splashes on my legs were the ones I felt when Ricky spat at me. The splotches on my dress—from the bottle hitting the tree—were the ones that caught me by surprise.
I reshaped my mouth to explain, but the look on Ma Pearl's fleshy face made the incident with Ricky feel about as scary as a church picnic. If she was that upset about my dress, I knew she wouldn't take lightly to those cracked eggs frying on the side of the road.
With no other options, I smoothed down my soiled dress and muttered, "I accidentally fell when Sugar and Li' Man ran out to meet me."
When Ma Pearl's nostrils flared, I braced myself for a scolding.
Luckily, Sugar pointed at Li' Man and said, "He did it."
Not so lucky for Li' Man.
Mr. Pete squinted at him.
Li' Man fidgeted.
Sugar smiled.
Mr. Pete, a huge man with heavy hands and an even heavier voice, creased his forehead and said, "Christopher Joe, apologize to your Aunt Rose. You got her dress all dirty."
Li' Man dropped his head to his chest and muttered, "Sorry."
Before I could defend him, Ma Pearl cut me off. "Go take off that nasty dress." She pointed toward the porch. "Don't come in here. Go through the front room."
Humiliated, I backed out of the parlor doorway, took three steps across the porch, and entered the house through the front room as I had been commanded. I hurried to the back of the house, to the bedroom I shared with my fifteen-year-old cousin Queen, to change into clothing more suitable for entrance into Ma Pearl's parlor.
The parlor was a space she reserved for special people, like Mr. Pete—or for herself and Queen, her favorite grandchild, when they wanted to sit and listen to their daily radio programs. The parlor also held Ma Pearl's good furniture: the worn powder blue sofa, settee, and chairs that were no longer welcome in Mrs. Robinson's parlor. As a matter of fact, everything in Ma Pearl's parlor, from the sofa to a pair of melted-down white candles, all came from the Robinsons' grand white house up the road.
Papa always said, "Don't never turn down nothing the white folks gives you. And make sure they sees you using it."
Ma Pearl should have turned down those outdated Sears and Roebuck catalogs she kept stacked in the corner, collecting dust. The only use we got from them was flipping through the pages, dreaming of things we'd never own.
By the time I found another homemade dress to slip over my head and returned to the parlor, the chatter had returned as well. Like a bird in the early morning darkness, Ma Pearl twittered incessantly about the dangers of living in the city. She had been listening to radio programs about crime in big cities like Chicago and Saint Louis, and she wanted to impress Mr. Pete with what she thought she knew about living up north.
Papa, his expression serious as always, sat in one of the powder blue chairs next to the window. He wore his Saturday-going-to-town clothes—creased khakis and a starched white shirt—for the occasion. His black pipe, filled with Prince Albert tobacco, but never lit, rested between his lips.
Though tall, Papa was not a hulk of a man the way Ma Pearl was an amazon of a woman. Farm work kept him slim. Also, unlike Ma Pearl, he was not impressed with Mr. Pete. As "ruint" as Mama was, he was not fond of her being married to a man who, at forty-nine, was closer to Papa's fifty-nine years than Mama's twenty-eight, regardless of how much land he farmed.
Even though I had changed into a clean dress, I hesitated to enter the parlor. With Ma Pearl and Papa being the only two privy to Mama's visit—and obviously to her northern migration—their appearance almost matched the crispness of the Chicago-bound family. Plus, I hadn't thought to wet a rag and wipe the dust from my ankles and feet. I was about to turn around and head back to my room before Ma Pearl noticed and gave me another scolding, but when Mama saw me lingering in the doorway between the parlor and the front room, she invited me to join her. She patted the spot next to her on the settee and said, "Come set beside me, Sister."
As soon as I sat next to Mama (and scooted my feet as far under the settee as possible), Sugar left her spot next to Mr. Pete on the sofa and wedged herself between us. "I wanna set beside you too," she said, glancing up, grinning at Mama. When Mama smiled her consent, I scooted over and made room for Sugar. If Mama had waited a bit to nickname her the way she did me and Fred Lee, perhaps she could have named her Salt instead, seeing that sometimes she could be just as salty as she was sweet.
Mr. Pete smiled at Fred Lee, who stood rather than sat. "Me and Christopher Joe don't bite," he said.
Fred Lee, leaning against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes cast to the floor, ignored Mr. Pete. I could tell he was as angry as I was that Mama was leaving for Chicago.
Fred Lee was tall like Mama. As a matter of fact, even at age twelve, he was almost as tall as the burly Mr. Pete, without the bulk. But we both, according to Ma Pearl, looked like our daddy, Johnny Lee Banks. She also claimed that's where Fred Lee got his "slow wits." Of course, I could confirm neither, seeing I had never met the man myself, even though he lived right there in Stillwater with his wife and children.
When Fred Lee didn't answer him, Mr. Pete turned back to Ma Pearl to continue exchanging notes on city life. As he bragged about the things they would do once they got to Chicago, Papa took his pipe from his mouth and regarded him curiously. Leaning back in his chair, Papa crossed his right foot over his left knee and interrupted the conversation. "What kinda work you say you got up there again, Pete?"
Mr. Pete sat straighter. "I got a position with Armour and Company," he said proudly. "The meat factory."
Papa furrowed his brow. "They 'low coloreds to handle meat up there in them factories?"
"I won't be handling meat," Mr. Pete said matter-of-factly. "I'll be making soap."
"Soap?" Papa said, uncrossing his legs. "At a meat house?"
Mr. Pete tilted his head to the side. "You never heard of _Dial_ soap, Mr. Carter?"
"I makes my own soap, Pete. No need to concern myself with the store-bought kind."
Mr. Pete jerked back, his face flustered. "You never heard the radio advertisements?"
Papa placed the pipe back in his mouth. He shook his head and pretended to puff as he uttered, "Nope."
"Can't believe you never heard the advertisements," Mr. Pete said, his voice low.
After a moment of silent staring, his expression bewildered, Mr. Pete cleared his throat and said, _"'Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?'"_
I suppressed a chuckle. But Ma Pearl, with a grin as wide as the room, couldn't contain her enthusiasm. "Oooh, Pete," she said, clasping her hands like a child before a candy counter, "you sound jest like the man doing the abertising on the radio."
Mr. Pete beamed like a lighthouse.
Papa, still not impressed, countered, "Don't much listen to the radio, Pete. So I reckon I ain't never heard of a meat house making soap."
"Aw shoot, Paul," Ma Pearl said. "Ain't no different than the rough lye soap you makes from the hog fat."
Papa rubbed his chin, pondering. "I reckon it ain't."
As Mr. Pete, Ma Pearl, and Mama prattled on about Armour and Company, Chicago, and their shiny new apartment awaiting them on the South Side, Papa continued to regard Mr. Pete with a furrowed brow. "Pete," he said finally, his forehead wrinkled, his pipe dangling from his hand, "you sold all that land and bought a fancy car just so you could drive up to the city to make soap?"
Mr. Pete's expression soured. "Mr. Carter," he said, his voice booming, "a Negro can own all the land in Mississippi and still be treated worse than a hog. I can't even register to vote in this county without the threat of being gunned down on the courthouse steps." He placed his arm around Li' Man's shoulders and pulled him close. "I didn't sell my land to buy a car," he said, staring intently at Papa. "I sold my land to buy an opportunity. A future for my children."
"Well, making soap still don't sound like a proper way to make a living to me," said Papa.
Mr. Pete shook his head. "I don't want this kind of life for Callie and Christopher." He gestured toward the open window, suggesting the cotton fields beyond it. "They deserve better."
"Better than what?" asked Papa, his brows raised.
Mama interjected. "They got real good schools up there," she said. She smiled awkwardly and tugged at one of Sugar's long braids. "Our babies can even go to the same school as white children if they want."
_Good schools for Sugar and Li' Man, huh? With white children. Well, what about me and Fred Lee? Don't we deserve good schools too instead of that haunted school for coloreds where everything in it is junk the white folks didn't want in their children's schools anymore?_
When I was little, watching Mama pamper Sugar and Li' Man, I used to think that maybe if I had light skin and long hair like Sugar's, she would love me that way too, maybe even let me live with them. And the same for Fred Lee, except his hair would be curly and coal black like Li' Man's. So every night after I finished reciting the Lord's Prayer to Ma Pearl, I prayed earnestly, "Jesus, please let me wake up in the morning with bright skin and long hair like Sugar's." But every morning I woke with the same chocolate complexion and short, nappy hair I had the day Mama left.
I finally gave up on the prayer after two years and two seriously callused knees.
Now all I wanted was to scream at Mama and shake her till her head rattled. But of course I didn't. I didn't say a word as she and Mr. Pete sang the glories of their new life up north. And neither did Fred Lee. He was as silent as a stump.
When Mama got ready to leave, she hugged me and kissed my cheek. She smiled at Ma Pearl and said, "Take good care of my babies, now." When she tried to hug Fred Lee, he pulled away.
"I'll write soon as we get settled," she said. Surprisingly, her voice held a slight quiver.
As Ma Pearl and Papa walked the Chicago-bound family to their train of a car, Fred Lee, with his shoulders hunched and his fists clenched, left the house and headed to God only knew where.
Me? I collapsed in the chair next to the window and peeled back the curtain, my heart breaking when I peered out. Piling into that shiny black car, smiling, Mama and her family looked so happy, as if they had stepped off the pages of one of those Sears and Roebuck catalogs in the corner. And I would've torn off my right arm to join them if I could have. I spent six years wishing I could be a part of her and Mr. Pete's family. Now they were heading to Chicago, leaving my life and Fred Lee's for good.
I tried to hold back. I had promised myself I would never cry over Mama again. But I couldn't stop the flood. Tears gushed out before I knew it, racing down my cheeks, rushing over my trembling lips. I hugged my knees to my chest, dropped my head, and sobbed into the folds of my dress, welcoming the tears, urging them to hurry, to flush the pain from my heart. I sat there trembling and sobbing, burying my face in my dress, wanting to block out the world, until the sound of slamming car doors jolted me to my senses.
My tightening chest reminded me that I couldn't bear another chastisement from Ma Pearl for wearing that tear-soaked dress in her pristine parlor. I gave my face a final swipe, sprang from the chair, and fled to the back room to release my tears in private.
# Chapter Three
## MONDAY, JULY 25
BEFORE OUR OLD ROOSTER, SLICK CHARLIE, even had time to crow, Ma Pearl called my name from the doorway of the bedroom. "Rose Lee," she said. "Git up, gal."
I didn't move. Monday meant laundry, cooking, and cleaning. And that was all before noon. After that, I had to go to the field. Besides, with Mama gone, the heaviness in my heart had radiated down to the rest of my body, paralyzing my arms and legs. When Mama was a car ride away in Greenwood, I knew I would occasionally see her when she felt the need to have Mr. Pete drop her off for a visit on a Saturday afternoon. But with her all the way up in Chicago, I'd be lucky to see her once a year, when all the other northern Negroes paid the South a visit. If she ever decided to come back, that is.
"Rose Lee," Ma Pearl said again. As long as her voice remained low enough so she would wake only me and not Queen, I pretended to be asleep. But when she leaned inside that sheet-covered doorframe and said, "Gal, git up. You going to the field this morning," I shot up faster than a stalk of corn in the middle of July. Laundry, cooking, and cleaning were bad, but going to the field all day was worse.
I didn't bother putting my housecoat on over my thin nightgown or even rubbing the crust from my tired eyes. I dashed out of that room and chased Ma Pearl through the house, asking, "How come I gotta go to the field this morning, Ma Pearl?"
I stumbled through the moonlight of Fred Lee's room, on through the darkness of Ma Pearl and Papa's room, all the way to the soft glow of the kerosene-lit front room. The floorboards of our old house creaked with every step.
For a big woman, my grandma sure could move fast. I panted as I tried to keep up. By the time we reached the kitchen, I was sweating. And it didn't help one bit that our old woodstove in the corner was lit up like a campfire.
Ma Pearl lumbered over to the icebox and pulled out a bowl of butter. A basket of fresh eggs from the henhouse waited on the table while the nutty aroma of coffee percolated in the pot. Without even a glance at me, she finally answered my question. "Albert and his boys cain't make it today."
I shaped my mouth to protest, but she cut me off. "Don't complain."
When she sealed her words with a steely-eyed look, I plopped down on the rickety bench next to the window and yanked back the faded yellow curtain. It was still black outside. The only indication of morning was a pink haze lingering over the horizon at the end of the long rows of cotton. The yellow glow in the barn meant that Papa was already in there preparing for a long, hot day. I yawned and wondered why I was up before Fred Lee, seeing that he had to go to the field as soon as the sun came up too.
On a normal Monday, before I worked like a slave in the house, I would go out to milk Ellie while Queen lay around somewhere curled in a ball, pretending she had the monthly cramps. I let the curtain fall and peered at Ma Pearl. "Is Queen go'n milk Ellie this morning?" I asked.
With her face in a tight frown, Ma Pearl dipped flour from the croker sack with a tin can and poured it into her sifter. She held the sifter over her scratched-up mixing bowl and cranked the handle. Like a soft dusting of fresh snow, flour flowed into the bowl. When she was good and ready, Ma Pearl paused, pursed her lips, and glared at me. "You know that gal cain't tell a tit from a tat," she said. "You go'n milk Ellie. You got time."
Like a small child, I crossed my arms and pouted. I couldn't believe I would have to go to the field all day _and_ still be expected to work around the house. With the help of Mr. Albert Jackson, who lived a few miles down the road from us, and his two sons, Levi and Fischer (Fish for short), I at least got a break from the field two mornings a week.
"What happened to Mr. Albert 'n'em? How come they can't come today?" I asked.
Ma Pearl's pudgy fingers pinched the butter into the flour. While she worked at the mixture until it resembled yellow cornmeal, her eyebrows knit into a deeper frown. "I said they cain't come."
"But Levi already took off early on Friday," I complained.
Ma Pearl's face hardened. "Stay outta grown folks' bizness."
Well, it _was_ my business if I had to go out there to that hot cotton field and do the work of three men, one full‑grown and two almost grown. But I couldn't say that to Ma Pearl. She would've slapped me clear on into July of 1956.
She wobbled over to the icebox and pulled out a quart-size bottle of buttermilk. With a heavy sigh, she lumbered back to the table and slowly poured the buttermilk straight from the bottle into the mixture of flour and crumbled butter. While turning the stiff mixture with a fork, she mumbled under her breath, "Anna Mae and Pete did right leaving this dirn place. Nothing here but a bunch a trouble."
I tilted my head to the side. "Ma Pearl—"
She scowled.
I sealed my lips.
With her forehead creased, Ma Pearl went back to work on the biscuits.
She shook extra tablespoons of flour into the sticky mixture as she began half singing, half moaning, "Stay outta grown folks' bizness," as if it were a real song. "All these dirn chi'rens jest oughta stay outta grown folks' bizness."
While her fingers shaped the sticky batter into dough, her made-up lyrics morphed into the humming of a real song. _"'Why should I feel discouraged,'"_ she sang quietly, _"'and why should the shadows come? Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heav'n and home?'"_
Something was wrong. Mr. Albert Jackson and Levi and Fish never missed a full day of work. And Ma Pearl never bothered with Gospel music unless it was Wednesday or Sunday, church days. Otherwise, she swayed and snapped her fingers to the blues.
I pulled back the curtain and stared into the early morning darkness again. As the sun peeked over the horizon, promising another blazing hot day, Slick Charlie finally got his lazy self up and crowed. I dropped the curtain and stared down at a crack in the floorboards as I listened to Ma Pearl's chanting, _"'Jesus is my portion. A constant friend is he. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.'"_
Her singing annoyed me. I was thirteen, not three. If something had happened to Mr. Albert and his sons, I was old enough to know about it. I studied Ma Pearl's face for answers as she worked the big ball of dough. She rolled and patted, stretched and pulled, concentrating, as if that beige lump were the most important thing in her life at the moment.
I tried one more time. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, I quickly asked, "How come Mr. Albert ain't coming?"
Ma Pearl's hand paused midpat. She glanced at me but didn't say a word. She sighed and began patting the dough again. "Colored folks just oughta stay in their place. It'd keep us all outta a whole lotta trouble. One Negro do something, white folks get mad at everybody."
I rubbed goose bumps from my arms even though it was probably a hundred and ten degrees in the kitchen with that stove burning. Mr. Albert didn't seem to be the kind of Negro who would get in trouble with the whites. To my knowledge, he had always stayed in his place, just like Papa. Just like white folks like Ricky Turner warned us to do when he chased us off the road with his pickup. Then I had the nerve to challenge him by tossing a rock his way _and_ by poking my tongue out at him. I couldn't help but wonder what Ma Pearl would have thought of that.
Cautiously I asked, "Did Mr. Albert do something? Is he in trouble?"
Ma Pearl ignored my question. "Fetch me that rolling pin from the safe."
As I got up to get the rolling pin, she spoke under her breath. "These young folks don't know noth'n. Go'n get us all kil't. Running round here talking 'bout the right to vote."
Young folks? Levi or Fish. But right to vote? That would be Mr. Albert. He was the only one old enough to vote. Now I was even more confused. Could Mr. Albert even read? And surely he wouldn't do anything to stir up trouble with whites in Stillwater.
My heart pounded as I opened the door of the gleaming white cabinet where we kept things we didn't want the rats to feast on during the night. Just two months before, back in May, a preacher named Reverend George Lee had been killed for helping colored folks register to vote. I prayed that nothing like that had happened to Mr. Albert.
"A Negro ain't got the right to do nothing 'cept live free and die," Ma Pearl said.
Live free? When we couldn't even walk up the road without being chased down by a peckerwood in a pickup? I didn't realize my hand was shaking until I reached up to the middle shelf for the rolling pin and knocked over a Mason jar full of last winter's pear preserves. Like dominoes, that jar knocked over another jar, and that one, another. All three of them rolled out of the cabinet and crashed to the floor.
"Gal, watch what you doing!"
"Ma Pearl—" I started, but didn't finish. It wouldn't do any good. I could tell from those lines in her forehead that she didn't want any apology I had to offer. Plus, I knew it wasn't just those fallen preserves and the sticky mess they made that had her in a huff.
I handed her the rolling pin and sighed. "I'll clean it up."
Ma Pearl groaned. "I'll clean it up myself. You just go'n in there and git yo'self ready to work. I didn't git you up early jest to sit round here and run yo' mouth. You got a long day ahead. Now git. You know how slow you is."
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
"And wake Fret'Lee, too." She sighed and pursed her lips. "Try not to wake up Queen. She didn't sleep good last night."
When I was halfway out the door, she stopped me. "Go'n empt' that slop jar too," she said, turning up her nose. "That thing stank worse then skunk spray. You and Queen piss through the night more'n anybody I know."
_You mean Queen pisses through the night more than anybody you know,_ I wanted to say. _I sleep through the night because you work me like a donkey all day._
But I was smart enough not to talk back to Ma Pearl. Like I said, there was no sense in arriving in 1956 before the rest of the world got there. So I kept my mouth shut as I went on to the back room to fetch the slop jar and take it out to the toilet to pour out the queen's pee.
# Chapter Four
## MONDAY, JULY 25
HERE'S HOW I FIGURE THINGS HAPPENED EARLIER that Monday morning before the sun ever rose over Stillwater, Mississippi:
God called his faithful angel Gabriel to his big shiny throne and said, "Gabe, I have a special job for you today."
Gabriel honored his boss with a bow and said, "Master, whatever you wish is my command."
Then God said, "Take a great big bucket and fly over to the sun. Fill that bucket with as much heat as it will hold; then go down to Stillwater, Mississippi, and pour it over a girl named Rose Lee Carter. Then bake her. Bake her real good, until she learns not to complain so much."
And I know old Gabe did just what God ordered, because by midmorning I was so hot I could hardly breathe. That sun beat down on me like I owed it money from six years back. Sweat dripped in my eyes so bad that I couldn't tell cotton from weeds, and I know I was chopping down both.
But even with my impending heat stroke, I felt I had a right to complain just a little bit after what Ma Pearl did that morning. Before I could get my clothes on good, she was calling me to get to the barn to milk Ellie while Queen slept. And it didn't help one bit that that cantankerous cow (Ellie, not Queen) wouldn't cooperate. Milk squirted everywhere except the darned bucket.
Queen claimed she'd been cramping all night and hadn't slept a wink. It's a wonder she didn't bleed to death as much as she had the cramps. Queen was two years older than me. Well, almost three, seeing she would turn sixteen that October. And like me and Fred Lee, she lived with Ma Pearl and Papa instead of with her mama, my aunt Clara Jean, and her family. That's because Uncle Ollie, Aunt Clara Jean's husband, wasn't Queen's daddy, like Mr. Pete wasn't mine. Matter of fact, Queen didn't even know who her daddy was. Nobody did, except Aunt Clara Jean, of course. And Aunt Clara Jean never would tell a soul who Queen's daddy was.
Folks said he was white. And that wasn't too hard to believe, seeing that Queen was light enough to pass for white herself if she'd wanted to, _and_ seeing that her long hair never needed the heat of a straightening comb. Plenty of folks in our family were yellow, but Queen was different. And with the way she never lifted a finger to even wash a plate, she acted like she was white too.
Folks said that when Queen was born, Ma Pearl took to her like ants to a picnic. They said she snatched that newborn baby from Aunt Clara Jean's bosom and claimed her like a hard-earned prize. That's because Ma Pearl favored pretty. And to Ma Pearl, light equaled pretty, even if the person was as ugly as a moose.
Folks said that when I first came out of Mama, my skin was as pink as a flower. Mama said she took one look at me and declared, "I'm go'n call you Rose, 'cause you so pretty like one." But Ma Pearl said, "Don't set yo' hopes high for that child, Anna Mae. Look at them ears. They as black as tar. By this time next year, that lil' gal go'n be blacker than midnight without a moon, just like her daddy."
Of course Ma Pearl was right. Before my first birthday rolled around, on February 4, 1943, I was as black as a cup of Maxwell House without a hint of milk. And according to Aunt Clara Jean, I was the ugliest little something Stillwater, Mississippi, had ever seen.
Of course, my dark skin is what sentenced me to the field. "Queen too light to be out there in that heat," Ma Pearl always claimed. But like Goldilocks's claim about Baby Bear's porridge, my dark complexion was just right.
As I gripped the hoe between my callused palms and stared down at what seemed like a mile-long row of cotton, I wanted to cry. Thanks to Mr. Albert and sons, I now had to suffer at least four full days in the field instead of three.
I usually didn't go to the field on Monday and Thursday mornings, the days Ma Pearl worked for Mrs. Robinson. While she kept their house, I kept ours. And Queen, even though she was almost sixteen and pretty much grown, did nothing—except sit around and read magazines that Mrs. Robinson had tossed out.
But I guess I should've considered myself lucky. Most colored folks didn't have it nearly as good as we did. Since Papa was one of the best farmers in the Delta, Mr. Robinson put him in charge of his cotton. Other colored folks who lived on plantations had to deal with straw bosses like Ricky Turner's evil daddy. And some of them were, as Ma Pearl put it, "the most low-downed white mens you ever did see."
I looked up and saw that Papa and Fred Lee had left me way behind. They always did. I was a slow chopper. Ma Pearl said I had my head in the clouds, daydreaming. And she was right. I was always dreaming about the day I could have a house like Mrs. Robinson's, with a maid to clean up after me, a cook to prepare all my meals, and a substitute mama to change my baby's diapers simply because I couldn't take the smell.
Actually, I decided I would have a house better than Mrs. Robinson's, and it certainly wouldn't be in Mississippi. It would be in Chicago. Because no matter what it took, I was going there one day, just like Mama and all the rest of them.
In Chicago I'd go to the finest school they had—a school where coloreds and whites went together. No white school with good stuff and a colored school with a bunch of old stuff. And we'd all use the same bathrooms and drink from the same water fountains, too.
Then I'd graduate from that school and go to a fine college, a college where only the smartest people could go. I'd study to be a doctor, like my friend Hallelujah wanted to be; then we could both be rich like that colored doctor he told me about who lived in Mound Bayou. After I became a doctor and made a lot of money, I'd come back down to Mississippi and buy Papa a brand-new car, one better than Mr. Pete's. And I'd teach him how to drive it. Next, I'd buy him a big white house just like Mr. Robinson's, and I might let Ma Pearl live there with him. Then again, I might not.
Those were my plans. Chicago. College. And caring for my family.
Daydreaming—it's how I survived that dusty cotton field.
"Rosa Lee!" a second-soprano voice called.
Before I even turned, I knew I would find Hallelujah Jenkins standing at the edge of the field, waving at me.
Nobody called me Rosa but him. "A pretty name for a pretty girl," he'd said.
"A preacher's son ought not to tell lies," I'd said back.
Besides, who else would've been calling my name from the edge of a cotton field midmorning instead of working in one? I glanced up at the sky. The sun was between nine and ten o'clock. Every Negro I knew, other than Queen, was somewhere working, either in a white man's field or in a white woman's house.
Hallelujah Jenkins was the most privileged colored boy in Leflore County, Mississippi. Slightly chubby and not so athletic, he always wore starched shirts, creased slacks, funny-looking suspenders, and brown penny loafers, even in hundred-degree weather, just like his daddy, Reverend Clyde B. Jenkins the Second. And he was constantly pushing his thick black glasses up the bridge of his pudgy nose.
Hallelujah was actually Clyde B. Jenkins the Third. But everybody called him Hallelujah. When he was eighteen months old, that was the first word out of his mouth, at a funeral, no less.
Hallelujah even dressed nice when he helped us out in the field on occasion. And trust me, those occasions were few and far between, as the old folks used to say. Ma Pearl said he was too delicate for farm work. But Papa said it was a sign that Hallelujah would be a man of books and not of brawn. "A learned man like his daddy," Papa said.
"Erudite" is the word my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, would use to describe him.
Hallelujah was a strange kind of fellow, but he was also my best friend. And when I saw him that morning, I remembered it was his birthday. He was finally fourteen. "Fourteen going on forty," as Papa would say. But to Hallelujah, fourteen seemed to be the magic age when he thought Queen—the girl he claimed he would one day marry—would finally pay attention to him. Guess he forgot that she would keep having birthdays too.
Like me, Hallelujah didn't have a mama. Well, I had one. She just didn't act like one. But Hallelujah already had three mamas in his brief lifetime. Hallelujah's first mama, his real mama, died when he was four, his second mama when he was eight, and his third mama when he was twelve.
It's true. They all died four years apart. Folks said Reverend Jenkins killed them. They said he bored them to death when he forced them to listen to his sermons all week before he put his congregants to sleep with them on Sundays. Rumor had it he was on the lookout for wife number four. Too bad every woman in Leflore County did her best to avoid even shaking the poor man's hand on Sunday morning, in case there was any truth about his sermons boring his deceased wives to death.
Hallelujah trudged on up the row toward me, his penny loafers collecting dust along the way. It was so hot that even he wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to hide his face from the sun, when a fedora usually graced his head.
"How come you didn't grab a hoe?" I asked him. "Can't you see I need some help?"
Hallelujah shook his head. "Can't. Preacher let me stop by for only a minute."
"What? Long enough to eat some of Ma Pearl's cooking?"
Normally, Hallelujah would've laughed. But that day he didn't. He didn't even smile.
"Happy birthday," I called, hoping to at least conjure a lip curl.
But Hallelujah's expression remained stoic. With a wave of his hand, he gave me a dry "Thanks."
I leaned on the heavy hoe and wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When Hallelujah got closer, I could see that his eyes were red, as if he'd been crying.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Hallelujah tilted his head sideways. "Didn't you hear?"
"Hear what?"
"About Levi."
My legs went weak.
I knew something bad had happened.
With Ma Pearl acting jittery that morning and Papa being quieter than usual, I knew something had happened that they didn't want me to know about it. Mr. Albert, Levi, and Fish had been working with us in Mr. Robinson's fields for as long as I could remember, and they had never missed a day of work.
My top lip felt numb when I spoke. "S-something happened to Levi?"
Hallelujah removed his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. Before he put his glasses back on, anxiety shone in his eyes. "Rosa Lee," he said, his voice shaking, his eyes tearing up, "Levi's dead."
My knees buckled. If it hadn't been for the hoe, I would've crumbled to the ground.
Black, pulsating dots flashed around me as Hallelujah's next words floated to my ears: "pickup . . . shotgun . . . head . . ." Dead.
The black dots multiplied as the earth spun beneath my feet. Nausea rose in my stomach, and every drop of biscuits and eggs I'd eaten that morning threatened to come back up.
Dropping the hoe, I grabbed my stomach and bolted from the field.
As I stumbled clumsily between the dusty rows of green cotton leaves, I couldn't help but resent them. Levi Jackson, a fine young man, had spent most of his life tending to that field, bringing that cotton to life every summer. Now he no longer had his.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream until my anguish was heard all over Stillwater—all over Mississippi—all the way to Chicago, straight to my mama's ears. I don't know why, but I hated her at that moment. I hated her more than the nameless face that had shot Levi Jackson for no good reason.
But I couldn't scream. I couldn't open my mouth and take a chance on throwing up and killing any of Mr. Robinson's precious cotton.
By the time I reached the edge of the field, my stomach lurched. Racing past the chickens scratching in the yard, I dashed toward the toilet, heaving the whole time.
I'm not sure why I ran to the toilet, knowing its stench would only make me gag more. When I reached it, I ran behind it, my body lurching forward, spewing the last of my breakfast toward the ground.
Hallelujah banged on the door of the toilet. "Rosa Lee, you okay?"
"I'm back here," I called weakly, all my strength now a yellow puddle on the ground.
Rubbing goose bumps from my arms, I came from behind the toilet and headed up the path to the backyard. Hallelujah trailed behind me. When I reached the yard, I hugged my arms around my stomach and doubled over. A sick moan followed.
Hallelujah put his arms around my shoulders and ushered me to the back porch. When my body dropped on it like a sack of overgrown potatoes, I pressed my face in my palms and screamed. I screamed until my stomach hurt.
I shouted into my palms. "Why, Hallelujah? Why?"
"He registered to vote," Hallelujah said, his voice hoarse. "And they killed him."
I raised my face from my palms and wiped away tears with my sleeve. "Levi wasn't old enough to vote," I said angrily.
Hallelujah removed his glasses and wiped tears from his own face. "He turned twenty-one last Thursday," he said. "Went to the courthouse and registered the next day."
"Levi left the field early on Friday," I said, my voice choking. "Said he had something important to do."
Hallelujah stood right beside me, but his words seemed distant as he detailed the little he knew of Levi's murder. My mind was on Levi and what a fine young man everybody said he was. So all I heard from Hallelujah's rant was "forced off the road" and "shot in the head."
I could see Levi's dark brown face as if he were standing right in front of me. It hadn't been a week ago that I heard him brag to his younger brother Fish that this would be his last summer "chopping some white man's cotton." He was the first person in his family of eight boys to graduate from high school and attend college. After his first-grade teacher declared him brilliant, his parents scratched and scrimped for nearly twelve years in order to send him. In the summer, he came home and chopped cotton to help out, with the promise that when he graduated, he would get a good job and move his parents off Mr. Robinson's place. That September would have been the beginning of his last year at the colored college Alcorn. And it was all for nothing. Levi was dead. Gunned down like a hunted animal.
"Something needs to be done about folks being killed for registering to vote," I said, my teeth clenched. "First Reverend Lee in Belzoni, and only two months later Levi?"
Hallelujah wiped his face with his handkerchief, then put his glasses back on. He laughed, but it wasn't a happy laugh. "White folks won't do a thing to another white for killing a Negro," he said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he stared out toward the cotton field, where Papa and Fred Lee were mere dots on the horizon. "They won't even do anything if a Negro kills a Negro. A Negro ain't worth a wooden nickel to them. Kill one, another one'll be born the next day to take his place." He took his glasses off again and wiped his eyes.
Hallelujah plopped down on the porch beside me. We both stared out at the chickens clucking aimlessly around the yard. Slick Charlie, our only rooster, stood guard at the door of the henhouse, as if to say _You hens better stay out there in the yard where you belong. Stay out there till your work is done._
When the screen door burst open, I jumped so hard I almost fell off the porch.
Queen stormed out the door. It was well past nine o'clock, and she still wore rollers in her hair. Her pointy nose stuck up in the air, as if she smelled something foul. She pinned her hazel eyes on me and Hallelujah and said, "Y'all cut out all that racket. I'm trying to sleep." A copy of _Redbook_ magazine hung from her hand.
Hallelujah tipped his hat. "Morn'n, Queen," he said. "Didn't mean to wake you."
Queen ignored Hallelujah as if he were a leaf on a tree. Instead, she glowered at me. "Can y'all hold down the noise?"
"Queen, Levi Jackson got shot last night," I said.
Queen shrugged. "Niggas get shot round here all the time."
Hallelujah stared at Queen, his eyes narrowed. "Levi's dead, Queen," he said sternly. "They say some white men in a pickup forced him off the road and shot him in the head."
For a brief moment, shame crossed Queen's face. Then, as quickly as that moment came, it vanished. Queen turned up her nose and said, "I knew that uppity nigga would get hisself killed one day." She stormed back into the house, allowing the screen door to slam shut behind her.
Hallelujah and I stared at the door in silence.
A few seconds later, I sighed and shoved myself off the porch. "I've gotta get back to the field," I said. "Ma Pearl will beat the black off me this evening if she finds out I've been sitting around talking to you instead of working like I'm supposed to."
"Preacher'll be back shortly to pick me up," Hallelujah said. "I'll just head on up the road and meet him."
"No!" I said, grabbing his arm.
Hallelujah flinched with surprise.
I quickly moved my hand and said, "Don't walk down the road by yourself."
Hallelujah stared at me, confused. "I meet Preacher along the road all the time."
I told him about my encounter with Ricky Turner.
He slumped back down on the porch. "I'll wait for Preacher," he said.
# Chapter Five
## TUESDAY, JULY 26
THAT MORNING, MR. ALBERT WAS RIGHT BACK IN Mr. Robinson's cotton field with sixteen-year-old Fish and one of his younger sons, Adam, barely ten. Adam would replace Levi.
Mr. Albert's three older sons had left, one by one, for Detroit six years prior. Like Mr. Pete, they had packed up their young families and fled the dirt clods of the Delta as soon as they saved up enough money to start a new life someplace else.
Nobody talked about Levi, at least not in my hearing, anyway. Ma Pearl and Papa acted as if their words might get picked up by the wind and carried over to Mr. Robinson's ears if they said anything about the shooting. Hallelujah had said that folks acted the same way when Reverend George Lee was shot in Belzoni back in May. Some, he said, even claimed it was the preacher's own fault that he was killed. "If he'da just took his name off them voting records like the white folks told him," he'd heard a woman at church whisper, "he wouldn'ta got hisself kil't."
I was glad when I saw Reverend Jenkins's brown Buick stirring up dust along the edge of the field, as I was sure Hallelujah would have some news about Levi.
When Hallelujah jumped out, Reverend Jenkins—his thick glasses glaring in the sunlight—said something to him, probably instructing him to mind his manners. Then he waved and drove off. He honked and waved at Papa at the far end of the field as the tires of his Buick crunched rocks on the road.
I paused (not that I was doing much work anyway) and leaned against the hoe. "Hey," I said, waving at Hallelujah before he even reached me.
Hallelujah smiled and waved back. It was good to see him smile again. But as hot as it was out there—and I mean heat that wrapped its arms around me like a long-lost relative giving a hug—that boy was wearing his dark brown fedora instead of a straw hat.
"What you trying to do," I said as he got closer, "get black like me? You gonna burn up in this heat."
Hallelujah touched the tip of his hat and grinned. "The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice."
"Who told you that lie?"
"Read it in a book," he said.
I chuckled and started chopping again. "Even the devil got sense 'nuff to wear a straw hat in this heat."
Hallelujah followed me as I crept along the row. Again, he didn't bother to stop by the barn and pick up a hoe to help out. But there really wasn't much to chop, seeing that Papa knew how to take good care of cotton. We didn't have many weeds, like I'd heard about in some fields. But I was still slow. Even little Adam could outchop me.
I was dressed in Fred Lee's too-big overalls and his long-sleeved shirt, and it took a lot of effort for me to walk up and down quarter-of-a-mile-long rows of cotton in the suffocating heat for five hours straight. I stopped for a water break at the end of every row. It's a good thing I worked under Papa's supervision instead of a white supervisor like Ricky Turner's evil pappy.
"What's your business today?" I asked Hallelujah.
Hallelujah shrugged. "Preacher let me take a break from the store. 'A couple hours only,' he said."
"You helping Miss Bertha today?"
Hallelujah nodded. "Yep."
"And you need a break already," I teased him.
Hallelujah grinned and pretended to wipe sweat from his brow. His aunt, Bertha Jenkins, owned a small grocery store—the only Negro-owned business in Stillwater. Even though she sold mostly staples, like flour, cornmeal, and sugar, white folks still weren't too happy about her store, seeing that it took business away from theirs. It had been broken into more times than anybody cared to count. She could barely keep her shelves stocked. The police dismissed the vandalism as "coloreds destroying their own property to try to make God-fearing white folks look bad." But we all knew who was really trying to sabotage Miss Bertha's business.
"So, what's Miss Sweet cooking today?"
No matter how many times I heard it, I just couldn't get used to people calling Ma Pearl "Miss Sweet." She was about as sweet as a slice of lemon soaked in vinegar. Her real name, of course, was Pearl, but I couldn't see how that one fit her either, seeing that a pearl is usually a thing of beauty.
I squinted at Hallelujah. "It's Tuesday. Not Sunday. What else she go'n cook besides beans?"
"What kind?"
I shrugged. "Pinto, I reckon."
"That's good enough for me," Hallelujah said. "Beats the air soup I would've eaten."
I teased him. "So you really stopped by to get fed, huh?"
He patted his thick middle and said, "Yep."
I glanced down the row to make sure I was still far away from Papa, as he and Fred Lee were coming back down the row toward me. "Heard anything about Levi?" I asked under my breath.
Hallelujah stuffed his hands into his pockets. "Preacher's getting the NAACP involved."
Spit caught in my throat, and I almost choked. I stopped chopping and placed a finger to my lips to shush Hallelujah. "Not so loud," I said, my eyes darting toward Papa.
NAACP—Ma Pearl said if I ever uttered those letters in her house, it would take a year to wash the taste of lye soap from my mouth. The letters stood for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And according to Hallelujah, the group was trying to do just that: help colored people advance. "To help our people find their way out of these cotton fields," I once heard Reverend Jenkins say.
Reverend Jenkins was involved in the group. Secretly, of course. So Hallelujah knew all about it, had even been to some meetings. I knew nothing, except what I got from him or from the discarded pages of the _Clarion-Ledger_ newspaper, which I sneaked and read while out in the toilet. The _Clarion-Ledger_ was the largest white-owned newspaper in Mississippi, and it was the Robinsons' favorite. What it reported about the NAACP was that it was nothing more than a bunch of northern Negro agitators coming to the South to incite good colored people to stir up trouble with whites.
And Ma Pearl agreed.
"The Robinsons is good white peoples," she said. "So we ought not 'sociate with Negroes who stir up trouble."
She said we were lucky. Mr. Robinson let us keep hogs, chickens, and a cow on his place when other landowners wouldn't. Most coloreds had to buy overpriced meat, eggs, and milk from the white stores because Miss Bertha didn't have the means to keep such things at her store. Or they had to just do without. So we should've been grateful for Mr. Robinson's generosity, especially with the way he kept our house furnished, always allowing Mrs. Robinson to buy items she'd soon tire of and then pass them on to Ma Pearl.
Even Mr. Robinson himself had said he'd run any Negroes off his place if they caused trouble. "Any nigra bold enough to drink that poison the NAACP is pouring out is bold enough to find another place to stay," he'd said. "Including you, Paul," he told Papa. And Ma Pearl was taking no chances on getting "thowed off" Mr. Robinson's land.
The only thing I was grateful for was having a friend like Hallelujah, whose papa wasn't afraid of white folks—or at least knew how to sneak around them. If Ma Pearl and my own grandpa wouldn't tell me anything, Hallelujah sure would. My thirsty ears drank up that "poison" as quickly as he could pour it out.
"Preacher said they'd try to get Medgar Evers to come this way and see if he can get the sheriff to do something," he said.
"Medgar Evers?" My heart pounded. Medgar Evers was a big name in the NAACP, from what I'd heard. Field secretary. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I knew Ma Pearl would've scourged me if she'd known I was learning such things from Hallelujah.
I started chopping again, in case Ma Pearl decided to spy on me from the kitchen window. Sweat poured down the sides of my face, and I wiped it with my sleeve. "Didn't Medgar Evers go down to Belzoni when Reverend Lee got killed?" I asked. "Nothing happened then. Nobody got arrested. Didn't even make the papers," I said.
Hallelujah corrected me. "It didn't make the white papers. Plenty of colored papers like the _Defender_ reported it. And _Jet,_ of course."
"That contraband?" I said, teasing.
Hallelujah laughed. The first time he brought over a copy of _Jet_ magazine, Ma Pearl caught a glimpse of it while we sat in the kitchen flipping through it. Unfortunately, all she saw was the shapely, bathing-suit-clad model in the centerfold. She yanked the magazine out of Hallelujah's hand, flipped through it herself, and immediately judged it preachy and pompous. "A bunch a high-class northern Negroes trying to make everybody else feel bad 'bout how they lives," she said. She tossed the magazine back to Hallelujah with, "Preacher oughta be 'shamed of hisself letting you read that trash full o' half-nekked womens."
She never said that the fashion magazines Queen got from Mrs. Robinson were trash. Yet they too held plenty of pictures of bathing-suit-clad beauties, except they were white.
I shivered, even though sweat poured down my sides under my two layers of clothing. It scared me that the only newspapers and magazines I read were the ones the Robinsons read—the safe papers—the papers that didn't report the story about a preacher being gunned down for registering himself and others to vote.
I learned from Hallelujah that Reverend George Lee had been shot in the head while driving his car. He ran off the road and crashed, dying before he made it to the hospital. Nobody was arrested. Just like probably nobody would be arrested for Levi's murder, either.
"What are they so afraid of, Hallelujah?"
"Nobody wants to die, Rosa Lee," Hallelujah said quietly.
"I don't mean colored folks. I mean white folks. Why are _they_ so afraid? Why are they killing people just because they want to vote?"
Hallelujah furrowed his brow. "Rosa Lee," he said, "with the privilege to vote—to choose—we can change things, even put our own people in power."
"You know how crazy you sound? Colored folks can't even own a store round here without white folks sabotaging it. Can you imagine a Negro running for office?" I removed my hat from my head and fanned myself. "He'd have a bullet in his head before his name got on the ballot good."
Shielding his face from the sun with his hand, Hallelujah pondered what I had just said. He was always thinking, always digging deep into that reservoir of information he had gleaned from the magazines and newspapers he frequently read. I knew he'd come up with an answer to any challenge I might present. Sure enough, after a moment he pointed at me and said one word: "Kansas."
I questioned him with my tilted head and raised brows.
"Brown versus the Board of Education," he said. "Topeka, Kansas."
I shrugged.
"The Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional," Hallelujah said, smiling. "No more separate‑but‑equal. White folks _have_ to let colored children go to school with white children in that state now."
I still didn't understand.
Hallelujah squinted. "Don't you see, Rosa? Now that we have the power to vote, we can make that happen in Mississippi, too."
Hallelujah's words took a moment to soak through my heat-damaged head. But when they did, I dropped the hoe and doubled over. I thought I would die laughing. This time I knew Hallelujah had gone too far with his crazy thinking. Whites and coloreds at the same schools in Mississippi? Never in a million years.
# Chapter Six
## TUESDAY, JULY 26
WHEN THE SUN BEGAN INCHING ITS WAY TOWARD NOON, Hallelujah folded his arms and said, "Ain't it about quitting time?"
"C'mon," I told him. "I'm 'bout to die out here even if it ain't. I'm so thirsty my mouth feels like it's stuffed with cotton." I dragged my hoe back along the row, too tired to pick it up. "If we walk real slow," I said, "it'll be close enough to twelve by the time we reach the house. And maybe Ma Pearl won't be cross with me for leaving the field a few minutes early."
When we reached our grassless backyard, the first thing we saw was Slick Charlie chasing three hens toward the henhouse. Hallelujah laughed. "Ain't them hens got sense enough to run in opposite directions?"
"I think they like being chased by Slick Charlie," I said, nudging him in the side. "Kinda like how Queen likes being chased by you."
Hallelujah took off his hat and fanned himself. With his light brown complexion, I could see a hint of pink spread across his cheeks. "Humph," he said. "I ain't stud'n Queen. If Queen had any sense, she'd be chasing me." He snapped his suspenders and said, "I'm a man who's going places."
"One, you ain't a man," I told him. "And two, the only place you're going is to Ma Pearl's kitchen to eat up her food."
Hallelujah tucked his hat under his arm and broke into a strut. "I'm going up north like everybody else," he said. "Except I'm going to Ohio. Columbus. Because it was named after the fellow who discovered this country."
I spat a dry spit and said, "You ain't going nowhere." But I didn't mean it. I'd never heard of any Negro going to Ohio. But if Hallelujah said he was going, then he probably was. The Jenkinses always did things differently from other colored folks. And Hallelujah was forever plotting to be the first Negro to do this or the first Negro to be that. I just hoped he didn't leave before I figured out a way to get to Chicago. There was no way I could survive the dusty Delta without him.
In the middle of all that heat, a breeze picked up. The threadbare sheets and pillowcases Ma Pearl had hung on the line that morning flapped and snapped in the wind. It made me think maybe God was smiling at me instead of frowning. And maybe he'd send old Gabe down with a few clouds and some wind for the afternoon chopping time.
When we climbed the steps to the back porch, the scent of pinto beans hit my nose. I should've been tired of beans, seeing that we ate them nearly every day, but Ma Pearl didn't fix beans the way other folks fixed them. She simmered hers with tomatoes, brown sugar, onions, and green peppers because that's how Mrs. Robinson liked them. She had seen the recipe in _Better Homes and Gardens_ and had Ma Pearl fix her beans that way ever since.
After washing my hands with the lye soap in the basin of water sitting on the porch, I hurried and kicked off my dusty shoes and left them at the back door. Hallelujah did the same. As soon as we walked through the screen door and saw Queen sitting at the table, I swear I heard Hallelujah's knees knock together. He stammered when he spoke. "A-afternoon, Queen. Y-you look lovely today."
Queen, with her straight black hair pulled high in a ponytail like some movie star, didn't even acknowledge Hallelujah. She sat at the table with one dainty hand wrapped around a Mason jar filled with iced tea and the other flipping through a Sears and Roebuck catalog, as if she had money.
Her sleeveless red and white checkered dress clung to her curves like gold on a ring. And she wore enough rouge and red lipstick to put a harlot to shame. If I had dressed like that, Ma Pearl would've laid an egg.
When Hallelujah spoke to her a second time, she stopped midflip and turned up her nose. She stood, sneered, and said, "Go to hell, Clyde Bernard Jenkins _the Turd_."
Satisfied that she had sufficiently insulted Hallelujah, she picked up her iced tea, snatched up the catalog, and switched on out of the kitchen, that smirk still plastered on her ugly face.
Hallelujah shrugged as if he didn't care, but I saw that hint of red come back to his cheeks. I felt heat rise in my own face too. It made me want to slap Queen straight on into the next week. Just because she was almost sixteen didn't mean she could damn the preacher's son to hell and call him a turd.
Queen didn't return to the kitchen until all of us field hands—me, Fred Lee, Mr. Albert, Fish, and Adam—had washed up and were seated at the table. Her face was pinched up worse than the edge of a pie crust as she sat on the bench next to the open window. Ma Pearl never let anybody else sit away from the table.
When Papa came in and took his place at the head of the table, he smiled and asked Hallelujah, "How's Preacher?"
"Just fine, Mr. Carter," Hallelujah answered.
Papa reached for the jug and poured himself some tea. "Gettin' his sermon ready for Sunday?" he asked.
Hallelujah nodded. "Yes, sir."
Papa squinted at him. "It any good?"
Hallelujah fidgeted for a moment, then lowered his eyes and muttered, "It's a real killer, sir."
We all laughed, even Mr. Albert, Fish, and Adam, despite the grief that hung on their faces like veils.
Amid the laughter, Ma Pearl brought a huge pot of beans and set it in the middle of the table. Whatever we didn't eat at dinnertime, we'd have again for supper that evening.
When Ma Pearl took the top off the pot, the first thing I saw were little slimy pods of green floating on top. Before I knew it, I gasped and opened my big mouth. "Ma Pearl, you put _okra_ in the beans?" I crossed my arms and huffed. "You know I hate okra."
When Ma Pearl frowned, I knew what was coming next. I cringed and felt the sting before her heavy hand even reached my face. _Whap!_
I tumbled backwards, toppled the chair, and landed on the wood floor.
Ma Pearl stormed to the other side of the table and stood directly over me. Glaring down, she crossed her arms over her generous bosom and said, "Beggars shouldn't be so choosy."
With both palms soothing my stinging face, I muttered a choked, "Sorry, Ma Pearl."
Tears raced down my face as I slowly rose from my sprawled position on the floor. I wanted to get up and run, but Ma Pearl might've thrown a skillet at my head if I had left that kitchen.
As I righted my chair and sat, I didn't dare look up. I knew everybody at that table shared my shame. They clamped their mouths shut and stared at their hands.
But Queen? Without even looking, I knew her lips were curled up in a grin.
Ma Pearl finally dropped her hands to her sides and stomped back over to the stove. She snatched up a pan of cornbread and threw it on the table with a clank. "If you don't like my cooking," she said, scowling, "try catching a train to Chicago and see what yo' mammy got on the stove."
I wiped my face with my shirtsleeve and choked back fresh tears.
"Rose Lee," Papa said gently.
I didn't answer him, and I wouldn't look up.
Papa's voice was stern but kind. "Rose Lee," he said, "when you lay down on your bed last night, was your belly crying for food?"
I muttered, "No, sir."
"Then thank the good Lord for this food. Not everybody in this world has some."
"Yes, sir," I mumbled. I bowed my head and said as quietly as possible, "God in heaven, thank you for this food. Please let it satisfy my belly so I won't go hungry. Amen."
Except for Ma Pearl's angry breathing, the kitchen was silent. Tears blurred my vision, but I could see well enough to swallow my shame, pick up my plate, and ladle a good helping of beans onto it. To appease Ma Pearl, I made sure I included one, and only one, pod of slimy green okra. I just prayed they were all gone from that miserable pot come suppertime that evening.
# Chapter Seven
## SATURDAY, JULY 30
I WAS TEN YEARS OLD WHEN I ATTENDED MY FIRST FUNERAL. It was the funeral of what I thought was a very old woman. She had long white hair surrounding a wrinkled black face, and the undertaker had shaped that face into an awful frown. The woman's name was Mrs. Vergene Miller, and she left behind thirteen children, all full grown. And with the way the undertaker had molded that frown on her face, I couldn't help but wonder if she ruled her children with an iron fist, the way Ma Pearl ruled hers.
But what stood out most and made me remember Miss Vergene's funeral was not her white hair or her frowning face; it was her thirteen children and the way those children, especially her eight sons, wept and wailed and fell out on the floor in a dead faint as they cried out for their mama.
Before that day, I had never seen men cry. And every time they cried out "Maa-maa," I cried too, because I knew what it was like not being able to see your mama every day. I cried so hard that I had bruises under my eyes for seven days.
So that Saturday morning, as I sat packed in a pew at Little Ebenezer Baptist Church, I stared at the black casket that held Levi Jackson's dead body and I didn't even try to hold back my tears. Every time one of Mr. Albert's sons cried out, "Lord, why they kill my brother?" I thought about Fred Lee and how I would wail too if somebody killed him.
The air was putrid with perfume and perspiration. All around me, people fell backwards on the wooden pews, wailing and weeping. Levi's mama, Mrs. Flo-Etta Jackson, or Miss Etta, as everyone called her, stood at the end of my pew. She wore her white usher's uniform and her thick-soled white shoes. As head of the ushers' board, she took her job seriously, standing at her post even at the funeral of one of her own. Nevertheless, tears rolled down her round cheeks and onto the collar of her white dress as she used one hand to fan mourners and the other to distribute tissues, not bothering to wipe her own tears, even though they flowed heavily enough to flood the church floorboards.
"Gawd has called one of his angels home," the flat-nosed Reverend E. D. Blake bellowed from the pulpit. "Too soon, some might say. But Gawd says right on time. For his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts not our thoughts."
Tearful "amens" rose from the congregation, as if what Reverend Blake had said was the truth. I shouldn't have been surprised to hear such nonsense coming from him. He, like Papa and Mr. Albert, was the kind of Negro who stayed in his place, which was probably why Mr. Albert chose to have Levi's funeral at Little Ebenezer Baptist Church rather than at our church, Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church. He knew that Reverend Jenkins wouldn't have been afraid to speak the truth about how Levi died.
_God didn't call Levi home,_ I wanted to shout at Reverend Blake. _A white man's bullet did._ But I couldn't shout that any more than I could shout "Hallelujah!"—because there was no proof that it was a white man's bullet that killed Levi. Only the word of disgruntled Negroes who, according to a group called the White Citizens' Council, wanted to stir up trouble in Mississippi.
I'd heard of the White Citizens' Council from Hallelujah, but three days after Levi's death I got the chance to hear from them with my own ears. That Wednesday, Ma Pearl sent me to Mrs. Robinson's to pick up a bag of her older son Sam's old clothes for Fred Lee. I was supposed to go by at twelve, during my break. Instead I left the field early and went by around a quarter before noon. Four cars were parked in front of the Robinsons' house. All four of them belonged not to Mr. Robinson but to other white landowners and businessmen. While I waited at the back door, I heard Mr. Robinson and the other men, who were sitting in the dining room and ranting about what the Citizens' Council must do to protect the rights of white folks. And one of those things was not to let that group, the National Association for the "Agitation" of Colored People—the NAACP—contaminate the good colored citizens of Leflore County. When Mrs. Robinson returned with the bag of clothes and realized I could hear everything being said in the dining room, her face turned as red as a tomato. She practically shoved me out the door after handing me the clothes.
So I was not surprised when the NAACP tried to get involved after Levi's death and Mr. Albert told them to let it be. "The boy's already dead," he said. "Stirring up trouble for other Negroes won't bring him back."
Just thinking about it made me shiver. For if it had been Fred Lee lying in that casket dressed in a cheap brown suit donated by Mr. Robinson himself, Papa might've said the same thing.
"Peace over power" is what he always said.
"How can a man have peace if the fear of death is always at his back?" I asked him.
He said he'd learned to do like Paul the Apostle and be content in whatever state he was in.
_I'll be content,_ I said to myself, _when the state I'm in is no longer Mississippi._
After someone died, it normally took colored folks a good two weeks before they had a funeral, seeing how they had to gather up enough money to pay the undertaker and everybody else. But Levi's funeral happened quickly, in less than a week, as Mr. Robinson paid for the funeral.
I was already annoyed by the way folks acted as if Levi had simply died in his sleep, but when Louvenia Smith, also known as Miss Doll, began belting out "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," I became even more annoyed. A self-appointed funeral singer (and Ma Pearl's personal friend), she sang a solo at every funeral she attended, whether the family asked her to or not. Back in her younger days, she had been a great singer, I was told. Now she was way past her prime, and her voice had faded significantly, but the kind folks in Stillwater didn't have the heart to tell her so.
_"'I looked over Jordan,'"_ she croaked, _"'and what did I see?'"_ She moaned. _"'A band of angels comin' after me . . .'"_
And with that, Miss Etta hit the floor with a thud.
A gasp escaped from the crowd, followed by a hush, as Sister Jenny Louise Harris stopped banging on her out-of-tune piano.
Within seconds, Miss Etta was surrounded by a flurry of white uniforms.
"Scoot over!" a male usher ordered our row.
We practically piled on top of one another as we moved over to make room. On the count of three, four ushers hoisted Miss Etta up and onto the pew. The pew creaked.
Did I mention that Miss Etta was about the size of Ma Pearl?
# Chapter Eight
## SATURDAY, JULY 30
SHE KNEW DIRN WELL SHE COULDN'T SERVE AT HER own boy's fune'," Ma Pearl said as she dropped large spoons of chicken dressing on plates as mourners passed through the assembly line in Miss Etta's cramped kitchen. Once served, most of them headed straight on out the back door to feast under the shade trees as they fanned away flies. I was surprised they held the repast at the Jacksons' anyway, seeing that theirs was one of the smallest and most dilapidated houses on Mr. Robinson's land. But it seemed that all the colored people in Stillwater and the other small communities in Leflore County were assembled there that day.
As usual during a repast, each family had brought their own plates, cups, and utensils, along with a large pot or pan of some food item to share with everyone else. Ma Pearl had brought a pan of dressing and a pan of fried chicken.
Miss Doll—who was anything but—frowned as she slapped creamed potatoes next to the chicken dressing. "If it'd been my boy," she said, "they wouldn'ta been able to keep me outta that casket. Shame how they ack'n like nothing happened. Like that boy just died from somp'n natra." She tapped the spoon against the side of the pan to rid it of stuck-on potatoes. "Wadn't his time," she said, shaking her head. "I don't care what Rev'ren Blake say. Wadn't his time."
I stood beside them, as silent as a stump as I made sure that each person in the line received one, and only one, piece of Ma Pearl's famous fried chicken.
"Humph," Ma Pearl said. "That boy was a fool. That's what got him kil't."
Miss Doll's face tightened. "They didn't hafta shoot him. Coulda jest warned him like they did Say-rah's boy. You see how he got on outta here the next day. Caught the first bus to Memphis."
Ma Pearl snorted. "Memphis ain't no better. They killin' niggas up there, too." She gave me an evil look and said, "I bet' not catch one of mine going down to the courthouse talk'n 'bout vot'n. They wouldn't hafta wor' 'bout the white man. I'd kill 'em with my own two hands."
Miss Doll dipped the spoon into the mountain of potatoes and scooped up a helping. "I still don't like how they ack like the boy just died from somp'n natra. He was shot," she said bluntly. "How else they 'splain the bullet hole in his head?"
"If you ast me," Ma Pearl said, "he already had a hole in his head. A _whole_ lotta stupid."
Miss Doll chortled. "Sweet, you sho' is crazy."
"Not half as crazy as these young folks," Ma Pearl said. "I ain't too happy 'bout the way things is myself. But they better than they used to be. And they sho' ain't worth gittin' shot over."
Miss Doll sighed. "Nah, they ain't," she said, shaking her head. "They sho' ain't."
Ma Pearl groaned. "My name ain't Jesus, and I ain't 'bout to be nobody's sacrificial lamb and find myself hanging from no dirn tree."
_I doubt there's a tree limb in all of Mississippi strong enough to hold you,_ I said to myself.
"What's so funny?" Ma Pearl said when she caught me grinning.
I shook my head. "Nothing."
"Then wipe that grin off yo' face, 'fore I do it for you," she said. "You jest left a fune', not a dirn wedding."
I pressed my lips together and concentrated on the chicken. But out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of Miss Doll. She, too, was trying hard not to grin. I could only wonder what she might have been thinking.
"Psst," came a soft voice from the back door. I turned and saw Hallelujah beckoning me with his finger.
"Can you come outside for a minute?" he whispered.
I poked a chicken thigh with a fork and slid it onto the next person's plate. The chicken pan was still half full, so I asked Miss Doll to cover for me while I talked to Hallelujah.
As we slipped out the back door, my nose rejoiced. I was glad to be out of the Jackson house, which always smelled like day-old cabbage and musty feet.
Unlike our house, the Jacksons' house was surrounded by trees instead of cotton fields. As the yard was congested with people picnicking on blankets in the shade, Hallelujah and I went for a walk in the wooded area out back.
Mr. Robinson, it seemed, owned half the land in Stillwater, plus land dotted throughout the county. What he didn't use for farming, he built shanties on and rented them to colored people at exorbitant rates. His wooded land, he used for lumbering. There were plenty of stumps in these woods, where trees had lost their lives for the shacks Mr. Robinson built.
We walked away from the house until we could no longer hear the whispered chatter of voices—some mournful, some confused, but all angry, either at the white men who killed Levi or at Levi himself for getting killed.
We sat together on a wide stump, and Hallelujah placed a newspaper on my lap.
When I saw the picture and the headline, I screamed and flung the paper as far away from me as I could. My stomach did somersaults as Hallelujah retrieved the paper from the trunk of a nearby tree.
He thrust the paper into my face and said in the deepest voice he could muster, "Read it!"
"No!" I said, shielding my eyes with my hands. My body trembled, and sweat poured down my sides. I didn't have to see the paper again. Its headline, PREACHER'S MOUTH SHOT OFF, would be seared in my mind forever, along with the gruesome picture of Reverend George W. Lee with his face sewn up like Frankenstein.
As if loaded down by a heavy weight, Hallelujah dropped his body next to me on the stump. He sighed loudly and said, "I promised Preacher I'd never show you this." He paused and stared back at the cluster of mourners congregated around the Jacksons' yard. "But after seeing how people reacted about Levi's death, like it's not a big deal, I had to share it with somebody." He extended the paper toward me. "You need to know the truth, Rosa."
My stomach churned, but I took the paper hesitantly. I glanced at the headline again. PREACHER'S MOUTH SHOT OFF, TONGUE SHOT INTO, ALLEGEDLY, BY WHITE MEN. Across the top of the page read _Southern Mediator Journal_. I had never heard of the paper.
"A Negro paper?" I asked.
Hallelujah nodded. "Yes. Arkansas. Little Rock."
He pointed at the top of the paper, where it read, "The South's Progressive Negro Weekly. Little Rock, Arkansas." Hallelujah took a deep breath, then exhaled. "His face was ripped in two. The undertaker had to suture it back together."
A chill crept over my body.
"Hundreds of shotgun pellets in his face," Hallelujah continued, anger burning in his eyes, "and the sheriff dismissed them as dental fillings. He didn't say a thing about the bullet holes in his shot-out tires."
As I studied the paper, Hallelujah said, "Dr. T.R.M. Howard in Mound Bayou said some Negroes would sell their grandmas for half a dollar, but Reverend Lee was not one of them."
"Negroes like Ma Pearl," I said, glancing up at him.
"Judas niggers."
"What?"
"Judas niggers," Hallelujah repeated. "Negroes who'd sell their grandmas for half a dollar just to stay in the white man's favor."
I told him what Ma Pearl said about Levi having "a whole lotta stupid" in his head and how she'd kill her own if they registered to vote.
Hallelujah leaped from the stump. "That's bull crap!" he said, banging his fist in his palm. "We have rights too. And that includes the right to vote. A man shouldn't have to die for wanting to vote."
I tugged his shirttail. "Calm down before folks get suspicious."
He slumped down on the stump with a huff.
"Reverend Jenkins know you talk like that?" I asked.
A quick shrug of his right shoulder was Hallelujah's only reply.
"You shouldn't use such strong language. You might start cussing like Queen."
"These white folks around here will make even a preacher cuss," Hallelujah answered.
"Well, don't you start," I said. "Be a shame for a good boy like you to end up in hell."
"I live in Mississippi," he replied tersely. "I'm already in hell."
"Hell is hot, and it's full of demons," I said.
Hallelujah glared at me and said, "And so is Mississippi."
# August
# Chapter Nine
## FRIDAY, AUGUST 19
JULY HAD COMPLETELY MELTED AWAY, AND WE WERE more than halfway into August before we heard from Mama up in Chicago. The cotton-chopping season had ended, and I had nothing to do except work like a donkey around the house while Queen sat around acting like, well, like a queen.
God had sent ol' Gabriel down with more buckets of blazing heat. And being as faithful as the Bible describes him to be, ol' Gabe poured that heat on us good. Everything around us was as parched as a winter peanut. Except the cotton. It was growing strong.
Papa prayed every day that it wouldn't rain. Rain would ruin his crop. Sun would help it prosper. And every day, it seemed, a wide, dark cloud hovered right over the cotton field, then suddenly poofed away without leaving a trace of water. Every night, Papa fell on his knees and thanked God for holding the rain in the clouds for one more day.
It was too hot to do anything besides work in the house anyway. So there I was, down on my knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, my hands chafing from lye soap, while Queen relaxed on her lazy behind in the parlor, lost in the wonderful world of radio soaps.
School wouldn't start for another two weeks. And I couldn't wait. Folks said the colored school was haunted, said it was built over a cemetery. And since the white folks who built it didn't bother to relocate the sixty-nine Negro corpses that rested beneath it, angry ghosts appeared randomly throughout the day to scare away the intruders. Papa said it just wasn't right to disturb a sacred space that way, said he didn't blame the haints if they showed up. "Wouldn't want folks stepping on my grave either," he said.
Personally, I never saw any haints, unless you count the little round white man with the doughy face who visited on occasion to make sure "you folks have all you need ovah heah."
But I didn't care that the school was haunted. I only cared that it was new, even if everything in it was raggedy junk from the white school. At least we had a school. Most colored children weren't lucky enough to even go to school, especially the ones who lived on somebody else's land. With cotton-picking season right around the corner, they were expected to work. Luckily for me and Queen and Fred Lee, Papa allowed us to attend school even during the harvest season. Ma Pearl, on the other hand, couldn't have cared less.
Grade school was considered a decent education by most folks in the Delta anyhow. But not for me. I wanted more. I needed more. I couldn't be like Papa and spend the rest of my life working in a cotton field. Nor like Ma Pearl, cleaning up after and serving white women like Mrs. Robinson. I would turn into a madwoman if I had to be surrounded by all the fanciness of a white woman's house all day, then return home and try to find contentment with the drabness of my own.
If only for this reason alone, I wanted—no—I _had_ to do like Levi Jackson and some of the others. I had to finish up high school and head off somewhere to a college. Except Levi would never again set foot in a college, thanks to the fool who put a bullet in his head. But at least his younger brothers would have a better chance than he did.
Right after Levi's funeral and before the cotton chopping was all done, Mr. Albert and his wife, Miss Flo-Etta, took their younger sons and joined their older sons in Detroit. He said he was done with Mississippi and would never set foot on that demon soil again. Perhaps Fish, Adam, and Mr. Albert's other young sons would get to go to one of those fancy schools up north, where they claimed white children and colored children sat in the same classrooms—something I figured I would have to see for myself to believe.
My seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, had said that would eventually happen in Mississippi. But she also said it was the actions of people like the NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers who got us that new colored school built. She said that Mr. Evers had first gone to Alcorn, the colored college where Levi had gone, and studied business. After that, he tried to go study law at that fancy white college they call Ole Miss. Miss Johnson said that as long as colored folks tried to force their way into white schools, white folks would spend money to build colored schools. That way they could claim colored children had the same privileges as white children, and they wouldn't be forced to integrate like they had done in Topeka, Kansas.
But she and Reverend Jenkins both said that they could build all they wanted, but a change was still coming to Mississippi, and soon. Reverend Jenkins himself had attended a funny-sounding colored college named Tougaloo, where he studied literature. So besides preaching, he was also a teacher at the colored high school, and he sold life insurance policies on the side. Hallelujah was planning to study medicine when he went to college. I wanted to learn important things like that too—medicine, or maybe even business or law like Mr. Evers.
I was almost finished with the kitchen floor and was about to get started on sweeping the back porch when Ma Pearl yelled from the parlor. "Rose Lee! Come read this."
I scrambled up from the floor and dried my hands on a dishrag. I welcomed the break from my work, even if it was only to read the mail. Ma Pearl was one of the reasons I knew I had to get as much schooling as possible. She'd been born in 1899, her mama and papa were former slaves, and she couldn't read or write a lick. She couldn't even read the mail when it came in. Papa, however, had taught himself to read when he was a boy. He told me that while his mama cleaned the white woman's house, he read the white children's books, figuring out the words by studying the pictures. He couldn't read all that good, but at least he could read some. Good thing too, since he studied that _Farmer's Almanac_ like it was the Bible. His favorite reading, however, was the three-day-old Memphis _Commercial Appeal,_ a white-owned newspaper that the Robinsons passed on to Ma Pearl. Papa read the paper in the late evening, after what he called a hard day of cotton-field meditation. He said that after spending a whole day looking inside his own head, it was nice to take a break and look inside someone else's.
I knew before seeing it that the letter in Ma Pearl's hand was from Mama. And I also knew, from the sour look on Ma Pearl's face, that the letter didn't contain that lil' something Mama had promised to send as soon as she got settled.
When Ma Pearl thrust the letter in my face, she cussed under her breath and said, "See what that heffa got to say."
Mama shouldn't have promised money she couldn't deliver. Now Ma Pearl would be in a dark mood all weekend. And with her not having to go to Mrs. Robinson's again until Monday, I dreaded the three-day wrath we all had coming.
As I studied the letter before I read it out loud, it broke my heart. The penmanship was so poor I couldn't tell whether it had been written by my twenty-eight-year-old mama or my six-year-old stepbrother. Mama had had to quit school at fifteen because she was "in the family way." Despite her age, she had still gotten only as far as sixth grade. Ma Pearl said she was too busy studying Johnny Lee Banks instead of studying her books.
But even with a sixth-grade education, I would think Mama could do better than the mishmash of so-called words I was staring at. Mama's spelling was so bad it read like some kind of secret code.
> _Dear Mama and Papa,_
>
> _How ya doin. Fin I hop. We fin to. Pete got lost wen we got her. He went to the rong bildin. A white girl told us we was on the rong side a the free way. She tol us go a cupa mo blocs soth. She was nic. We fond our bildin. It so tall. It bout the talless thing I eva seed. Our partmint aint nar bout big as the hose in Grenwood. But at lees it got a bafrum. We aint got to go otsid. And we got swichs on the wall for the lites. We aint got to pull no strng to trun them on. And we got closit to put our cloths in._
>
> _Pete lik his job. I aint fond one yet. They say thar pline hear. But they bout as hard to com by as they is in Missippi. They say pline white wimens hirin mads. But I aint come all way to Chicgo to be no mad._
>
> _Baby Susta com frum st luis last wek to see us. She said she goin to Missippi on the 21 to see ya. She gon be ther for a cupa weks. Pete say it be a whil four we com back. We got to git our mony back rit._
Ma Pearl grunted. "You go'n read the dirn letter or burn a hole in it with yo' eyes?" She stood so close to me that I could feel her breath on my ear. At that moment, I was glad she couldn't read.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to figure out a way to read the letter out loud and not make my mama sound stupid, especially with Queen sitting right there in the room. Her mama, Aunt Clara Jean, had finished eighth grade. But I don't know what Queen was so proud for; her mama dropped out for the same reason mine did. And at least I knew who my daddy was. Besides, everybody knew Mama wasn't the brightest flower in Ma Pearl's bouquet, even if she was the prettiest.
I quickly finished scanning the letter to get the gist of it so I could say out loud what my mama wasn't competent enough to write in a letter.
"Dear Mama and Papa," I read.
"How y'all doing? Fine I hope. We're fine too. Pete got lost when we got here. He went to the wrong building. A white girl told us we were on the wrong side of the freeway. She told us to go a couple more blocks south. She was nice. We found our building. It's so tall. It's about the tallest thing I've ever seen. Our apartment ain't near as big as the house in Greenwood, but at least it's got a bathroom. And light switches and closets to put our clothes in.
"Pete likes his job. I ain't found one yet. They say there are plenty here. But they're about as hard to come by as they are in Mississippi. They say plenty of white women are hiring maids. But I didn't come all the way to Chicago to be no maid.
"Baby Sister came from Saint Louis last week to see us. She said she's going to Mississippi on the twenty-first to see y'all. She will be there for a couple of weeks. Pete says it'll be a while before we come back. We got to get our money back right."
I stopped reading and folded the letter. The rest was about how she missed me and Fred Lee. I would've felt stupid reading it out loud.
"Folks want you to raise they chi'ren," Ma Pearl said, "but they don't want to send you nothing to help raise 'em with. She better hurr'up and get her money right."
That last sentence seemed to be the only thing Ma Pearl heard in the whole letter. Funny how she never said a word to Aunt Clara Jean when she and Uncle Ollie always seemed to have plenty. Even though they, too, lived on Mr. Robinson's place, their house was bigger than ours, and it even had a bathroom, of sorts. Plus Uncle Ollie owned a car. Not many coloreds living on somebody else's land could make that claim.
Queen took her ear from the radio long enough to ask, "So Baby Susta coming on Sunday?"
"That's what Mama says."
Queen held out her hand. "Lemme see that."
"No," I said sharply, pressing the letter to my chest.
Queen sneered. "Girl, I already know yo' mama can't write no better than Ellie out in the barn." She jumped up, snatched the letter from my grasp, and rolled her eyes. "And I know she don't talk near 'bout as proper as you just made her sound in this letter," she said, scoffing as she glanced at the letter. "I don't even know how you can read this chicken scratch anyway."
She tossed the letter back at me. It hit the floor.
Then she quickly switched from putting down Mama to criticizing Aunt Belle, who was referred to by everybody, except me, as Baby Susta, or Baby Sister, if you chose to say it right. "Hope she bring me something good," she said as she flopped back down in her chair. "I couldn't even wear half that junk she brought the last time."
I picked up the letter from the floor and placed it in the front pocket of my dress. It wasn't worth the fight to insist that Queen pick it up. "Maybe if you quit eating and sleeping all the time and tried a little work, that behind of yours wouldn't spread so fast," I told her.
With her nose in the air, Queen said to me, "Don't worry 'bout my behind. Worry 'bout them sticks you call legs. Besides, don't nobody wanna be po' as a pole like you."
"I'd rather be po' as a pole than have a behind that sits up like a couple of muskmelons," I said.
Queen sucked her teeth and said, "Git on out there in the field and scare some crows, lil' ugly girl."
"Crows eat corn, not cotton, stupid."
Queen nodded toward my dress pocket, which held Mama's letter. "I wouldn't be so quick to call people stupid if I was you."
Before I could set my mouth to respond, Ma Pearl butted in. "You done cleaning that kitchen, gal?"
"Almost," I muttered.
"Almost ain't never got nothing done. Get on in there and quit running yo' mouth. Today Friday. Baby Susta be here Sunday. And you know how she like to bring folks down here with her, like Mississippi some kinda zoo that the whole world jest gots to see."
"Yes, ma'am," I mumbled.
Queen, snickering, relaxed in her chair and turned up the volume on the radio.
"Aren't you glad you use Dial?" the radio announcer said. "Don't you wish everybody did?"
As I ambled toward the kitchen, my heart stinging from the letter, my hands stinging from the lye soap, I hated Mama even more for marrying Mr. Pete.
# Chapter Ten
## FRIDAY, AUGUST 19
THE ONLY BRIGHT SPOT IN MAMA'S LETTER WAS THE announcement that Aunt Belle, the youngest of Ma Pearl's children, was coming from Saint Louis that Sunday, the twenty-first. Only two days away. Of course that meant extra work for me. But I didn't care. Having relatives visit from up north was worth the extra labor of scrubbing down everything in the house. Everything had to be bone clean, including the front yard, which would be swept until it was nearly as clean as the kitchen floor.
Special care had to be taken with Grandma Mandy's old mothball-scented room, between the front room and the kitchen. Ma Pearl kept it as a guest room and worshiped it as a shrine, seeing as it had been the room where Papa's mama slept for the ten years she'd lived with them. From what I'd heard, Grandma Mandy could barely stand the sight of Ma Pearl, yet Ma Pearl did all she could to win her favor. So even with Grandma Mandy seven years dead, her ancient bones cold in the ground, Ma Pearl kept her room unoccupied and as pristine as Mrs. Robinson's parlor, while I had to share a room with wanna-be-swanky Queen.
Unlike Queen, I didn't care nearly as much about the clothes Aunt Belle would bring as I did about seeing how rich colored folks were after they had been living up north for a while. I thought about some of the other things Mama said in that letter, things about light switches and closets. Things Mrs. Robinson had in her house. I thought it was almost magical that whenever I walked into a room in her house, all I had to do was hit a switch on a wall and the light would come on. I couldn't wait to grow up and get me a real house, with a toilet that flushed my doo-doo down to God knows where, instead of an outdoor toilet where everybody's mess sat stagnant and maggot-covered in a hole until a new toilet was built.
And closets? What a dream it would be to put my clothes in their own special little room instead of folded in a cardboard box in a corner. Of course, if I had a closet, I reckon I'd need some decent clothes to hang in it too. But one day—one day it would happen, because I was determined to get myself a good education and make it happen.
When I went out to sweep the back porch, I found Fred Lee sitting on the steps. He was tossing corn at Slick Charlie and his female admirers—the twenty or so hens that supplied us with eggs and the occasional chicken dinner.
"Got a letter from Mama today," I told him.
Fred Lee shrugged, kept tossing corn to the chickens, and didn't utter a word.
I took the letter from my pocket and extended it toward him. "Wanna read it?"
He spat on the ground, then shook his head. Even with his near-charcoal complexion, he still looked like Mama, in my opinion, despite what Ma Pearl said. He had her sleepy eyes and her thin nose and thin lips, unlike me, with my wide nose and full lips.
I placed the letter back in my pocket and began sweeping the porch. But I wasn't nearly as concerned about the dirt as I was about my brother. At only twelve, his thin shoulders were already hunched over, almost as bad as Papa's at fifty-nine.
My aunt Ruthie Mae, the knee baby of the family, was married to a mean man everybody called Slow John. Slow John drank all the time and was always getting into fights. He even stabbed an old man six times in the chest for cheating him at dice. Papa said Slow John was hard like that because he grew up without his mama. Folks said she was shot to death by Slow John's daddy in a juke joint up in Clarksdale.
As I swept the porch and stared at my brother, I wondered if he would become hard like Slow John. When Fred Lee was little, Ma Pearl was always calling him stupid because he wouldn't talk. Until around age four, the most he would do was mumble. Even though I was only five, I tried my hardest to teach him how to talk. By the time he was four and a half, he still knew only a few words. He didn't speak in sentences until he was almost six.
Then Mama left us. Fred Lee shut down again. After that, it took him two years to say more than "umm." Standing there on the back porch that hot August afternoon, nearly a month after Mama had left for Chicago, I couldn't recall two words having come out of Fred Lee's mouth since.
I took a chance on getting caught by Ma Pearl and leaned the broom against the house. I went to the edge of the porch and sat with my brother. Fred Lee had never cared much for touching, so there would be no pat on the knee or arm draped around his shoulders. I folded my hands in my lap instead.
"Wanna talk?" I asked.
Fred Lee shook his head.
"You should," I said.
Fred Lee shrugged.
"Baby Sister's coming Sunday."
Nothing.
"She'll probably bring us something."
Silence.
I should have expected that response from Fred Lee. He didn't give a hoot or holler about stuff like that. Like Papa, he seemed to be content in whatever state he was in, even if that state was the State of Poverty.
Ma Pearl said that Fred Lee was slow in the head like our daddy. She said, "All them Banks is a tad bit touched." Interestingly, according to Ma Pearl, all of mine and Fred Lee's bad traits came from the Banks blood. None of them came from hers.
Seeing that my brother wasn't going to talk, I got up and began sweeping the porch again. Then he decided to talk.
"How come she don't want us?" he asked, his voice coming out choked.
I didn't stop sweeping. But the broom stopped moving, as if it had a mind of its own. I took that as a sign from above and placed the broom against the wall. I sat and had a long-overdue talk with my brother.
At first neither of us said a word. We simply sat there in the sun, listening to the sounds of the chickens clucking in the yard. Occasionally a grunt came from the hog pen as our sow and her three plump pigs cooled themselves in the mud. The pigs would soon become our meat. Then Papa would mate our sow with Uncle Ollie's boar to produce new pigs. They, too, would be fattened up with slop, and the circle of life would continue.
I took a handful of corn and tossed it into the yard. The chickens left the corn they were already pecking at and raced toward the fresh drop. "Sugar and Li' Man are still babies," I told Fred Lee. "They need Mama more than we do."
I cringed at my own lie.
"Ain't Sugar seven?" Fred Lee asked.
I didn't answer. He already knew Sugar was seven—the age I was when Mama left us, saying we were big enough to take care of ourselves.
"I'm leaving as soon as I can get my hands on some money," Fred Lee said.
I jumped. That was the most I'd ever heard my brother say in his entire life.
"How you suppose you gonna do that?" I asked him. "Every dime we manage to get goes in Ma Pearl's hatbox."
Fred Lee shrugged. "I'll figure out a way. Pick pecans, maybe."
"Gotta have somebody to pick for," I said. "Mr. Robinson already got his pickers. Little children. Nine and under. So he only has to pay them three cents a pound. Then he can go to Greenwood and sell them for twenty cents a pound."
Fred Lee said nothing.
"Picking pecans won't get you enough money to buy a bus ticket nohow," I said.
Fred Lee shrugged, grabbed a handful of corn, and tossed it into the windless space above the yard. He gazed out at the fields, which were bursting forth with bolls, just begging to be picked, weighed, and sold. "We too black for her," he said.
"The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice," I said, mimicking Hallelujah.
"That's stupid," Fred Lee muttered.
Of course it was. Hallelujah could comfortably make fun like that. His complexion was an acceptable caramel color. He knew he could stand in the sun all day long and never get as black as me and Fred Lee. Besides, only a fool would want to.
_The blacker the berry, the quicker it gets thrown out_ is what he should've said, because that's exactly what I felt like, something thrown out, like the corn Fred Lee and I tossed to those chickens.
# Chapter Eleven
## SUNDAY, AUGUST 21
AFTER MAMA LEFT US AND MARRIED MR. PETE, Aunt Belle would sit with me nearly every day on the old broken-spring sofa in the front room and fill my heart with dreams. We'd sit there with a Sears and Roebuck catalog spread in our laps and dream over dresses. Pretty, frilly dresses. The prettiest, frilliest dresses a little girl could ever wish for.
I remember pointing at a blue one with a stitched white bodice and a big bow tied in the back. I smiled and asked, "Will you buy me this one?"
"Um-hmm," Aunt Belle said with a nod.
I beamed and pointed at another. "And this one?" It was red with white polka dots. The white collar was round and wide.
"Sho' will," Aunt Belle promised.
I vividly remember a black velvet one with a white lace collar. Aunt Belle promised me that one day it, too, would be mine.
Other than in those catalogs, I never laid eyes on any of those pretty dresses. At only seven years old, I was too young to realize my aunt didn't have the means to purchase them. Less than a year after Mama left, Aunt Belle, at nineteen, left too. She moved to Saint Louis with Papa's youngest sister, Isabelle, after whom she was named. There she attended beauty school. And although she had only finished eighth grade, like Aunt Clara Jean, three years after moving to Saint Louis, she opened her own beauty shop.
Papa said she had grit. As a little child, I thought he meant grits, like what we ate for breakfast. So whenever Ma Pearl cooked them, I ate a big helping because I wanted grit too, like Aunt Belle.
In my eyes, Aunt Belle was rich. Not as rich as Mr. Pete, but richer than most folks I knew. She never bought me those promised dresses, but she brought both Queen and me clothes every August before school started back in September. We weren't allowed to keep these clothes folded in boxes in the corner in our room like the homemade croker-sack dresses. Ma Pearl kept our good clothes in her room, hanging in that old scratched-up chifforobe Mrs. Robinson gave her. And sometimes Queen would be the only one allowed to wear hers. Ma Pearl would find a reason to deny me mine, such as claiming they didn't fit me right. So they remained a collection, untouched, in the chifforobe.
When Sunday finally came, I thought I would burst from excitement. Plus, we didn't have to go to church, as Ma Pearl wanted to have the house ready and the food cooked by the time Aunt Belle arrived.
I sat on the front porch, my legs dangling over the edge. I didn't worry about sweat, splinters, or even snakes as my legs swung anxiously back and forth under the raised porch. I simply enjoyed the scent of collard greens and candied yams floating from the kitchen. I could even smell the buttermilk in the cornbread. Ma Pearl usually cooked on Saturday night, with Papa believing that Sunday was the Sabbath. But this time he made an exception and let her cook on Sunday. So, long before the sun ever left China that morning, she was up fixing chicken and dressing and whipping up cakes—coconut and caramel.
It was straight-up noon, and the sun nearly burned a hole in the top of my head. But as soon as I got up to grab my straw hat to avoid heat stroke, I saw a black car coming down the road with a cloud of dust surrounding it. I knew it was Aunt Belle. It was one of the most beautiful sights I'd ever seen.
I burst through the screen door and yelled, "She's here! Baby Sister's here!"
Queen dropped her magazine and bolted from the chair by the window. If I had been a monkey, she would have crushed my tail, as Papa liked to say. She was out of the screen door before I could even turn around good. She raced across that porch and bounded down the steps faster than Li' Man and Sugar had that day they told me they were going to Chicago.
It's a good thing she didn't collide with the car, as fast as she was running.
Aunt Belle's car (or rather, Great-Aunt Isabelle's car) pulled slowly into the yard and stopped under the ancient oak tree. Except this time Aunt Belle wasn't driving. A man was. And he was the blackest man I had ever seen in my life. So black that it looked like only a bright yellow shirt and a set of grinning teeth were positioned behind the steering wheel. And just as Ma Pearl predicted, the car held three other northern just-gotta-see-Mississippi spectators as well.
By the time I reached the car, everybody—Ma Pearl, Papa, and Fred Lee—had come out of the house. While Ma Pearl and Queen and I swarmed Aunt Belle's car like bees on a hive, Papa and Fred Lee remained on the porch. I could tell they were studying the stranger in the driver's seat as his wide grin revealed teeth that were whiter than Ma Pearl's bleached bloomers.
Aaron. That was the stranger's name. Aaron. Like Moses's brother in the Bible. Except his name was much longer: Aaron Montgomery Ward Harris. "I was named after the famous Aaron Montgomery Ward who created a mail-order catalog," he said. "Like those you have stacked there in the corner." He smiled proudly as he nodded toward our collection of Sears and Roebuck catalogs. "But feel free to call me Monty."
Like me, Mr. Aaron Montgomery Ward Harris was as dark as midnight without a moon. With his black hand interlocked with Aunt Belle's creamed-coffee one as they sat together on the settee in the parlor, I couldn't help but think of a piano and how the keys worked together to make music. Aunt Belle and Aaron, or Monty, as I had decided to call him, looked happy, like two people making music.
The three northern spectators were a man and a woman—newlyweds, James and Shirley Devine—who looked to be around Aunt Belle's age, and a girl, Ophelia, who looked to be about Queen's age. Ophelia was the sister of the sophisticated Shirley. And she was a Goliath of a girl, big boned and as ugly as an ogre. But sitting crossed-legged on the sofa, wearing a cream-colored pantsuit and as much makeup and the same hairstyle as her full-grown older sister, she made even Queen appear homely.
And she made me feel five years old. Papa allowed me to wear pants only when I went to the field, and even then, they belonged to Fred Lee. And makeup? Never.
The country people—Queen, Fred Lee, and me—sat on raggedy chairs brought to the parlor from the porch. Ma Pearl and Papa sat in the matching blue chairs, one near the window, the other near the door, while the sophisticated Saint Louis folks sat on the settee and sofa.
"Where y'all staying?" Ma Pearl asked. That was always her first question to Aunt Belle. Never "How was the trip?" Or "How's everybody up there doing?" But always "Where y'all staying?"
"Monty has folks in Greenwood," Aunt Belle answered. "We'll be staying with them."
Aunt Belle had said she could never go back to sleeping under a tin roof or peeing in a pot after having enjoyed the luxuries of living up north. Yet with hope, and without fail, Ma Pearl had me scrub everything from top to bottom and from left to right, anticipating a different answer from her youngest child.
Ma Pearl addressed Monty. "You from here?"
"My mother grew up around Money," he answered. He grinned and added, "Mississippi, that is," then chuckled at his own joke.
"You ain't no kin to Mose Wright 'n'em, is you?" Ma Pearl asked.
Monty thought for a moment before he said, "The name doesn't sound familiar."
"Mose a farmer over there in Money," said Ma Pearl. "A good man. A preacher."
"My mother never mentioned any Wrights," said Monty. "She moved to Saint Louis at age twenty. I was born and raised there, as a matter of fact. But I believe Mother's family might have moved to Greenwood when she was around seven or eight, so she doesn't remember much about Money. Just that it was small. Nothing more than a one-horse town."
"Mose wouldn'ta been livin' in Money then, Pearl," said Papa. "He just moved out there on Mr. Frederick's place 'bout eight, maybe nine years ago."
Ma Pearl squinted at Monty. "You kinda put me in the mind of Preacher Mose. You favor him a lil' bit."
"There's no telling who I'm related to down here," said Monty. "My mother still has family scattered throughout the Delta. Some in Greenwood still. But more in Mound Bayou, the city founded by Negroes. Some of Mother's family moved there in 1898, shortly after the city was founded. But she's never mentioned any Wrights from Money."
Ma Pearl's forehead creased. "How old is you?" she asked Monty.
"Thirty," he answered.
"Belle ain't but twenty-fo'."
"That's only six years' difference, ma'am."
With her expression stoic, Ma Pearl answered, "I can count."
Monty grinned. "I'm sure you can, ma'am."
Ma Pearl, of course, couldn't let him have the last word. She glared at him and said, "Y'all sharing a bed?"
Aunt Belle fidgeted, shifting her weight upon the settee. "We're engaged, Mama," she said. She showed Ma Pearl her ring finger. It held a thin gold band. Atop it sat a dainty diamond.
Ma Pearl snorted. "That ring don't mean y'all can share a bed."
Papa sat straighter in his chair. He removed his pipe from his shirt pocket and placed it between his lips. He didn't bother filling it with Prince Albert.
But before he could say a word, Aunt Belle blurted out, "It's a shame what they did to Mr. Albert's boy, ain't it?"
Ma Pearl's jaw dropped so hard it could've hit the floor. "What you know 'bout that?" she asked.
"Anna Mae and Pete told me."
"How they know and they way up in Chicago?"
"Pete said he read about it in the _Defender,_ " Aunt Belle answered. "Said it wasn't much, just something about another Negro killing going unpunished in Mississippi. Didn't even have his name. But Pete knew it was one of the Jackson boys. The one that was at Alcorn College."
Papa rubbed his chin. "Hmm, the _Defender,_ " he said. "That's a colored paper, ain't it?"
Monty nodded and said, "Indeed, it is. The _Defender_ is a paper created and run by Negroes, Mr. Carter. It was founded in 1905 by Robert Abbott."
Ma Pearl raised an eyebrow. "Abbott? That don't sound like no colored name to me."
"Neither does Carter," said Monty. "But I assure you, ma'am"— he held up his hand and turned it backwards—"Mr. Abbott was a Negro, with a complexion as dark as mine."
Queen sneered. I could imagine what she was thinking—the same thing she'd said to me too many times: _Wouldn't wanna run into a spook like you after dark._
"How they know 'bout what's going on in Mississippi?" Ma Pearl asked.
Aunt Belle spoke up. "Just because Mr. Albert wouldn't allow the NAACP to get involved directly doesn't mean they didn't in other ways," she said. "People still talk."
"Um-hmm," Ma Pearl said, pursing her lips. "It's all that talk that caused Albert 'n'em to run off in the night, sked half to death. They know'd them NAACP peoples wadn't go'n keep they mouths shut. And as soon as they'da started lurking round here, white folks get mad and take it out on the rest o' the family."
"Mr. Albert and his family are probably better off in Detroit anyway," said Aunt Belle as she rolled her eyes toward the window, where Mr. Robinson's rows of white cotton stretched till they met the horizon. "At least they don't have to pick that man's cotton."
"Humph!" Ma Pearl said. "He coulda at least stayed one mo' week to help Paul finish choppin' that last stretch o' cotton."
"You're blaming the wrong people," Aunt Belle said. "The NAACP didn't run Albert Jackson from Mississippi. White folks did."
Ma Pearl's forehead creased as she squinted at Aunt Belle. "You ain't messing with them NAACP peoples, is you?"
Without hesitation Aunt Belle snapped open her black patent leather purse and whipped out a small brownish card. She handed it to Ma Pearl.
Ma Pearl grabbed her chest as if her heart had suddenly failed. "Lawd, I knowed we shouldn'ta let you go up there with Isabelle."
Ma Pearl might not have known how to read, but she certainly knew her letters. With a grunt, she read them one by one. "N-A-A-C-P," then the name, "Lucy Isabelle Carter." With a flip of her wrist she flung the card back at Aunt Belle. It landed on the floor. "Didn't know I was raising no dirn fool," she said.
Aunt Belle picked up the card and placed it back in her purse. "I'm not a fool, Mama."
Ma Pearl stared hard at Aunt Belle. "You is a fool. All y'all fools," she said, motioning toward the sofa at the three Saint Louis spectators.
Their eyes bucked.
"Mrs. Carter, I assure—"
With a pudgy pointed finger, Ma Pearl cut off Monty. "You got her into this, didn't you?"
"Monty didn't get me into anything, Mama," said Aunt Belle. "I'm a grown woman. I make my own choices."
"Stupid choices," Ma Pearl said. "Messing with them folks won't do nothing but get a Negro kil't. Where was they when L. B. Turner 'n'em run Albert's boy off the road and shot him?" She paused for an answer, then said, "They sho' wadn't here to stop 'em."
"So they know who did it," said Monty.
Ma Pearl was dumbfounded. She had put her own foot in her mouth, as she liked to claim about other people.
Monty pressed on. "If they know who did it, why won't the sheriff do anything?" He looked from Ma Pearl to Papa and back again. "Why wouldn't his family allow NAACP involvement?"
When nobody answered Monty, my chest tightened. I wanted the sour conversation to stop. Aunt Belle's coming home was the highlight of my summer. Now Ma Pearl was about to ruin it. But before I could open my mouth and risk getting a backhand slap from Ma Pearl, Fred Lee opened his.
"What do them letters stand for?" he asked, his voice timid.
Everybody stared at him as if his skin had suddenly turned white and his hair blond.
After a moment Monty displayed all thirty-two of his gleaming white teeth. "NAACP stands for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People," he said. "The organization was formed in 1909 to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate racial hatred and racial discrimination."
He sounded like my teacher Miss Johnson reading from the history text. Poor Aunt Belle. She was about to marry a walking, talking _Encyclopedia Britannica_.
"One of our biggest concerns now is to eliminate these Jim Crow laws in states like Mississippi," he continued, "and to prevent decent young colored men like yourself from swinging from a tree with a rope around your neck."
Ophelia the Ogre's eyes popped.
"Or getting shot in the head for wanting to vote, like Levi Jackson," said Aunt Belle, cutting her eyes at Ma Pearl.
Ma Pearl bolted up from her chair and charged at Aunt Belle. "Git outta my house with that crazy nonsense," she said. She towered over Aunt Belle and pointed toward the door. "Go on back to Saint Louis with that crazy aunt of yours."
The Saint Louis spectators looked as if they'd get up and run any minute.
Monty draped his arm around Aunt Belle's shoulders and pulled her closer. With new assurance, Aunt Belle stared hard at Ma Pearl, unmoved by her threat. "I came to visit my family," she said, her voice calm and steady, "and I won't leave until my vacation is over."
Ma Pearl planted thick fists on her thick hips. "You won't be bringing that mess up in my house," she said. "You ain't go'n git me run off this place. Everybody can't run up north."
Papa stood up and put a hand on Ma Pearl's broad shoulder. "Have a seat, Pearl," he said quietly.
Luckily, the tension broke for a moment when Ophelia wiggled in her seat and asked where the toilet was.
Ma Pearl's head jerked toward me. "Show that gal where the toilet at."
The toilet. The toilet! My mind raced. The toilet was outside. I stared at Ophelia in her fancy beige suit and wondered whether she knew that as well.
After a gulp, I waved her toward the door and said, "Follow me."
Though her outfit was dainty, her walk certainly wasn't. Big-boned Ophelia looked like a man in women's clothing. And she had a voice to match.
Still, I was jealous. Especially as the sophisticated scent of her perfume filled the air around us as we strode through the meager surroundings I knew as home. After walking through the front room with the rundown furniture, Grandma Mandy's room with its mothball mustiness, and the kitchen with its antiquated woodstove and icebox, I felt about as proud as a barren hen. By the time we reached the back porch, I was wishing I had simply walked around the outside of our little unpainted house instead.
"Watch your step," I said as we descended the steps from the porch, warning her not so much about the steps, but about the drops of chicken poop scattered throughout the backyard.
Ophelia fanned herself with her hand as we walked the path to the toilet. Her makeup had begun to glisten with sweat. "It's so hot down here," she said. "How do you stand it?"
"It ain't hot in Saint Louis?" I asked.
"Not this hot," she said, wiping sweat off her forehead.
Before we even reached the toilet, its odor attacked the air and wiped out the sweet scent of Ophelia's perfume. She wrinkled her nose. "Good God, that thing stinks," she said.
"It's a toilet," I said. "It's supposed to stink."
Ophelia laughed a throaty laugh. She pointed at our outdoor toilet and said, "That nasty thing is not a toilet. A toilet is inside a house. A toilet gets flushed after it's used. And it smells like pine after we clean it." She laughed again and said, "That filthy thing is an outhouse."
I balled my right hand into a fist. But I quickly mustered all the strength I could find to relax it before it slammed into Ophelia the Ogre's ugly face.
While she stood there laughing, her face uglier than it was before, I unhooked the latch and yanked open the toilet door. "Go ahead. Use it."
She covered her nose with her hand. "I don't have to use it. I just wanted to see what it looked like."
I planted my hands on my hips and gave her a dirty look. "You had me walk out here in this heat for nothing?"
Still shielding her nose from the stench, Ophelia nodded and said, "I've heard about these things, and I wanted to see one for myself."
After that, I really wanted to punch her in that big ugly nose she was guarding. Instead, I slammed the toilet door, hooked the latch in place, and stormed back toward the house. I couldn't believe I was missing important conversation in the parlor just to show some ungrateful northern spectator what an outside toilet looked like.
While I had been outside giving city Ophelia an education on country living, someone had been out to Aunt Belle's car and returned with two large shopping bags.
"Since your birthday is coming up," Aunt Belle said to Queen, "and you're turning sixteen, I thought pantsuits would be perfect for you. Especially with the way you've filled out."
Pantsuits! Aunt Belle brought us pantsuits! Just like the fancy one Ophelia was wearing.
When Aunt Belle began pulling the bright-colored outfits out of the bag, Queen squealed. "I'll be the only girl in school with pantsuits from the city," she said, beaming.
"Probably the only girl in pantsuits at all," Aunt Belle added.
Papa cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. But Ma Pearl threw up her hands and cried, "Lawd, if that NAACP mess don't git y'all sent straight to hell, wearin' them pantses sho' will."
Aunt Belle handed the two bags to Queen. "Here. I don't need to pull them all out in front of everybody. Take these on to the back and try 'em on."
When she handed the bags to and directed her statement at Queen, and Queen only, my heart stopped beating for a few seconds, then started back up again. Seeing all the fashionable pantsuits she had brought for Queen, I thought it was only right to ask her if she brought me anything. Maybe someone had neglected to bring them from the car.
"Did you bring _me_ anything?" I asked.
Aunt Belle's head jerked up, and she eyed me strangely. Then she looked at Ma Pearl. Then back at me. "Rose Lee, honey, Mama said you wouldn't be needing any school clothes." She looked at Ma Pearl again, her mouth slightly open.
Ma Pearl nodded. "That's right. She ain't going back to school."
My chest tightened as "What?" slipped quietly from my lips.
"You heard me," Ma Pearl said. "You won't be going to no school. You finished seventh grade. That's more'n you need already."
"Ma Pearl—"
"What you need mo' schooling for?" She narrowed her eyes. "You strong. You can work with yo' hands. And Papa go'n need you to pick cotton anyway, with Albert 'n'em gone."
My heart pounding, I turned to Papa. "Can't you get somebody else to help with the cotton? What about Slow John?"
Ma Pearl's eyes bucked. "That fool? He ain't go'n work for nobody."
Monty, with an expression just as perplexed as mine, chimed in. "This child's absence from school is only until the cotton has been picked, correct?"
If looks really had the ability to kill, Monty would have died instantly with the way Ma Pearl stared at him. "This ain't yo' bizness," she said. "This between me and mines. If I say she got all the school'n she need, then she got all the school'n she need. Seventh grade. That's way mor'n I ever got. When she finish the pick'n, she can help me out round the house."
Tears stung my eyes. And a pressure filled my head so quickly that it felt as if it could explode. Plenty of folks who worked in the fields kept their children out of school until the harvest was over, but Ma Pearl was talking foolishness if she expected me to quit school altogether. I had no choice but to speak up. "Miss Johnson said I was one of the smartest students at the school," I said, my voice shaking. "She said I could even go all the way to college if I wanted to. I can't quit school. That would be a waste."
Ma Pearl grunted. "Waste?" she said, her brows raised. "What's a waste is a strong gal like you goin' to school 'stead o' work'n like you should be. You thirteen. Too old for school." She sniffed and added, "Besides, what that lil' foolish teacher know? College ain't free. So how a po' Negro like you s'posed to go?"
My eyes met Papa's. "Can't you find somebody else to help pick the cotton?" I pleaded.
"I said you ain't goin' back. Cotton or no cotton," Ma Pearl interjected. "I need you here at this house takin' some o' the load off me 'stead o' runnin' up there to that school gittin' too smart for yo' own good."
Monty gestured toward Fred Lee and Queen. "What about these two?"
Ma Pearl's nostrils flared. "Don't try to tell me how to raise my grandchi'ren."
"Papa," I pleaded again, my voice cracking.
"We'll talk about this later, Rose Lee," he said quietly.
I was so lost in my misery, I hadn't concerned myself with what Aunt Belle's friends might have been thinking until they began to shift nervously on the sofa. When I saw how they stared at me with pity, my tears crested and flooded down my cheeks. Ma Pearl had not only crushed my spirit. She had also totally humiliated me in the presence of the sophisticated Saint Louis spectators.
# Chapter Twelve
## WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24
WHILE REVEREND JENKINS READ FROM THE BOOK OF ISAIAH, I removed a scrap of paper from my Bible, took a pencil from behind my ear, and scribbled a note to Hallelujah: "Ma Pearl said I can't go back to school."
Shock raced across Hallelujah's face. _What?_ he mouthed. He removed a pen from his shirt pocket and scribbled on my note. He handed it back to me.
"Has she lost her mind?" the note read.
I pushed back a chuckle. Laughing was not allowed in church, especially on Wednesday nights, and especially while Reverend Jenkins was reading. We had only begun having Wednesday night services since the beginning of the year. We were Baptist, and Baptist folks usually went to church only on Sunday.
All. Day. Long.
But Reverend Jenkins had made a covenant with the Lord that year and promised to be holier, like the folks at the Church of God in Christ. So he added Wednesday nights to the torture of our church attendance.
Reverend Jenkins's voice boomed from the pulpit: _"'He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.'"_
I snapped to attention. The preacher always seemed to say just the right words at just the right time. That was exactly what I felt like: a lamb to the slaughter, a sheep before my shearer. And I couldn't even open my mouth to defend myself.
I responded to Hallelujah: "She lost her mind a long time ago."
"Queen, too?" Hallelujah wrote back.
When I first read the note, I giggled, imagining he meant Queen had lost her mind like Ma Pearl. Of course, in my opinion, she had. But I scribbled back, "No. Queen gets to go."
Hallelujah mouthed, _What?_ He lowered his head and wrote.
I suppressed a smile when I read "The way she hates school!!!"
I wrote back, "Don't be surprised if she drops out at 16."
"What did Mr. Carter say?" Hallelujah wrote.
The scrap of paper was out of space, so I flipped through my Bible—the Bible Reverend Jenkins had given me for my twelfth birthday—for another. I scribbled, "He said we'd talk about it later."
"When?" wrote Hallelujah.
I shrugged and wrote, "Don't know. It's been 3 days already."
I had never known Papa to lie to me. But that's exactly what I had begun to fear he'd done. I couldn't believe he had sided with Ma Pearl to keep me out of school.
Hallelujah wrote, "You think Preacher could talk to Miss Sweet?"
I didn't want to tell Hallelujah what Ma Pearl really thought of his daddy. "That boy ain't nothing but a educated fool," she'd say of Reverend Jenkins. "Can't preach worth a lick. Now, Reverend E. D. Blake over at Little Ebenezer, that's a preacher."
_Reverend E. D. Blake wouldn't know a Holy Scripture if it came and sat at the table with him and offered him supper,_ I wanted to tell her.
I wrote back, "She's made up her mind."
"Can he talk to Mr. Carter?" wrote Hallelujah.
I groaned slightly and scribbled, "He won't even talk to me!"
"Still got 2 weeks. Maybe he's still thinking about it," wrote Hallelujah.
Two weeks. What if Papa said no? What if I really was forced to quit school with only a seventh-grade education? That was worse than my aunts. At least they all made it through eighth grade. And my poor mama, only sixth. But at least she was pretty enough to have a man like Mr. Pete want to marry her. But I wasn't pretty like Mama, so I wasn't expecting someone like Mr. Pete to whisk me off to the courthouse and marry me—then take me off to Chicago so our children could go to those good schools they bragged about. And I certainly wouldn't have the opportunity to get myself educated like Aunt Belle. Because I didn't have the grit to defy Ma Pearl the way she had.
My chest tightened as I wrote, "How will I ever leave Mississippi if I can't get an education?"
Hallelujah frowned and wrote back, "You will get an education."
"How do you know?" I wrote.
Hallelujah sighed and scribbled. Then he smiled and handed me the note. It read "Just pray. Have faith. God will make a way."
"Stop sounding like a preacher!" I wrote back.
Hallelujah grinned at my note. He loved it when he sounded like a preacher, even though he didn't want to be one. "I wanna be a surgeon like Dr. T.R.M. Howard in Mound Bayou," he often said. "And I'm gonna be the first Negro to attend that new medical school Ole Miss opened in Jackson."
I didn't really care at that point to be the first Negro to do anything. I just wanted to be the first person in my family to graduate from high school.
Hallelujah handed me the note again. "Can Miss Johnson talk to Miss Sweet?"
I wrote back, "She thinks Miss Johnson is stupid."
Hallelujah wrote, "I think she's cute."
I smiled and wrote, "She's a grown woman. You're a boy."
With a sly grin and raised brows, Hallelujah scribbled, "So?"
I wrote, "What do you know? You think catfish-eyed Queen is cute."
Hallelujah blushed, lowered his head, and scribbled on the paper: "Stop passing notes in church."
And I did. I was out of paper.
# Chapter Thirteen
## WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24
THE ONLY GOOD THING ABOUT REVEREND JENKINS forcing us to go to church on Wednesday night was that he fed us afterward. Well, we fed ourselves. Every family brought something to share with everybody else. Like a repast. Except no one had died, unless you count the Holy Ghost, who was killed the minute he set foot in Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church.
During the night I realized that I had drunk way too much of Miss Doll's sweet tea. This time Queen wouldn't be the only one peeing up the pot through the night.
The pot was kept in a tiny room off the side of Fred Lee's room. For some reason it was called the back room, even though it was actually on the side of the house. The room served as our indoor toilet, without the proper plumbing, of course. Besides keeping the pot in there for nighttime use, the back room was also where we took our daily wash-ups and twice-a-week baths in a number-three tin tub.
I made my way into the dark room and gently waved my hand before me until I hit the string that hung from the light bulb in the ceiling. Strangely, this pretend-it's-a-bathroom was the only room in the house with electricity. Mr. Robinson, promising Papa that he would convert the room so that it had an actual toilet, with indoor plumbing, had wired the room for lights first but never got around to getting the plumbing put in. But at least we could see without having to light a kerosene lamp when we needed to use the pot at night. Too bad the only privacy was the double sheets hanging in the doorway.
After giving my bladder some relief, I crept back through Fred Lee's room using the moonlight as my guide. I felt my way along the wall until I reached the sheet that hung in the doorway of the room I shared with Queen. When I pulled it back to enter, my heart nearly stopped. I thought I was seeing a ghost. Instead it was Queen, fully dressed and climbing out the window.
My gasp startled her. She stopped, one leg on the floor of our bedroom, the other hanging out the window.
"Queen!" I said, my voice between a shout and a whisper. "What you doing?"
Queen just stood there with her eyes bucked and her mouth gaping. She was wearing one of the new outfits Aunt Belle had brought her—a light pink pantsuit that fit her curvy body like a second skin. Ma Pearl would kill her if she found out she'd sneaked clothes out of the chifforobe. Well, maybe not, since it was Queen.
Letting the sheet drop to shield our room from Fred Lee's, I tiptoed in. "Where you going?" I whispered as I got closer to Queen.
She placed a finger to her mouth and shushed me. She brought her whole body inside the room, then peeped out the window.
"You running away?" I asked, assuming that any bags she had packed must have been tossed outside, seeing that her hands were empty.
With a wave of her hand, Queen shushed me again. "Naw, fool. I ain't running away."
"Then why you sneaking out the window?"
She sucked her teeth and said, "None a yo' ol' ugly business."
The shock of her angry reply made me jump. Then I heard a horn. It sounded as if the tooter just barely touched it, so as to alert only someone who knew to be listening for it.
Queen glanced out the window. "Go back to bed," she hissed at me like an angry snake.
I stalked toward the window. "Who's out there?"
Queen blocked me with her arm. Her nostrils flared. "Like I said, that ain't none a yo' business, ol' ugly spook," she said, her teeth clenched.
When I tried to push past her, she shoved me to the floor. Before I could get back up, she was out the window faster than a gush of wind. I stumbled to the window just in time to see her race to the edge of the field, where a rusted-out white pickup waited.
My stomach twisted. The pickup belonged to Ricky Turner.
# Chapter Fourteen
## SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
HALLELUJAH STARTED DRIVING WHEN HE WAS ONLY eight years old. After the second Mrs. Clyde B. Jenkins the Second died, Reverend Jenkins was so torn up that he couldn't even remember how to start his own car. So eight-year-old Hallelujah jumped right on into the front seat, started it for him, and drove straight down the road without missing a beat. And at fourteen he was a master behind the wheel.
When he pulled up in front of the house that morning, I beamed. And if I had been the squealing type, I would have done that, too. Hallelujah might have been his daddy's chauffeur at eight years old, but Reverend Jenkins rarely allowed him access to the keys once he was actually almost old enough to drive.
I hopped into the passenger seat of the brown Buick, my grin stretching from my right ear to my left, and commanded, " To Miss Addie's, my good man." I held on tight to my crate of eggs, as I knew what would happen next.
Gravel flew behind the car as Hallelujah sped off. Good thing Ma Pearl had gone fishing that morning, else she would've barged out of the house like a giant mama bear, yelling, _Gal, git outta that car with that foolish boy!_
Gravel beat on the sides of Reverend Jenkins's Buick like popcorn popping in a skillet of hot grease. Hallelujah and I both hooted, as if we were a couple of city gangsters who had just pulled off the heist of the century. I knew to cherish the moment, as there was no telling when I'd see another one like it.
After catching Queen sneaking off into the night with Ricky Turner, I finally told Ma Pearl and Papa about him chasing me off the road nearly a month before. I told them right in front of Queen, hoping she'd take a hint. She didn't do a thing but roll her eyes at me.
Ma Pearl threw a fiery fit when she realized that Miss Addie never got her eggs and had to make do a whole month without them. "Eggs is needed for everything," Ma Pearl had yelled at me. "You should've told somebody. I oughta slap the black off you right now."
Papa interrupted her rant and said he'd get Preacher to take me the next time. The preacher sent his son instead. So there we were, Hallelujah and I, rumbling down the road to Miss Addie's, when Hallelujah decided to spoil my adventure by telling me that another Negro had been killed in Mississippi for helping colored people register to vote.
"His name is Lamar Smith," Hallelujah said. His voice was quiet, and his eyes were fixed intently on the noisy rock road ahead of us. "He was sixty-three years old. A farmer and a war veteran. He had voted only a few weeks ago. When he was shot down, he was at the courthouse, trying to help other Negroes register to vote."
I, too, stared at the rocky road ahead, saying nothing as Hallelujah gave me the horrible details of this man's murder. By the time we pulled into Miss Addie's yard, which was only big enough to accommodate the Buick, I was trembling and had broken into a cold sweat.
"You better stop all that shaking before you break them eggs," Hallelujah said, nodding toward the crate in my lap.
I tried to smile at his attempt to calm my nerves. But how could I smile when a sixty-three-year-old man had been gunned down in broad daylight just for voting and taking other Negroes to the courthouse to vote?
Ten o'clock in the morning?
Right on the front lawn of the courthouse?
The sheriff saw the killer leaving the scene covered in blood, and he did nothing?
Mississippi had to be the most evil place in the world.
I thought about the ages of the people who had been killed in just a few short months. Reverend George Lee was fifty-one. This man, Lamar Smith, was sixty-three. And Levi Jackson had just turned twenty-one. They all risked their lives to try to make a change.
Reverend George Lee, from what I was told, was a man of means, like Mr. Pete. But rather than running up north, he chose to stay down south and fight for his rights. I didn't know much about Lamar Smith, except his age and that he had fought in the war, but he was older than Papa. Yet he decided to go to the courthouse and help other colored people register to vote. Then there was Levi, who was almost finished with college. He could have waited one more year, then left Mississippi and started a new—better—life somewhere else. Instead, he risked his life, even though he knew that Reverend George Lee had been killed only a few months before.
I could now understand why people like Mr. Pete chose to leave. He had his own land, on which he grew plenty of cotton. He had a nice house in Greenwood. He was better off than a lot of white folks in Leflore County, or even in Mississippi. Yet if he did something as simple as register to vote, like one of them, he could be killed.
At first, after seeing Mama and everyone else leaving Mississippi for a better life up north, I wanted to go only because I wanted that kind of life too. But after hearing that white folks in Mississippi would kill anybody, regardless of age, for simply wanting to exercise their right to vote, I wanted to leave before I was old enough to face the life-and-death decision of whether to stand up for my rights or just sit back and leave things the way they were.
Hallelujah turned off the motor, got out, and then ran around to the passenger side and opened the door for me. Either Reverend Jenkins had taught him well, or he didn't want to take a chance on my dropping Miss Addie's eggs.
Miss Addie's yard was so small that we were practically at the rickety front steps when we got out of the car. I was almost afraid to climb the steps and walk across the tattered porch, even though I had done it too many times to count. Each time, I wondered whether it would be the last.
At nearly 102, Miss Addie had been born a slave. And since she lived on Mr. Robinson's place and her last name happened to be Robinson as well, we all assumed that her family had been owned by Mr. Robinson's family. And from the looks of her house, it appeared she was still living in a slave shack.
But slave or not, Miss Addie, like the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—whom my old teacher Miss Johnson frequently quoted—could read and write. And from what I had heard, she was a person with rather strange insight, and she had delivered not only nearly every colored baby in Stillwater but a few white ones as well.
Before I could tap on the door, she called out in her crackly voice, "Y'all come on in."
Miss Addie's house had three rooms—a front room, a middle room, and a back room, which held a table, no chairs, a woodstove, and a tiny icebox. The house was what folks called a shotgun house. If you shot a gun at the front door, the bullet would zoom straight through the house and go right out the back door, assuming nobody (or nothing) was in its path.
Miss Addie's front room served as her bedroom as well as her living room. In it she had no other furniture besides her bed, a rocking chair, a spit cup for her snuff, and a large tree stump that sat right in the middle of the floor, as if someone had chopped down a giant tree and built the shack right around it, which I think they did.
The middle room was where Miss Addie's granddaughter, Jinx, slept. Jinx, who was also Miss Addie's caregiver, was a forty-something-year-old spinster who sat around giggling all the time when there was nothing actually funny. I'm not sure whether Jinx was her real name or not, but I imagine that when it came time for choosing which relative would live with and care for Miss Addie, someone probably pointed at her and said, _Jinx! You're it!_
I was hoping that Jinx wouldn't be there when we arrived. But as soon as Hallelujah and I stepped through the door, she emerged from the middle room, giggling for no apparent reason and asking for the eggs. "How come you didn't bring 'em last time?" she asked me.
Miss Addie, rocking back and forth in her rocker, said with some exasperation, "I told you dat boy run her off da road, Jinx."
Jinx giggled, hugging the egg crate to her chest, as if I might take it back. "How you know a boy run her off the road, Mama?" she said. "You ain't left this house in ten years."
Miss Addie picked up her spit cup—a tin can that once held store-bought peaches. She spat in the can, then wiped dripping snuff from her chin with a dingy handkerchief. "These old eyes sees what others cain't," she said.
With eyes nearly as silver as dimes, Miss Addie, some folks claimed, was born with a caul, or sixth sense, and therefore could "sense" things that other people couldn't. But most folks, like Jinx and Ma Pearl, just thought she was plain ol' senile.
"Set a spell, chi'ren," she said, motioning toward the stump.
Jinx giggled and said, "I'll put the eggs in the icebox."
Before she left the room, Miss Addie said, "Brang these chi'ren some dem teacakes you made the other day."
"No, thank you," I said quickly. "We ate before we left." Besides being a giggler, Jinx was also a nose picker. And from what I had heard, she couldn't cook worth a lick anyway.
"They taste funny, Mama," Jinx said, giggling. "I didn't have no eggs, remember?" For some reason, she found that extremely funny and broke into a giggling fit as she headed to the back of the house.
"How's yo' papa 'n'em?" Miss Addie asked me, although she stared straight at Hallelujah.
"Everybody's fine," I answered. She was still staring hard at Hallelujah.
Hallelujah fidgeted.
Miss Addie pointed a bony black finger at him and narrowed her silvery eyes. "You ain't the boy, is you?"
"Me?" Hallelujah asked, pointing his thumb at his chest. He chuckled. "No, ma'am. Rosa and I are friends. I would never run her off the road. I gave her a ride here."
Miss Addie moaned as if she were in pain. "Um-umph, not that," she said, shaking her head. "It's somp'n else. But I cain't quite git a holt of it."
Hallelujah glanced at me and grimaced. We had both heard stories of Miss Addie's so-called visions, which even Reverend Jenkins said were no more than her recounting stories from her hundred-year-old past.
Jinx reappeared in the doorway. With her head tilted to one side and her hand over her heart, she was serious for once and not giggling. "Mama, what you talking 'bout?" she asked.
Miss Addie kept her eyes fixed on Hallelujah. "Dat boy," she said, pointing. "Somp'n 'bout dat boy."
Jinx shook her head and said, "Mama, don't start that crazy hoodoo talk with these chi'rens here."
"Dis ain't no hoodoo!" Miss Addie snapped. "Dis da truth. Somp'n 'bout to happen. Somp'n 'bout to shake up Miss'sippi jest like dat flood of twenty-seven shaked us up. It came heah to wash 'way da sins o' dis place."
Jinx stormed into the room. "Stop it, Mama," she said. "Stop scaring these chi'ren. Every day, you sit round here ack'n like some kinda witch cooking up spells. You too old and too close to death for this kinda stuff. You go'n end up going straight to hell."
But Miss Addie didn't stop. She wrapped her thin arms around her frail body and rocked vigorously in her chair. "Yes, Lawdy, baby, somp'n 'bout to happen. Somp'n 'bout to happen. Somp'n 'bout to shake dis place."
Jinx giggled nervously and said, "Don't y'all pay Mama no mind. Ain't nothin' 'bout to happen, 'cause she don't see nothin' 'cept the angel Gabra, who 'bout to come take her home soon."
Miss Addie stopped rocking and stared at Jinx. "Ain't no anja 'bout ta come git me. My time ain't close as you thank it is. But dis place," she said, motioning around the room. "Dis place. Her time done come. Somp'n 'bout to happen. Lawdy, somp'n 'bout to happen."
Even though there wasn't a whiff of cool air in that tiny room, chills covered my arms. I was ready to leave.
"Well, we have to go now," I told Miss Addie. I nudged Hallelujah.
Rather than hearing me, it seemed that Miss Addie had fallen into a trance. She pointed toward the ceiling and said, "Look! Do you see it?"
Hallelujah and I looked up at the same time. I don't know what he saw, but all I saw was sunlight streaming in through the cracks in the ceiling.
"Yes, Lawdy, baby," Miss Addie said as she threw her head back. "The time is com'n dat all mens should repent!" She dropped her head to her chest, then began to sway and moan. The sunlight that was streaming in through the cracks in the ceiling suddenly disappeared. The sky had clouded. The room grew darker, as if a giant hand had covered the whole house and was blocking out any sunshine that had previously managed to seep in.
Miss Addie's moaning grew louder as the room grew darker. It seemed as if she would moan forever. When she finally stopped, the room was as quiet as a graveyard.
"Jinx!" she yelled.
We all jumped.
Jinx stepped forward. "I'm right here, Mama," she said quietly, like a child chastised and found guilty.
Miss Addie grinned, as if nothing unusual had happened, and said, "Git these chi'ren some dem teacakes 'fo they leave."
# Chapter Fifteen
## SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
I HADN'T BEEN ABLE TO GET A FULL NIGHT'S SLEEP since the night I got up to use the pot and caught Queen sneaking out the window. And that Saturday night was no different. She lay over on her bed, breathing softly, but I couldn't tell whether she was really asleep or just faking. I decided she was faking. So I did the same, with my face turned toward her bed in case she tried to sneak out.
Sure enough, after what felt like an hour of lying there playing possum, I heard a truck in the distance. It cut off suddenly, but I could still hear some clanking, as if the truck were coasting along without its engine running.
Queen's bed creaked.
When she eased off the bed, I saw that she was fully dressed. Again, in one of her new outfits. A powder blue pantsuit.
I sprang up to a sitting position.
Queen nearly jumped to the ceiling. "You scared me!" she said, half yelling, but mostly whispering.
I crossed my arms over my chest and asked, "You going somewhere?"
Her face, illuminated by moonlight, quickly went from surprised to hateful. "Mind your own business, spook!" she hissed at me as she headed toward the window.
I got up from my bed and followed her. "You're gonna get in trouble."
"Not if you keep yo' dumb mouth shut."
"I don't mean that kind of trouble."
Queen waved me off. "You don't know nothing, ol' ugly girl. You just a baby."
"I know sneaking out at night with a boy can _get_ you a baby."
Queen's face hardened. She grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm so hard it popped.
I winced and tried to wriggle free. But for someone who never did any work, Queen was surprisingly strong.
Twisting my arm harder, she leaned her face nearly nose to nose with mine and snarled, "If you say one word about this, I will break this arm _and_ twist that ugly head right off yo' skinny . . . black . . . neck."
She breathed heavily in my face. Her breath smelled like mints. Those, too, she obviously stole from Ma Pearl's chifforobe when she'd swiped the powder blue outfit she was wearing.
Before I could wrestle free from her grip, the faint tap of a horn had Queen dropping my arm and dashing out the window faster than Flash Gordon.
"I hope you get eaten up by mosquitoes!" I yelled after her.
I fell onto my bed feeling just what she'd called me: stupid. Why should I care what happened to her? She was meaner than a bear caught in a beehive, as Ma Pearl would say. So she deserved whatever she had coming. I couldn't believe Ma Pearl was making _me_ leave school and letting _her_ stay in. She wasn't doing anything with her life but throwing it away. I, at least, had dreams.
I lay flat on my back and rubbed my wrist. My skin burned where Queen had dug her long fingernails into it. I didn't know what time it was, but I knew it was late and I should've been sleeping. Before I knew it, Slick Charlie would be crowing, the scent of coffee, biscuits, and salt pork would be stuck in the stuffy air, and Ma Pearl would be storming through the house with her war cry: "Rise 'n shine, Saints! It's time for church!"
Of course, that wouldn't include Queen, who would be curled up in a ball, moaning, "Oh, Ma Pearl, I can't go to church this morning. I got the cramps."
I flipped my pillow to the cooler side, rolled over to face the wall, and tried to sleep. But it was no use. Everything and everybody raced through my mind, especially poor Hallelujah, who was in love with Queen, and probably with Miss Johnson, too, only because of their light complexions. Why was everybody so afraid of blackness?
Well, everybody except Aunt Belle, whom I hadn't seen all week because of Ma Pearl and her big mouth. To be fair, I couldn't blame Aunt Belle's absence entirely on Ma Pearl. It was Aunt Belle herself who was too busy working on behalf of the NAACP and didn't have time for her family.
She and Monty, along with their northern comrades, were driving all over Leflore, Sunflower, and Bolivar Counties rounding up backwoods Negroes, trying to convince them to register to vote. Didn't she realize that Reverend George Lee and Mr. Lamar Smith, a proud colored man who fought in a war, were lying stone cold in their graves for doing the same thing? I never thought I'd agree with Ma Pearl, but now this NAACP thing was affecting my own kin, and I was afraid. I didn't want my aunt gunned down in the prime of her life. Nor did I want her body mutilated and hanging from a tree. I wanted her at the house with us, sitting around eating good food, telling funny stories, and laughing—filling my head with dreams of what life was like up north.
My chest ached, and I wanted to go find her, snatch that little NAACP card from her black patent leather purse, and burn it before her very eyes. Like any other Negro, I wanted change too, but not at the expense of my own family.
When sleep finally came, I found myself in a dream where I was trapped inside Miss Addie's tiny house. Her silver eyes aglow, she stood over me, swaying, and chanting, "Somp'n 'bout to happen. Somp'n 'bout to happen."
I called for Jinx to make her stop. But Jinx was nowhere in the house. I was all alone with Miss Addie, and I had no way to escape. The walls closed in, and the little house came crumbling down upon me.
# Chapter Sixteen
## SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
I SAT UP STRAIGHT IN MY BED, GASPING FOR AIR. My heart raced so fast I felt it would rush right out of my chest.
Sunlight filtered into the room through the thin beige curtain.
Queen was back in her bed, curled into her covers like a baby who just got over the colic and could finally sleep. Since I hadn't heard her sneak in and hadn't heard Slick Charlie when he crowed, the dream, which felt so short, was obviously much longer.
Exhausted from the lack of sleep and the weariness of my worries, I forced my body off the bed and to the back room to use the pot. As I sat there, I realized that the aroma of coffee seeped through the walls, but its accompaniments—the biscuits and the Sunday-morning salt pork—were missing. Nor had Ma Pearl yelled for us to rise and shine.
I felt an ache in the pit of my stomach as I crept back to my room to dress. Fred Lee was still in bed. This was unusual for a Sunday morning. I threw a housecoat on over my nightgown and headed to the kitchen. My heart leaped when I saw Aunt Belle sitting at the table. Her hands were wrapped around a cup of coffee as she stared at Ma Pearl, who sat across from her. They were both silent.
As hot as it was in our house, I suddenly felt chilled. The looks on Aunt Belle's and Ma Pearl's faces immediately signaled something was wrong. I wrapped my housecoat tighter around my body and hesitantly crossed the threshold into the kitchen.
Aunt Belle's head jerked in my direction even though I hadn't made a sound.
I'm not sure why, but the first words out of my mouth were, "Where's Papa?"
"Papa's with Preacher," Ma Pearl answered briskly.
"And Monty," Aunt Belle added. Both of their expressions were tense.
I looked from face to face, confused. My thoughts raced. _It's Sunday morning. Ma Pearl didn't wake her troops for church. Aunt Belle is here in the kitchen, her hands wrapped around a chipped white mug filled with black coffee. Yet they both say to me, "Papa's with Preacher. And Monty."_
Something wasn't right. "How come Papa's with Reverend Jenkins?" I asked, my voice quivering. "Something happened at church?"
Aunt Belle removed her right hand from the coffee cup and extended it toward me. "Come sit down," she said quietly.
As I entered the kitchen, a jolt of nervousness attacked my stomach. I stumbled to the chair next to Aunt Belle and sat.
She took my hand and held it in hers. Her hand was warm from the coffee. "A Negro boy is missing," she said.
My heart beat faster. "Hallelujah?"
Aunt Belle squeezed my hand. "No, sweetie," she said, shaking her head, looking apologetic.
"It's one of Mose Wright's grandboys," Ma Pearl interjected, her tone indifferent. "Down here from Chicago."
"Nephew, Mama," said Aunt Belle. "It's his nephew that's missing."
"Missing?" I asked. "What you mean by missing?"
"We're not sure," answered Aunt Belle. "Monty's cousin in Greenwood got a call early this morning from another cousin who lives near Money. Said he heard that two white men burst into Mose Wright's house before day this morning and took the boy. Monty insisted on going there, so I called Reverend Jenkins to go with him. When Reverend Jenkins stopped by here to let Papa know there'd be no church today, Papa offered to ride with them and insisted I stay here with Mama." She glanced at Ma Pearl, as if the idea repulsed her.
"My Papa?" I asked.
Ma Pearl glared at Aunt Belle. "To keep this gal from runnin' over there."
Mose Wright? The name sounded familiar. "Ain't that the man you asked Monty if he was kin to?" I asked Ma Pearl.
Ma Pearl pushed her chair from the table and heaved herself to a standing position. "Um-hmm," she said. "That's him. And I bet you any 'mount of money, that boy of his was down here stirring up trouble, jest like this gal and her boyfriend is doing," she said, glaring at Aunt Belle. "That NAACP nonsense go'n git us all kil't."
Aunt Belle's forehead wrinkled. "This has nothing to do with the NAACP, Mama. I doubt that boy was old enough to know anything about the NAACP. But I can assure you, the NAACP will not let this thing go unnoticed. It's time somebody put a stop to all this white terror."
Leaning forward and placing her huge hands on the edge of the table, Ma Pearl braced herself for one of her rants. She stood there, silently glaring at Aunt Belle as if she were the devil himself sitting at her kitchen table. "White terror, huh?" she said, smirking. "Chile, you ain't see'd no white terror yet. These NAACP peoples keep coming down here interrupting these people's way of life, these white folks liable to burn down every shack on every plantation in order to keep things the way they is round here."
Aunt Belle stared at Ma Pearl and shook her head with pity. "Mama, haven't you ever dreamed of something better for yourself than cleaning up after Mrs. Robinson and her children?" With one hand, she gestured around the room. "Wouldn't you like to own a house one day? Have a kitchen with some running water and a real gas stove? And what about your grandchildren? Don't you want something better for them?"
"That what Isabelle got up there in Saint Louis?" Ma Pearl asked. "A fancy house to call her own?" Ma Pearl snatched up her empty cup, turned on her heel, and stalked over to the stove. As she picked up the coffeepot, she chuckled. "You been in Saint Louis, what? Five years? Now, you know something?" She refilled her cup as she chuckled again. "Isabelle tell you how she got that house?"
Aunt Belle didn't answer. She simply stared into her coffee cup, her expression somber.
"You don't know nothing, do you, gal? That fancy house yo' aunt got up there in Saint Louis?" Ma Pearl paused and stared at me. "I ain't go'n say how she got that fancy house in front this chile here," she said. "But I know one thang: all that living up north go'n do is teach you how to be a dirn fool."
Tears bulged in Aunt Belle's eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand. I couldn't tell whether she was sad or angry, but what came out of her mouth next told me she felt sorry for Ma Pearl. "Slave mentality, Mama," she said. "These whites down here have you thinking you're somehow less than they are because of the color of your skin." She shook her head. "You're not. I'm not," she said, pointing to her chest. She glanced around the room, gesturing with her hand. "None of us are."
Ma Pearl's nostrils flared. "And you got a fool mentality, gal. White mens wouldn'ta took that boy for no reason. He did something." She paused and took a sip of her coffee. "He did something a'right. And it's go'n cause trouble for all the other Negroes round here. You wait and see. If I told you once, I told you a thousand times: one Negro do something, and white folks get mad at all us. Like we all is one."
"Coloreds outnumber whites in this county, Mama," Aunt Belle said. "We shouldn't let them run over us like this."
Ma Pearl strolled over to the table and set her cup down. "Us?" she asked with raised brows. "You don't live her no mo'." She waved her hand in the air. "You a city gal now. Coming down here in yo' fancy car with yo' fancy friends. Wearing fancy clothes, bringing these gals fancy clothes, trying to make them like you. White folks don't take too lightly to niggas trying to act like them. And that's exactly what you city niggas do—try to act like you white. Like you as good as them."
"We are," Aunt Belle answered tersely, her voice quaking.
Ma Pearl snorted a laugh. "You think if I dress up that sow out there in the hog pen I'm go'n let her come in here and sleep in my bed? Nah," she said, shaking her head. " 'Cause she still a hog, no matter how clean and dressed up she is. And niggas is still niggas, no matter how dressed up they is."
Aunt Belle sighed. "Mama," she said, pausing, shaking her head. "You should want something better for yourself than this." She motioned her hand to signify not just the house, but all of Mississippi, it seemed.
Ma Pearl lumbered over to the back door and stared out through the screen. She stood there, not saying a word, only contemplating as she observed her backyard full of chickens, a few hogs, and a cow mooing in a small patch of a pasture. "Things is better than they used to be," she said, still not turning to face Aunt Belle. "And they wouldn't be so bad as they is if the gov'ment wadn't trying to force the whites down here to act like the whites up north."
"Mama, why are you so afraid of white people?"
"You ain't see'd what I done see'd," Ma Pearl said. She turned abruptly, nearly spilling her coffee. She stared icily at Aunt Belle. "That boy ain't missing," she said. "He dead. Just like every other nigga that got outta place with the white man. And ain't nobody go'n do a dirn thing about it."
"The NAA—"
Before Aunt Belle could finish spelling out the letters, Ma Pearl cut her off. "The NAACP can go to hell for all I care. More Negroes been kil't since they came down here than ever before. Whites, too, if they find theyselves on the wrong side of the line. The NAACP can't stop a Negro from being lynched, and they can't make the sheriff put a peckerwood in jail for doing the lynching. This Miss'sippi. Ain't nothing go'n never change."
# Chapter Seventeen
## SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
WITH MA PEARL'S WORDS RINGING IN MY EARS, I left the kitchen and went back to my room. I had to lie down and ease the pain throbbing in my head.
When I sighed and collapsed on my bed, Queen stirred in hers. She sat up, stretched, and asked me what time it was.
I shrugged and mumbled that it was a little after ten.
Yawning, she asked, "What's going on? How come Ma Pearl didn't wake us up?"
"A colored boy from Chicago is missing. White men took him from his uncle's house in Money."
Queen shrugged and asked, "We ain't going to church?"
I shook my head. "Reverend Jenkins is over in Money. Papa, too."
She sniffed the air and said, "Ma Pearl didn't cook?"
"Queen," I said, scowling, "a colored boy is missing. Two white men came to his uncle's house in the middle of the night and took him."
"That don't mean Ma Pearl can't cook," she said, jumping up off the bed. "Can't believe I got to git my own food."
"Don't you ever care about anybody other than yourself?"
"Niggas oughta quit acting a fool round here," she said, yanking back the sheet in the doorframe. "Nothing I can do 'bout him missing. He probably somewhere hanging from a tree by now anyways."
I lay on my bed, shaking. A colored boy from Chicago was missing in Mississippi, and my own cousin was too callous to care.
No. He wasn't missing.
He had been taken.
By two white men.
And they knew exactly where he was.
Fear gripped me and wouldn't let go. What if Queen was right? What if he was hanging somewhere from a tree? It wasn't as if we hadn't heard plenty of stories like that before. What kind of place was I living in, where white men could just walk into the house of a colored person and take away his kin? What if it had been Fred Lee? Would Papa have just let him go? Or would he have put up a fight?
At the thought, a sick feeling invaded my stomach. Papa might not have fought.
When the sheet hanging in the doorframe of the bedroom moved and I saw that the hand moving it wore a diamond engagement ring, I shut my eyes and pretended to sleep.
"You didn't go to sleep that fast," said Aunt Belle.
I didn't answer.
"I see your eyes moving under your lids. And your breathing is all wrong. You ain't asleep, Rose Lee."
I opened my eyes and stared at Aunt Belle standing in the doorway.
"You okay?" she asked.
Though she smiled, worry crisscrossed her face. I wanted to smile back at her and tell her I was okay, but my emotions wouldn't allow me. It wasn't until that moment that I realized how angry I was at her. She had been in Mississippi for a whole week, and I had seen her only once—on the day she arrived. The day when all she could talk about was the NAACP and what needed to change in Mississippi, and not a word about what life was like for her up north. The day she brought fancy pantsuits for Queen and none for me. The day she allowed Ma Pearl to humiliate me in front of all her sophisticated Saint Louis friends and didn't utter a word in my defense.
I turned my eyes from her and stared at the ceiling. Even now, she wasn't really in that room to see me. She only wanted to know how I was feeling about what was going on around me. It took a missing Chicago boy just to get her to the house. And that's only because Papa took her place and forced her to stay with Ma Pearl.
Without an invitation, she entered the room and sat on Queen's bed. "Sorry I haven't been around much," she said, sighing.
_Much? You haven't been around at all,_ I wanted to tell her. But I didn't say anything. I was no longer a brokenhearted seven-year-old whose head she could fill with dreams from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. I was a thirteen-year-old who finally realized that when black birds flew north, they outgrew the ones they left in the South. Unless the ones they left were old enough to vote. Then they came back and asked them to risk their lives by registering. And for what? To be gunned down before they could even set foot in the courthouse?
Ma Pearl was probably right. The boy from Chicago was probably stirring up trouble just like Aunt Belle and Monty were doing. Without my permission, words suddenly flew out of my mouth. "Don't you care if you die or not?"
"What?" Aunt Belle asked, as if my words had startled her.
I sat up on the bed and faced her. "Don't you care about dying?" I asked, my voice shaking.
"Of course I care about dying. We all care," she said. "But that doesn't mean we should shrink back and not fight for our rights."
"You have your rights. Nobody is gonna kill you for voting in Saint Louis like they did Levi Jackson or that old man Lamar Smith."
"But that's why we're here."
I turned my face from her and said, "I thought you were here to visit your family. That's what you told Ma Pearl. And that's what you've been doing for the past few years, visiting family, not rounding up people to register to vote."
Aunt Belle came and sat beside me on my bed. "Things have changed, Rose. Do you know what Brown versus Board of Education means?"
I nodded. "The Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in the state of Kansas."
"That's right," Aunt Belle said. "And soon it will happen all over the country." She shifted her weight on the bed and asked, "Do you know what the White Citizens' Council is?"
Again I nodded. "Hallelujah told me about them."
"That group formed right here in the Delta, in Indianola, not too far from Stillwater. They formed shortly after the Supreme Court passed down their ruling. Their membership spread like fire throughout the South. They want to make sure the government doesn't force integration on the South the way it had to do in Kansas."
"They're in more than one state?"
Aunt Belle nodded. "Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana. They're all over the South."
I told her about what I heard at the Robinsons' a few days after Levi's death, how I heard Mr. Robinson himself say they had to put a stop to the NAACP, calling them the National Association for the Agitation of Colored People. "Mr. Robinson even threatened Papa and Ma Pearl that he'd throw them off his place if they got involved with the NAACP."
"Then you know why we're here," Aunt Belle said. "The White Citizens' Council uses those scare tactics to keep Negroes from registering to vote. They know that if colored people voted, the South would lose its fight to keep Jim Crow laws intact."
"They ain't just scaring people, Aunt Belle. They're killing them," I said. "Levi is dead. Lamar Smith is dead. Reverend Lee is dead. And for all we know, that boy from Chicago—Mr. Mose Wright's nephew—could be dead. And like Ma Pearl said, we don't know what he did to make those white men angry enough to take him from his uncle's house."
Aunt Belle's expression grew dark. "Well, I assure you it wasn't registering to vote. The boy is fourteen and from Chicago. And for all we know, he didn't _do_ anything. It wouldn't be the first time these crackers lynched a colored man just because they felt like it."
I grabbed my chest. "You think he was lynched?"
Aunt Belle shook her head. "No, no, no. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that." She looked away, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes.
"Aunt Belle," I said quietly, "do you think he's dead?"
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. "Let's not think that way, okay?"
I nodded, but the thought lingered in my mind like a bad dream. I didn't know the boy from Chicago, but I knew my own little brother. And I would want to die myself if something happened to him, especially if he was taken in the middle of the night by white men.
Aunt Belle turned back to me and said, "Come here." She embraced me and held me tight. "I know you're scared. This is a hard place to live in, and it's a hard time to live here as well. But you've got to be brave. We're in a war. And there has never been a war fought where everyone lived. Some folks will have to die."
My body shook. "But I don't want that somebody to be you," I said. "Can't you just stop? Can't you just go back to Saint Louis? Why do you have to risk your life just so colored people in the South will vote?"
Aunt Belle pulled away and held me by my shoulders. "When I first left for Saint Louis, I swore I would never set foot in Mississippi again," she said. "Then I came back to visit, and I saw the plight of my people. It broke my heart. Once I met Monty and learned so much about our history from him, I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to come back and help my people."
I shook my head and muttered, "I don't wanna be here. I wanna leave. Go to Chicago. Saint Louis. Anywhere. As long as it ain't the South."
"And you will," Aunt Belle said. "When you're old enough."
"What about now? Why can't you take me back with you when you leave next week?"
Aunt Belle shook her head. "I can't."
"Why not?"
Her forehead creased. "Besides the fact that Mama won't let you leave?"
I didn't answer.
Aunt Belle sighed and said, "I can't. I just can't right now, because I didn't come down here to take you back to Saint Louis, so I'm not prepared to take care of you."
"I don't need you to take care of me," I said, my voice pleading. "I know how to take care of myself. I can cook and clean and do anything a grown person can do."
With solemn eyes, Aunt Belle simply shook her head and said, "I'm so sorry, Rose. But I just can't right now. That's not why I came."
Aunt Belle's words closed in and crushed me, just the way Miss Addie's shack had crushed me in my nightmare. And at that moment I wished the nightmare had been true. I would have preferred being buried under the rubble of Miss Addie's fallen shack than sitting there holding the ruins of my crushed dreams.
# Chapter Eighteen
## SUNDAY, AUGUST 28
AFTER AUNT BELLE LEFT MY ROOM, I SLEPT FOR HOURS. And I didn't care if Ma Pearl got mad at me. She could have come in and beat me with that black strap of hers, and I wouldn't have cared. Aunt Belle had disappointed me so badly that I didn't really care if I just suffocated in my hot room. The air was thick and muggy from what I assumed was middle-of-the-afternoon heat. I had no idea what time it was, but Queen's bed was made. Not neatly, but made, nonetheless. Since we didn't have church, she was probably already gone to visit her mama and her six siblings, which she occasionally did on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, although it was more like babysitting while Aunt Clara Jean went from house to house gossiping.
My body was stiff, and my head ached. Too much sleep. My body wasn't used to sleeping past sunrise. I got up and stumbled through Fred Lee's room, hoping someone was kind enough to have left me a basin of water so I could wash my face. There was none. I'd have to go outside to the pump and get my own. But at least someone, obviously Fred Lee, not Queen, had emptied the pot of the previous night's contents. One less chore for the day.
On my way to the kitchen, I couldn't help noticing the voices coming from the parlor, which was to the right of the front room. The voices belonged to Papa, Ma Pearl, Aunt Belle, and Monty. They were talking about the missing boy.
In the front room was a large rectangular mirror that Ma Pearl had gotten from Mrs. Robinson. Though the mirror was cracked straight down the middle, it still served its purpose of showing reflections—twice. It hung on the wall next to a large picture of a longhaired, smiling Jesus—also courtesy of Mrs. Robinson. Through the mirror I could see Papa perched in his chair, directing his attention toward the settee, where I assumed Aunt Belle and Monty sat.
"I knowed he did something," I heard Ma Pearl say.
Standing on tiptoe, I could see that she was sitting in the chair next to the window, her arms folded defiantly across her bosom.
"Since when did speaking to a woman become a crime?" asked Aunt Belle, her tone icy.
"Any fool know it's a crime when you is colored and the woman is white," retorted Ma Pearl. "That boy oughta knowed better." She paused, then said, "His mama oughta taught him better."
"The boy is fourteen, Mrs. Carter," said Monty. "He was born and raised up north. Things are different there. Negro youths and white youths attend the same schools even, so it's only natural the boy would assume a few words to the woman wouldn't harm anything. He was probably only being polite."
"Things ain't no different up north," Ma Pearl said. "Y'all jest fool yo'selves into thinking they is. Colored is colored, and white is white. I don't care where you run to. Chicago. Saint Louis. Detroit. It's all the same. You a fool if you think they ain't. They jest ain't got the signs posted, is all."
"Mose's boys said his nephew didn't say a word to the woman, as far as they know," Papa said. "It's her white word against his colored one."
"But he did whistle when she came out of the store, according to one of the boys," said Monty.
In the mirror, I saw Papa shaking his head. "Po' Mose," he said. "If them boys would've told him 'bout the boy doing the whistling, he could've been ready. He could've sent him on back to Chicago, or at least he would've had his shotgun ready. He wouldn't've let them come in his house like that and walk 'way with his kin. He wouldn't've," he said, shaking his head. "I know Mose. He wouldn't've just let 'em take that boy like that."
Papa himself had two shotguns. I wondered if he had them loaded and ready. Many Negroes, according to Papa, had armed themselves with shotguns and pistols. But I'd never heard of one using them to defend himself against a white man. It seemed the only folks Negroes shot were one another. Sometimes in self-defense, and sometimes just out of plain anger.
"And that boy's poor mama," Aunt Belle said quietly. "Lord, she must be some kind of sick with worry."
"Imagine how Mose felt when he had to call her," said Papa.
Ma Pearl threw in her nickel's worth. "If the boy's mama was so worried, she woulda kept him up there in Chicago. Any fool know Mississippi ain't no place for quick-tongued niggas."
"Woman, you're just plain evil!" Monty cried. "How can you say something so cruel? That poor woman's son is missing. In Mississippi at that. White men with pistols came in the middle of the night and took him from his bed. Didn't even want him to take the time to put on a pair of socks, for God's sake. And you have the nerve to blame his mama for letting him come down here?"
Unfazed, Ma Pearl answered curtly, "And you jest plain stupid. And disrespectful. And you can git the devil on outta my house." She glowered at Monty and swung her thick arm toward the direction of the door.
I heard the settee creak as Monty stood.
"Sit down, son," Papa said. "I wear the pants in this house." To Ma Pearl he said, "Pearl, I've had enough of yo' nonsense. Mr. Bryant and his brother had no right to come in Mose's house like that in the middle of the night and take what didn't belong to them. No right at all," he said, shaking his head. "Mose is tore to pieces over this, and his wife done up and left too. Said she wasn't coming back. Never setting a foot in that house again."
How I secretly wished Ma Pearl would do the same!
"This ain't the time to blame nobody 'bout how they raised they chi'ren," said Papa. "This is the time to pull together. To help. To pray that the boy is returned safe."
Ma Pearl grunted but otherwise remained silent. Papa might not have been a man with an imposing stature, but when he spoke sternly, even Ma Pearl listened.
"Maybe he's lost somewhere," said Aunt Belle. "Maybe they just scared him and let him go, so maybe he wandered off in the woods somewhere and can't find his way back to Preacher Wright's house."
I thought about nine-year-old Obadiah Malone running through the woods to get away from Ricky Turner. When his daddy found him, he had passed out. What if this boy was lying somewhere in the woods, passed out from the loss of blood or dehydrated from the heat? Being from Chicago, surely he wouldn't know how to find his way through the woods.
"You believe that lie, baby?" asked Monty. "You believe two white men would force a Negro from his bed at gunpoint in the middle of the night, have a little chat with him, and then let him go?"
The room grew quiet.
"We can hope," Papa finally said.
Ma Pearl shifted in her chair. "You say Mr. Bryant was one of the mens that took the boy?"
"That's what Mose say," Papa answered. "Said he wanted to talk to the boy from Chicago. The one that did all that talk up at his sto'."
"And a big bald-head one was the other man?" asked Ma Pearl.
"Um-hmm," said Papa. "Mose say he was the one with the pistol. Said he walked through the house like he owned it. Yelled at anybody that woke up to go back to sleep. Threatened Mose. Told him if he wanted to live to see sixty-five, he best forget his face." With a sigh, Papa dropped his head. "Mose say he'll never forget that face."
"I heard of Bryant. And the bald-head one sound like his brother. Milam," Ma Pearl said brusquely. "Lawd, I hope it ain't J. W. I believe he the man Doll say her nephew work for in Glendora. She say he one o' the meanest white mens in Mississippi. Meaner than a bear caught in a beehive. Fought in the war. Learnt how to beat mens to death with his pistol."
The room was quiet again. My legs grew weak from standing on my toes to peer into the parlor through the cracked mirror. I needed to go get water so I could wash up. But I couldn't move. My curiosity kept my ears glued to the parlor and my eyes on that mirror.
Finally Ma Pearl spoke. "Y'all know that boy dead."
"Mama!" Aunt Belle snapped.
"They might as well be looking for a body 'stead o' waiting for the boy to show up at the front do'," Ma Pearl said. "If Big Milam is the one that got a holt of him, he dead."
What if Ma Pearl was right? What if the boy was dead while everybody was waiting for him to show up at the house? What if Miss Addie was right about something bad about to happen in Mississippi? What if colored folks were about to start getting killed for any old reason and regardless of their age?
Reverend George Lee in May.
Levi Jackson in July.
That old man Lamar Smith in the middle of August.
And now a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago might be dead too? And August hadn't even ended.
My head spun, and I no longer felt like going to the kitchen to warm up water for washing. I no longer felt like doing anything but crawling back into bed and hiding my head under the pillow. I had to do something to block out the horrible thoughts swirling through my head.
# September
# Chapter Nineteen
## THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
WHEN I WAS ALMOST TEN AND REALIZED THAT GOD wasn't going to lighten my skin any more than he was going to let the moon rule the day, I began to wonder what it was like to be white. More specifically, I used to wonder what I would be like if I were white. Would I be nice like old Mrs. Jamison, whose husband owned a clothing store uptown? It was rumored that she allowed her colored maid to enter her house through the front door as well as eat with her at the dining room table. The only time Ma Pearl got to see Mrs. Robinson's front door was when she had to answer it. Or would I be spiteful like Ricky Turner and chase Negroes off the road with my pickup just for the fun of it? I always figured I would be a nice white person, that I wouldn't hate Negroes or mistreat them. But maybe that was because I was a Negro and knew what it felt like to be mistreated simply because my skin was brown. And among my own people, I also knew what it felt like to be shunned simply because my skin was _too_ brown.
Hallelujah once showed me a copy of _Jet_ magazine that had an article called "The Most Beautiful Women in Negro Society." On the cover was a woman labeled "Pretty Detroit Socialite." She looked as white as Mrs. Robinson.
Hallelujah, twelve years old at the time, cooed and clucked over her, claiming that he'd marry a pretty woman just like that one day. I didn't see one picture of a woman with dark skin among those listed as "the most beautiful women in Negro society."
Also in _Jet_ I saw an advertisement for a product that could make my skin light. After that, I started bleaching my skin with the stuff Aunt Clara Jean used to keep her complexion "even." Every time I went to her house, I'd sneak into her bedroom, grab the jar of Nadinola Bleaching Cream from her dresser, then smear the cream all over my face. The label read "Lightens skin fast!" and "Results guaranteed!" I'd return home thinking that in no time at all, my skin would be pretty and caramel like the rest of the women in my family, with the exception of Aunt Ruthie. Of course, just like the prayer, the cream didn't work, as it had to be used daily in order to see results.
A lot of good the cream would have done anyway, seeing how much time I spent in the sun, chopping and picking cotton. That's where I was supposed to be that morning. Instead, I was somewhere I wasn't even allowed: Ma Pearl and Papa's bedroom. I should have been in the field picking cotton, but I just couldn't go. I couldn't take it a third day in a row, especially knowing I wouldn't get to go to school the next week when everyone else went.
Heavy-hearted doesn't begin to describe what I was feeling that morning. Since the Chicago boy was still missing, so was Aunt Belle. She and Monty were riding all over the Delta in search of any signs of the boy and in search of answers as to how something like that could have happened. I couldn't believe she cared more about someone she had never met than she did about her own family. She had only a few days left before she returned to Saint Louis, and she couldn't bother spending them with us.
That morning, I was sick and tired of being _sick and tired_. So, like my wanna-be-a-movie-star cousin Queen, I faked an illness. Not cramps, but a summer cold. The dry, hacking cough and sneezing were easy to conjure with a little help from a black‑pepper‑filled handkerchief, but the fever was a bit harder to fake. Sitting close to the woodstove helped, though.
As I stood before Ma Pearl's dresser and studied my reflection in the clouded mirror, I felt as black as a crow and uglier than a mule. The room was dark because of the thick curtains Ma Pearl had made to block out the sunlight, but that didn't prevent me from seeing the frightening figure before me. My bony shoulders jutted out from the sleeveless croker-sack dress. And my shapeless arms were so skinny it's a wonder I was able to even work the pump long enough to fill a bucket with water.
I stared at my reflection and felt guilty for wishing I were more like Queen. Despite her ugly catfish eyes, her light complexion and long hair still made her attractive. And she was shaped just right, like the women in _Jet,_ who showed no shame when displaying their perfect bodies in what looked like nothing more than bras and bloomers.
With Ma Pearl at Mrs. Robinson's and Queen still sound asleep, I knew it would be safe to slip my dress off for a second and see what I looked like in my bra and bloomers. I knew I'd look nothing like the models in the magazine, but something in the back of my mind made me wonder. Why I turned the radio on for this occasion, I will never know. But I did. I turned the dial several times to quiet down the static; then the music came through.
Nat King Cole. "Unforgettable." While listening to the crooning, I slipped my dress over my head and let it drop to the floor. But after I wiggled out of my dingy white slip, I cringed at the sight in the mirror.
A skinny, furless bear. That's what I looked like. Tall. Brown. Skinny. Like a bear who forgot to wake from hibernation and starved through three winters. A vision that was certainly not _unforgettable_.
When the song ended, I placed one hand on my hip and the other behind my head. Tilting my hip to the side, I pretended I was posing for _Jet_ magazine. I whispered at my reflection, "Rose Lee Carter, pretty Chicago socialite." Yes. Chicago. That's where I would go. Forget Saint Louis. I would have to find a way to make my mama love me enough to return for me and Fred Lee so she could raise us right along with Li' Man and Sugar.
I switched to the other hip. "She left Mississippi at age thirteen. Attended the best schools in Chicago. Graduated at the top of her class. She is now a college student studying to be a teacher. Or a lawyer. Or a doctor. Or maybe even a movie star."
I quickly recognized the next song. A thousand times I had watched Queen dance around the parlor, snapping her fingers and shaking her hips as she listened to it. With the beat so catchy, I couldn't help swinging my hips from side to side too, wondering what it would be like to be one of those northern socialites.
The song was something about a sandman bringing dreams. Snapping my fingers, I danced until I worked up a sweat. I knew I probably looked like a fool standing before the mirror, dancing in my undergarments, but at the moment, I didn't feel like one. I felt free. Happy. Rejuvenated. Ready to move up north and conquer the world.
_"Mr. Sandman,"_ the song said, _"bring me a dream."_
Hallelujah. He was kind of cute. Probably the cutest boy I'd ever seen. But he liked Queen, not me. Everybody liked Queen. Everybody liked beautiful, light-skinned Queen.
But at that moment, I didn't care. I hugged my body and pretended I was dancing in one of those juke joints where Ma Pearl claimed that Slow John caroused on Saturday nights. I hummed to myself.
"Mr. Sandman, hmm, hmm, h—"
"Gal, what is you doing?" Ma Pearl cried from the doorway.
Shock flashed through my body like lightning. "Ma Pearl!" I gasped as I scrambled to get my dress off the floor and over my head.
Ma Pearl, her arms folded, her eyes cold, stared at me from the doorway. "What the devil is you doing in my room, Rose Lee?"
I feared my heart would beat out of my chest. "I—I—" I didn't know what to say. There I was, undressed, dancing in front of a mirror, in a room where I wasn't even allowed, on a day I'd pretended to be sick so I wouldn't have to work in the field, and I couldn't think of a lie that was less humiliating than the truth.
"I ast you a question, Rose Lee," Ma Pearl said.
My mind scrambled for an answer. When it didn't find one quickly enough, Ma Pearl stormed toward the wall where the black strap of terror proudly hung. She yanked it from the nail and said, "Guess I have to speak to the backside, since the mouth on vacation."
Recognizing the familiar threat as an invitation for a beating, my brain quickly conjured up an answer. "It was too hot in my room," I said, my words rushing together. "My fever felt like it was getting worse. That's why I came in here. Your room ain't as hot." I pointed toward the blackout curtains, my hand shaking.
Ma Pearl narrowed her eyes. "And why was you half nekked?"
"I took off my dress to cool off faster."
"Um-hmm," Ma Pearl said, staring at me from head to toe.
She made me feel ashamed even with my dress on.
"You better be glad that boy in the front room waitin' for you," she said, frowning. "Otherwise I'd beat the devil outta you for lying to me. Talkin' 'bout a fever. You got a fever all right."
"Ma Pearl, it wasn't like that," I said, wishing I could melt into the floor and disappear.
She jerked her head toward the door. "Git on in there and see what that boy want. He running round here frantic. Like he go'n die if he don't talk to you."
Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. "What boy?" I asked.
"Preacher's boy." Ma Pearl frowned. "Who else be looking for yo' lil' black self?"
"Hallelujah," I whispered. Guilt overcame me. Just knowing I had been standing before the mirror, undressed, swaying to music and thinking about Hallelujah, made me feel dirty and ashamed. I wanted to cry, but I knew I couldn't. Ma Pearl didn't tolerate tears unless she had administered a beating strong enough to warrant them.
Seeing that she had deflated me, she sniffed haughtily and said, "Git on outta my room and quit ack'n like a dirn fool. You see that boy all the time."
Slapping me hard on my backside as I passed her, she added, "That's for running down my dirn radio batt'ries."
I felt as low as a smashed spider as I stumbled into the front room, where Hallelujah, fedora in hand, sat on the three-legged sofa near the front door. "Rosa Lee," he said, his voice sounding relieved. "I thought something had happened to you."
Swallowing the tears before they formed, I motioned him to follow me outside to the front porch.
"I went to the field looking for you, and Mr. Carter said you were sick in bed," Hallelujah said, his voice rushing out. He slumped into one of the close-to-broken chairs on the porch. I leaned against a post instead.
"I'm okay," I mumbled, staring at the floorboards.
Hallelujah placed his fedora back on his head and leaned forward in the chair. "I knocked and knocked and nobody answered. I was worried."
When I didn't say anything, Hallelujah began to nervously tap his foot. "Mr. Carter told me to go get Miss Sweet. I ran to the Robinsons' and found Miss Sweet starching shirts in the backyard." Still nervously tapping his foot, he wrapped his arms around his stomach, as if to calm himself. "I didn't know what to think when you didn't answer the door," he said, his tone somber.
"I'm okay" was all I could muster. Tears threatened to gush. I felt like a fool letting Ma Pearl catch me like that. I felt even more like a fool standing outside on the porch with Hallelujah after I'd just been inside dancing undressed in front of the mirror. I didn't think the day could get any worse until Hallelujah uttered his next words.
"They found him, Rosa Lee," he said quietly.
I shook my head. "What?"
Hallelujah's voice choked when he spoke. "They found the boy from Chicago."
_Found._ I grabbed my chest. From the look on Hallelujah's face, I knew it was worse than when Obadiah Malone was found, passed out, near Stillwater Lake.
"They found him yesterday," Hallelujah said. "Preacher just got word this morning."
My throat went dry. "Wh-wh-where?" I managed to ask. "Where did they find him?"
"The Tallahatchie River."
The landscape swirled. I grabbed the porch post to keep from falling.
Hallelujah took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead. "A fisherman found him caught up in a bunch of tree roots. They tied a cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire," he said, his voice strained. "Tried to keep him down with the weight."
Hallelujah stared toward the ancient oak in the front yard. His eyes seemed to be fixed on that tree for an eternity before he finally said, "He floated to the surface anyway. No matter how hard they tried," he said, swallowing, fighting back tears, "they couldn't hide it. They couldn't hide their crime."
# Chapter Twenty
## SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, AUNT BELLE READ ME A BOOK she had found in the trash at the Robinsons'. I remember the book's cover. It was red, yellow, black, and tattered. And I remember the title: _Remarkable Story of Chicken Little._ I asked Aunt Belle what "remarkable" meant. She said it meant that the story was unbelievable. After she read it, I understood why. Chicken Little thought the sky was falling—that the world, as she knew it, was coming to an end.
She was wrong. And because of her foolish mistake, she and all her neighbors were coaxed straight into a fox's den and eaten by the fox. And like Chicken Little, because of one foolish mistake, a boy was dead.
That Saturday morning, as I sat on the front porch with Papa and waited for Uncle Ollie to arrive, I, too, felt as if the sky were falling. The blanketlike cloud draped over us with such blackness it seemed as if God had asked his faithful angel Gabriel to paint it that way. It seemed that any minute the sky would open up and wash us all away.
Maybe Hallelujah was right. Maybe Mississippi itself was hell. No. Mississippi was worse than hell. At least in hell you know who the enemy is. And at least, if you believe the Bible, you know how to keep yourself from going there. But in Mississippi you never knew what little thing could spark a flame and get you killed. Registering to vote. Voting. Or even something as little as whistling at a white woman.
But it wasn't just the storm clouds that darkened my morning. It was Aunt Belle; she had left without bothering to say goodbye. The minute she found out about the Chicago boy's funeral, she sent word by Reverend Jenkins that she and her northern comrades were leaving—heading to Chicago. I figured that's probably where she was at that very moment—in Chicago—preparing to attend a funeral for someone she'd never met while the folks who loved her sat under the heavy weight of a thunderous Mississippi sky.
As Papa and I waited for Uncle Ollie, we didn't dare sit in the house. Ma Pearl was in a huff—slinging pots and pans around as if they had scorned her. She had planned to go fishing that morning, but both the thunder and the news that a dead body had been floating in the river for three days kept her at home.
Papa and I sat in silence as we watched the black clouds roll across the sky, looking as if there was no end to them. Thunder rumbled in the distance, yet it was still so hot that it felt as if the heat could burn a person's skin off. No one thought the weather would turn so suddenly, as the day before had been sunny. Now it felt as if those thick clouds had trapped the heat over Stillwater the way heat got trapped inside the belly of our black woodstove.
At a quarter of ten, Uncle Ollie's old Ford came rumbling up the road. The car was black with lots of dents, but it got Uncle Ollie, along with all the family members he often chauffeured, where they needed to go. And that Saturday, Papa and I were going to visit his little black bird in the woods—my aunt Ruthie.
Aunt Ruthie and her husband, Slow John, didn't live on anybody's place. They simply lived in a shack hidden so deep in the woods that even a bear couldn't find it. And since they didn't live on anybody's place, Slow John, an uneducated, rowdy drunk, had no one to work for—no sharecropping or tenant farming. And because of his bad spirits (and the many other spirits he consumed on a daily basis), he rarely held a job more than a week at a time.
Slow John and Aunt Ruthie were so poor they didn't even have a problem with rats. Those rats took one look at that empty kitchen, shook their heads, and walked away.
Uncle Ollie's car shook and rattled as he drove over tree roots that snaked throughout Aunt Ruthie's grassless front yard. As soon as the car stopped, just short of the splintered front steps, three of Aunt Ruthie's children—Li' John, Virgil, and Mary Lee—rushed off the sagging porch and raced to the car.
"Papa!" they cried. They had just seen him the month before, but they acted as if they hadn't seen him in a year.
The screen door creaked open, and Aunt Ruthie stepped out on the porch. She might have had a complexion like cocoa, but she was one of the most beautiful women I knew. She kept her long hair pressed and curled. And when she smiled, her face lit up so bright it could soften even the hardest heart, except that evil Slow John's.
Her slender body was draped in the same dress she seemed to wear every time I saw her, a lime green one with faded red flowers. With one hand on her hip and the other over her heart, she called out to the car, "Y'all come on in, Papa."
Aunt Ruthie's house always smelled like lemons. Every door and window in the house was kept open during the summer. And with so many trees surrounding it, it was always cool, even if the air everywhere else in Stillwater sat stiff at a hundred degrees. But wintertime was a different story. Aunt Ruthie's house had so many cracks in the walls and floors that it was as cold as the outdoors.
Visiting Aunt Ruthie made me appreciate why Ma Pearl didn't want to get thrown off Mr. Robinson's place. There was a time when Aunt Ruthie and Slow John, like the rest of the family, had resided there as well. From what I heard, Slow John stole money from Mr. Robinson and blamed another worker. But the truth came out when Slow John was foolish enough to go in to town the next week and buy a bunch of new clothes from Mr. Jamison's store. Mr. Jamison immediately notified Mr. Robinson that one of his "nigras" had come into the store flashing a heap of money. After that, Slow John was never again able to secure a spot on a white man's place, except for that shack, which was owned by an out-of-town landlord who couldn't care less about his property.
"Papa, you didn't have to do that," Aunt Ruthie said when she saw us hauling sacks of food from the car. She said that every time. And every time, Papa replied, "Ah, this ain't nothing, Ruthie. We got plenty at the house. No sense in us having all this extra."
"Li' John, y'all take them sacks to the kitchen," Aunt Ruthie said.
Uncle Ollie handed his sack to Li' John, but Papa and I held on to ours like we always did. "Me and Rose got this, Ruthie," he said.
We followed Li' John through the bedroom to the right of the front room, then on to the kitchen from there. Aunt Ruthie had only one bedroom in her house: it was for her and Slow John. The children slept on pallets in the front room and the kitchen. Girls in the front room, boys in the kitchen.
Every time I entered Aunt Ruthie's kitchen, I thought about the nursery rhyme "Old Mother Hubbard," whose cupboard, too, was bare.
As we helped seven-year-old Li' John and six-year-old Virgil place food in the safe, Papa clucked his tongue. "Bible say a man who won't take care o' his own is worse than a infidel. Lord Jesus, help that man do better by his family."
I also thought of how the Bible says that if a man didn't work, he ought not to eat. Yet there was Papa, once again supplying that lazy man's kitchen with food. But I quickly dismissed the thought when I looked into the eyes of Aunt Ruthie's daughters, four-year-old Mary Lee and two-year-old Alice, staring hungrily at the bags of beans, as if they couldn't wait to smell them simmering in a pot.
"Y'all set a spell," Aunt Ruthie said when we went back to the front room. She shooed all the children, even the baby, who had just begun to crawl, outside to play on the front porch. I prayed that they didn't get struck by lightning, seeing how the house was surrounded by all those trees.
While Ma Pearl's house was furnished with Mrs. Robinson's halfway decent castoffs, Aunt Ruthie's house was furnished with whatever anybody else in the family could've easily burned as rubbish in their backyards. That day, I made a promise to myself that when I found my way out of Mississippi and got an education and a job, I would buy Aunt Ruthie a house, just like I planned to buy one for Papa. I would fill her house with beautiful brand-new furniture and fill her kitchen with so much food that she would feel like she lived in a store.
Aunt Ruthie settled her skinny self down on a brown chair that had been thrown out by Aunt Clara Jean and turned to me, saying, "I bet you miss your mama."
I swallowed the truth. "Yes, ma'am," I said.
"Anna Mae sho' is lucky," Aunt Ruthie said. "Always has been," she added, sighing.
"How the chi'ren?" Papa asked.
"They fine, Papa," said Aunt Ruthie. "You hear how they out there runnin' round that porch makin' all that racket."
"Um-hmm," Papa said, nodding, staring toward the wide window that overlooked the porch.
Even with hungry bellies, Aunt Ruthie's children could smile. Their daddy might have been a trifling drunk, but their mama was always there. Always caring. Always loving them with everything she had.
"Ready for school?" Aunt Ruthie asked me.
I looked at Papa, then I replied tersely, "I won't be going to school next week."
"You won't?" Aunt Ruthie asked, her brow furrowed.
Just thinking about school made a lump rise in my throat. I shook my head because I couldn't answer.
"How come?" she asked.
This time Papa spoke for me. "Rose is needed at the house. I'm shawt on help for the pickin', and Pearl gittin' to the point where she need mo' help too."
"This jest till the harvest in, like we used to do, right?" Aunt Ruthie asked. "She goin' back in November, ain't she?"
When Papa shook his head and said no, I felt like fainting.
Aunt Ruthie grimaced and said, "You go'n take Rose outta school, as smart as she is?"
Papa sighed, but he didn't answer Aunt Ruthie, just like he wouldn't answer me. Instead, just like he had done when he questioned Mr. Pete on the day they left for Chicago, he crossed his right leg over his left knee, removed his pipe and Prince Albert tobacco from his shirt pocket, filled the pipe, and placed it between his lips. He puffed, even though there was no smoke, while Aunt Ruthie and I regarded him with the same curiosity with which he had regarded Mr. Pete when Mr. Pete had made a decision others could not seem to comprehend.
# Chapter Twenty-One
## SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
I DOUBTED THERE WAS A NEGRO IN STILLWATER, other than Slow John, who wasn't in church that morning. Even Uncle Ollie came. And Aunt Ruthie, which was rare. She and her children huddled in the last row of the church, near the window. Aunt Ruthie once told me that she didn't like church, because when they came, folks stared at them as if they didn't belong. I stopped staring when I realized I was acting like one of those folks.
I snapped to attention and stopped glancing around being nosy when Miss Doll belted out, _"'Je-e-e-sus, keep—me neeear thy cross. There a pre—cious foun-n-n-tain. Free to all a he-e-ealin' stream—flows from Cav—re-e-e's moun-n-n-tain.'"_
The congregation joined in. _"'In the cross . . . in the cross . . . be my glo-o-o-ree-e-e evu-u-uh. Till my rap-tured soul shall find . . . rest . . . beyond . . . the ri-i-i-ver.'"_
It didn't take long for me to tune them out, and my eyes—and mind—began to wander again. River. The Tallahatchie. A body weighted down with a seventy-pound cotton-gin fan. I had never been inside a cotton gin, but they always looked scary to me. A huge barnlike building where cotton was processed. Very spooky.
Seventy pounds is a lot of weight. I had picked that much cotton before, and I could never lift the sack. I shivered as I imagined someone binding an object that heavy around my neck, then throwing my body into the river. What if that had been Hallelujah? Or Fred Lee? It didn't matter who he was, really, because he still belonged to somebody. Somebody who loved him.
By the time my mind drifted from the Tallahatchie River and found its way back to Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, the congregation had completed their moaning of "Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross," and the seven-member choir had begun to sing another song about Calvary.
> _"Calvary,_
>
> _Calvary, Calvary, Lord!_
>
> _Surely He died on Calvary._
>
> _Don't you hear Him callin' His Father?"_
About midway through the song, Miss Doll changed the lyrics. _"Can't you hear him callin' his mother? Can't you hear him callin' his mother?"_ she sang again and again.
Several women removed handkerchiefs from their purses and began dabbing their eyes. Ma Pearl's eyes bulged as though she might cry as well.
"Scorned and beaten, despised of men," Deacon Edwards, the thinnest man I had ever seen in my thirteen years, cried over the singing. His words blended into the singing as though they were part of the lyrics. "A dog got a better chance at living than a Negro in Mississippi," he said.
The choir continued to moan "Calvary," as several "amens" were murmured among the members.
Miss Doll's voice got louder. _"Can't you hear him callin' his mother? Can't you hear him callin' his mother? Surely, oh surely, he died in Mississippi."_
Miss Doll could no longer contain her tears, and they came spilling from her eyes. Women began to shout and holler, and the ushers sprang into action. The air around me was thick, and I thought I would suffocate. I had been going to church all my life, and I had never felt "the Spirit" until that moment. I don't know what came over me, but my body began to tremble and tears gushed from my eyes as well.
Ma Pearl gave me a handkerchief, and I buried my face in it. Even though many others were crying, I somehow felt embarrassed to allow them to see my emotions so openly displayed.
"Jesus, forgive me of my sins, seen and unseen," came a shout from the back. The voice belonged to Aunt Ruthie.
I peered back, but Ma Pearl's head turned so fast, I was sure she would snap her neck. Aunt Ruthie, according to her, was what the Apostle Paul called himself: the chief of sinners. The only sin I knew Aunt Ruthie committed was marrying that old slue-footed Slow John, which was both a sin and a shame.
Aunt Ruthie stood, her arms splayed as though hanging on a cross. Her face turned heavenward, tears flowing, she cried out for mercy. Her children, all holding on to her, cried too.
By the time the choir and Deacon Edwards finished, the only dry eyes in the little church belonged to Ma Pearl. And even hers were a little moist.
My body rocked with emotion. Emotion I had never felt before. I remembered how I felt at my first funeral. How I cried because children—grown children—cried for their mother. And I remembered how I felt at Levi's funeral. But something was different this time. This wasn't a funeral, yet I felt as though it were. Somehow I felt that something worse had happened than what happened to Levi. This boy, Emmett, they say his name was, had only been visiting. He wasn't like the rest of us—born in Mississippi, stuck in Mississippi, just waiting for our chance to get out of Mississippi. He'd come here to visit, to spend time with relatives, enjoying good food and laughter, the way I had wanted Aunt Belle to. Instead he made one mistake, and he was sent back home in a pine box.
Sometimes I wished God would give Gabriel a big eraser and say, _Gabe, I made a mistake. I should have made everybody one color. So take this eraser, go down to earth, and erase the color. Make everybody colorless so they can all feel special._
As tears streamed down my face and as Deacon Edwards moaned and sang, _"'I love the Lawd. He heard my cry. I-I-I-I l-o-o-o-ve d-e-e-e Law-awd. He-e-e-e hear-r-r-r-d my-y-y-y cry. And pitied every groan,'"_ I realized I was crying not for Levi Jackson nor for Emmett Till, but for myself, Rose Lee Carter. Because I was a Negro. A person of color. A person who could be killed simply because my skin had a color. And that color happened to be a dark shade of brown.
But really the shade of brown didn't matter one bit. A Negro didn't have be brown to be hated. He needed only to be labeled "Negro" by the blood running through his veins. The skin on the upper side of his hand could have been as light as the skin on his palms, like Queen's, but because he was a Negro, he was despised and hated.
By the time the last shout had died to a whimper, Reverend Jenkins stood in the pulpit, armed with his Bible and, strangely, a newspaper. "For those of you blessed enough to own a Bible," he said, "turn, if you will, to the book of Saint Matthew, the chapter being twenty-eight, and we shall commence reading at verse twelve."
A few pages ruffled, as only a handful of people owned Bibles or, at best, could read them.
Reverend Jenkins read aloud while those of us who could, read silently:
> _"A ND WHEN THEY WERE ASSEMBLED WITH THE ELDERS, AND HAD TAKEN COUNSEL, THEY GAVE LARGE MONEY UNTO THE SOLDIERS,_
>
> _S AYING, 'SAY YE, HIS DISCIPLES CAME BY NIGHT, AND STOLE HIM AWAY WHILE WE SLEPT.'"_
"Now, we know from the Bible," Reverend Jenkins said as he stepped from behind the podium and began pacing, "Jesus was _raaaaised_ from the dead."
A few "amens" came from the deacons.
"But look at this, folks," said Reverend Jenkins. "When word of the Resurrection reached the ears of the chief priests, what did they do?"
"Preach, Preacher!" yelled Deacon Edwards, who obviously didn't know the answer.
Reverend Jenkins strode back to the podium. "They _asseeembled_ with the elders and took _counselllllll_." He looked over at the deacons sitting crisply in the front row, smiled, and said, "In other words, they met with the deacons and came up with a plan."
Reverend Jenkins paced again. "Can you imagine them," he asked, "huddled around a table, whispering, 'Where is he? What happened to him? How could he get out? His disciples must have taken him.' Another shook his head and said, 'We had soldiers guarding that tomb. That's impossible.' They straightened their robes and said, 'But we can't let this get back to Pilate. We'll look like fools. He'll know we killed an innocent man.'"
"So what did they do?" Reverend Jenkins asked, heading back to the podium.
There was a moment of silence. No "amens." No "Preach, Preacher!" Just . . . silence.
Reverend Jenkins slammed his Bible so hard on the podium that dust fell from the ceiling. "They lied!" he said. "They paid off the soldiers to say the disciples came and stole the body while they slept. Now what kind of cockamamie story is that? Roman soldiers guarding the tomb? And all asleep at the same time? Pilate would have had them all killed for sleeping on the job."
A few chuckles arose from the congregation; otherwise, the whole room was stiffly still and silent. The only noises were Reverend Jenkins and the whirring hum of box fans. It was the first time I had ever seen everybody awake during a sermon.
Reverend Jenkins removed his glasses, wiped them with a handkerchief, and placed them back on his face. He stared at the congregation for a moment, then placed the newspaper on the podium and spread it open. Whispers vibrated throughout the congregation.
"Suffer me a moment, if you will, as I read portions of this article from this morning's edition of the Memphis _Commercial Appeal,"_ Reverend Jenkins said.
Ma Pearl grunted.
Reverend Jenkins held the paper up to display the headline. "Charleston Sheriff Says Body in River Wasn't Young Till," he read. He placed the paper back on the podium. "I had written and rehearsed an entirely different sermon for today. But when I got this paper this morning, special delivery from a close friend, I knew I had to address this issue."
An even quieter hush fell over the congregation as Reverend Jenkins read from the paper:
> **_"Sheriff H. C. Strider said yesterday he doesn't believe the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi was that of a Negro Boy who was whisked from his uncle's home accused of whistling at a white woman._**
>
> **_"'The body we took from the river looked more like that of a grown man instead of a young boy,' the Tallahatchie County Sheriff said in Charleston, Miss."_**
Reverend Jenkins stopped reading and stared at the congregation. "Y'all know of any Negro men missing in Mississippi?"
Heads shook, and voices murmured, "No, sir."
Reverend Jenkins grimaced and continued reading.
> **_"Sheriff Strider said the victim looked at least eighteen years old and probably had been in the water four or five days."_**
Reverend Jenkins chuckled and said, "Four or five days, huh? I ask you again, y'all heard of any Negroes gone missing in the last few days other than the Chicago boy, Emmett Till?"
Murmurs filled the church.
Reverend Jenkins quieted the crowd with the wave of his hand, then continued reading.
> **_"He said there was a large silver ring on the boy's middle finger of his right hand._**
>
> **_"'Mose said he couldn't identify the ring and would have to talk to his boys to see if they could identify it,' Sheriff Strider said. He was speaking of Mose Wright, Till's uncle with whom he had been staying._**
>
> **_"Sheriff Strider said he believes Till is still alive."_**
"Till is still alive. Now, what kind of nonsense is that?" Reverend Jenkins asked. "Sheriff Strider is a big fat liar. And I do mean FAT!" He threw the paper toward a fan in the pulpit. Pages flew in all directions.
He pushed back his suit coat and stuffed his hands into his pants pockets. He paced back and forth in front of the pulpit.
After a moment he stopped pacing. As his right hand came out of his pocket, he held it palm up and stared at it. "On the one hand," he said, "we have a man everybody knows to be dead, and the powers that be concoct a story to say that his disciples stole him."
Then the left hand. "And on the other hand, we have a body that's been packed in a pine box, placed on a train, and shipped back to Chicago, and the powers that be say it's the wrong body. If it was the wrong body, then why did they try to make Preacher Wright bury it the same day they found it floating in the river?"
As his hands swiftly went back into his pockets, Reverend Jenkins paced the floor. "You know what identified him?"
After no response from the congregation, Reverend Jenkins held up his hand. "His ring. His father's ring. A signet ring. They stripped him of his clothes," he said, pacing and waving his hands. "They took off his shoes." He pointed at his feet. "But they didn't think to take the ring off his finger. Had it not been for the ring," he said, smiling, holding up his hand again, "Sheriff Strider might've been able to convince the people of a lie."
# Chapter Twenty-Two
## SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
MA PEARL WAVED A DRUMSTICK AT ME. "You know revival next week, don'cha?"
I broke off a piece of cornbread, pinched up a few fingers of collard greens, and mashed them together. I stuffed them into my mouth. "Didn't we have revival already? In June?" I muttered, my mouth full.
"Having it again. A special one. Too many y'all young folks ain't saved."
_Plenty of grown folks ain't saved either._ "Oh," I answered, lowering my eyes, diverting my attention to a crack in the floor. I was trapped. Nobody was in the house except the two of us. And I had no excuse to get away from sitting in the kitchen eating Sunday dinner with Ma Pearl.
Uncle Ollie had come by the house shortly after church was out. His voice was panicked as he told Papa that his boar had somehow escaped the hog pen and was on the loose. That hog was as huge as a whale, meaner than Ma Pearl, and considered dangerous outside the pen. So Uncle Ollie, Papa, and Fred Lee had gone out to search for it, leaving the dinner company to consist of Ma Pearl and me. And the last thing I wanted to talk about was revival and the mourners' bench.
"It's time," Ma Pearl said. "Past time. You thirteen. Should've been down in the water befo' you was twelve. Ain't nothing certain. You see that boy dead at fo'teen. That could be you."
My skin prickled. Every summer, including this one, I'd ignored Ma Pearl when she spoke of revival and going to the mourners' bench. She had begun hounding me to "get religion" shortly after Mama left us and married Mr. Pete. I was only seven at the time, but Hallelujah, who was only eight, had gotten religion two years prior, when he was six. So on the day I turned twelve, even Reverend Jenkins had begun warning me about my "soul's salvation" as he handed me that glossy black Bible with the words "King James" engraved in gold.
Revival was a weeklong ordeal, where "sinners" were assigned a special pew up front. Monday night through Friday night, they sat on that bench, gloom covering their faces as they waited for "a sign from de Lawd." Saved church members took turns praying for them at the altar. And during each prayer, the "mourners" (biblically known as sinners) were required to kneel before the mourners' bench and pray along. Once a mourner received a sign from the Lord, he or she "crossed over" and became a candidate for baptism.
I didn't want to go through all that trouble, sitting on a special pew at the front of the church while folks prayed over me like maniacs, spraying their spit all over the place. Nor did I want to spend the whole week, while home, praying "without ceasing," stopping only to eat. The "mourners" even had to keep a pious face while working in the field (which wasn't hard to do, considering the circumstances). They weren't even allowed to talk to anyone until after they received their sign and crossed over. All their time was spent "mourning" for their sins.
But Ma Pearl was right about one thing. I had felt as if I had all the time in the world—until the Chicago boy was killed. With the way colored folks were being murdered in Mississippi, I knew I needed to give a little thought to my soul.
"What about Fred Lee?" I asked. "And Queen?"
Ma Pearl took a bite out of a chicken thigh, as she had already stripped the drumstick down to the marrow. Breaking her own rule, she spoke with her mouth full. "They goin' too," she said. "All o' you shoulda been to the moanin' bench long time ago," she said. "Don't know why I let y'all lay up in my house loaded down with sin nohow. I shoulda sent all o' you to the bench back in June."
She paused, wiping grease from her mouth with a dishrag. "Twelve, thirteen, and fifteen," she said. "All y'all too dirn old to be running round here without religion."
I scooped candied yams onto my fork, but didn't eat them. I thought about how Queen had been to the mourners' bench three times already and had never crossed over, regardless of how many times Ma Pearl knelt right down beside her at that bench and prayed over her until her voice gave out. What if I, like Queen, never received my sign? What if I humiliated Ma Pearl year after year by going to the bench until I was nearly grown, and I never got religion? I was about to make a case for myself, but Ma Pearl started up again.
"Shoulda never let that boy start preaching," she said, referring to Reverend Jenkins. "He ruin'n y'all with all this nonsense 'bout being saved by grace. No wonder y'all cain't git a sign. The preacher ain't taught you how to ast for one."
Reverend Jenkins used to preach at an African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, church before he started preaching at Greater Mount Zion. He didn't believe in the mourners' bench, but he suffered through it for the old folks' sake. Reverend E. D. Blake used to be our preacher. Every Sunday it was fire and brimstone, until Papa and some of the other deacons found out about Reverend Blake's questionable behavior outside of church. He left Greater Mount Zion and began preaching at Little Ebenezer soon after. Reverend Jenkins started filling in after that. He was well received by Papa and the other deacons, and he stayed permanently. But Ma Pearl favored Reverend Blake and his preaching, regardless of how folks claimed he behaved when he wasn't wearing his preacher's robe.
From the kitchen we heard the front door open. "Yoo-hoo! Housekeeping!"
I wanted to get up, leave my tasty food, and run. Aunt Clara Jean was here. And from the rumble of feet, it was obvious she'd brought those rowdy chaps of hers, too.
"Back here!" Ma Pearl called from the kitchen.
"Lawd, Jesus, something smell good back here," Aunt Clara Jean said as she lumbered toward the kitchen. Like Ma Pearl, she was big, boisterous, and brusque. A perfect mismatch for tiny, sweet Uncle Ollie.
"Mama, what you cook?" she asked as she pulled out a chair without an invitation. "Junior, y'all go on outside 'n play hide-the-switch or something," she said, shooing her little ones away. "Queen, you go on in there and lay down."
"What's wrong with Queen?" Ma Pearl asked.
"Sick," Aunt Clara Jean answered. "Done thowed up everything she ett today."
"She ain't got the summer flu, is she?" Ma Pearl asked.
Aunt Clara Jean reached across me and grabbed a chicken wing from the pan in the middle of the table. "She ain't got no fever or nothing like that. Jest said she wadn't feeling good, then started running to the bathroom to thow up."
Queen entered the kitchen. She looked whiter than any one of the Robinsons. Pale skin. Droopy eyes. And dry lips.
Ma Pearl beckoned to her. She placed the back of her hand on Queen's forehead. "She ain't warm," she said to Aunt Clara Jean. "What else ailing you?" she asked Queen.
"Just a little headache," Queen said, placing her hand on her forehead.
"Git you a glass o' that tea and go back there and git'n the bed," Ma Pearl said.
Queen nodded, got a glass from the safe, and poured herself some tea.
After she left the kitchen, Aunt Clara Jean leaned toward Ma Pearl and, with her forehead creased, whispered, "You reckon Queen might be 'specting?"
Ma Pearl's nostrils flared. "Heck, nah. I don't let these gals leave this house 'cept to go to church. The only place Queen been is yo' house. If she in trouble, it didn't happen under my roof."
Aunt Clara Jean smirked as she snatched a wedge of cornbread from the skillet. "You didn't let me and Anna Mae leave the house either," she said, chortling.
Ma Pearl shot Aunt Clara Jean an icy look. "Queen ain't in trouble."
When Aunt Clara Jean didn't respond, Ma Pearl turned her attention toward me. "Wouldn't surprise me none if this lil' heffa here get herself in trouble soon."
"Me?" I said, leaning back, my thumb pointed at my chest.
"Her?" Aunt Clara Jean said, her head cocked toward me. She laughed and said, "Don't nobody want that ol' black thang."
"Humph," said Ma Pearl. "You shoulda see'd what I caught her doing in my bedroom last week."
Aunt Clara Jean's head snapped toward me. "What?" she asked, wide-eyed, eager for gossip.
My blood felt like it drained as Ma Pearl proceeded not only to give a play-by-play of the fiasco of my dancing scene in her bedroom, but also to embellish the story with details that were way beyond my thirteen-year-old imagination. "All moanin' and groanin'," she said, frowning with disgust.
Aunt Clara Jean looked down her nose at me and said, "Umph, umph, umph. She fast, jest like her mama."
I felt tears begin to bulge. "Ma Pearl, you know that ain't true," I said, my lips trembling.
Ma Pearl narrowed her eyes at me. "You wadn't in front of my mirror dancing like a tramp off the street?"
Before I could stop them, tears fell in clumps into my food. I took my chance on a skillet flying to the back of my head and got up from the table and ran out the back door.
My whole body shook as I raced down the steps, across the backyard, and straight to the cotton field, the sound of Ma Pearl's and Aunt Clara Jean's cackling following me all the way.
I ran all the way to the far end of the field before I stopped and collapsed in the dust. The tall green leaves and white cotton bolls hid me as I lay there and sobbed—promising myself that I would one day kill Ma Pearl and Aunt Clara Jean.
# Chapter Twenty-Three
## THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8
PAPA WAS WRONG WHEN HE SAID I NEVER FORGET. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember what my daddy's face looked like. I had seen him only once, from a distance, when he came to see Fred Lee shortly after he was born. Every year when the cotton was full and ready for harvesting, I thought about that day.
Fred Lee and I were both nursing at Mama's breast, but she still had to go to the field to pick cotton just the same. She would come back to the house every few hours to nurse Fred Lee, then allow me—at nearly two years old—to have the rest of whatever was left of her milk when he was done.
On one of those days, there was a knock at the door. It was our daddy, Johnny Lee Banks. Mama stood at the slightly open door, her back to me, and told him, "I can't see you no mo'."
"I didn't come to see you," he replied. "I jest wanna see the baby."
I thought he was talking about me until Mama said, "You can't see him neither."
"They say he don't look nothing like me," my daddy replied. "I wanna see for myself."
"You need to leave 'fo my mama catch you here," Mama said, pushing on the door.
Instead, the door opened wider, and Johnny Lee tried to push past Mama. She pushed him back out the door, but not before I saw his face. I guess I didn't see it long enough to hold it in my memory. But his voice is still there. It dragged, just like Fred Lee's.
I couldn't remember my daddy's face, but poor Queen had never even seen her daddy's face. Nor did she know his name. Fred Lee had seen our daddy once, when he had gone to town with Uncle Ollie. Neither said anything to the other, but Uncle Ollie had pointed him out from a distance and said, "There go yo' pappy, boy."
Queen was following in the same footsteps as our mamas. Maybe she'd get lucky like Aunt Clara Jean and find a kind man like Uncle Ollie who would marry her and start a new family. Or perhaps she'd end up like Mama and find a rich man who desired a pretty woman to raise his children.
Well, I didn't want to end up like any of them, not Mama, not Aunt Clara Jean, and certainly not Aunt Ruthie, who, to escape Ma Pearl's house, married Slow John. From what I'd heard, she had been offered the same opportunity as Aunt Belle. Papa's sister Isabelle had come from Saint Louis and offered to take her back when she was sixteen, said she could attend a cooking school and become a chef. But Ma Pearl refused to let her go. Two years later Aunt Ruthie slipped off in the night and married Slow John.
Angry with her or not, I knew I'd pattern my life after Aunt Belle. Like Aunt Belle, I knew I'd have to escape through someone taking me up north. And I knew I had to learn a trade. I would've preferred finishing high school and going to college, but at the time, anything would have been better than chopping and picking cotton. Or squeezing milk from an ornery heifer before the sun came up in the morning.
That Thursday afternoon, after having baked in the sun for four days straight, I'd made up my mind not to kill Ma Pearl and Aunt Clara Jean after all. They weren't worth me frying in the electric chair. Besides, I had devised a plan.
After Emmett Till's funeral, Aunt Belle and Monty had decided to return to Mississippi to see what assistance they could offer the NAACP. They would arrive on Sunday and stay for two weeks. By the end of those two weeks I hoped to convince Aunt Belle to take me back with her. In my heart I knew Chicago was not an option. If Mama didn't want me and Fred Lee when we were Li' Man and Sugar's age, then she certainly didn't want us when we were just about grown. She renounced us as her children the day she began referring to us as Sister and Brother and had Li' Man and Sugar call us Aunt Rose and Uncle Fred.
In the meantime, while I waited for my chance to be a part of the great colored migration, I had to drag that sack through the field and collect Mr. Robinson's cotton while Queen and Fred Lee went to school. Queen had thrown up every morning. And every evening after school she fell asleep before her head hit the pillow. Ma Pearl was still asking her if she had the summer flu. She refused to believe her precious Queen was capable of doing any wrong.
That Thursday was also the fourth night of revival. Ma Pearl made us all go to the mourners' bench. But I wasn't trying to get religion. Why would I want to go to heaven if she and Aunt Clara Jean would be there? I'd take my chances in hell before spending an eternity with them.
So every night, Monday through Wednesday, I had sat on that front pew—the mourners' bench. I sang when everyone else sang, shouted when everyone else shouted, and got down on my knees and bowed when everyone else prayed. But I didn't pray for religion. I asked God to put a curse on Ma Pearl and Aunt Clara Jean instead. I knew it was selfish and evil, but after exhausting myself with tears in that cotton field, evil was all I could feel toward them.
I knew I needed religion or, more specifically, a faith, something to believe in. But I didn't have to kneel and pray before a bench in the front row of the church, with a bunch of people moaning and praying over me, to get it.
Reverend Jenkins said that all we had to do was confess that we were sinners and ask for forgiveness. But the old folks said that was nonsense. You couldn't get religion without a sign.
"You gotta be still and ask the Lawd for a sign," Deacon Edwards had cried out every night of revival. "Pray, 'Lawd Jesus, I is a wretch undone. Please, Suh, look and have mercy. If I got religion, please show me some sign.'"
And I did. I prayed that Deacon Edwards would lose his voice so he would stop screaming all over the place. I also prayed that Aunt Belle would change her mind and take me to Saint Louis.
I would find my faith eventually, when I was ready. And not when Ma Pearl said I should.
# Chapter Twenty-Four
## FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
"'I LOVE THE LAWD; HE HEARD MY CRY,'" Deacon Edwards sang out. The rest of the church joined in as he dragged out the words:
_"'I-I-I-I l-o-o-o-ve d-e-e-e Law-awd. He-e-e-e hear-r-r-r-d my-y-y-y cry.'"_
Deacon Edwards: _"'And pitied every groan.'"_
The church: _"'A-a-and pi-i-i-tie-e-ed e-e-e-ver-e-e-ey gro-o-oan.'"_
Friday had finally come, and the mourners' bench wasn't as packed as it had been on Monday. There were only a few of us, six to be exact, still waiting for a sign. On Monday the front pews had been so packed, there was barely room for our arms, which were smashed to our sides as our hands lay folded in our laps. But on Friday the choir stand was packed and the mourners' bench sparse, as the newly saved saints glared piously down at those of us still waiting to receive a message from heaven.
Queen had crossed over on Tuesday night. Finally. I guess the death of Emmett Till was enough to scare even the worst of sinners toward salvation. When I asked her what sign she had asked God for, she told me it was none of my business and to worry about getting my own sign. So much for being saved. She perched on the front row of the choir stand, her legs crossed, her lips pursed, her nose pointing, fanning her proud face with a paper funeral-home fan that displayed a picture of Jesus knocking at a door.
Well, I had asked for only one sign, and I knew I wasn't about to get it. Deacon Edwards was in full swing, leading the opening prayer, praying for the last of the mourners on the bench. If all of us didn't cross over that night, revival would not be considered a complete success. So he prayed fervently, sweating and spitting while folks moaned and shouted as if a funeral were in progress.
The prayer portion of the night seemed to drag on forever. After Deacon Edwards, Miss Doll prayed. Ma Pearl, of course, couldn't let either of them outshine her. She prayed, it seemed, for nearly a half-hour. While she prayed, I—rather than asking for my soul's salvation—asked that she'd choke on her spit, which was flying all over the front of the church.
After all prayers had been delivered on behalf of us sinners, Reverend Mims, a small man from a nearby farming community, approached the podium to deliver the message. We always had a guest preacher for revival, as it was a well-known fact that an educated preacher like Reverend Jenkins couldn't save souls with his rhetoric. It took fire and brimstone for that. Reverend Mims, though small, was an imposing figure. His voice was loud and intimidating, making me feel as though it were the devil knocking at my heart, wishing to come in instead of Jesus. And he was as black as a witch's hat, as Ma Pearl liked to say, with almond-shaped eyes as yellow as gold.
Since he never used a Bible, Reverend Mims simply began speaking. "Jesus said, 'Behold, I stand at the do' and knock. If any man open it, I'll come in and have supper with him.' How many y'all want the Lawd to come to yo' table this evening and have supper with ya?" he asked, pointing at the six of us left on the mourners' bench. He waved his hand toward the choir stand. "Look at all these folks who said yes when the Lawd knocked. Don't you want to join them at the table?"
The room erupted in "amens."
Now that he'd gotten the crowd stirred, Reverend Mims leaned back, cupped his right hand to the side of his mouth as if to shout his message to heaven, and said, "Praise ya, Lawd, for these souls that's go'n one day join you at yo' grand table in heaven. We all go'n feast on milk and honey. Come on taste and see that the Lawd is good." He dropped his hand and danced a little jig around the pulpit as if he had said something remarkable.
The congregation, it appeared, agreed. Folks started dancing and shouting about milk and honey, wearing a long white robe, and sitting at the Lawd's table, as if it would happen that night. When Fred Lee and I made eye contact, it took every ounce of resolve to keep myself from laughing. I knew I shouldn't have been playing around during such a serious and sacred time, but I wanted to come to religion on my own terms, not Ma Pearl's.
"Y'all young folks better be ready to meet the Lawd at any time," Reverend Mims shouted over the shouting. "When death come to look for souls, he ain't looking at nobody's age. He'll take ya at eighty-four, sixty-four, forty-four, twenty-four, fourteen, or even four. Yes, he take babies, too. He'll take you whether you a man or a woman, boy or girl, white or black. He'll take you whether you live in Mississippi or just visiting."
Folks started shouting and falling all over the floor.
"Is you ready?" Reverend Mims shouted over the chaos. "Is you ready?" He stared straight at Fred Lee when he said those words. Throughout the week Fred Lee had only been playing around, like me. He said he wasn't "stud'n no mourners' bench." Now he sat as still as stone as Reverend Mims pierced his soul with his words and his ugly yellow eyes.
"A fo'teen-year-old boy. Just a boy," he said, his voice rising. "Visiting. Taking a vacation 'fore going back to school. Wanted to see Miss'sippi. Wanted to see how things is down here, like so many others who been up there in the North all they life." He paused, closed his eyes, and moaned.
A few shouts of "amen" rose from the church.
Reverend Mims opened his eyes and set them on the mourners on the bench. _"'Time is filled with swift transition,' the old song says. 'Naught of earth unmoved can stand, Build yo' hopes on things eternal. Hold to God's unchanging hand.'"_
It didn't take long before the pianist struck up a note, and the church joined in with, _"'Everybody ought hold to his hand, to God's unchanging hand. Hold to his hand, to God's unchanging hand. Build yo' hopes on things eter-r-r-r-nal. Hold to God's unchanging hand.'"_
"Behold, I stand at the do' and knock," Reverend Mims said over the singing, his hand cupped around his mouth, his golden eyes shining toward heaven. "If any man will just open up, I'll come in."
After a moment he directed his gaze back at Fred Lee and pointed. "Boy, is you ready?" he asked. "Is you ready to die?" He feigned a puzzled look. "No?" he said, as if Fred Lee had answered him. His next question seemed to be aimed at all of us left on the mourners' bench. "Y'all think that boy from Chicago was ready to die? Y'all think he would've followed them white mens outta his uncle's house if he knowed they was go'n kill him? That boy didn't come to Miss'sippi to die. That boy come to Miss'sippi to live. To eat some good ol'‑fashion' home cooking. To smell the scent of fresh air. To see green fields and white cotton bolls. Instead he saw the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Death don't 'scriminate, and it don't give you no warning. Be ready!"
I gasped when Fred Lee stood. All week long, like me, he had not taken the mourners' bench seriously. As he took the seat of the right hand of fellowship, I couldn't believe that with one sermon, a little country preacher had convinced him otherwise.
Shouts erupted from the crowd, with Ma Pearl shouting the loudest.
I didn't shout, but I smiled. I was happy that my little brother got religion, even if I wasn't ready to make that commitment myself. It took the church several minutes to finish shouting and dancing over Fred Lee's conversion.
But even after another ten minutes of spewing fire and brimstone, Reverend Mims couldn't move the last five of us mourners from that bench.
# Chapter Twenty-Five
## TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
I DIDN'T BOTHER WIPING THE SWEAT THAT POOLED beneath my eyes. I simply trudged toward the edge of the field, homebound, lugging the stuffed-to-the-brim cotton sack behind me. That evening, it seemed my sack was heavier than I ever remembered. I hadn't worked any harder than usual, but the sack seemed a bigger burden regardless. Perhaps it was because for the past week and a half I had watched Queen and Fred Lee hop into Uncle Ollie's car and head into town for school while I headed out to the field with Papa.
It made no sense. I was the smartest of the three, but I was the one stuck in the field. I could understand that Fred Lee was only in seventh grade, and perhaps Ma Pearl and Papa wanted him to at least finish that much. But Queen was headed off to the tenth grade. She was the one who had more schooling than she needed, not me. And she was pretty enough that any man would want to marry her, like Mr. Pete married Mama. But that ungrateful girl was wasting her time with the likes of Ricky Turner and wouldn't even give a smart colored boy like Hallelujah the time of day. I'd be happy if someone as smart as Hallelujah was bent on marrying me. Not that I was looking at marriage as my way out. But like almost any other girl, I looked forward to a family of my own someday too.
My clothes clung to my sweaty body, and all I wanted was a cool bath in the tin tub. But since it was only Tuesday, I knew I wouldn't get one. I'd have to wait for Wednesday, then again on Saturday. In the meantime, I had to make do with a wash-up, a bird bath, as Ma Pearl called it. Besides, there on the front steps sat Hallelujah, waiting for me.
Friend or not, I resented him sitting there in his freshly pressed clothes, that fedora atop his head, his penny loafers shining—not even a drop of sweat on his nose. But then I remembered that he had promised to bring me something to read, and my heart skipped a few beats. He had promised to bring me a book Reverend Jenkins had ordered for him from a teachers' catalog. The book was called _Native Son,_ and it was written by a colored man named Richard Wright, who was supposedly born and raised right here in Mississippi. Like that phenomenon of colored and white children sitting side by side in classrooms up north, a colored man from Mississippi with his name on the outside of a book is something I'd have to see to believe.
By the time I reached the edge of the porch, Hallelujah was grinning.
I dropped my sack on the ground and asked, "What you so cheerful for?"
"Look what I got," he said, waving a magazine toward me.
"Contraband?" I said, staring at and, for the first time, resenting the copy of _Jet_. The cover was powder blue and white, and it, of course, had a picture of a beautiful Negro woman on the cover. "Where's the book you said you'd bring me?"
Hallelujah scowled. "Preacher said _Native Son_ wasn't a proper book to be sharing with a lady."
I winced and said, "I ain't no lady. If I was a lady, I wouldn't be wearing myself out in that cotton field. I'd be sitting under a shade tree like Mrs. Robinson and sipping on some ice-cold lemonade."
Hallelujah laughed and placed the magazine in my hand. "This is better than the book right now," he said. "It's last week's edition. There's an article about Emmett Till. Page three."
"Oh," I said, my perspective changing as I took the magazine from his hand.
"How Dark Negroes 'Pass' Down South," the cover read. That, at least, sounded like information I could use. But when I opened the magazine to the article on Emmett Till, my jaw dropped. "Oh my God, Hallelujah. He looks so much like you."
"Looked," Hallelujah corrected me. Then he said, "I know. Gave me chills when I saw it. Preacher even said we have the same birthday. July twenty-fifth."
I stared at the picture, a professional shot of a smiling, handsome boy wearing a fedora, a starched shirt, and a tie—what Hallelujah wore every Sunday. I couldn't believe the resemblance, as if they could have been brothers.
"Glad he didn't wear glasses," Hallelujah said, his voice low. "That would've been too close."
"Uncanny," I whispered. "That's the word Miss Johnson would use."
When I glanced at Hallelujah, I noticed that goose bumps were creeping up his neck. I wondered whether he was thinking about our visit to Miss Addie's and her strange reaction when she saw him. I sure was. I rubbed away goose bumps from my own arms as I pondered on how she "sensed" that something bad might happen by just looking at Hallelujah.
I started reading the article out loud: " 'A fourteen-year-old Chicago junior high school student, Emmett (Bobo) Till, who was kidnapped by a trio of gun-toting whites early Sunday morning while visiting relatives in Money, Miss., was feared a lynch victim because he "whistled at a white girl." '"
I looked up at Hallelujah. "I thought folks have been saying that the third man might be colored."
Hallelujah shrugged. "What difference does it make? If he was colored, he's still as guilty as the whites."
I read on silently.
"What you think of Preacher Mose sticking around for the trial?" Hallelujah asked.
"What trial?"
"The trial for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam next week."
"A trial?" I asked, glancing up from the magazine. "Next week?"
Hallelujah nodded.
"In Mississippi? For a white man killing a Negro?"
Hallelujah grinned. "Two white men. And they could go to prison for life if found guilty."
"Praise the Lord," I said.
"Sinners can't praise the Lord."
I narrowed my eyes at him. "They do every Sunday at Greater Mount Zion."
Exasperated by my remark, Hallelujah ripped the magazine from my hands and turned to the article on Emmett Till. He read, "'. . . the sheriff ordered the family of sixty-four-year-old Rev. Moses Wright, a retired Church of God in Christ minister and the boy's uncle, to "take his family from the town for their own safety." The minister, however, refused to leave his home after making arrangements to hide his wife, three sons, and two visiting Chicago grandsons, Curtis Jones and Wheeler Parker.'" He peered at me and asked, "You think you could be that brave?"
"He's braver than most Negroes," I said. "I don't know if I'd be bold enough to hang around. Not after what they did to his nephew."
"I would," said Hallelujah. "I wouldn't let those crackers run me from my home either. I'd stay and testify too."
"You wouldn't," I challenged him.
He nodded. "Would so. My daddy would too. He said Preacher Wright is one of the bravest men he knows."
"If he's so is brave, how come he let them take his nephew in the first place?"
Hallelujah stared at me as though I had turned as orange as the sun. After a moment his forehead wrinkled. "He didn't know they'd kill him, Rosa. They said they wanted to talk to him. He trusted them. Wouldn't any colored man do the same if two white men came to his house in the middle of the night asking to speak to one of his kin?"
"Scoot over," I said, plopping down on the step next to him. "I guess if there was a colored man with him, like Reverend Mose believed, then he wouldn't think they'd do something so violent." I took off my hat and fanned myself. "I bet even Papa would've let Fred Lee go if two white men came saying he'd done something wrong and they wanted to talk to him."
As I fanned myself with my straw hat, I realized how badly I needed that bath. "Sorry if I stink," I said.
Hallelujah pinched his nose. "Pee-eww. Yes, you do."
Playfully, I slapped the fedora off his head. "So how was school today?" I asked.
Hallelujah narrowed his eyes at me as he retrieved his hat from the yard.
He sat back down on the step and fanned himself with the hat. "Folks keep whispering about the Chicago boy and the NAACP, and Miss Wilson's about to have a fit worrying about white folks getting word of it."
Miss Wilson was a new teacher at the colored school. She had been out of college for only a year, with plans to move up north. But her mama, although she was only in her fifties, got sick with what Ma Pearl called "old-timer's disease." And since her mama refused to leave her home, Miss Wilson remained in Stillwater to care for her.
"Miss Wilson can't afford to lose her job," I said.
With a roll of his eyes, Hallelujah said, "She ain't nothing like Miss Johnson."
"I bet she ain't," I said, rolling my eyes back at him.
Hallelujah scowled and placed his hat on his head. "I ain't talking about the way she looks."
After silence sat between us for a minute, Hallelujah finally spoke. "You know how Miss Johnson is. She's brave like Preacher Mose. She'd encourage us to talk about what happened."
"What's Miss Wilson like?"
"As scared as a chicken in a fox den."
I chuckled, but Hallelujah didn't even bother with a smile. "She wants us to put on a patriotic play for the fall and sing that stupid song about _'This land is your land. This land is my land.'"_
"So?"
Hallelujah's brows shot up. "So?" He motioned toward the cotton field. "Is that your land you just picked cotton from?"
"You already know it's Mr. Robinson's land," I said, annoyed at him.
He nodded toward the cotton sack. "How much you gonna get for spending the day in the blazing hot sun filling that thing with cotton?"
"Nothing," I muttered.
"Because this land ain't your land," he said, smiling, satisfied.
I recalled what Mr. Pete had said to Papa before they left for Chicago: _A Negro can own all the land in Mississippi and still be treated worse than a hog._ "You know that's why Mr. Pete left, don't you?"
Hallelujah scoffed. "What good is it for a Negro to own acres of cotton if the white man owns the scales?"
I laughed and told him how I always thought Mr. Pete was rich.
"No such thing as a rich Negro in the Mississippi Delta," he replied. "Unless you count Dr. Howard in Mound Bayou. But that's because Mound Bayou was built by Negroes and is run by Negroes."
"Papa said that all Mr. Pete got for his land was enough to buy a fancy car and drive it to Chicago. He thinks it's a shame he's working for Armour and Company, making soap."
Hallelujah winced. "He'll make more in a factory in Chicago than he would've made growing cotton in Mississippi. But if he was white . . ."
He didn't finish the statement. He simply stared out at the rows and rows of cotton and glowered.
"You gonna do the play?" I asked.
"No."
"What'd Reverend Jenkins say?"
Hallelujah shrugged. "Haven't told him. But he'll probably agree with me."
"Just do it," I said. "Don't cause any trouble for Miss Wilson."
Hallelujah gave me a sideways glance. "Did you read the last few lines in that article?"
"I read the whole thing."
"'If this slaughtering of Negroes is allowed to continue,'" he read from the magazine, "'Mississippi will have a civil war. Negroes are going to take only so much.'" He slapped the magazine shut. "Those were the words of Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou. And I agree with him. Jim Crow has muted colored folks in Mississippi for too long. It's time for us to speak up and be heard."
"And get shot."
"They're gonna kill us anyway. Might as well die a hero."
"Or a fool."
Hallelujah dismissed my comment with a wave of his hand. "If there's gonna be a civil war in Mississippi between colored and white, I'll be the first to sign up."
"And maybe the first to die."
"They can't kill all of us."
"Says who?"
"Eisenhower would send troops down here before he let that happen."
I laughed. "You think the president of the United States cares about Negroes in Mississippi?"
"Abraham Lincoln did."
I stood and stretched. "Well, I, for one, ain't ready to die," I said, yawning. "I want to live. And not in Mississippi."
"Well, I'm not running. I'm staying. And I'm fighting."
"Thought you were going to Ohio."
"I am. But not anytime soon. Like I said, if there's gonna be a civil war between coloreds and whites, I'm up for the task. If old man Preacher Wright won't run, then neither will I."
Maybe Hallelujah was right. Maybe it was time to fight. If Mississippi was willing to have a trial for two white men who killed a Negro, maybe the battle was already halfway won. But of course, there were always people who did what they could to dodge a war—like Ma Pearl's brother Elmer, who Papa said refused to fight in the First World War. Uncle Elmer said the fight wasn't his business, much like Ma Pearl was always claiming the fight between coloreds and whites wasn't hers.
Was it mine? I wasn't so sure. I didn't know if I could be as brave as Hallelujah or Preacher Mose or even Levi Jackson, who risked his life to fight for change.
"I'm proud of you. You know that?" I said, smiling at Hallelujah.
He tipped his hat. "You should be. I'm a man who's going places. And right now I'm about to go in there and feast on whatever Miss Sweet cooked up for supper."
I turned up my nose. "Cornbread. Warmed-up speckled butter beans we had at dinnertime today. Fried corn. Okra and stewed tomatoes."
"Beats the air soup Preacher's serving up at our place," Hallelujah said, patting his stomach.
I tilted my head to one side and squinted to keep the evening sun from my eyes. "You been there before, haven't you?"
"Where?"
"Money."
Hallelujah shrugged. "A few times."
"You ever been to that store? The one where they say Emmett Till talked to the woman?"
He nodded.
"You see her?"
Hallelujah turned his gaze from me and stared at the ground. "Twice."
"She pretty?"
Hallelujah nodded.
"Would you have done it?"
"Whistled at her?"
"Yeah."
Hallelujah stared at me for what felt like an entire five minutes before he finally said, "Heck, no. I'll fight, but I ain't crazy enough to start one."
# Chapter Twenty-Six
## WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14
IT WAS LATE, AND WE HAD JUST SETTLED IN FOR THE night after attending church. We were all kind of piddling around before we went to bed. I sat in the front room with Fred Lee, who was reading his history text while I looked at the funny pages from a week-old copy of the Jackson _Clarion-Ledger_. After reading through several chapters of the book of Jeremiah—the "weeping prophet"—during church service, I needed something to give me happy thoughts before going to sleep.
Across from us in the parlor sat Ma Pearl, Papa, and Queen. Ma Pearl and Queen listened to a show on the radio while Papa browsed the pages of a Sears and Roebuck catalog.
When the knock came, it surprised us. No one ever visited that late at night.
We all froze. Except Papa. Springs creaked when he rose from his chair.
He touched his finger to his lips, requesting our silence. As quietly as he could, except for the squeaking floorboards, he crept to his bedroom to retrieve his shotgun.
_Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom._ The knock came again. My heart pounded so fast I thought it would beat out of my chest.
With his shotgun at his side, Papa called through the door, "Who there?"
"It's me, Papa," a weak voice came from the other side. "Open the door."
"Ruthie?" Papa called.
When he opened the door, Aunt Ruthie and her children flooded inside. The children clung to her like cuckle bugs.
Ma Pearl, with Queen at her heels, stormed from the parlor. "Gal, what the devil is you doin' with these chi'rens out this time a night?"
Aunt Ruthie stood in the middle of the floor, her face illuminated by the glow of the kerosene lamp. The two younger children, their faces buried in the fabric of her faded plaid dress, hugged her knees; the older ones circled her waist. The baby was cradled in her arms.
"Ruthie," Papa said, his face puzzled, "what is you doin' here?" He placed the shotgun against the wall and peered out the door. "How y'all get here?"
"Walked," Aunt Ruthie muttered, her head hanging, a wide-brimmed straw hat covering her face.
"Walked?" asked Papa. "Seven miles?
Aunt Ruthie nodded.
"In the dark?"
Without raising her head, Aunt Ruthie lifted her arm and mumbled hoarsely, "I had a flashlight."
Her voice rattled, like she'd been crying.
"What you doin' walking seven miles in the dark with these babies?" Papa asked.
Before Aunt Ruthie could answer, Ma Pearl yanked the hat off her head. One of the baby's diapers was wrapped around her head. Blood had soaked through.
"Lawd, Ruthie," Ma Pearl snapped. "You done let that ol' drunk fool beat you again?"
"What happened, Ruthie?" Papa asked gently.
Aunt Ruthie choked back a sob. "He hit me in the head with his steel-toe boot."
"Lawd-a-mercy," Papa whispered.
Queen went over to Aunt Ruthie and took the baby from her arms. When Aunt Ruthie's tears crested, so did mine. I wiped them quickly with the back of my hand.
"Rose, you and Fret'Lee make a pallet on the floor in Grandma Mandy's room for them chi'ren," Papa said. "Ruthie and the baby can have the bed." He turned to Aunt Ruthie and said, "Come on back here. Let me clean you up."
But Ma Pearl wouldn't let her go without a fight. She planted herself right in front of Aunt Ruthie's face. "Don't make no sense how you let that man beat on you, gal," she said. "And he'n even feed'n you and them chi'ren?" She shook her head. "You shoulda left that fool long time ago."
Aunt Ruthie, rubbing her arm and still staring at the floor, choked back sobs. "I'm leaving," she said. "For good. This the last time he go'n hit me."
As if hearing her voice triggered their memories, the children began to cry. Papa, in a sterner voice this time, said, "Take them chi'ren on to the back, Rose and Fred."
Fred Lee had already set his book aside, but I was still sitting on the sofa with the funny pages spread in my lap. I felt immobilized. Everybody talked about Slow John beating Aunt Ruthie, but I always hoped it was an exaggeration. Now I was seeing it for myself. Her children huddled around her, crying—clinging to her, as if at any minute she could be taken away from them—was a testimony of how frightening it must have been. Aunt Ruthie herself stood there looking equally frightened, as if the boogeyman himself had chased her and the children through the dark night, along those wooded predator-filled roads, to the safety of her parents' house. And all she received from her own mama was chastisement, blaming it all on her.
Then, as if Ma Pearl's words finally registered, Papa asked Aunt Ruthie, "These chi'ren ett?"
Aunt Ruthie glanced at Ma Pearl, then at Papa. "They ett," she said softly. "They ain't hongry."
Ma Pearl snorted. "I bet they ain't." She stepped aside as Fred Lee and I pried the children from the folds of Aunt Ruthie's dress.
"Lord, my chile ain't got a bit o' sense," Ma Pearl said, throwing her hands into the air. "Let'n that man beat the devil outta her."
"That's enough from you, Pearl," Papa said. "This gal can't help that man so hard. She here now. That's all that matter."
"Humph," Ma Pearl said. "She been here befo'. She'll go back soon that jackass show up saying he sorry."
"I ain't goin' back" was the last thing I heard Aunt Ruthie say before Fred Lee and I ushered the children to the back. I prayed she was speaking the truth.
While Fred Lee and I got old quilts from the chest in Grandma Mandy's room, surprisingly, Queen came in and calmed the children. All four of them huddled around her as she sat on the side of Grandma Mandy's bed and held the baby. At that moment, as she rubbed their backs and whispered, "Hush now. It's go'n be all right," I almost liked her. I almost forgot how mean and ugly she could be most of the time.
By the time we got everyone settled—the children resting on a pallet, Aunt Ruthie cleaned up and in the kitchen sharing a cup of coffee with Papa, Ma Pearl and Queen back to their radio show—I headed to bed, as it seemed cruel to continue reading the funny pages when there was so much sadness in the house. As I passed through Fred Lee's room and said good night to him, there was another knock at the door. My heart knew it was Slow John, and again it threatened to pound out of my chest.
As much as I wanted to run to my bed and hide my head under a pillow (actually I wanted to hide my whole body under the bed), my feet wouldn't allow me. As if drawn by a force unknown, they turned and headed toward the front of the house.
_Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom._
"Who there?" Papa asked. I'm sure he knew as well as we all did that it was Slow John.
"I came to git my wife," Slow John bellowed from the other side of the door.
Papa didn't open the door. He picked up his shotgun instead. "Go home and git some rest, John," he called through the door. "Sleep off them spirits."
"I ain't drunk, old man," Slow John answered. "I ain't goin' nowhere b'dout my wife."
"Ruthie and the chi'ren stayin' here tonight," said Papa.
_Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom._ "Open this do', old man."
"Git off my porch, John," Papa said. " 'Fore I blast you off."
From the other side of the door, Slow John let out a drunken laugh. "You won't shoot me, you old fool."
Papa cocked his shotgun. "I'll shoot you and take your body to the sheriff myself. Even dig your grave if they ast me."
For a moment, there was silence on the other side of the door, then the shuffling of feet. By the heaviness of his steps, I could tell that Slow John was wearing the steel-toe boots he'd used to whack Aunt Ruthie in the head.
_Wump!_ Slow John kicked the door. "Come outta there, Ruthie, 'fo I come in there and git you," he yelled.
Aunt Ruthie jumped. She had been leaning against the doorframe to Grandma Mandy's bedroom, but now she stood, stiff-backed and trembling.
"My daughter ain't leaving this house, so you might as well go home," Papa said.
"She ain't yo' daughter no mo', old man," said Slow John. "She my wife."
"Ruthie!" he called loudly. "I sorry. I sorry for what I done to you. I swear I ain't go'n do it no mo'." He paused for a moment, then said, "Got a new job, too, baby. Mr. Callahan said he give me work d'morrow. I told him, 'Suh, I be there first thang in the moan'n. I couldn't wait to git home and tell you 'bout it." Another pause, then: "It broke my heart to find you gone."
After a long silence, there was loud weeping on the other side of the door, then, "Ruthie, baby. Please. I loves you. I go'n kill myself if you don't come back."
The look on Aunt Ruthie's face was hard to read. Her empty stare. Was it fear? Or pity?
"Ruthie," Papa said, "you a grown woman. You make your own choices. You chose to marry that man. It's your choice to go or stay. I can't decide for you."
Aunt Ruthie took a step toward the door.
"Dirn fool," Ma Pearl hissed.
With a tremble in her voice, Aunt Ruthie called through the door. "I can't wake up the chi'ren right now, John. I'll be home in the morning."
"I needs you home d'night."
"In the morning," Aunt Ruthie repeated. Her voice shook so badly that she could hardly speak. "You go on to the house and git some sleep," she said to Slow John, staring sheepishly at Papa.
After a long silence, Slow John answered, "I gots to go d'work in the moan'n. I need to take y'all home d'night."
Aunt Ruthie wrapped her arms around her waist, dropped her head, and muttered, "A'right."
"Lawd, have mercy!" Ma Pearl cried. She threw her giant hands in the air and stormed toward her bedroom.
Papa gave out one more warning. "Ruthie," he said, almost as a sigh.
"Let'r go, Paul," Ma Pearl called over her shoulder. "She'll learn 'ventually. That school o' hard knocks is a dirn good teacher."
With tears rolling down my cheeks, I, too, turned and went to my room, knowing my heart couldn't take the sight of Aunt Ruthie walking through that door, especially with fresh blood seeping through the clean rag Papa had just wrapped around her busted head.
# Chapter Twenty-Seven
## WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
"BEER!" MONTY YELLED. "BEER. IN A COURTHOUSE. During a murder trial. Stupid and senseless," he hissed.
I sat on the floor in Grandma Mandy's old mothball-scented room next to the kitchen, my ear pressed against the wall, straining to pick up every word of the conversation from the adults huddled around the kitchen table. There was so much excitement over the third day of the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam that I was sure the week of September 19, 1955, would go down as one of the best weeks in Negro history in Mississippi. Our little unpainted house on Mr. Robinson's place buzzed with commotion that Wednesday night, and with so much hope. After Reverend Mose Wright had stood before a courtroom full of white people and pointed out J. W. Milam for the jury, Reverend Jenkins and Monty couldn't stop bragging of his bravery.
But obviously Monty was livid over someone drinking beer during the trial. Having never been in a courtroom myself, I had no idea whether this was normal behavior.
"Mississippi is making a mockery of the justice system," he said. "No one should be allowed to drink beer during a trial. It's just plain stupid."
"When you have the judge setting the example," Reverend Jenkins chimed in, "what can you expect? He sat there and sipped on a Coca-Cola."
"This kind of tomfoolery would never be tolerated in a northern courtroom," said Monty.
"Baby, calm down," Aunt Belle said with a slight laugh. "We can't worry about what these people do or do not allow to go on in their courtroom, as long as they let the Negro press in to report the story. God knows we can't depend on the white press to tell the truth."
"Amen to that, Baby Sister," said Reverend Jenkins. "Thank God for the Negro press—"
"But did you see that press table?" interjected Monty. "All our people cramped around a card table against the wall? And they made Congressman Diggs sit there too? And what's with that fat sheriff strolling in there, greeting them with 'Hello, niggers' every morning?"
"Baby, we're not gonna let the negatives overshadow the positives, okay?" said Aunt Belle. "Reverend Mose did a fine job. Stood right there in the midst of all that white, pointed, and said, 'There he is.'"
I was exhausted from a long day of picking cotton, frustrated at all the learning I was missing at school, but somehow I stayed there on the floor, my legs stretched before me, my head resting against the wall, the nutty scent of Maxwell House coffee lingering in the air. The conversation of colored people discussing the trial of two white men accused of lynching a Negro made me feel good. But then there was Ma Pearl, and she simply had to toss in her two coins.
"I don't like all this crazy talk up in my house," she said. "Coloreds and whites was gittin' 'long jest fine 'fo all these NAACP peoples showed up."
"God, Mama," Aunt Belle said. "How can you call this master-slave existence getting along?"
"I ain't nobody's slave," Ma Pearl said. "I gits paid for my work."
Even from the other side of the wall, it seemed I could hear Aunt Belle's eyebrows shoot up when she asked, "What? Three dollars a week?" She sighed and said, "It's a shame how that woman got you thinking she loves you."
"Y'all young folks thank you know everything," Ma Pearl said. "Don't know nothing. Thank them northern Negroes go'n be round when the Klan show up at ol' Mose's do'step tonight? Nah, they ain't. They go'n be somewhere hidin' behind they own locked do's."
The kitchen was silent for so long it was as if they all had suddenly fallen asleep.
Finally Ma Pearl spoke again. "Not all white peoples is bad," she said.
"Yes, Mama, we understand," said Aunt Belle. "Negroes have their good white people just like white folks have their good nigras. And it was them good nigras that helped Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam kidnap Emmett Till. Any word yet from Miss Doll about where her nephew and Milam's other good nigras have run off to since this trial started?"
"I don't know noth'n 'bout that," Ma Pearl answered brusquely. "If them NAACP peoples wanna know where Doll's nephew at, they can ast _her,_ 'cause it ain't my bizness."
"Well, we know that he and the others know something," offered Monty. "The word among our people is that the sheriff is holding Milam's workers in a jail somewhere in a town called Charleston until this trial is over. Now, just why do you suppose the sheriff would go through so much trouble?"
"Like I said, ain't none o' my bizness what Milam's niggers do," Ma Pearl answered.
Monty puffed out his chest. "Well, _our people_ will find them. And when we do, we _will_ get some answers."
"And jest who is _yo' peoples?_ " Ma Pearl inquired.
"The NAACP, of course," answered Monty.
"I wish I could get my hands on Milam's _Judas_ niggers," Aunt Belle hissed. "I'd beat 'em worse than Bryant and Milam beat poor Emmett. And if I had a pistol, I'd use _it_ on Bryant and Milam!"
"Gal, Saint Louis done really ruint you!" Ma Pearl snapped. "I didn't raise you like this. That boy dead 'cause his mama didn't teach him to respect white folks. Now you talkin' foolish jest like I bet he was. Talkin' 'bout shootin' white mens. Gal, I taught you better'n that."
"Miss Sweet!" Reverend Jenkins yelled. His voice was so loud I jumped.
When he spoke again, his voice had calmed to his preaching level. "I understand there's a certain bond between the older Negroes and the whites, but we're living in a new time, and Mississippi needs to change with the times. Respect is something I agree with, but the constant bowing down to whites because of Jim Crow scare tactics has got to stop. True, the young man had no business whistling at Mrs. Bryant, but not because she's white and he was a Negro, but because he was a fourteen-year-old boy and she is a grown, married woman. That's the kind of respect we need to teach our children. Respect for their elders, respect for authority, respect for their fellow human beings. Not respect based on some antiquated Southern way of life."
When the silence came again, I should have known that Ma Pearl was getting her ammunition together to fight back.
_"Preeeeacher,"_ she addressed Reverend Jenkins sarcastically, "you sit here in my kitchen telling me how things got to change. But the man who own this house says I best leave things the way they is. Tells me I gots to leave if I let these northern Negroes tell me how I oughta live in Mississippi. Now you tell me this: Where we go'n go if we git thowed off this place? You got a house for me? You go'n let me and Paul and all these chi'ren of mines live in town with you and yo' boy? I 'spect y'all got 'nuff room for all us with all that money you makin' taintin' the chi'ren through the week and fleecin' the flock on Sunday."
Reverend Jenkins chuckled. "First of all, Miss Sweet, I teach our children, not taint them. And second, last I checked, my flock didn't have enough wool for me to fleece."
"Humph" was all Ma Pearl could counter with.
"You could always come to Saint Louis, Mama," Aunt Belle said softly.
_Saint Louis?_ My heart felt like it momentarily stopped.
_I would gladly go to Saint Louis with you!_ I wanted to cry out to Aunt Belle. _If only you'd ask!_ Saint Louis—Chicago—even Detroit. It didn't matter, as long as it wasn't Mississippi. Why was she extending an invitation to Ma Pearl and not me? I know she said she wasn't prepared to take me with her. But how much preparation could she possibly need? Her two weeks were almost over, and I still hadn't had an opportunity to speak to her in private. If only I had the chance, I could perhaps convince her that I, too, was worthy of the North.
Ma Pearl snubbed her offer anyway, saying, "And live with you and that tramp Isabelle?"
"Pearl!" said Papa. "That kinda talk ain't called for."
"Y'all NAACP lovers tell me this," Ma Pearl said. "Where Mose at now? Jest answer me that. Y'all sittin' up in here braggin' 'bout what he did in that courtroom, now tell me: Where he at?"
No answer. So Ma Pearl answered herself. "He holed up somewhere, hidin'. Sked outta his mind. That's where he at. 'Cause there ain't nothin' none y'all can do to protect him."
I heard a sigh, as if someone was about to answer, but Ma Pearl spoke again. "If I said it once, I said it a thousand times. Them NAACP peoples ain't go'n do nothin' but git more folks round here kil't."
In my heart, I wanted to be brave like Preacher Mose and stand up to white people—stand in a crowded courtroom and point a finger at someone like Ricky Turner and say, _There he is! He's the one that tried to run me off the road, then spat tobacco juice at me! He's the one that chased nine-year-old Obadiah Malone into the woods and all the way to Stillwater Lake! He's the kind of evil person who would kill a Negro for no reason!_
But as Papa always said, the spirit might be willing, but the flesh is sometimes weak.
After hearing what Ma Pearl said about Preacher Mose, I suspected that in the courtroom his spirit was willing, but in the dark of the night, his flesh became weak. And when it came to standing up to white folks in Mississippi, my flesh, like Preacher Mose's, weakened when I thought of the horrors they could do to me.
# Chapter Twenty-Eight
## THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
DURING CHURCH ON THE PREVIOUS TWO WEDNESDAY NIGHTS, I had been so tired after picking cotton all day that I barely kept my eyes open while Reverend Jenkins droned on with his lesson. As a matter of fact, I welcomed any prayers the congregation decided to offer, because it gave me a chance to rest my eyes. And I especially welcomed Deacon Edwards. That man could call upon the Lord for a good fifteen minutes without even stopping to catch his breath. But that Thursday night, when Reverend Jenkins decided to hold a prayer meeting before the last day of the trial, sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.
Church was packed. It was more of a victory celebration than a prayer meeting. Even Aunt Belle and Monty were there, as well as a few other folks from around Leflore County who didn't regularly attend Greater Mount Zion Church.
"Today was a great day for the Negro in Mississippi," Reverend Jenkins had said at the beginning of the service. "A historic victory."
Not only had Preacher Mose stood before a courtroom packed with white people and pointed out a white murderer the day before, but on that Thursday, Mamie Till, the Chicago boy's mother, had bravely testified before the court that she was one hundred percent sure the body found in the river was that of her son, Emmett Louis Till.
Sheriff Strider and the lawyers defending the "accused" murderers were adamant in trying to convince the jury that the body pulled from the river had been there too long to be that of Emmett Till, even making a mockery of the colored undertaker during the trial. They were still holding on to the claim that the NAACP had gone through all that trouble to secure a dead Negro's body, tie a seventy-pound gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and throw it into the Tallahatchie River just so they could pick a fight with whites in Mississippi. Aunt Belle said she had even overheard one white person laugh and say, "Ain't that just like a nigger to try to swim across the Tallahatchie with a gin fan tied around his neck."
Whether they tried to make a mockery of the trial or not, Aunt Belle and Monty were convinced that with the testimony of two surprise witnesses, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had to be found guilty. An eighteen-year-old colored man named Willie Reed had been brave enough to testify before that menacing crowd that he had seen the two accused men take a Negro boy into a barn, and after that he heard screams and beatings. Willie Reed's aunt, Amanda Bradley, had also been brave enough to go to a Mississippi courthouse and point Milam out among his own folks. She, too, had heard the screams coming from the barn that morning and had seen Milam leaving it.
With all that was going on in our little part of Mississippi, I felt invigorated. I felt hopeful. Colored folks were being brave and openly pointing a finger at whites who had committed crimes, and it was all because of a city boy who forgot he was supposed to act a certain way around whites in Mississippi.
After enough folks in the church exhausted themselves with shouting, Deacon Edwards dropped to his knees before the prayer bench at the altar and let out a moan. "Ummm, I just wanna say thank ya!" he shouted. "Thank ya for giving courage to the Negro t'day, Lawd. Thank ya that yo' angels of mercy surrounded Miz Till as she entered that hostile coatroom. Thank ya for watchin' over Brother Willie Reed as he told 'em what he see'd that moan'n when the mens beat that po' boy. Look and have mercy, Lawd. Keep yo' eye on the young lady that told the coat what she heard that moan'n. Let them be safe, Lawd. Don't let there be no 'taliation 'gainst them." When he paused and began to moan, the women of the church began to shout, as they always did. It was then that I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, the girl behind me, Lula Brown, motioned toward the back of the church, where Hallelujah stood near the door. He motioned for me to join him. The moment I had the opportunity, I sneaked out under the pretense of going to the toilet, which wasn't a lie, entirely. After sitting through all that singing and shouting, my bladder was stretched to its limit.
After leaving the toilet, I met Hallelujah at Reverend Jenkins's car, where he sat on the hood. I climbed up on the hood of the Buick and stretched out my legs. The shouting inside the church had quieted, and Reverend Jenkins stood in the pulpit. Outside, several other teenagers loitered around the church, sitting on cars, chatting, smoking, or doing whatever else they felt like doing while the old people inside praised the Lord.
"I don't have a good feeling about this," Hallelujah said.
"So you have a bad feeling?"
I leaned back and rested on the windshield, my arms folded behind my head. The night was clear, and stars blanketed the sky. The air was muggy and smelled of cotton, and I actually felt like taking a nap right there on the hood of Reverend Jenkins's car. Unfortunately, my friend wanted to talk.
Hallelujah leaned back and rested against the windshield as well. He sighed. "At first I was all excited about what's been happening this week. Preacher Mose being brave enough to point out the killers in court. Mrs. Till coming down here and all. And man, Willie Reed having the nerve to actually sit in a Mississippi courtroom and say he saw white men take a Negro into a barn and then heard a beating . . . that was something."
I raised up and rested on my right elbow. I stared at him. "So what's your problem?"
Hallelujah sighed again. "What's gonna happen if these two white men are found guilty?"
"They'll rot in jail," I said as I again rested my head against the windshield. A smile stretched across my face. Two white men could go to prison for killing a Negro. In Mississippi. If that could happen, anything was possible.
"And what if they don't?" Hallelujah asked. "What if the jury says they're not guilty?"
I shot up on my elbow again. "How can a jury find them not guilty? Two people testified they heard the beating. Willie Reed saw J. W. Milam with the boy. Ain't that what everybody's been saying? That he witnessed it?"
Hallelujah stared at the sky, but he didn't answer me.
After what seemed like forever, he finally said, "Imagine this, Rosa." He turned to me and said, "Lean back, close your eyes, and imagine this."
I did as I was told.
"Now, I know you can't stand Queen," he said. "But imagine if Queen did something really horrible, and you knew she needed to be punished. But imagine the punishment coming from Miss Sweet, someone you can't stand even more."
"Hey," I said, my eyes popping open. "Stop judging my feelings about my kinfolk."
Hallelujah shrugged. "Not judging. Just telling the truth. I know you don't like Queen, but I know Miss Sweet plagues you even more. Am I right?" he asked, his brows raised.
I laughed. "I don't know where you're going with all this, but if Ma Pearl beat Queen for _any_ reason, folks would hear me laughing all the way to Chicago."
"Okay, maybe that wasn't the best example. Let's see," he said, tapping his finger to his lips.
I exhaled loudly to let him know I was annoyed.
He sprang up on his elbows and asked, "You know what Preacher said Sheriff Strider told the press?"
"I have no idea," I answered, a bit exasperated with him speaking in riddles.
"He said we don't have any trouble down here until some Southern niggers go up north and the NAACP talks to 'em and they come back home. He said if they'd keep their noses and mouths outta our business, folks in Mississippi would be able to do more in enforcing the laws."
I narrowed my eyes at him and said, "Stop speaking in parables and just tell me what you're trying to say."
"What I'm saying is white folks aren't gonna convict their own because of outsiders interfering. You do know that every lawyer in Sumner is defending those two murderers, don't you?"
"Nope. Didn't know that."
"They're teaming up against us, Rosa."
"Of course they are. Haven't they always?"
"My aunt Bertha went to Sumner the week before the trial. You know what she saw when she went inside a few stores?"
I didn't answer.
"Money jars on the counters. She said from what she heard, every store in town was collecting money to help defend those killers."
My heart took a dive. "Our people are teaming up too," I said, trying to remain hopeful. "Look at all the folks down here watching the trial. Aunt Belle closed her shop to come down here. She's losing money. Everybody's doing what they can to help push them to a guilty verdict."
"It won't be enough," Hallelujah said dryly.
"Since when did you become Mr. Gloom and Doom?"
"When I realized we're up against a powerful system."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," he said, holding a finger up for each point he made, "we have five lawyers defending those murderers. We have every white person in Leflore and Tallahatchie Counties with their threatening eyes glued to the jury, daring them to side with those rabble-rousers called the NAACP and convict two of their own. And we have an all-white male jury. Of course we both know that neither women nor coloreds could be on the jury anyway. But that's beside the point."
"But what about Willie Reed's testimony? He saw them. _And_ he heard them."
Hallelujah shook his head. "Won't matter."
I pointed toward the church. Even while Reverend Jenkins was preaching, folks were still waving and shouting. "Your daddy is a smart man," I said. "If he didn't think we were gonna win, he wouldn't be in there stirring up the crowd."
Hallelujah stared at the illuminated windows of Greater Mount Zion for so long it was as if he were in a trance. We could hear Reverend Jenkins, but we couldn't decipher his words. Whatever they were, they were words of hope. Yet what Hallelujah was saying made sense, as if this whole trial were just for show. Emmett Till had been dead for less than a month, but the trial for his killers was almost over. One more day, Friday, September 23. From what Aunt Belle had told me, there would be something called closing arguments; then the jury would make a decision. I suddenly felt sick to my stomach as I watched all those people celebrate something that might not happen.
"Preacher knows," Hallelujah finally said, his voice low.
"Knows what?"
"That those killers won't go to prison."
"Then why is he in there making people shout?"
"He's not stirring them up over what he thinks might happen tomorrow. He's trying to get them ready for the future."
"Riddles," I said, exhaling. "Talk to me straight. I'm not a philosopher like you. I don't even go to school anymore."
"Things are gonna change, Rosa. If Mose Wright and Willie Reed can stand in a courtroom and tell on white people, maybe people will be braver."
"These people," I said, gesturing toward the church. I fell back on the windshield and took a breath. "I doubt it."
"Only time will tell," Hallelujah said quietly.
"Did he ever want to be anything else other than a preacher and a teacher?"
"Preacher?" Hallelujah asked, his brows raised. He thought for a moment, then sighed. "He had dreams of going up north, he told me once. But that was when he had a wife. I don't know if he's ever wanted to be anything more than a preacher and a teacher, though. He sells the insurance policies for the extra, but he says colored folks don't realize they need life insurance just like white folks do."
"You think he ever wanted to be a lawyer?"
Hallelujah glanced toward the church. "Nah. He doesn't care too much for arguing. Just teaching and preaching."
"You think Mr. Evers might get to be one?"
"A lawyer?" said Hallelujah. "Sure, if he can ever get into a law school."
"I wonder why people like Mr. Evers don't just leave Mississippi," I said as I thought about how much I wished I could leave. "Folks like him and that doctor in Mound Bayou could just pack up like Mr. Pete did and go. They could go anywhere they want. Instead, they're here. Fighting for rights."
Hallelujah sighed. "Preacher said it wouldn't be good if everybody left. Imagine what this place would be like if everybody who could just up and went?"
I leaned back and stared at the sky. "Stars can't shine without darkness," I said.
"What?"
"Stars can't shine without darkness."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I have no idea. I don't even know where the words came from. But seeing those bright stars reflecting against that black sky, I thought about how my great-aunt Isabelle once brought this little boy from Saint Louis to Mississippi for the first time. He was surprised to see stars. He'd never seen a star in his life. He said Saint Louis didn't have stars. Aunt Isabelle corrected him and said the stars couldn't be seen in the city at night because of all the lights. The stars shine perfectly in Stillwater, especially out in the country, because there's no light dimming their brightness."
"And you accuse me of talking in riddles," Hallelujah said, raising up on his elbow.
"I still don't know what it means," I said. "It just popped into my head as I was looking at the sky."
"Let me know when you figure it out."
"Well, it won't be tonight," I said, leaping off the hood of the car. "I've gotta get back inside before Ma Pearl realizes how long I've been gone."
"Wait," Hallelujah said. "I think I know what it means."
"What?" I asked, eager to know what he thought my strange utterance meant.
"Stars can't shine without darkness," Hallelujah repeated. "You've got to have some darkness to know what light is. If every Negro who _could_ leave packed up and left, the struggle wouldn't be the same."
I frowned, indicating that I still didn't understand.
Hallelujah pointed at the church. "Your aunt in there . . . she owns a beauty shop, right?"
I nodded.
"What if she had stayed here, in Mississippi, and opened a shop?"
"White folks would find a way to sabotage it, like they do your aunt Bertha's store, perhaps?"
Hallelujah nodded. "Perhaps. But I'm willing to bet," he said, staring intently toward the illuminated windows of the church, "if she had been able to open a shop here, in a place where our people are shunned and oppressed, it would have made her feel even more accomplished than she already does."
"Stars shine brighter in the darkness," I said quietly.
Hallelujah crossed his arms over his chest and nodded. "Dreams have more meaning when you have to fight for them," he said. "That's why folks like my father choose to stay. They know they have a right to be here, and they're willing to do whatever it takes to make those rights equal."
# Chapter Twenty-Nine
## FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, WATCHING A TEENAGE AUNT BELLE grow into womanhood, I thought she was the toughest, bravest person I knew. Papa was certainly right about her having grit. Unlike Mama and the rest of my aunts, Aunt Belle was never afraid of Ma Pearl. Aunt Ruthie told me once that she had the same opportunity as Aunt Belle—to go to Saint Louis and become a beautician. She said every time Great-Aunt Isabelle came to Mississippi, Aunt Ruthie would do her hair. And every time, Great-Aunt Isabelle would say to Ma Pearl, "Sweet, you need to let me take this girl back to Saint Louis. I'll send her to beauty school so she can get licensed to do hair and make a decent living for herself. She won't need much training with all the talent she already got." And every time, Ma Pearl refused, even when Great-Aunt Isabelle suggested allowing Aunt Ruthie to be trained as a chef rather than a beautician. But the vocation didn't really matter. Aunt Ruthie said that Ma Pearl was too suspicious of Great-Aunt Isabelle, convincing herself that her spinster sister-in-law made her money running a brothel rather than a boarding house.
"She ain't go'n take my daughter to the city and ruin her," Ma Pearl had said.
So Aunt Ruthie ended up marrying Slow John instead and became a punching bag rather than a beautician, a chef, or "ruined."
When Great-Aunt Isabelle saw the same talent in Aunt Belle, she asked Ma Pearl again to let her take the child back to Saint Louis with her. Again, Ma Pearl said no. At age nineteen, Aunt Belle—who had hidden away half the money she earned caring for various white women's children and ironing the shirts of various white women's husbands—packed her bags and caught a train to Saint Louis without Ma Pearl's blessings. Yes, Aunt Belle had grit. Which is why I was so surprised to see her sitting, doubled over on the sofa in the parlor, her head in Monty's lap, sobbing so hard that her body quaked.
Monty, rubbing her back, looked as if he, too, might cry any minute.
The trial for the two white men who had killed Emmett Till was over. And just as Hallelujah had predicted, the jury had set them free.
For as long as I live, I don't think I'll ever forget the looks on Aunt Belle's and Monty's faces when they walked through the front door. It was as if they had returned from a funeral. In a sense, I guess it could've been considered a funeral, seeing how hope had died that day.
"It was all a farce," Aunt Belle said, her voice choked and garbled with tears. "The whole trial was just for show. They never planned to convict those men."
Monty said nothing. With his eyes cast downward, he only nodded and rubbed her back.
Aunt Belle raised her head and wiped her face with the back of her hand. "Did you see them kissing? Did you see that evil devil and his wife stand right there in front of a camera and lock their faces together for all the world to see? Like they were having a private moment in their own bedroom?"
Monty sniffed back a sob and answered hoarsely, "Yeah, baby. I saw."
"If anybody did any flirting in that store," Aunt Belle said, her teeth clenched, "it was probably that little tramp herself."
"Calm down, baby," Monty told her. "Don't make yourself sick over this."
"I'm not making myself sick. That mockery of a trial just made me sick." She sniffed and said, "And those two murderers smoking cigars like they just had babies? Disgusting."
"Cheering and clapping like they had won an election," Monty said icily.
"Well, they won all right. They certainly left me feeling defeated."
Defeated. That's what we were. Every last Negro, not just in Mississippi, but in the nation. Even the northern Negroes, with their entourage of cameras and notebooks, NAACP leaders and prominent members, congressmen and dignitaries, couldn't defeat the Jim Crow ways of Mississippi.
It made my heart sick to see Aunt Belle so broken and to see so many people's hopes crushed. Aunt Belle had lost money while she was down here that additional two weeks. Monty, who had already used up all his vacation when he came with Aunt Belle in August, took time off without pay. He even said he risked losing his job. How many others, I wondered, had lost time and money for this trial, only to hear a Mississippi jury say, "Not guilty."
"Less than an hour," Aunt Belle whispered. "It took them less than an hour to come back out and tell that lie."
"One hour and eight minutes, to be exact," Monty said. He then added, in a southern drawl, "'And that's 'cause we stopped to drink sody pop. If we hadna been thusty, we coulda been done in a few minutes.'"
At Monty's joke, Aunt Belle chuckled like a sad clown. "Did those fools really believe the NAACP would dig up a corpse and put it in the river?"
"Of course they didn't," Monty said. "You heard the attorney: 'Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to set these men free in the face of this preshuh. Yoah ancestahs would absolutely turn over in their graves if you don't set these boys loose. We have got to use our legal system to protect our God-given freedoms.'"
Monty's rendition of the trial in a southern accent obviously calmed Aunt Belle's nerves a bit. She sat up and wiped her face with a handkerchief instead of her hand. "Well, their Anglo-Saxon ancestors are about to do a lot of turning now, because Negroes are not about to let this thing rest. Those two might have gotten away with murder, but things are about to change in Mississippi."
"Not just Mississippi," said Monty, "but the South."
"Something's about to happen," I whispered.
"What?" Aunt Belle asked.
"Something's about to happen," I said, louder. "That's what Miss Addie kept saying."
"Miss Addie, the old midwife?" asked Aunt Belle.
I nodded. "She said something was about to shake up Mississippi."
"Humph," Aunt Belle said, her expression questioning. "Maybe that old woman really does have a sixth sense after all."
"Well, whether the old lady is a soothsayer or not," said Monty, "something's gotta change."
"You ain't even from here," Ma Pearl blurted out as she stormed into the parlor, wiping her hands on a dishrag. "Why you care so much about what Mississippi do?"
Monty nodded at Ma Pearl. "And a good afternoon to you too, Mrs. Carter."
Ma Pearl snorted. "Northern and uppity is what you is, boy. Folks like you is the reason them peckerwoods is walking free rat now."
Monty pointed at his chest and said, "It's because of folks like me that there was ever a trial in the first place."
"You dirn right," Ma Pearl said, undaunted. "If that lil' uppity Chicago boy hadn't been up in that sto' running his mouth, he would be with his mama 'stead of in a grave."
"Lord Jesus, have mercy!" Aunt Belle said. She threw up her hands. "Let me get out of this crazy woman's house before I start to hate her."
Ma Pearl, her face like flint, her hands in fists, leaned toward Aunt Belle. "If you cain't take the truth, go on back up there where you run off to in the first place. I ain't never ast you to come back to my house. You the one keep running back this way."
Both Monty and Aunt Belle seemed to spring from the sofa at the same time. But Aunt Belle faced down Ma Pearl. "We'll be more than happy to get out of this hellhole," she said. "I don't know why I've wasted so much time here in the first place. Mississippi will never change because of Negroes like you, Mama. You're the same kind of Negro that helped those two men kidnap and kill Emmett Till. Won't even register and exercise your right to vote. So in love with that white woman that she ain't even got to wipe her own behind. Before her stuff even hits the toilet, you there waiting with a wad of tissue in your hand to take care of it for her."
_WHAP!_ With every ounce of strength in her huge body, Ma Pearl swung her fist into Aunt Belle's jaw and knocked her across the room. Aunt Belle crashed in the corner, scattering dust and Sears and Roebuck catalogs across the floor.
"Belle!" Monty screamed.
Sprawled on the floor, Aunt Belle moaned and rubbed her jaw. Monty rushed to her and lifted her upper body off the floor. He smoothed Aunt Belle's hair from her face. "Baby, you all right?"
Still rubbing her jaw, Aunt Belle, with closed eyes, could only moan.
Monty stared up at Ma Pearl. "Woman, have you lost your mind?"
"Talk to yo' girlfriend. She done lost her mind talking to me like that in my own house."
Monty cradled Aunt Belle's head. "I can't believe you hit your own daughter," he said, staring at Ma Pearl as if he wanted to do the same to her.
"Hit you, too, if you talk to me like that in my own house."
I rushed over to Monty when I saw him struggling to get Aunt Belle to the sofa. We lifted Aunt Belle, who was still moaning, onto the sofa. "I'll put some cold water on a towel for her face," I said.
Ma Pearl pointed at me. "Don't you take not one chip of ice from my icebox either. You better make do with pump water."
At that moment Papa entered the parlor. He had washed up and changed his clothes as he prepared to eat supper. "Pearl," he said, his brows raised, "what's going on in here?"
"Paul, you wouldn't believe what that gal just said to me." Ma Pearl pointed at Aunt Belle and said, "She done called me everything but a child of God."
"Mr. Carter," Monty said, "I assure you that Belle was only responding to Mrs. Carter's antagonistic ways. Under normal circumstances, there is no way she would use such fresh language in the presence of her elders."
"Hold on a minute, son," Papa said, his palms raised. "I'm a country boy. Speak to me with plain words."
"Ma Pearl started it," I said. My hands shot up to my mouth, knowing they were already too late to stop the words.
Ma Pearl stormed toward me.
But rather than Papa, Monty stopped her. "If you even think about putting your hands on this child, woman, I will deal with you myself."
A lump rose in my throat.
Papa grabbed Ma Pearl by the shoulders. "Pearl, it's time for you to head back to the kitchen. Rose, go get that wet towel for Baby Susta's jaw," he said to me.
After having subverted Ma Pearl, I knew to use the front door and walk all the way around the house to the pump rather than get water from the bucket in the kitchen. By the time I returned with the towel, Papa was sitting in his chair with his unlit tobacco-filled pipe in his mouth.
Aunt Belle was stretched out on the sofa, her head resting in Monty's lap as he and Papa chatted. The Sears and Roebuck catalogs were, again, neatly stacked in the corner.
I handed Monty the towel, and he placed it on Aunt Belle's jaw.
"You all right?" I asked her.
"Um-hmm," she replied, half moaning, her words garbled. "I bith my tongue. But I'm okay. She's beath me worth with that blat strapth of hers."
The black strap of terror, its sting worse than that of a thousand hornets. I shivered as I recalled the many lashes I had received from it myself.
"She had no right to hit you with her fist like a man," Monty said.
"I shouldnth sassth my mama," Aunt Belle replied. "I was raisth bettha."
Monty smoothed a curl from her face. "Stop trying to talk and rest that swollen jaw. Can't have you looking like Frankenstein."
"Donth makth me laugth," Aunt Belle said, chuckling. "It hurths."
"So they ain't going to prison," Papa said softly.
His words snapped Monty and Aunt Belle out of their banter and back to reality.
"No, sir, Mr. Carter, they're not," Monty said, the grimness returning to his face. "A jury of their peers found them not guilty. They get to go home, back to their families, back to being the good citizens of Mississippi that they always have been."
Monty's sarcasm hung in the air like thick perfume. Good citizens of Mississippi. Good citizens who had put a northern Negro in his place and sent a message to the rest of the country: Mississippi makes its own rules, and nobody can make us do otherwise, not the NAACP, not the Negro press, not even the president of the United States. We can kill all the Negroes we want. You can make us have a trial, but you can't make us find our white citizens guilty.
"Mr. Carter, you registered to vote?" Monty asked, his eyes squinting, challenging Papa.
Papa removed his pipe and shook his head no, even though he knew Monty already knew the answer to that question. "What good would it do, son?"
"Do you know why that jury was all white, Mr. Carter?"
" 'Cause they always is," Papa answered.
Monty grimaced. "Because there are no Negroes registered to vote in Tallahatchie County, Mr. Carter. That's why the jury was all white."
Papa placed his pipe back in his mouth as he considered Monty's words. The only noise in the house at that moment was the distant clanking of pots and pans as Ma Pearl released her fury in the kitchen. Finally a hearty laugh rocked Papa's lanky body. I had never seen him laugh so hard, not even when he occasionally read the funny pages. When he finally composed himself, he asked Monty wearily, "Young man, do you really think they woulda 'lowed a colored man in that jury box?"
"Of course not," Monty answered. "But at least we could have made a case for it."
"Every colored man in the county coulda been on the courthouse reg'stry as voters. Still wouldn'ta made a diff'rence," said Papa.
"Will you even consider it, Mr. Carter?"
"Trying to git on the voting reg'ster?"
"Yes," Monty said, nodding. "Signing up. Registering to vote."
"Son, I have a family to provide for. Gittin' shot down at the courthouse won't put food on the table."
Aunt Belle raised her head slightly. "How can anythinth chane if our people won'th voth?"
As the room went silent, I imagined Papa, aging and hunched over, walking up the courthouse steps in Greenwood. The next thing he knows, a bullet strikes him in the back. Then another. Then another. They keep hitting him, even after he has fallen and tumbled down the stairs.
"When I'm old enough, I'll register to vote," I said. Everyone stared at me, not saying a word. "Papa's right. He has a family to take care of. He can't take chances like that. It's the young folks who have to take a stand while we can. Before we have families depending on us."
When Monty smiled and said, "Good for you, Rose," my heart melted. And it melted for two reasons. One, Monty was handsome and smart, and I was glad he was about to marry my favorite aunt. And two, I thought about Levi Jackson and how, simply because he wanted to vote, he was shot and killed. What if that happened to me and I never got a chance to even vote in the first place? What good was my name on some voters' list if I was dead? Fear rose up in my throat at the thought of something so daring. Now I understood why folks were fleeing to the North rather than staying and fighting. Why die in Mississippi when you could live up north?
But everybody couldn't leave, or wouldn't—like Papa, who seemed to be perfectly content with living and dying in Mississippi. I had never asked him before, but that moment seemed as good as any to pose the question.
"Papa, how come you didn't leave?"
"Mississippi is home, daughter," he said. "I'm a farmer. I loves the land. I loves the fresh air. My animals. The cotton."
"Do you love working for that white man living in his mansion down the road?" Monty asked, his sarcasm lingering in the air again.
"Matter of fact, I do," said Papa. "I loved working for his daddy, too. Every white person ain't full o' evil, son."
I thought about the day after Levi's death, when I went to the Robinsons' and Mr. Robinson was hosting a meeting for the White Citizens' Council. From what Hallelujah had told me about the group, how they wanted to make sure the government didn't interfere with the way things were in Mississippi, I couldn't help but side with Monty.
"I didn't say he was evil," Monty said. "But you have to agree that the living conditions are unfair."
Papa raised his brows. "Who told you life was fair? You think 'cause a man don't live in a mansion he can't be happy? I never go to bed hungry, son. I ain't never went without clothes on my back. And this roof over my head don't leak. This furniture," he said, gesturing around the room, "I didn't pay a dime for it, but it sets as good as anything you can git in one of them catalogs lying there on the floor."
Monty was silent.
"Mr. Robinson never done me no wrong, son," Papa said quietly. "Neither his father. They were both good to me."
Aunt Belle threw in her garbled two cents. "They oughth thue be. Everythinth they own is becauth of Negroes workin' them fieldths."
"Daughter, I ain't complaining," Papa said. "This is where the good Lord saw fit for Paul Elias Carter to be born, right here in Stillwater, Mississippi. He knowed I'd love the land before I was even here. He shaped me in my mother's womb and fitted me to farm. And with that I'm happy. With that I'm content. Ain't no shame in serving others."
When nobody said anything else, Papa continued. "The minute I saw you," he said to Aunt Belle, smiling, "I knowed you'd be like Isabelle. That's why I wanted to call you Belle. Isabelle was never happy with the land. She hated the outdoors. She hated the fields. She wouldn't even plant a garden or go fishin'. She loved taking care of the house. But she always wanted one of her own. A big one. The first chance she got, she caught that train to Saint Louis and took a job housekeeping for that old white man after his wife died. When he died, his chi'ren give that house to Isabelle. She made herself a living by opening that house up and serving others."
Aunt Belle's face hardened. "Doesth Mama know thath?"
Papa nodded. "She know."
"Humph," Aunt Belle said with a grunt.
_This land is your land. This land is my land._ Maybe that's why the ninth-grade teacher wanted the class to do a patriotic play and sing that song. Perhaps she, like Papa, considered Mississippi home. This land was her land as much as it was any white person's land. Mississippi. This land was my land too. And I had a right not to let anybody chase me away from it the way they had done Mama and Mr. Pete. All that land. And he sold it to rent something called an apartment.
A battle raged within me. What if I remained in Mississippi and never became more than a field worker or some white woman's maid? What if I never finished school? I admired Papa for his strength. For his contentment. But I couldn't emulate it. I knew I could never be happy living in a shack on some white man's cotton plantation. Nor could I be happy living in a town where I had to look down at the ground whenever I saw a white person approaching. I couldn't be happy living in a place where I was made to feel less than human. Either things had to change in Mississippi, or I had to leave it. Someday.
"What about me, Papa?" I asked. "What did you think when I was born?"
A smile spread across Papa's face. But before he could speak, Aunt Belle chimed in. "I rememberth when thu were born," she said, smiling.
Monty patted her hand and said, "Rest that jaw, baby."
"Soon as old Addie left the room, Belle ran in there to see you. You was as pink as you could be," Papa said, laughing. "Belle begged Anna Mae to call you Rose."
"You did?" I asked Aunt Belle.
She nodded and said, "Rotha. I called you Rotha."
"Rosa?" I asked.
Aunt Belle smiled and nodded.
"How did it get to be Rose?" I asked.
"Pearl," Papa answered briskly. "She said Rosa wadn't a real name." He paused and chuckled. "Old Addie wrote Rosa on the birth record anyway," he said, "no matter how many times Pearl told her your name was Rose."
"She still calls me that," I said. "Hallelujah, too."
"Rosa," Monty piped in. "It's Italian. Comes from Rose of Viterbo, a saint from Italy. But the name also means 'dew.'"
"Like the stuff on the grass in the morning?" I asked.
Monty nodded. "Like the dew in the morning, gently refreshing the earth. The bearers of this name tend to want to analyze and understand the world. They search for deeper truths than simply what's on the surface." He winked at me and said, "Rosa. I like that. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, right?"
I smiled. Maybe having a walking, talking _Encyclopedia Britannica_ as an uncle wouldn't be so bad after all.
Monty turned to Papa. "Mr. Carter, why isn't this girl in school?"
Papa fumbled for words. He removed his pipe from his mouth and, staring at the ceiling, scratched his chin, which I doubted even itched.
During the past three weeks, while I watched Queen and Fred Lee rise and dress for school and I dressed for the field, I had wondered the same thing: Why wasn't Papa fighting for my right to be in school? Why was he allowing Ma Pearl to force me to settle for only a seventh-grade education when he himself had regarded education important enough to teach himself to read and write? I had asked him about it only once, and he'd replied that I was where I was needed most. It turned out he had the same reply for Monty.
"Rose is where I needs her most right now," he said. But then he added, "She'll go to school, soon as the harvest is in."
My eyebrows shot up. "I will?"
Papa nodded and said, "You will."
"I won't have to stay home and help Ma Pearl?"
Papa shook his head. "Pearl'll be a'right. The good Lawd'll send her the help she need."
Tears rushed to my eyes. I was going to school when the cotton was picked. I might be late starting, but at least I was going. I wanted to rush to Papa and hug him. But that was something I'd never done before, and I knew I was too old to start. So I simply whispered a choked "Thank you."
But Monty sat up straight on the sofa. "Mr. Carter, on my many drives throughout this county, I've seen plenty of Negro men who could take Rose's place in that field. These men have nothing better to do than play checkers in front of a country store."
Papa placed his pipe back in his mouth. "Them mens expects to be paid."
"Then pay them," Monty said.
Papa glared at Monty. "I already hired all the extras I could afford. I can't hire no mo'."
"But why Rose and not Fred Lee and Queen?" asked Monty. "Wouldn't you have harvested faster with the extra help?"
"Because Rose is apt," Papa said. "She don't need no school to learn. She'll find a way to get her learning, just like Belle did. Queen and Fret'Lee don't have them kind of smarts. If I keep them outta school even for the harvest, they'd soon give up. They'd accept that way of life. But not Rose. She know how to make a way outta no way." Papa's expression brightened a bit when he said, "Even now she'll catch up and outrun every child in that school."
"But why now?" asked Monty. "Why have you suddenly decided she should go when the cotton is picked?"
Papa scowled and said, " 'Cause a Negro without proper schooling ain't nothing to the white man but a nigger."
Smiling, Monty turned to me and said, "I hear you've been considering a fresh start."
I gave him a questioning stare.
"Saint Louis?" he answered, his brows raised.
"I . . ." was all I could say before the words jumbled up in my mouth and refused to come out. I glanced at Aunt Belle. Like Monty, she was smiling.
"Belle and I have been talking," Monty said. "She told me about your conversation when we were here a few weeks ago."
"Our . . . conversation," I stammered, glancing from Monty to Aunt Belle, then back again.
"I gaith whath you askth me thome thought," Aunt Belle said.
Monty patted her on the knee, reminding her to rest her jaw. "The last time we were here," he said to me, "we weren't prepared to take you back. But after giving your request some thought and talking it over," he said as he glanced lovingly at Aunt Belle, "we'd love to have you in Saint Louis." He nodded at Papa and said, "That is, if it's okay with you, Mr. Carter."
My heart raced. I should have been smiling, leaping for joy at Monty's words, but instead, my stomach churned with nervousness. Since the day Mr. Pete took Mama away in his train of a car, I had wanted nothing more than to go with them. To live a life up north. A life I could experience only from the way colored people from up north dressed, from the way they talked, even down to the way they laughed—which was vastly different from the way things were for colored people in the South. I couldn't believe the door to that good life was suddenly standing open before me. Monty and Aunt Belle were asking me, Rose Lee Carter, to go back to Saint Louis with them.
Like me, Papa seemed to have lost his ability to speak. He sat there, his expression unreadable, staring at Monty. When he didn't respond after what seemed to be more than a minute, Monty spoke. "We'll of course wait till after the harvest, if you'd like." He smiled at me and said, "What do you say to the first week of November, Rose?"
Good thing I was sitting, else I would have hit the floor. Not only were my knees weak, but my whole body seemed to have melted like warmed butter. Here was my chance to leave Mississippi, and my emotions were in a whirlwind. Especially when I saw the look in Papa's eyes. It was the same look of defeat that held Aunt Belle captive when Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were set free from the charge of murdering Emmett Till.
"Papa," I said softly. "You want me to go?"
When Papa shook his head and said, "You know the answer to that question is no," my heart took a dive.
But then he said, "But I won't hold you back."
"You won't?" I said, my voice cracking.
Papa's expression brightened. "Not no mo'," he said, shaking his head. "Not no mo'."
# Chapter Thirty
## SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
"'LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED: YE BELIEVE IN _God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.'"_
For nearly all my life, for as long as I could remember, I had heard those words from John, chapter fourteen, recited by a deacon every Sunday morning that I attended church. But for some reason, hearing them from Papa that morning as I sat on a hard wooden pew in Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church on the last Sunday in September, right after having watched my own people go through so much change in such a short time, the words had more meaning than usual.
_"Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me."_ Jesus spoke those words. I knew that because the words were in red in my Bible. I believed in God even though he didn't answer my prayer and make me pretty like Queen and Sugar. As I grew older, I realized what a silly prayer it was anyway. God didn't care what I looked like. He didn't care what any of us looked like. According to Reverend Jenkins, John the Baptist looked like a wild man, but God used him anyway. It didn't matter how dark my skin was or how nappy my hair, I was still somebody. I was named after a saint. My name meant "courage." And in one language, my name even meant "dew." And dew is refreshing.
_"In my Father's house are many mansions . . ."_ Papa always said he never needed a mansion on earth because he had one waiting for him in heaven. It was hard for me to picture heaven, or even to believe in it, honestly. When I thought of all the people who had died on earth and all the ones still left to die, the idea of a place in the sky that could house all of us simply made me dizzy and confused. And mansions? Were they real mansions, or did that idea of a mansion represent something else? I didn't know. I couldn't know, which is why it's called faith, as Papa always said.
But one thing I did know as I sat and absorbed those words that Jesus spoke: if there was a heaven, Papa would surely be there. But because I had not "put my trust in Jesus," as Ma Pearl frequently pointed out, I would not. I was destined for hell.
A lump rose in my throat. And before I could retrieve my handkerchief from my dress pocket, tears flowed. As much as I tried to fight them, I couldn't hold back the tears. According to the Bible, Jesus said he was preparing a place for his people so that where he is, there they would be also. People like Papa and Reverend Jenkins believed this. Who was I to deny it simply because I had something to prove to Ma Pearl? I was doing what Papa called cutting off my nose to spite my face, the same thing whites in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, had done when they set two killers free.
Without my permission, my legs straightened to a standing position and began walking to the front of the church. They were so wobbly I thought I would crumble to the floor any minute. But I didn't. I made it to the front. The look on Papa's face as he stood before the altar podium told me I had made a huge mistake. It was against protocol for anyone to come before the church unless specifically called to the altar. But he didn't chastise me.
When the church completed singing "Pass Me Not," everyone sat except me. I stood there trembling, nervous sweat dripping from my armpits and down my sides. When Papa took his seat among the deacons on the side pews facing the altar, Reverend Jenkins came from the pulpit and stood beside me. He placed his arm around my shoulders and whispered, "What is it, Rose?"
"I want to be baptized," I whispered, my voice shaking. "I want to be saved."
"Have you asked Jesus to be your Lord and Savior?"
"Yes, sir," I choked out. "But I didn't get a sign."
My body couldn't stop shaking. I knew Reverend Jenkins was progressive in his thinking, but I didn't know whether he would accept my confession and allow me to be baptized with the others on the following Sunday, as I hadn't crossed over during revival.
Gently, with his arm still around my shoulders, Reverend Jenkins turned my body to face the congregation. "Our sister Rose," he announced to the congregation, "has confessed her hope in Christ and would like to become a candidate for baptism. Is there a motion?"
When no one spoke, I glanced up. My gaze met Ma Pearl's. Hers was so fierce I thought I would faint. What if I had made a fool of myself? What if no one moved that I become a candidate for baptism, because I hadn't gotten religion during revival like everyone else? I stared down at the floor, too ashamed to face the church. Then, as if in a dream, I heard Papa's voice from the deacon's bench. "I move that Rose Lee Carter become a candidate for baptism."
A moment passed before another deacon said, "I second the motion." My mind was so foggy that I didn't recognize the voice, but a sense of relief washed over me.
"It has been moved that our sister Rose Lee Carter become a candidate for baptism on next Sunday, October second," said Reverend Jenkins, his right hand raised high in the air. "All in favor, say aye."
A hearty "aye" rose from the congregation.
"All opposed, say nay," said Reverend Jenkins.
My heart beat faster with the silence, but no one opposed my baptism.
"It has been motioned and approved by a unanimous vote of yes from the saints that our sister Rose become a candidate for baptism," Reverend Jenkins said. When he smiled and hugged me right in front of all those people, my body melted into sobs.
I stumbled almost blindly back to my seat, feeling free and happy. Surprisingly, Ma Pearl gave me a gentle pat on the knee. Her approval. It didn't bother me one bit that she felt she had something to do with my conversion. I would no longer cut off my nose to spite my face. I would allow her to be proud of what she thought she had accomplished.
I smiled as the church sang, _"'None but the righteous, none but the righteous, none but the righteous shall see God, shall see God. Take me to the water to be baptized. I know I got religion. Yes, I do.'"_
I, Rose Lee Carter, was a candidate for baptism. And when I died, wherever or whatever heaven was, I would be there with Papa and a man named Jesus, who was so important that his words were printed in red in my Bible.
_"'Come, we that love the Lord,'"_ the choir sang out, _"'and let our joys be known; join in a song with sweet accord, join in a song with sweet accord and thus surround the throne, and thus surround the throne. We're marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful Zion; we're marching upward to Zion, the beautiful city of God.'"_
Though the choir sang, my mind wandered back to the Scripture Papa had read: _"I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also."_
I knew the Scripture was about Jesus going to heaven to prepare a place for his disciples, but I couldn't help but think of Aunt Belle and Monty, who were on their way to Saint Louis—to prepare a place for me. And they would come again in November, and not just receive me, but relieve me from the misery of Mississippi. I couldn't contain my smile. Not only had I "gotten religion" on my own terms as opposed to Ma Pearl's, but I had also finally gotten my chance to fly away, as so many others had done before me.
# Chapter Thirty-One
## MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26
A SCREAM JOLTED ME FROM SLEEP. Moonlight gleamed through the thinly curtained window. The sunlight of Monday morning had not yet arrived. So why was Ma Pearl in our room? And why was she standing next to Queen's bed, yelling for her to get up?
"You ain't 'sleep!" she said. "No sense pretending you is. Wadn't two minutes ago that I just saw you crawl in here."
When a second scream filled the bedroom, my eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness and spotted the black strap of terror. In a perfect arch, it swung and landed _whap_ against Queen's curled-up body. And then _whap_ . . . _whap_ . . . _whap_ . . . , it lashed Queen, as if it had a mind of its own.
Queen's hands moved in every direction in an attempt to block it. "Ma Pearl, please!" she screamed. "Please, stop!"
"I'm go'n kill you!" Ma Pearl yelled. "I'm go'n kill you!"
I sat straight up in my bed, stunned, only half believing it had taken the changing of the season and nearly a month of watching Queen run outside and vomit every morning for Ma Pearl to realize there was a baby inside her and not a summer flu.
When Queen noticed me sitting up, she cried, "Help me! Make her stop!"
"Cain't nobody help you but Jesus," Ma Pearl said, pointing toward heaven with one hand while wielding that strap with the other. Her arm rose so high with the strap that it seemed to touch the ceiling. She brought it down with a _WHAP_ against Queen's back. "I told y'all I didn't want to bring up no mo' babies in my house."
When Ma Pearl paused for a moment to catch her breath, Queen uncoiled her body and—still on her bed—fell on her knees. With her hands clasped in a prayer position, she begged Ma Pearl for mercy.
"I ain't the one to forgive you," Ma Pearl said. "That's God's bizness. My bizness is to beat the devil outta you for bringing mo' shame in my house. Sneaking outta here at night like a common tramp."
Dazed by the drama, I hadn't noticed that Queen was fully dressed in a yellow pantsuit.
"Ma Pearl, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she said, her head bowed, her body rocking back and forth.
"You ain't sorry," Ma Pearl said, her teeth clenched. "You in trouble. And cain't nobody undo that."
Before Queen could get her hands up to shield her face, the black strap of terror slashed across it. Queen's cry was so loud, it's a wonder it didn't wake the Robinsons up the road.
But it did wake Papa. He came rushing into the room, struggling to pull his britches over his underwear.
"What?" was all he said as his eyes adjusted to the moonlit room.
Ma Pearl turned swiftly toward him. "This gal done gone out and got herself in trouble."
"Queen?" Papa said. His countenance fell as he stared at the sobbing figure on the bed.
Queen lay on her side, her knees pulled up to her chest, her head shielded by her arms, her body worn from Ma Pearl's lashes. "I'm sorry, Papa," she said, whimpering.
"Queen?" Papa said again, as if he somehow expected to get a different answer. "You, Queen?" he said softly.
"Yes, Queen!" Ma Pearl said. She coiled the strap around her thick hand as she stormed toward the doorway. "Ast her who the daddy is."
Papa looked at Queen, then back at Ma Pearl.
"Go on," Ma Pearl said, "ast her."
Papa turned to Queen. "Queen?" he said again. This time his tone was one of inquiry rather than shock.
Queen answered him with heavier sobs.
Ma Pearl folded her arms across her chest. "She was sick too long. I watched her every day. And nothing," she said, scowling. "So I knowed she was leaving at night."
Queen's sobs grew louder.
"Caught her tonight," Ma Pearl said. "Gittin' thowed outta that ol' peckerwood's truck. Jest thowed her out like she was a piece a trash."
"Queen," Papa said, sighing.
Ma Pearl snorted. "Dirn fool like her mama. White man ain't go'n never own up to no colored baby." She stormed out of the room, the sheet serving as a curtain between the two rooms swaying behind her.
"Go on back to sleep," she said when Fred Lee's bed creaked. "Ain't nothing wrong, 'cept Queen done got herself in trouble."
At that, Queen whimpered. And it took only a second for the whimpering to turn into broken sobs.
Queen uncurled her body and reached up. She begged for Papa's embrace. "I'm sorry, Papa," she uttered.
Papa dropped his head. With his shoulders slumped, he turned and left the room.
As Queen curled herself into a ball and wept even louder, I got up and lit the kerosene lamp that sat on the wooden crate that served as a night table between our beds.
At first I didn't speak. Instead, I, the newly saved sinner, knelt beside my bed and offered up a prayer for her, begging God not to allow Ma Pearl to beat her so viciously again. Then I went over to her bed and rubbed her back.
Queen winced.
I could feel the bruises beneath the soft fabric. Dark red seeped through yellow.
"We need to get these clothes off you."
"Okay . . ." Queen whimpered.
But when I began to help her out of her clothes, she wailed. "I just wanna die! Jesus, just let me die!" She curled back into her ball, cringing at every touch.
Tears sprang to my eyes. "It's gonna be all right, Queen," I whispered, my voice choking. I stared at what was once beautiful, almost sand-colored skin. It was now bruised, bloody, and purple.
Staring at Queen's body brought back a memory I didn't know I had. It was a memory of a time before Fred Lee was born—a memory of a night Ma Pearl stormed into that very room Queen and I shared.
Mama and I cuddled in one bed, and Aunt Clara Jean and two-year-old Queen cuddled in the other. The memory was a fog, but I remembered Mama crying and Aunt Clara Jean soothing her with, "Sister, it's go'n be all right."
Tears sprang to my eyes when I thought of Mama possibly getting that kind of beating twice. The memory and the sight of Queen's back made me vow I'd never allow myself to get into that kind of trouble with Ma Pearl.
After helping Queen get out of her blood-soaked clothes, I went to the back room and got the basin of water for morning washing, along with a towel. When I returned, Queen was sitting up, the sheets loosely wrapped around her.
"It hurt so bad," she said when I sat beside her.
"I know," I whispered.
"If you hadna woke up," she said, choking back a sob, "she mighta killed me."
"She wouldn't have killed you," I said softly. "She didn't kill Mama. And she didn't kill Aunt Clara Jean."
"I wish she had. I wish she had killed us both before I was even brought to this miserable world."
"Don't talk like that, Queen. You won't have to stay here forever," I said. "One day you can leave like everyone else. Like me," I added, feeling renewed joy at the thought of going to Saint Louis in November.
"How can I leave?" Queen asked. "Who go'n take me to live with them? I'll have a child attached to my hip." She said that in a tone indicating that the problem was someone else's fault and not her own.
"Mama and Aunt Clara Jean both had babies before they were married," I said. "But they still got husbands. They still left."
"But they didn't get to choose," Queen said bitterly. "What woman would want to spend her life looking at something as big and ugly as Mr. Pete?"
I carefully wiped blood from her shoulder, but said nothing as I considered how small Uncle Ollie seemed compared with the mammoth-size Aunt Clara Jean.
Queen's countenance fell. "He lied to me," she said.
"Who?" I asked.
"Jim," Queen answered.
"Jim who?"
"Robinson."
My eyebrows came together. "Jimmy Robinson?"
Queen nodded.
"What did Jimmy Robinson lie to you about?"
"He said he loved me."
I stopped wiping blood from her delicate skin. I was so confused it seemed cobwebs had cluttered my head. "Why would Jimmy Robinson say he loved you?"
As if the same cobwebs had magically appeared in her head, Queen stared at me blankly. After a moment she flinched. "You thought I was with Ricky Turner?"
I was too confused to answer.
Even in pain, Queen managed a conceited stare. "I got more class than that."
"But Jimmy's only fourteen. The same age as Hallelujah."
Queen stared at me, as if the mention of Hallelujah's name disgusted her. "Jim's more man than that boy will ever be," she said, her nose in the air.
Blood rushed to my head and seemed to pound in my ears.
I didn't know why, but somehow knowing that Queen had gotten in trouble with Jimmy Robinson instead of Ricky Turner appeared frightening. What if Mr. Robinson found out? What would happen to Ma Pearl and Papa? Where would they go if Mr. Robinson ran them off his place because of Queen? Regardless of how good a farmer Papa was, I doubted he wanted to work for anyone other than Mr. Robinson.
My teeth clenched. "How could you do this to them?"
"What?" she said, staring at me as if I had asked her where babies came from in the first place.
"How could you do this to Ma Pearl and Papa?"
Queen rolled her eyes. "I didn't do anything to them. They did this to me." She shifted her weight and moaned in pain. "They lock us up in this house and won't let us go nowhere but church and school."
"That's no reason for you to do what you did," I said.
She rolled her eyes again and said, "When else was I supposed to leave this damn house and have some fun?"
"But with Jimmy Robinson?"
Queen's haughty stare returned. "Why not?" she asked, her tone icy.
"Because he's white, and you're colored."
"I'm as good as any white girl he coulda had," she said, sniffing.
"He told you that?"
"He loves me," Queen said. "I know he do."
I pointed at her stomach. "What'd he say about that?"
As Queen stared at her stomach, tears suddenly flooded her eyes. "He loves me," she insisted, her voice cracking.
I sighed. "But he threw you out of the truck?"
"Ma Pearl lied," she snapped. "He didn't throw me out. I tripped and fell."
I took a deep breath and let it out. But I didn't respond to Queen. I knew for myself how Ma Pearl could dress up a story, but I doubted she was making things up this time. I was sure Jimmy Robinson _had_ thrown Queen out of that truck. He had discarded her, just the way his mama discarded the things she no longer wanted. He discarded her and handed her over to Ma Pearl.
# October
# Chapter Thirty-Two
## SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2
"'WADE IN THE WATER. WADE IN THE WATER, CHILDREN. _Wade in the water. God's gonna trouble the waters.'"_ The words were meant to comfort the fourteen of us lined up along the sloping path that led to the banks of Stillwater Lake. Mother Edwards, Deacon Edwards's wife, and Ma Pearl had lined us up according to age, with the youngest, nine-year-old Obadiah Malone, leading the way. Queen, being the oldest, as she'd turn sixteen in less than a week, was last. I was in front of her, and Fred Lee stood before me.
The old saying goes that if you aren't truly saved, if your sign was false and you didn't have religion, God would allow you to choke and strangle in the water when the preacher plunged you under. The night before, Queen had confessed to me that she was scared to go down into the water. After Ma Pearl's discovery of her secret, she had said she didn't want to be baptized. But Ma Pearl wasn't hearing it. Queen was already about to bring her enough shame without backing out of her baptism as well. So there she stood behind me, all dressed in white, from the turban wrapped around her head to the thick stockings covering her feet, scared half to death that when she went down into that water, God was going to make it choke her to death.
Reverend Jenkins said that "troubling the waters" referred to a Bible story about a healing pool, where an angel troubled the waters during a certain season and the first person in the pool after the stirring would be healed. But my teacher Miss Johnson said the song was a secret slavery song, directing runaway slaves to wade through water to throw off their scents so dogs couldn't track them. She said God would trouble the waters to keep snakes or alligators from attacking the slaves. I didn't know whose version of the song's story was correct, but I did know that I felt my own knees knock a bit just from the thought of my body being dipped backwards underwater. What if I slipped? What if Reverend Jenkins and Deacon Edwards dropped me? How deep was the water? I couldn't swim, and I doubted whether any of them could either. What if I, like Queen, felt I wasn't truly saved? Would I choke?
_"'See that host all dressed in white. God's gonna trouble the water. The leader looks like the Israelite. God's gonna trouble the water.'"_
My knees knocked harder as our seemingly fear-free little leader Obadiah waded into the water. He was flanked by his older brothers Abner and Abel, both fifteen and already deacons. All the Malone children had been baptized before they'd reached the age of accountability, but at only nine, Obadiah had outdone them all. I prayed that his conversion was sincere and that he hadn't been like me at that age, confusing the deacons' words, "I move that so-and-so become a candidate for baptism," with "I move that so-and-so receive a box of candy for baptism." I would hate to see him come out of that lake sputtering to catch his breath.
_"'If you don't believe I've been redeemed. God's gonna trouble the water. Just follow me down to the Jordan's stream. God's gonna trouble the water.'"_
With the water covering the deacons' waists, it nearly swallowed little Obadiah's shoulders, so much so that he could have bent his knees and he would have been baptized as soon as he stepped into the lake.
The little brown face peeking out from all the white of the turban and the baptismal robe didn't look so fear-free once Reverend Jenkins and Deacon Edwards faced him toward the crowd. I was sure Obadiah was about to cry. But when Reverend Jenkins asked him if he believed that Jesus was the son of God, that he died on the cross for our sins, and that he rose again on the third day to conquer death, hell, and the grave, little Obadiah boldly proclaimed, "Yes, sir. I do!"
"Amens" reverberated around the banks of the lake, after which Reverend Jenkins bent his face toward the sky and belted out, "In obedie-e-e-ence to the great head of the church and upon the profession of your faith, Obadiah Malone, I baptize you in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost."
I could feel everyone, including myself, hold their breath as Obadiah was completely immersed in the water and swiftly brought back up.
_"'If you don't believe I've been redeemed. God's gonna trouble the water. Just follow me down to the Jordan's stream. God's gonna trouble the water.'"_
By the time the line got down to just Fred Lee, me, and Queen, I wasn't as nervous anymore. Maybe that was why they let the younger children go first—to show the older ones that there was nothing to fear. No one had choked or even hiccupped coming out of the water. All eleven of the first candidates had truly been saved.
I held my breath again as Fred Lee was led into the water. He was taller than Reverend Jenkins and Deacon Edwards. What if they dipped him under and couldn't lift him back up, and for that brief moment, he choked? Ma Pearl would have a fit if one of us embarrassed her. _Lord, don't let him choke. Don't let him choke,_ I prayed over and over. When Fred Lee was lifted out of the water, I released my breath. Then the nervous feeling that had left me earlier returned. But it didn't come alone. It brought company—a gurgling in my stomach. I suddenly felt like I needed to run to the toilet. _Lord, not now. Not while I'm wearing white._
When the deacon took my hand, it was shaking. "Don't be afraid, Sister Rose," he said. "If all these little ones can go down to the water, I know you ain't scared."
I got to the edge of the water and froze. My socked feet would not move. Both deacons tugged at my arms, lifting me into the water. I was glad the moment was meant to be an emotional one, as tears were streaming down my face.
The muddy water was still, just as its name implied. Yet I felt as if I were floating, as if I could just float up and float away. When Reverend Jenkins and Deacon Edwards faced me toward the congregants of Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, my eyes met Fred Lee's. With a towel draped over his shoulders, his arms crossed over his chest, he smiled reassuringly at me.
Reverend Jenkins spoke. "Rosa Lee Carter, do you believe that Jesus was the son of God . . ." And before I knew it, a toweled hand was cupped over my nose and mouth and I was bent backwards under the water. Ma Pearl had said to make sure we closed our eyes, but I didn't. I knew it was no more than a couple of seconds that I was under there, but it seemed as if I were staring up at that few inches of water covering my face for an eternity. Above the water loomed a clear blue sky, which I took as a sign that one day my life would be as clear and beautiful as it was.
Two days before the baptism, I had asked Ma Pearl to show me my birth certificate. I had never seen it, because she kept it locked away in her chifforobe. I never had a reason to ask for it before, but I wanted to see for myself what name Miss Addie had scribbled there. And just like Papa had said, the name, written in Miss Addie's crooked lettering, was Rosa Lee. So when Reverend Jenkins asked which name I wanted on my baptism record, I told him "Rosa" because that was my name. The name that was recorded upon my birth. Rosa Lee Carter. The name I would carry with me to Saint Louis when I started my new life.
I came up out of the baptismal waters of Stillwater Lake gasping for air. But I hadn't choked. I was happy to feel the warmth of tears rolling down my cheeks, because it was commonly believed that the truly saved would cry after baptism. When I came out of the water, Ma Pearl draped me in towels.
By the time I wiped my face and looked out at the lake, Queen was already in the water and facing the crowd. She looked peaceful rather than afraid. Maybe being the last one was good for her. I just prayed she didn't choke.
And she didn't. She came up out of that water like the queen she was meant to be. Regal and proud, despite the trouble she had gotten herself into.
# Chapter Thirty-Three
## SUNDAY, OCTOBER 2
AFTER THE BAPTISM AND THE CHURCH SERVICE THAT FOLLOWED, a large gathering of people came over to enjoy Ma Pearl's chicken and dressing. With her having three grandchildren baptized in one day, she was the envy of all the mothers of the church.
Baptism, it seemed, had even changed Queen. Or maybe it was that little issue of the trouble she found herself in that changed her. Either way, she surprised us all by joining Hallelujah, me, and Fred Lee as we sat in the shade of the ancient oak tree in the front yard. Fred Lee, as usual, didn't have much to say. But Hallelujah, in the presence of the Queen, couldn't seem to shut his mouth. And I wanted to punch him in it.
Although he had previously been talking about how colored folks in the South would soon have to stand up for their civil rights, for Queen's entertainment he began to prattle about some up-and-coming rock-and-roll singer he'd heard who was sure to become a favorite of both coloreds and whites.
"Elvis Presley, huh?" Queen said absently as she stared off into the distance.
"Yeah, out of Memphis," Hallelujah said. "Came from Mississippi, though. Tupelo. Just got out of high school a couple of years ago and already got a music contract. Heard he was just up in Clarksdale last month . . ." He babbled on.
Queen nodded but said nothing.
Fred Lee seemed more interested. Staring buck-eyed at Hallelujah, he said, "I didn't know you liked white folks' music."
I held back a chuckle. Hallelujah wasn't any more interested in white folks' music than I was in being Mrs. Robinson's maid.
Hallelujah beamed. "Oh, it ain't just white folks' music Elvis sings. He's got his own style."
Sometimes he sounded like such a fool when he got around Queen. Besides, if this Elvis fellow was on the radio, I was sure Queen had already heard of him, as much as she had her ear pressed to that thing, running down Ma Pearl's "batt'ries."
"I even hear that colored women are starting to name their sons after him," Hallelujah continued. "Can you imagine a colored boy named Elvis?"
Queen snapped her head my way and shot me a dirty look. I shook my head discreetly to let her know that if Hallelujah was throwing any hints her way, it wasn't on account of me. I hadn't told him a thing about her. Oh, I wanted so badly to tell him. To let him know there was no point in trying to impress Queen anymore, as she was already ruined and unfit to marry a preacher's boy. But it wasn't my business to tell. Time and Queen's growing belly would do that eventually.
"That ain't Aunt Ruthie, is it?" Fred Lee said, pointing up the road.
We all leaned forward and peered up the road to the west, in the opposite direction of the Robinsons'. Anybody with eyes could see that it was Aunt Ruthie and her brood of young ones stirring up a small puff of dust on the road.
"I hope she didn't walk seven miles with them chi'ren again," Queen said, leaping up from her chair.
"There's no sign of a car anywhere," I pointed out.
Queen ignored my sarcasm. "I hope Slow John didn't beat her again," she said. Without another word, she stormed across the yard toward the road. Within seconds she had joined Aunt Ruthie and begun gathering the children in her arms. In that instant, I knew, despite all her other shortcomings, she was going to make a fine mother.
When they reached the yard, Aunt Ruthie acknowledged us with a nod. Otherwise she kept her head down. Her right arm was wrapped with one of the baby's diapers, and there was blood on the sleeve of her faded plaid dress.
Out of nowhere, Hallelujah said, "Preacher almost married her."
My head jerked toward him. "Who?"
"Preacher asked your aunt Ruthie to marry him after my mama died."
"Your real mama?"
Still staring at Aunt Ruthie as she ambled across the porch, Hallelujah nodded.
We watched Queen settle on the edge of the porch. Her legs dangled from the solid blue trim of her blue and white checkered skirt, and her forehead wrinkled with concern as she gathered Aunt Ruthie's children on either side of her and cradled the baby in her lap.
"I never knew Reverend Jenkins wanted to marry Aunt Ruthie," I said.
Hallelujah shrugged. "He said she was one of the smartest women he knew."
"Ain't too smart," Fred Lee said, "lettin' Slow John hit her like that."
"Said she used to be one of the prettiest women in Stillwater, too," Hallelujah said.
"Reverend Jenkins said Aunt Ruthie was pretty?" I asked.
"She is pretty," said Hallelujah.
"But she's so d—" I stopped myself when I realized what I was about to imply.
"Dark women is pretty too," Fred Lee said.
"That ain't what I was about to say," I snapped.
"You was," Fred Lee countered.
Fred Lee was right. _I_ knew Aunt Ruthie was pretty. So why did I find it hard to believe Reverend Jenkins would find her pretty too? For the same reason I couldn't think of myself as pretty—my own grandmother had made me feel ashamed of my complexion, saying I was as black as midnight without a moon. But I had to remember my own strange words to Hallelujah on the night before the murder trial ended: _stars can't shine without darkness_. And I was determined that one day, instead of fretting over being as dark as midnight without a moon, I would shine as bright as the morning star—which, Reverend Jenkins told us, is the planet Venus and is also a sign of hope.
"How come Reverend Jenkins didn't marry Aunt Ruthie?" I asked Hallelujah.
"Miss Sweet wouldn't let him," he answered.
"Wonder why," I mumbled, staring at the house.
"I wish she had," said Hallelujah. "She's too smart and pretty for a man like John Walker. Preacher said after Miss Sweet wouldn't let her marry him, she ran off with the first thing with legs."
"She'd have been better off marrying a spider," I said.
"I'm glad she didn't marry Preacher," said Fred Lee.
Hallelujah and I stared at him.
"All o' yo' mamas die," Fred Lee said matter-of-factly.
We tried not to, but laughs slipped out of Hallelujah and me anyway.
Yet we knew this was no laughing moment. Here was our aunt, again at her parents' home, again having walked seven miles with her children, again having been beaten by her no-'count husband. And probably would, again, leave the safety of our house and go back to him.
I let my head lean back, and I looked up at the clear blue sky. The evening sun streaming through the leaves warmed my face. October had just begun, so the leaves on the ancient oak towering over me had not changed. They were still full, green, and fluffy. But I knew they would soon change. They would become orange and red and gold; then, eventually, they would fall from the tree. Change was inevitable in nature, as Miss Johnson used to say, but not in people. People had a choice, whereas nature did not.
Reverend Jenkins was sure that a change was coming to Mississippi, that life for the Negro would get better. I had made a promise before the church and before God that I would change, and today my sins had been washed away. Queen and Fred Lee, too, had made that profession of faith to change. And long ago, when she was our age, so had Aunt Ruthie. Now, years later, it seemed she needed to make a commitment to change again. A commitment to permanently walk away from a life where she wasn't really living. I closed my eyes and offered up a prayer for her. Only two people could help my aunt: God and herself.
Change. It's what I had been thinking about since that Monday after the Emmett Till murder trial—the day after Aunt Belle and Monty headed back to Saint Louis. So many thoughts warred against one another in my mind. I thought about what Hallelujah had said on the night before the trial ended, about why folks like Reverend Jenkins and Medgar Evers chose to stay in Mississippi even though they could probably leave, just like Mr. Pete, Mama, and Aunt Belle.
_Dreams have more meaning when you have to fight for them,_ he'd said. And that's why some people chose to stay. They knew they had a right to be there—this land is your land, this land is my land. And they wanted the freedom to do so.
But I also thought about Papa. The thought of leaving him broke my heart. I thought of my own words to Queen when I asked her, "How could you do this to them?" But then I had to ask myself, "How could I do this to Papa?" Especially now that Queen had disappointed him so.
How could I leave Papa? How could I leave Fred Lee? Leaving him would make me as bad as Mama. Who could know what might happen to him if both his mama and his sister left him, not counting the fact that his daddy had never bothered with trying to be a part of his life?
And Hallelujah. Yes, he sat there making a fool of himself over Queen, but he was still _my_ best friend. How could I leave him? And what kind of friends would I make in Saint Louis? If any?
My heart ached, both at the thought of leaving and at the thought of staying. Levi had stayed, and he didn't live to see a week over the age of twenty-one. Would that happen to me? I didn't know—couldn't know—but I had to be strong enough to find out. I had to stay—not just for the sake of those I didn't want to leave behind, but for my own sake. I had to know if I could shine in the darkness.
Imagine how bright a star would shine at midnight without a moon!
I had to be bold enough to write to Aunt Belle and let her know my choice. And I had to write that letter without delay—before I had time to change my mind. A chill came over me at the thought. But then, right there, the warmth of the Mississippi sun crossed my face while a single leaf fluttered down and brushed my cheek. I opened my eyes and stared down at the leaf that had landed in my lap. It was still green, with hints of yellow. Yes, a change was coming. And I, Rosa Lee Carter, would be right there to be a part of it.
# Acknowledgments
This book would not have happened without . . .
God—who gave me the talent to write and the strength to endure rejection.
The Mississippi Arts Commission—which boosted my confidence with a Literary Artist Fellowship Grant to encourage the completion of the book.
Victoria Marini (Literary Agent Extraordinaire!)—who salvaged my query from the slush and finally gave me the "yes" that changed my life.
Elizabeth Bewley (Super Awesome Ninja Editor!)—who showed me how to make a good story _great_.
Nicole Sclama (Super Awesome Editorial Assistant!)—who double-checked my research to make sure I got the facts straight.
Writer friends—who read various drafts of the manuscript and said, "This is good. Keep going."
The ladies of my Sunday school class at Brown Missionary Baptist Church—who prayed me through a six-year journey to find an agent.
All my family and friends—who believed that one day I would eventually land an agent and a book deal.
And, of course, the wonderful folks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books for Young Readers—who believed this story needed to be shared with children around the world.
**MiddleGradeMania.com **
# About the Author
Photograph by Chloe Jackson
LINDA WILLIAMS JACKSON was born in the small town of Rosedale, Mississippi—the Delta City of Brotherly Love. She still lives in Mississippi with her husband and children, where she enjoys writing stories about unassuming everyday characters in small-town settings.
Learn more about Linda at www.jacksonbooks.com
Follow her on Twitter at @LindaWJackson
# Contents
1. Title Page
2. Contents
3. Copyright
4. Dedication
5. Stillwater, Mississippi 1955
6. July
1. Chapter One
2. Chapter Two
3. Chapter Three
4. Chapter Four
5. Chapter Five
6. Chapter Six
7. Chapter Seven
8. Chapter Eight
7. August
1. Chapter Nine
2. Chapter Ten
3. Chapter Eleven
4. Chapter Twelve
5. Chapter Thirteen
6. Chapter Fourteen
7. Chapter Fifteen
8. Chapter Sixteen
9. Chapter Seventeen
10. Chapter Eighteen
8. September
1. Chapter Nineteen
2. Chapter Twenty
3. Chapter Twenty-One
4. Chapter Twenty-Two
5. Chapter Twenty-Three
6. Chapter Twenty-Four
7. Chapter Twenty-Five
8. Chapter Twenty-Six
9. Chapter Twenty-Seven
10. Chapter Twenty-Eight
11. Chapter Twenty-Nine
12. Chapter Thirty
13. Chapter Thirty-One
9. October
1. Chapter Thirty-Two
2. Chapter Thirty-Three
10. Acknowledgments
11. Middle Grade Mania!
12. About the Author
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 8,556 |
Home News Canada's top public-sector R&D body has launched a blockchain-based web application
Canada's top public-sector R&D body has launched a blockchain-based web application
Rameez Arif
The National Research Council of Canada (NRC), through its Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), unveiled it's plan to test blockchain technology for managing funding with Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Connecting Government to small and medium-sized enterprises
In its efforts to strengthen these ties, NRC IRAP will be hosting its brand-new blockchain explorer application, deployed on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and developed by Bitaccess, according to a recently published feature story. IPFS has a peer-to-peer functionality as it stores and shares data in a distributed manner.
Web applications which are deployed on IPFS are unalterable, unlike conventional webpages, and can be accessed even when the original web hosting service has gone offline improving the overall reliability of the service. Data accessibility and immutability is ensured by switching to IPFS as applications are hosted by several different computers.
Blockchain Adoption
Since June 2017, NRC has been striving to promote the usage of blockchain technology in the Canadian public sector. The NRC arranged a session, attended by Canadian Government officials, to pitch the benefits of using blockchain technology for better administration of its contracts with SMEs. At this meeting, NRC IRAP also disclosed its plans to test the effectiveness of blockchain technology in handling its Program's Contribution Agreements with Canadian SMEs.
There are several plus points of performing this blockchain experiment as it will bring together several different market players with added advantages of transparency and increased public disclosure.
This isn't the first time the NRC has successfully deployed blockchain technology. In January 2018 the NRC IRAP launched a trial to explore blockchain tech to make government research grant and funding information more transparent to the public.
Interplanetary File System
National Research Council of Canada
Previous articleWhat is Neon Exchange – NEX
Next articleThe Raven's Dispatch – Aug 23, 2018 – Is Mass Detokenization On The Way?
I love to do freelance writing about the regulatory, environmental, financial, business and technological aspects of the cryptocurrency industry and its underlying technology 'the blockchain'. I have a Masters Degree in Public Policy from Forman Christian College, Lahore and a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering from UET, Lahore. Moreover, I have six years of hands-on experience in the IP networks industry, working full-time as a Network Engineer.
What The Hell Is an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO)?
QuadrigaCX Scandal: Complete Guide (to Disaster)
Could Samsung Wallet Lead The Way In Crypto Adoption?
Schools in Kyrgyzstan Get Better Internet Access Thanks To UNICEF
U-Turn For Chinese Bitcoin (BTC) Miners
Tagomi Holdings Inc. Kites $12 M in a Funding Led by Paradigm | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 5,623 |
Luxembourg Open 2018, właśc. BGL BNP Paribas Luxembourg Open 2018 – tenisowy turniej WTA kategorii WTA International Series w sezonie 2018 z cyklu Luxembourg Open rozgrywany w dniach 15–20 października 2018 roku w Luksemburgu na kortach twardych w hali o puli nagród wynoszącej 250 000 euro.
Gra pojedyncza
Zawodniczki rozstawione
Drabinka
Faza finałowa
Faza początkowa
Pula nagród
Gra podwójna
Zawodniczki rozstawione
Drabinka
Pula nagród
Uwagi
Bibliografia
Linki zewnętrzne
2018 w tenisie ziemnym
2018
2018 w Luksemburgu | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 2,910 |
Fo Guang Shan () ist ein chinesisch-buddhistischer Orden der Mahayana-Tradition, der eine internationale Bekanntheit erreicht hat. Der Orden gründet und leitet weltweit Tempel und Gruppen unter seinem Namen.
Der Hauptsitz von Fo Guang Shan, nahe Kaohsiung (Taiwan), ist das größte buddhistische Kloster in Taiwan. Zusammen mit Tzu-Chi ist die Organisation eine der größten Wohlfahrtsorganisationen in Taiwan. Sie wurde 1967 durch Hsing Yun, einen bekannten buddhistischen Mönch und Gelehrten, gegründet. Der Orden entwickelte und fördert den humanistischen Buddhismus, eine moderne buddhistische Philosophie, die in Taiwan zurzeit sehr populär ist.
Das Ziel des Ordens ist es, dem Buddhismus weltweit zu einer größeren Bekanntheit zu verhelfen aber auch, ihn in das Leben und in die Herzen der Menschen zu bringen. Der Orden gehört zum Chan der durch Linji Yixuan begründeten Linji zong.
Der Hauptsitz in Kaohsiung
1967 kaufte Meister Hsing Yun mehr als 30 Hektar Land in der etwa 20 km nordöstlich von Kaohsiung gelegenen Gemeinde Dashu im Landkreis Kaohsiung als Gelände für den Bau eines Klosters. Die Einweihungszeremonie wurde am 16. Mai jenes Jahres gehalten.
Das Kloster wird von einer auf dem Gipfel des Fo-Guang-Shan-Berges stehenden 36 Meter hohen Statue des Amitabha-Buddha überragt. Auf dem Klostergelände befinden sich außerdem noch der "Weg der tausend Buddhas", an der gespendete Buddhastatuen aufgestellt wurden. In der Haupthalle befinden sich drei große Buddha-Statuen: Amitabha, flankiert von Mahasthamaprapta und Avalokitesvara. Bei großen Veranstaltungen zu Feiertagen wird auch der Platz vor der Haupthalle genutzt um mehreren tausend Menschen Platz bieten zu können.
Das Gelände wurde im Jahr 2011 um das Fo-Guang-Shan-Buddha-Museum erweitert.
Aktivitäten
Fo Guang Shan ist heute eine weltweit operierende Organisation. In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten sind Tempel und Organisationen auf fünf Kontinenten in 173 Ländern etabliert worden, welche von 1.300 Nonnen und Mönchen betreut werden. Der Orden Fo Guang Shan fördert Ausbildung und soziale Dienste. Er unterstützt die Beibehaltung und Einrichtung öffentlicher Universitäten, buddhistischer Hochschulen, Bibliotheken, Verlage, Übersetzungsbüros, buddhistischer Kunstgalerien, Teehäuser und mobiler medizinische Kliniken weltweit.
Der Orden unterhält und betreut ein Haus für Kinder, eine Haupt- und Hochschule, ein Altersheim und eine Fernsehstation.
Liste von Fo Guang Shan Einrichtungen
Tempel
Asien
Pu Men Temple (Taipeh, Republik China (Taiwan))
Pu Hsien Temple (Kaohsiung, Republik China (Taiwan))
Hoeh Beng Temple (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
Leong Hua Temple (Selangor, Malaysia)
Ching Ling Tong (Selangor, Malaysia)
Fo Hsiang Jin Sha Temple (Kowloon, Hongkong)
Dong Zen Temple (Kuala Langat, Malaysia)
Cheng Lin Thong (Petaling Jaya, Malaysia)
Motosu Temple (Ben Ji Tempel) (Motosu, Japan)
Nordamerika
Hsi Lai Temple (North America HQ) (USA, Hacienda Heights)
Hsi Fang Temple (USA, San Diego)
American Buddhist Cultural Association (USA, San Francisco)
Guam Buddhist Association (USA, Guam)
Lian Hua Temple (USA, Las Vegas)
San Bao Temple (USA, San Francisco)
Chung Mei Temple (USA, Houston)
Light of Buddha Temple (USA, Oakland)
Greater Boston Buddhist Cultural Center (USA, Cambridge)
BLIA Toronto (Kanada, Toronto)
BLIA Vancouver (Kanada, Richmond)
BLIA New Jersey (USA, Edison)
Südamerika
Zu Lai Temple, (Brasilien, Cotia, São Paulo)
Europa
Paris Vihara (Frankreich, Chateau Launoy, Renault)
London Fo Guang Shan (London, Großbritannien)
Manchester Fo Guang Shan (Manchester, Großbritannien)
Gelfingen Fo Guang Shan (Luzern, Schweiz)
Genf Fo Guang Shan, Europäische Zentrale (Genf, Schweiz)
Amsterdam He Hua Temple (Amsterdam, Niederlande)
Berlin Fo Guang Shan (Berlin, Deutschland)
Frankfurt Fo-Guang Shan (Frankfurt am Main, Deutschland)
Wien Fo Guang Shan (Wien, Österreich)
Stockholm Fo Guang Shan (Schweden)
Antwerpen Fo Guang Shan (Belgien)
Afrika
Nan Hua Temple, afrikanisches Hauptquartier (Bronkhorstspruit, Südafrika)
Australien
Nan Tien Tempel (Wollongong)
Chung Tian Tempel (Brisbane)
Fo Guang Shan, (Perth)
Neuseeland
Fo Guang Shan North Island (Auckland)
Schulen und Bildungseinrichtungen
Fo Guang Shan Pu-Men High School
University of the West (ehemals Hsi Lai University)
Nan Hua University
Tsung Lin Buddhist College
Fo Guang University
Publikationen und Medien
Merit Times
Buddha's Light Publishing
Universal Gate Magazine
Beautiful Life TV (BLTV, nur in Taiwan zu empfangen)
Weblinks
Offizielle Website (chinesisch, englisch)
Offizielle Website Deutschland, Frankfurt (chinesisch, deutsch)
Einzelnachweise
Buddhistische Ordensgemeinschaft
Buddhismus in Europa
Buddhismus in Taiwan
Kultur (Taiwan)
Zen
Organisation (Kaohsiung)
Gegründet 1967 | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 5,190 |
package it.wsie.twitteranalyzer.model.tasks.analisys.index;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
import org.apache.lucene.analysis.standard.StandardAnalyzer;
import org.apache.lucene.document.Document;
import org.apache.lucene.document.Field;
import org.apache.lucene.document.FieldType;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexOptions;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriter;
import org.apache.lucene.index.IndexWriterConfig;
import org.apache.lucene.store.SimpleFSDirectory;
/**
* @author Simone Papandrea
*
*/
public class Analyzer implements Indexer {
private IndexWriter mWriter;
private Pattern mPattern;
@Override
public void open(String name) throws IOException {
mWriter = new IndexWriter(new SimpleFSDirectory(Paths.get(INDEX_FOLDER + File.separator + name)),
new IndexWriterConfig(new StandardAnalyzer()));
mWriter.deleteAll();
mPattern = Pattern.compile("\\b(" + name.replaceAll("\\s", "\\\\s*") + ")\\b", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
}
public void close() throws IOException {
if (mWriter != null) {
mWriter.commit();
mWriter.close();
}
}
public final void write(List<String> messages) throws IOException {
Document document;
Field field;
document = new Document();
field = new Field(TWEET_FIELD, "", getFieldType());
document.add(field);
for (String message : messages) {
message = mPattern.matcher(message).replaceAll("");
field.setStringValue(message);
mWriter.addDocument(document);
}
}
private static FieldType getFieldType() {
FieldType field;
field = new FieldType();
field.setIndexOptions(IndexOptions.DOCS);
field.setTokenized(true);
field.setStored(true);
field.freeze();
return field;
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 7,831 |
\section{Introduction}
The purpose of this note is to show the monotonicity of the entropy type energy for the
heat equation on a compact quaternionic contact manifold inspired by the corresponding Riemannian fact related to Perelman's entropy formula for the heat equation on a static Riemannian manifold, see \cite{Ni04}. More recently a similar quantity was considered in the CR case \cite{CW10}. Our goal is to give a relatively simple proof of the monotonicity, more in line with the Riemannian case, by resolving directly the difficulties arising in the sub-Riemannian setting. In Section \ref{s:CR} we include a proof of the result of \cite{CW10} in the CR case from our point of view.
To state the problem, let $M$ be a
quaternionic contact manifold, henceforth abbreviated to qc, and $u$ be a
smooth \emph{positive} solution to the quaternionic contact heat equation
\begin{equation} \label{e:heat}
\frac{\partial}{\partial t}u=\Delta u.
\end{equation}
Hereafter, $\triangle u=tr^g(\nabla^2 u)$ is the negative sub-Laplacian with
the trace taken with respect to an orthonormal basis of the horizontal $4n
-dimensional space. Associated to such a solution are the (Nash like) entropy
\begin{equation}\label{e:N definition}
\mathcal{N}(t)=\int_M u\ln u \vol
\end{equation}
and entropy energy
functional
\begin{equation}\label{enf}
\mathcal{E}(t)=\int_M |\nabla f|^2 u \, Vol_{\eta},
\end{equation}
where, as usual, $f=-\ln u$ and $\, Vol_{\eta}$ is the naturally associated
volume form on $M$, see \eqref{e:volume form} and also \cite[Chapter 8]{IMV}. Exactly as in the Riemannian case, we have that the entropy is decreasing (i.e., non-increasing) because of the formula
\[
\ddt \mathcal{N}=-\mathcal{E}(t).
\]
Our goal is the computation of the second derivative of the entropy. In order to state the result we consider the Ricci type tensor
\begin{equation} \label{e:Lichnerowicz tensor}
\mathcal{L}(X,X)\overset{def}{=}2 Sg(X,X)+\alpha_n T^0(X,X) +\beta_n
U(X,X)\geq 4g(X,X),
\end{equation}
where $X$ is any vector from the horizontal distribution, $\alpha_n=\frac
2(2n+3)}{2n+1}, \quad \beta_n=\frac {4(2n-1)(n+2)}{(2n+1)(n-1)}$, and $T^0$
and $U$ are certain invariant components of the torsion, see Subsection \ref{ss:prelim}.
In addition, following \cite{IPV2},
we define the $P-$form of a fixed smooth function $f$ on $M$ by the following equation
\begin{multline} \label{e:P form}
P_f(X) =\sum_{b=1}^{4n}\nabla
^{3}f(X,e_{b},e_{b})+\sum_{t=1}^{3}\sum_{b=1}^{4n}\nabla
^{3}f(I_{t}X,e_{b},I_{t}e_{b}) \\
-4nSdf(X)+4nT^{0}(X,\nabla f)-\frac{8n(n-2)}{n-1}U(X,\nabla f),
\end{multline}
which in the case $n=1$ is defined by formally dropping the last term. The $P-
function of $f$ is the function $P_f(\nabla f)$. The $C-$operator of $M$ is the 4-th order differential operator
\begin{equation*}
f\mapsto Cf =-\nabla^* P_f=\sum_{a=1}^{4n}(\nabla_{e_a} P_f)\,(e_a).
\end{equation*
In many respects the $C-$operator plays a role similar to the Paneitz
operator in CR geometry. We say that the $P-$function of $f$ is non-negative
if
\begin{equation*}
\int_M f\cdot Cf \, Vol_{\eta}= -\int_M P_f(\nabla f)\, Vol_{\eta} \geq 0.
\end{equation*
If the above holds for any $f\in \mathcal{C}^\infty_o\,(M)$ we say that the
C-$operator is {non-negative}, $\mathcal{C}\geq 0$.
We are ready to state our first result.
\begin{prop}
\label{p:energy ineq} Let $M$ be a compact QC manifold of dimension $4n+3$.
If $u=e^{-f}$ is a positive solution to heat equation \eqref{e:heat}, then
we have
\begin{equation*}
\frac {2n+1}{4n}\mathcal{E}'(t)=-\int_M \left[ |(\nabla^2f)_{0}|^2+\frac {2n+
}{2}\mathcal{L}(\nabla f,\nabla f) +\frac {1}{16n}| \nabla f|^4 \right]u\,
Vol_{\eta} +\frac {3}{n}\int_M P_F(\nabla F)\, Vol_{\eta},
\end{equation*}
where $u=F^2$ ($f=-2\ln F$) and $(\nabla^2f)_{0}$ is the traceless part of horizontal Hessian of $f$.
\end{prop}
Several important properties of the C-operator were found in \cite{IPV2},
most notable of which is the fact that the $C-$operator is non-negative for $n>1$. In dimension seven, $n=1$, the condition of non-negativity of
the $C-$operator is non-trivial. However, \cite{IPV2} showed that
on a 7-dimensional compact qc-Einstein manifold with positive qc-scalar curvature
the $P-$function of an {eigenfunction} of the sub-Laplacian is
non-negative. In particular, this property holds on any 3-Sasakian manifold. Clearly, these facts together with Proposition \ref{p:energy ineq} imply the following theorem.
\begin{thrm}
\label{t:monotone energy} Let $M$ be a compact QC manifold of dimension $4n+3
$ of non-negative Ricci type tensor $\mathcal{L}(X,X) \geq 0$. In the case
n=1$ assume, in addition, that the $C-$operator is non-negative. If $u=e^{-f}
$ is a positive solution to heat equation \eqref{e:heat} then the energy is
monotone decreasing (i.e., non-increasing).
\end{thrm}
The proof of Proposition \ref{p:energy ineq} follows one of L. Ni's
arguments \cite{Ni04} in the Riemannian case, thus it relies on Bochner's
formula. More precisely, after Ni's initial step, in order to handle the extra terms in Bochner's formula, we will follow the
presentation of \cite{IV14}
where this was done for the qc Lichnerowicz type lower eigenvalue bound
under positive Ricci type tensor, see \cite{IPV1,IPV2} for the original result. In the qc case, similar
to the CR case, the Bochner formula has additional hard to control terms,
which include the $P$-function of $f$. In our case, since the integrals are
with respect to the measure $u\, Vol_{\eta}$, rather than $\vol$ as in the Lichnerowicz type estimate, some new
estimates are needed. The key is the following proposition which can
be considered as an estimates from above of the integral of the $P$-function
of $f$ with respect to the measure $u\, Vol_{\eta}$ when the $C-$operator is
non-negative.
\begin{prop}
\label{p:Paneitz estimate} Let $(M,\eta)$ be a compact QC manifold of
dimension $4n+3$. If $u=e^{-f}$ is a positive solution to heat equation
\eqref{e:heat}, then with $f=-2\ln F$ we have the identity
\begin{equation} \label{e:Paneitz estimate}
\int_M P_f(\nabla f) u\, Vol_{\eta}=\frac 14\int_M |\nabla f|^4 u\,
Vol_{\eta} +4\int_M P_F(\nabla F)\, Vol_{\eta}.
\end{equation}
\end{prop}
In the last section of the paper we apply the same method in the case of a strictly pseudoconvex pseudohermitian manifold and prove the following Proposition.
\begin{prop}\label{p:CR energy ineq} Let $M$ be a compact strictly pseudoconvex pseudohermitian CR manifold of dimension $2n+1$.
If $u=e^{-f}$ is a positive solution to the heat equation \eqref{e:heat}, then
we have
\begin{equation*}
\frac {n+1}{2n}\mathcal{E}'(t)=-\int_M \left[ |(\nabla^2f)_{0}|^2+\frac {2n+
}{2}\mathcal{L}(\nabla f,\nabla f) +\frac {1}{8n}| \nabla f|^4 \right]u\,
Vol_{\eta} -\frac {6}{n}\int_M F\, \mathcal{C}(F)\vol,
\end{equation*}
where $u=F^2$, $(\nabla^2f)_{0}$ is the traceless part of horizontal Hessian of $f$ and $\mathcal{C}$ is the CR-Paneitz operator of $M$.
\end{prop}
We refer to Section \ref{s:CR} for the relevant notation and definitions. As a consequence of Proposition \ref{p:CR energy ineq} we recover the monotonicity of the entropy energy shown previously in \cite{CW10}. We note that one of my motivations to consider the problem was the application of the CR version of the monotonicity of the entropy like energy \cite[Lemma 3.3]{CW10} in obtaining (non-optimal) estimate on the bottom of the $L^2$ spectrum of the CR sub-Laplacian. However, the proof of \cite[Corollary 1.9 and Section 6]{CW10} is not fully justified since \cite[Lemma3.3]{CW10} is proved for a compact manifold. It should be noted that a proof of S-Y Cheng's type (even non-optimal) estimate in a sub-Riemannian setting, such as CR or qc-manifold, is an interesting problem in particular because of the lack of general comparison theorems.
We conclude by mentioning another proof of the monotonicity of the energy in the recent preprint \cite{IP16}, which was the result of a past collaborative work with Ivanov and Petkov. Remarkably, \cite{CW10} is also not acknowledged in \cite{IP16} despite the fact that the calculations in \cite{IP16} came after I introduced to Ivanov many of the interesting (sub-Riemannian) comparison problems and drew their attention to \cite{CW10}. While I can hardly wish to be associated with \cite{IP16}, a quick look shows the line for line substantial overlap of \cite[Section 3]{IP16} with Chang and Wu' proof \cite[Lemma 3.3]{CW10}, the publication of collaborative work without a discussion with all sides is notable. Therefore, I decided to give my independent approach to the problem.
{\bf Acknowledgments.}
Thanks are due to Qi Zhang for insightful comments on the S-Y Cheng eigenvalue estimate during the Beijing Workshop on Conformal Geometry and Geometric PDE in 2015, and to Jack Lee and Ben Chow for some useful discussions. The author also acknowledges the support of the Simons Foundation grant \#279381.
\section{Proofs of the Propositions}
\subsection{Some preliminaries}\label{ss:prelim}
Throughout this section $M$ will be a qc manifold of dimension $4n+3$, \cite{Biq2}, with horizontal space $H$ locally given as the kernel of a 1-form $\eta=(\eta_1,\eta_2,\eta_3)$ with values in $\mathbb{R}^3$, and Biquard connection $\nabla$ with torsion $T$. Below we record some of the properties needed for this paper, see also \cite{Biq1} and \cite{IV3} for a more expanded exposition.
The $Sp(n)Sp(1)$ structure on $H$ is
fixed by a positive definite symmetric tensor $g$ and a rank-three bundle $\mathbb{Q}$ of endomorphisms of $H$ locally generated by three almost complex structures $I_1,I_2,I_3$ on $H$ satisfying the identities of the imaginary unit quaternions and also the conditions $$g(I_s.,I_s.)=g(.,.)\qquad \text{and} \qquad 2g(I_sX,Y)\ =\
d\eta_s(X,Y).$$
Associated with the Biquard connection is the vertical space $V$, which is complementary to $H$ in $TM$. In the case $n=1$ we shall make the usual assumption of existence of Reeb vector fields $\xi_1, \xi_2, \xi_3$, so that the connection is defined following D. Duchemin \cite{D}. The fundamental 2-forms $\omega_s$ of the fixed qc
structure will be denoted by $\omega_s$,
\begin{equation*}
2\omega_{s|H}\ =\ \, d\eta_{s|H},\qquad
\xi\lrcorner\omega_s=0,\quad \xi\in V.
\end{equation*}
In order to give some idea of the involved quantities we list a few more essential for us details. Recall that
$\nabla$ preserves the decomposition $H\oplus V$ and the $
Sp(n)Sp(1)$ structure on $H$, $$\nabla g=0, \quad \nabla\Gamma(\mathbb{Q})
\subset \Gamma( \mathbb{Q})$$ and its torsion on $H$ is given by
$T(X,Y)=-[X,Y]_{|V}$. Furthermore, for a vertical field $\xi\in V$, the endomorphism
$T_{\xi}\equiv T(\xi,.)_{|H}$ of $H$ belongs to the space $ (sp(n)\oplus sp(1))^{\bot}\subset
gl(4n)$ hence $ T({\xi}, X,Y)=g(T_{\xi}X,Y)$ is a well defined tensor field. The two $Sp(n)Sp(1)$-invariant trace-free symmetric
2-tensors $T^0(X,Y)= g((T_{\xi_1}^{0}I_1+T_{\xi_2}^{0}I_2+T_{
\xi_3}^{0}I_3)X,Y)$, $U(X,Y) =g(uX,Y)$ on $H$, introduced in
\cite{IMV}, satisfy
\begin{equation} \label{propt}
\begin{aligned} T^0(X,Y)+T^0(I_1X,I_1Y)+T^0(I_2X,I_2Y)+T^0(I_3X,I_3Y)=0, \\
U(X,Y)=U(I_1X,I_1Y)=U(I_2X,I_2Y)=U(I_3X,I_3Y). \end{aligned}
\end{equation}
Note that when $n=1$, the tensor $U$ vanishes. The tensors $T^0$ and $U$ determine completely the torsion endomorphism due to
the identity \cite[Proposition~2.3]{IV} $
4T^0(\xi_s,I_sX,Y)=T^0(X,Y)-T^0(I_sX,I_sY),$$ which in view of \eqref{propt} implies
\begin{equation}\label{need1}
\sum_{s=1}^3T(\xi_s,I_sX,Y)=
T^0(X,Y)-3U(X,Y).
\end{equation}
The curvature of the Biquard connection is $R=[\nabla,\nabla]-\nabla_{[\ ,\ ]}$ with {qc-Ricci tensor} and \textit{normalized} qc-scalar
curvature, defined by respectively by
\begin{equation*} \label{e:horizontal ricci}
Ric(X,Y)=\sum_{a=1}^{4n}{g(R(e_a,X)Y,e_a)}, \qquad
8n(n+2)S=\sum_{a=1}^{4n}Ric(e_a,e_a).
\end{equation*}
According to \cite{Biq1} the Ricci tensor restricted to $H$ is a
symmetric tensor. Remarkably, the torsion tensor determines the qc-Ricci tensor of the Biquard connection on $M$ in view of the formula, \cite{IMV},
\begin{equation}\label{e:Ric by torsion}
Ric(X,Y) \ =\ (2n+2)T^0(X,Y) +(4n+10)U(X,Y)+\frac{S}{4n}g(X,Y).
\end{equation}
Finally, $\vol$ will denote the volume form
\begin{equation}\label{e:volume form}
\vol=\eta_1\wedge\eta_2\wedge\eta_3\wedge\Omega^n,
\end{equation}
where $\Omega=\omega_1\wedge\omega_1+\omega_2\wedge\omega_2+\omega_3\wedge\omega_3$ is the {fundamental 4-form}. We note the integration by parts formula
\begin{equation} \label{div}
\int_M (\nabla^*\sigma)\,\, Vol_{\eta}\ =\ 0,
\end{equation}
where the (horizontal) divergence of a horizontal
vector field $\sigma\in\Lambda^1\, (H)$ is given by $\nabla^* \sigma =-tr|_{H}\nabla\sigma= -\nabla \sigma(e_a,e_a) $ for an orthonormal frame $\{e_a\}_{a=1}^{4n}$ of the horizontal space.
\subsection{Proof of Proposition \protect\ref{p:Paneitz estimate}}
We start with a formula for the change of the dependent
function in the $P$-function of $f$. To this effect, with $f=f(F)$, a short
calculation shows the next identity
\begin{multline*}
\nabla^3 f(Z,X,Y)=f^{\prime }\nabla^3F(Z,X,Y)+f^{\prime \prime \prime
}dF(Z)dF(X)dF(Y) \\
+f^{\prime \prime }\nabla^2F(Z,X)dF(Y) +f^{\prime \prime }\nabla^2F(Z,Y)dF(X)+f^{\prime
\prime }\nabla^2F(X,Y)dF(Z).
\end{multline*}
Recalling definition \eqref{e:P form} we obtain
\begin{multline} \label{e:P from change variable}
P_f(Z)=f^{\prime }P_F(Z) + f^{\prime \prime \prime }|\Cr F|^2dF(Z) + 2 f^{\prime
\prime 2}F (Z, \nabla F)+ f^{\prime \prime }(\Delta F)dF(Z) \\
+f^{\prime \prime }\sum_{s=1}^3 g(\nabla^2 F, \omega_s)dF(I_s Z),
\end{multline}
which implies the identity
\begin{equation} \label{e:Paneitz change variable}
P_f(\nabla f)=f^{\prime 2}P_F(\nabla F) + f^{\prime }f^{\prime \prime \prime
}|\Cr F|^4 + 2f^{\prime }f^{\prime \prime }\nabla ^2F (\nabla F, \nabla F)+f^{\prime
}f^{\prime \prime }|\Cr F|^2\Delta F.
\end{equation}
In our case, since we are interested in expressing the integral of
uP_f(\nabla f)=e^{-f}P_f(\nabla f)$ in terms of the integral of a $P
-function of some function, equation \eqref{e:Paneitz change variable} leads
to the ordinary differential equation $u\left (-\frac {u^{\prime }}{u
\right)^2=const$. Therefore, we let $u=F^2$ and find
\begin{equation} \label{e:Paneitz change variable F}
uP_f(\nabla f)=4P_F(\nabla F) + 8F^{-2}|\nabla F|^4 -8F^{-1} \nabla^2F
(\nabla F, \nabla F)-4F^{-1}|\nabla F|^2\Delta F.
\end{equation}
Now, the last three terms will be expressed back in the variable $f$ which gives
\begin{equation} \label{e:Paneitz change variable f}
uP_f(\nabla f)=4P_F(\nabla F) + \left [-\frac 14|\nabla f|^4+\frac 12
|\nabla f|^2\Delta f+ \nabla^2f (\nabla f, \nabla f)\right]u
\end{equation}
At this point, we integrate the above identity and then apply the (integration
by parts) divergence formula \eqref{div} in order to show
\begin{equation*}
\int_M \nabla^2f (\nabla f, \nabla f)u \, Vol_{\eta}=\frac 12\int_M \left[
|\nabla f|^4-|\nabla f|^2\Delta f\right]u \, Vol_{\eta},
\end{equation*}
which leads to \eqref{e:Paneitz estimate}. The proof of Proposition \ref{p:Paneitz estimate} is complete.
\subsection{Proof of Proposition \protect\ref{p:energy ineq}}
The initial step is identical to the Riemannian case \cite{Ni04}, so we skip the computations. Let $w=2\Delta f - |\nabla
f|^2$. Using the heat equation and integration by parts, exactly as in the Riemannian case, we have
\begin{equation}\label{e:E'}
\ddt \mathcal{E}(t)=\int_M(\partial_t-\Delta)(uw)\, Vol_{\eta}
\end{equation}
and also
\begin{equation}\label{e:key 1}
(\partial_t-\Delta)(uw)=\left [2g\left ( \nabla\left (\Delta f \right),
\nabla f\right)-\Delta|\nabla f|^2 \right]u.
\end{equation}
Next, we apply the qc Bochner formula \cite{IPV1, IPV2}
\begin{multline*}
\frac12\triangle |\nabla f|^2=|\nabla^2f|^2+g\left (\nabla (\triangle f),
\nabla f \right )+2(n+2)S|\nabla f|^2 \\
+2(n+2)T^0(\nabla f,\nabla f) +4(n+1)U(\nabla f,\nabla f) + 4R_f(\nabla f),
\end{multline*}
where
\begin{equation*}
R_f(Z)=\sum_{s=1}^3\nabla^2f(\xi_s,I_sZ).
\end{equation*}
Therefore,
\begin{multline} \label{e:dt-lap}
\frac 12(\partial_t-\Delta)(uw) =\big[-|\nabla^2f|^2-2(n+2)S|\nabla
f|^2-2(n+2)T^0(\nabla f,\nabla f) \\
-4(n+1)U(\nabla f,\nabla f) - 4R_f (\nabla f)\big]u
\end{multline}
The next step is the computation of $\int_M R_f (\nabla f)u\, Vol_{\eta}$ in two ways as was done in \cite{IPV1,IPV2} for the Lichnerowicz type first eigenvalue lower bound but integrating with respect to $\vol$ rather than $u\vol$ as we need to do here. For ease of reading we will follow closely \cite[Section
8.1.1]{IV14} but notice the opposite convention of the sub-Laplacian in \cite[Section 8.1.1]{IV14}.
First with the help of the $P$-function, working similarly to \cit
[Lemma 3.2]{IPV2} where the integration was with respect to $\vol$, we have
\begin{multline} \label{e:Rf u1}
\int_M R_f (\nabla f)u\, Vol_{\eta}=\int_M [- \frac{1}{4n}P_n(\nabla f)
\frac{1}{4n}(\triangle f)^2-S|\nabla f|^2 \\
+ \frac{n+1}{n-1}U(\nabla f,\nabla f)]u\, Vol_{\eta} +\frac {1}{4n}\int_M
|\nabla f|^2(\Delta f)u\, Vol_{\eta},
\end{multline}
with the convention that in the case $n=1$ the formula is understood by formally dropping the term
involving (the vanishing) tensor $U$. Notice the appearance of a "new" term
in the last integral in comparison to the analogous formula in \cite[Section
8.1.1, p. 310]{IV14}. Indeed, taking into account the $Sp(n)Sp(1)$ invariance of $R_f(\nabla f)$
and Ricci's identities we have, cf. \cite[Lemma 3.2]{IPV2},
\begin{equation*}
R_f(X)=-\frac {1}{4n}\sum_{s=1}^3\sum_{a=1}^{4n} \nabla^3 f(I_sX, e_a, I_s e_a)+\left [ T^0(X,\nabla f)-3U(X, \nabla f)\right]
\end{equation*}
hence \eqref{e:P form} gives
\begin{equation*}
uR_f (\nabla f)= \big[- \frac{1}{4n}P_n(\nabla f)-S|\nabla f|^2 + \frac{n+1}{n-1
U(\nabla f,\nabla f)\big]u\newline
+\frac {1}{4n}\sum_{a=1}^{4n}\nabla^3f(\nabla f, e_a, e_a)u.
\end{equation*}
An integration by parts shows the validity of \eqref{e:Rf u1}.
On the other hand, we have
\begin{multline} \label{e:Rf u2}
\int_MR_f(\nabla f) u\, Vol_{\eta} =-\int_M \left[\frac {1}{4n}\sum_{s=1}^3
g(\nabla^2 f, \omega_s)^2 +T^0(\nabla f,\nabla f)-3U(\nabla f,\nabla f
\right]u\vol,
\end{multline}
which other than using different volume forms is identical to the second formula in \cite[Section 8.1.1, p. 310
{IV14}. Indeed, following \cite[Lemma 3.4]{IPV1}, using Ricci's identity \[\nabla^2f
(X,\xi_s)-\nabla^2f(\xi_s,X)=T(\xi_s,X,\nabla f)\] and \eqref{need1}, we have
\[
R_f(\Cr f)=\left(\sum_{s=1}^3\nabla^2f(I_s\Cr f, \xi_s) \right)-\left[ T^0(\Cr f, \Cr f)-3U(\Cr f, \Cr f)\right]
\]
An integration by parts gives \eqref{e:Rf u2}, noting
the term $\sum_{s=1}^3
df(\xi_s)df(I_s\nabla f)=0$ and taking into account
that by Ricci's identity
$$\nabla^2f
(X,Y)-\nabla^2f(Y,X)=-2\sum_{s=1}^3\omega_s(X,Y)df(\xi_s)$$
we have
g(\nabla^2f , \omega_s) {=}\sum_{a=1}^{4n}\nabla^2f(e_a,I_se_a)=-4ndf(\xi_s).
$
Now, working as in \cite[Section 8.1.1, p. 310]{IV14}, we subtract \eqref{e:Rf u2}
and three times formula \eqref{e:Rf u1} from \eqref{e:dt-lap} which brings
us to the following identity
\begin{multline} \label{e:E formula 1}
\frac 12 \frac{d}{dt}\mathcal{E}(t)=\int_M\big[ -|(\nabla^2f)_{0}|^2-\frac {2n+
}{2}\mathcal{L}(\nabla f,\nabla f)\big]u\, Vol_{\eta} \\
+\frac {1}{4n}\int_M \big[3P_f(\nabla f)+2(\Delta f)^2-3|\nabla f |^2\Delta
f \big]u \vol,
\end{multline}
where $|(\nabla^2f)_{0}|^2$ is the square of the norm of the traceless part of the horizontal Hessian
\begin{equation*}
|(\nabla^2 f)_0|^2=|\nabla^2f|^2-\frac{1}{4n}\Big[(\triangle
f)^2+\sum_{s=1}^{3}[g(\nabla^2f,\omega_s)]^2\Big].
\end{equation*}
Next, we consider $\int_M \big[2(\Delta f)^2-3|\nabla f |^2\Delta f \big]u\,
Vol_{\eta}$. Using the heat equation we have the identical to the Riemannian case relation
\begin{equation*}
\frac{d}{dt} \mathcal{E}(t)=\frac{d}{dt} \int_M w \Delta u\,
Vol_{\eta}=\int_M \big(-2(\Delta f)^2 + 3|\nabla f|^2\Delta f - |\nabla f|^
\big )u\, Vol_{\eta},
\end{equation*}
hence
\begin{equation}\label{e:E formula 2}
\int_M \big( 2(\Delta f)^2-3|\nabla f|^2\Delta f \big) u\, Vol_{\eta}=
\frac{d}{dt} \mathcal{E}(t)-\int_M |\nabla f|^4u\, Vol_{\eta}.
\end{equation}
A substitution of the above formula in \eqref{e:E formula 1} gives
\begin{multline*
\frac {2n+1}{4n}\frac{d}{dt} \mathcal{E}(t)=\int_M\big[ -|(\nabla^2f)_0 |^2
\frac {2n+1}{2}\mathcal{L}(\nabla f,\nabla f)\big]u\, Vol_{\eta}
+\frac {1}{4n}\int_M \big[3P_f(\nabla f)- |\nabla f|^4\big]u\, Vol_{\eta}.
\end{multline*}
Finally, we invoke Proposition \ref{p:Paneitz estimate} in order to complete the
proof.
\section{The CR case}\label{s:CR}
In this section we prove the monotonicity formula in the CR case stated in Proposition \ref{p:CR energy ineq} following the method we employed in the qc case. This implies the monotonicity of the entropy like energy which was proved earlier in \cite{CW10}.
Throughout the section $M$ will be a $(2n+1)$-dimensional strictly pseudoconvex (integrable) CR manifold with a fixed pseudohermitian structure defined by a contact form $\eta$ and complex structure $J$ on the horizontal space $H=Ker \, \eta$. The fundamental 2-form is defined by $\omega=\frac 12 \eta$ and the Webster metric is $g(X,Y)=-\omega (JX,Y)$ which is extended to a Riemannian metric on $M$ by declaring that the Reeb vector field associated to $\eta$ is of length one and orthonormal to the horizontal space. We shall denote by $\Cr$ the associated Tanaka-Webster connection \cite{T} and \cite{W, W1}, while $\triangle u=tr^g(\nabla^2 u)$ will be the negative sub-Laplacian with the trace taken with respect to an orthonormal basis of the horizontal $2n$-dimensional space. Finally, we define the Ricci type tensor
\begin{equation}\label{e:Lichnerowicz tensor CR}
\mathcal{L}(X,Y)=\rho(JX,Y)+2nA(JX,Y)
\end{equation}
recalling that on a CR manifold we have
\begin{equation} \label{rid}
Ric(X,Y)=\rho(JX,Y)+2(n-1)A(JX,Y),
\end{equation}
where $\rho$ is the $(1,1)$-part of the pseudohermitian Ricci
tensor (the Webster Ricci tensor) while the
$(2,0)+(0,2)$-part is the Webster torsion $A$, see \cite[Chapter 7]{IV3} for the expressions in real coordinates of these known formulas \cite{W,W1}, see also \cite{DT}.
With the above convention in place, as in \cite{CW10}, for a positive solution of \eqref{e:heat} we consider the entropy \eqref{e:N definition} and energy \eqref{enf}, where $\vol=\eta\wedge(d\eta)^{2n}$.
We turn to the proof of Proposition \ref{p:CR energy ineq}. For a function $f$ we define the one form,
\begin{equation} \label{e:Pdef}
P_{f}(X)=\nabla ^{3}f(X,e_{b},e_{b})+\nabla
^{3}f(JX,e_{b},Je_{b})+4nA(X,J\nabla f)
\end{equation
so that the fourth order CR-Paneitz operator is given by
\begin{multline} \label{e:Cdef}
C(f)=-\nabla ^{\ast }P=(\nabla_{e_a} P)({e_a})=\nabla ^{4}f(e_a,e_a,e_{b},e_{b})+\nabla
^{4}f(e_a,Je_a,e_{b},Je_{b})\\
-4n\nabla^* A(J\nabla f)-4n\,g(\nabla^2 f,JA).
\end{multline}
By \cite{GL88}, when $n>1$ a function $f\in \mathcal{C}^3(M)$ satisfies the equation $Cf=0$ iff $f$ is CR-pluriharmonic. Furthermore, the CR-Paneitz operator is non-negative,
\[
\int_M f\cdot Cf \vol=-\int_MP_f(\gr) \vol\geq 0.
\]
On the other hand, in the three dimensional case the positivity condition is a CR invariant since it is independent of the choice of the contact form by the conformal invariance of $C$ proven in \cite{Hi93}.
We turn to the proof of Proposition \ref{p:CR energy ineq}. Taking into account \eqref{e:key 1} and the CR Bochner formula \cite{Gr},
\begin{multline}\label{e:bohh}
\frac12\triangle |\nabla f|^2=|\nabla^2 f|^2+g(\nabla(\triangle f),\nabla f)+Ric(\nabla
f,\nabla f)+2A(J\nabla f,\nabla f)
+ 4R_f(\Cr f),
\end{multline}
where $R_f(Z)=\nabla df(\xi,JZ)$, see \cite[Section 7.1]{IV14} and references therein but note the opposite sign of the sub-Laplacian, we obtain the next identity
\begin{equation} \label{e:dt-CR lap}
\frac 12(\partial_t-\Delta)(uw) =\big[-|\nabla^2f|^2-Ric(\nabla f,\nabla f)
-2A(\nabla f,\Cr \nabla f) - 4R_f (\nabla f)\big]u.
\end{equation}
Since \eqref{e:E'} still holds, working as in the qc case we compute $\int_M R_F(\Cr f)u\vol$ in two ways \cite[Lemma 4]{Gr} and \cite[Lemma 8.7]{IVO} following the exposition \cite{IV14}.
From Ricci's identity $$\nabla^2f (X,Y)-\nabla^2f(Y,X)=-2\omega(X,Y)df(\xi)$$ it follows $df(\xi)=-\frac {1}{2n}g(\nabla^2 f, \omega)$. Hence
\[
\nabla^2f(JZ, \xi)=-\frac {1}{2n}\sum_{b=1}^{2n}\nabla^3 f(JZ, e_b,Je_b),
\]
where $\{e_b\}_{b=1}^{2n}$ is an orthonormal basis of the horizontal space. Applying Ricci's identity
\[
\nabla^2f (X,\xi)-\nabla^2f(\xi,X)=A(X,\nabla f)
\]
it follow
\begin{equation}\label{e:CR rem}
R_f(Z)=\nabla ^{2}f(\xi ,JZ)=-\frac{1}{2n}\sum_{b=1}^{2n}\nabla^3 f(JZ, e_b,Je_b) -A(JZ,\nabla f).
\end{equation}
Taking into account \eqref{e:Pdef} the last formula gives
\[
R_f(Z)=-\frac{1}{2n}P_f(Z) +A(JZ,\nabla f)+\frac{1}{2n}\sum_{b=1}^{2n}\nabla^3 f(Z, e_b,e_b).
\]
Now, an integration by parts shows the next identity
\begin{multline}\label{e:Rf u1 CR}
\int_M R_f(\Cr f) u\vol=\int_M\big[-\frac{1}{2n}P_f(\Cr f) +A(J\nabla f,\nabla f)-\frac {1}{2n}(\Delta f)^2 +\frac {1}{2n}|\Cr f|^2 (\Delta f) \big]u\vol.
\end{multline}
On the other hand, using again \eqref{e:CR rem} but now we integrate and then use integration by parts we have
\begin{equation}\label{e:Rf u2 CR}
\int_M R_f(\Cr f) u\vol=\int_M\big[ -\frac {1}{2n}g(\nabla^2 f,\omega)^2-A(J\nabla f, \nabla f)\big ] u\vol.
\end{equation}
At this point, exactly as in the qc case, we subtract \eqref{e:Rf u2 CR}
and three times formula \eqref{e:Rf u1 CR} from \eqref{e:dt-CR lap}, which gives
\begin{equation*
\mathcal{E}'(t)=-\int_M\big[ |(\nabla^2f)_{0}|^2 +\mathcal{L}(\nabla f,\nabla f)\big]u\vol \\
+\frac {1}{2n}\int_M \big[3P_f(\nabla f)+2(\Delta f)^2-3|\nabla f |^2\Delta
f \big]u\vol,
\end{equation*}
where $|(\nabla^2f)_{0}|^2$ is the square of the norm of the traceless part of the horizontal Hessian
\begin{equation*}
|(\nabla^2 f)_0|^2=|\nabla^2f|^2-\frac{1}{2n}\Big[(\triangle
f)^2+g(\nabla^2f,\omega)^2\Big].
\end{equation*}
Taking into account that the formulas in Proposition \ref{p:Paneitz estimate} and \eqref{e:E formula 2} hold unchanged we complete the proof.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,630 |
Q: Mocking out with Sinon.js a dependency to be injected Having the following balanceRepository.js file.
module.exports = function(){
this.getBalance = (accountId)=>{
throw 'NotImplementedException';
};};
And the service transactionService.js file.
module.exports = function(balanceRepo){
this.isTransactionAllowed = (amount, accountId)=>{
const balance = balanceRepo.getBalance(accountId);
return amount <= balance;
};};
I would like to unit test that when we call transactionService.isTransactionAllowed, it will call internally to balanceRepository.getBalance. I was expecting the following code to work.
let BalanceRepository = require('../balanceRepository');
let TransactionService = require('../transactionService');
let should = require('should');
let sinon = require('sinon');
describe('transaction service', ()=>{
let fakeBalanceRepo = sinon.spy(BalanceRepository);
let transactionSrv = new TransactionService(fakeBalanceRepo);
transactionSrv.isTransactionAllowed(100, 987654321);
it('should call getBalance', ()=>{
fakeBalanceRepo.getBalance.should.be.called();
});});
I create a spy of the class BalanceRepository. I inject that spy object to my real implementation of TransactionService. Then, I assert that the getBalance method is called on the spy. It makes sense to me but it is not working!!
How can I inject a fake and assert that one of its methods was called?
A: sinon.spy(BalanceRepository) doesn't mean that class methods will be automatically spied (they won't).
TransactionService expects BalanceRepository instance while fakeBalanceRepo is a constructor.
If the intention is to spy on class method and not change its behaviour, it's:
let balanceRepo = new BalanceRepository;
sinon.spy(balanceRepo, 'isTransactionAllowed')
let transactionSrv = new TransactionService(balanceRepo);
transactionSrv.isTransactionAllowed(100, 987654321);
balanceRepo.getBalance.should.be.called();
A: This works as estus has commented.
let balanceRepo = new BalanceRepository();
let fakeGetBalance = sinon.stub(balanceRepo, 'getBalance');
let transactionSrv = new TransactionService(balanceRepo);
transactionSrv.isTransactionAllowed(100, 987654321);
it('should call getBalance', ()=>{
fakeGetBalance.should.be.called();
});
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 5,060 |
Q: SimpleDialog2 jQuery Mobile checkbox I have this code to show a popup with a checkbox, and I want when I click on the checkbox that triggers an alert with a value of the checkbox. How can I do this?
$('<div>').simpledialog2({
mode: 'blank',
headerText: 'Crate',
headerClose: true,
blankContent :
'<div data-role="fieldcontain">'+
'<fieldset data-role="controlgroup"><legend>Select:</legend><input type="checkbox" name="checkbox-1a" id="checkbox-1a" class="custom" /><label for="checkbox-1a">Cheetos</label></fieldset>'+
'</div>'+
'<a rel="close" data-role="button" href="#" id="submit">Submit</a>'
})
A: If I understand your question correctly (you want an alert to be displayed whenever someone clicks on the checkbox), just put this within the javascript tag in the head:
$('#checkbox-1a').click(function () {
alert(this.checked);
});
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 5,137 |
\section{Introduction}
\subsection{The relativistic localization problem}
Relativistic Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is characterized by an intricate interplay between particles and fields. While the dynamics of the theory are expressed in terms of fields, in experiments we observe particles \cite{Ana08}. However, the description of the latter is a source of conceptual problems. Particles have two key properties that are crucial to the physical interpretation of experiments. First, they are discrete, countable entities: the number of particle-detection events is always a positive integer. Second, they are localizable entities: every particle-detection event is localized in space and in time.
Particle discreteness is elegantly expressed in terms of the QFT spacetime symmetries. It follows from the requirement that the mass operator $\hat{M}^2 = \hat{P}^{\mu}\hat{P}_{\mu}$---defined in terms of the generators $\hat{P}^{\mu}$ of spacetime translations---has discrete spectrum \cite{Haag}. Hence, the corresponding subspace contains single-particle states that correspond to unitary irreducible representations of the Poincar\'e group.
Unlike discreteness, localization is highly problematic. Existing definitions of localizing observables conflict the requirement of relativistic causality, as evidenced by several theorems \cite{Schl71, Heg98, Mal96}. Assume, for example, that localization is defined with respect to some spatial observable ${\pmb x}$, leading to a sufficiently localized probability distribution $\rho({\pmb x}, t)$ for ${\pmb x}$ at some moment of time $t$. Then, time evolution leads to a probability distribution $\rho({\pmb x}, t')$ that evolves superluminally at latter times $t'$.
The localization problem originates from the fact that particle trajectories are not fundamental concepts in quantum theory. In absence of trajectories, localization is usually expressed in terms of single-time position observables. The most well-known example is the Newton-Wigner position operator $\hat{\pmb x}$ \cite{NW46, Wight62}. There are three problems in the physical interpretation of such observables. First, they do not transform covariantly under Lorentz transformations. This is due to the fact that there exists no time operator in quantum theory \cite{Pauli}; the position observable is not the spatial component of some covariant four-vector. Second, the associated probability distributions exhibit superluminal behavior \cite{RoUs87}. Third, massless particles with spin $s \neq 0$ (e.g., photons) are not localizable \cite{Wight62}, in contrast to the existence of well-localized photon-detection records.
Hence, even if there are many ways to construct densities $\rho({\pmb x}, t)$ with respect to some position variable ${\pmb x}$, we cannot interpret $\rho({\pmb x}, t)d^3x$ as the probability to find the particle in the volume $d^3x$ at the space point ${\pmb x}$. As a result, there is no obvious measure to quantify the localization of a quantum state, like, for example, the position variance in non-relativistic quantum mechanics.
The localization problem is not an artefact of the particle description, it persists even in a full QFT treatment. The definition of appropriate observables for localized measurement records is necessary for the conceptual completeness of relativistic quantum theory, irrespective of whether one employs particle or field degrees of freedom. It has been
recognized that localization observables should not be viewed as attributes of particles (or even of their associated fields),
but as attributes of the interaction between particles (or fields) and a measuring apparatus \cite{Haag, PeTe}. In this perspective, a solution to the localization problem requires
a consistent generalization of quantum measurement theory to relativistic QFTs.
\subsection{Localization via time-of-arrival observables}
The use of single-time position observables in relativistic systems suffers from two major conceptual problems. First, a position measurement at fixed time $t$ corresponds to an {\em instantaneous} scan of all space in order to determine the particle's position. It is implausible that such a process can be expressed in terms of a localized field-apparatus interaction. A breakdown of causality in the measurement of such observables is not a surprise.
Second, we do not measure single time observables in the laboratory. Actual particle detectors (e.g., photographic plates, silicon strips) have finite extension, and they are made sensitive for a long time interval during which particles are detected. This means that the location of a detection event is a fixed parameter of the experiment; the actual random variable is the detection time. Hence, it is more realistic to express particle localization in terms of {\em time-of-arrival measurements} rather than position ones \cite{Wer86}.
The simplest example of a time-of-arrival measurement is the following.
A particle is prepared on an initial state $|\psi_0 \rangle$ that is localized around $x = 0$ and has positive mean momentum. If a detector is placed at $x = L$, what is the probability $P(L, t)dt$ that the particle is detected at $x = L$ at some moment between $t$ and $t+\delta t$? The lack of a self-adjoint operator for time means that we cannot employ Born's rule in order to obtain an unambiguous answer. In spite of the problem's apparent simplicity, no unique time-of-arrival probability exists.
Several different approaches have been developed, each with a different conceptual framework. For reviews on the time-of-arrival issue (mainly in non-relativistic quantum mechanics), see, Refs. \cite{ML, ToAbooks}.
In this paper, we construct relativistic time-of-arrival observables that describe particle localization using the
Quantum Temporal Probabilities (QTP) method \cite{AnSav12}. QTP was first developed in order to address the time-of-arrival problem \cite{AnSav12, AnSav06}. It was then extended to a general algorithm for constructing quantum probabilities for temporally extended observables, i.e., observables that are not defined at a single pre-determined moment of time. QTP has been applied to the temporal characterization of tunneling \cite{AnSav13, AnSav08, AnSav17b}, to non-exponential decays \cite{An08}, to the response and correlations of accelerated particle detectors \cite{AnSav11}, and for defining entanglement witnesses in terms of temporal observables \cite{AnSav17}.
The key idea is to distinguish between the time parameter of Schr\"odinger equation from the time variable associated to particle detection \cite{Sav99, Sav10}. The latter are then treated as macroscopic quasi-classical variables associated to the detector degrees of freedom. Here, we use the word `quasi-classical' as in the decoherent histories approach to quantum theory \cite{Gri, Omn1, Omn2, GeHa, hartlelo}. It refers to coarse-grained quantum variables that satisfy appropriate decoherence conditions, and they approximately satisfy classical evolution equations \cite{GeHa, hartlelo}. Hence, although the detector is described in microscopic scales by quantum theory, its macroscopic records are expressed in terms of classical spacetime coordinates.
\subsection{Results}
In our approach, localization is expressed in terms of time-of-arrival observables, defined as emergent attributes of the interaction between a quantum field and a measuring apparatus---see Refs. \cite{ ECM08, HaYe09, HELM} for non-relativistic measurement models for the time-of-arrival. We make no reference to particles at the fundamental level.
Time-of-arrival probabilities are expressed in terms of QFT correlation functions, and the particle description {\em emerges} from the structure of the correlation functions. This is particularly important for the broader applicability of the method. Most experimentally accessible quantum states do not have definite particle number: there exist multiple decay channels and the creation of soft photons must always be taken into account \cite{WeinbergQFT}.
The main results of this paper are the following. First, we derive a general formula for the particle detection probability $P(X) d^4X$, for detection within a four-volume $d^4X$ at a spacetime point $X$.
We emphasize that $P(X)$ is a {\em genuine density} with respect to $X$. This is important because the probability density given by Born's rule $P({\pmb x}, t) = |\psi({\pmb x},t)|^2$ is a density with respect to ${\pmb x}$, but not with respect to $t$, i.e., $t$ appears as a parameter and not as a random variable. In contrast, time appears as a genuine random variable in the probability densities derived here.
The probability density $P(X)$ is a linear functional of a QFT two-point function that characterizes the field-detector coupling. It turns out that all information about the apparatus is contained in a single function that describes the four-momentum content of the apparatus pointer state.
This probability formula is completely general: it applies to all QFTs (free and interacting) and to all types of particle. It is a significant improvement over earlier QTP formulas \cite{AnSav12}, in terms of generality and rigor.
Second, we analyze in detail the case of a free scalar field. We construct a general class of Positive-Operator-Valued Measures (POVM) for the time of arrival of a relativistic particle with mass $m$ and spin $s = 0$. Each POVM is uniquely characterized by a {\em localization operator} $\hat{L}$ that describes how the apparatus localizes particle detection events.
Maximum localization is achieved for a specific $\hat{L}$ that is closely related to the Newton-Wigner position operator \cite{NW46}. In the non-relativistic limit, the maximum-localization POVM reduces to the one of Kijowski \cite{Kij}.
Third, we derive a new time-energy uncertainty relation in the form of a lower bound to the deviation $\Delta t$ of the time-of-arrival,
\begin{eqnarray}
(\Delta t)^2 \geq \frac{1}{4(\Delta H)^2} +\frac{m^2}{4} \langle \hat{H}^{-2}\hat{p}^{-4}\rangle; \label{1}
\end{eqnarray}
$(\Delta H)^2$ is the variance of the Hamiltonian $\hat{H} = \sqrt{\hat{p}^2+m^2}$ and $\hat{p}$ is the standard momentum operator.
This uncertainty relation is valid for all states with strictly positive momentum, and it does not depend on the properties of the detector. We argue that the r.h.s of Eq. (\ref{1}) is a measure for the spacetime localization of relativistic particles.
\medskip
We
describe the interaction between detector and microscopic particles in terms of a Hamiltonian that is a local functional of quantum fields. This implies that the field correlation functions that appear in the probability assignment satisfy QFT causality conditions.
For this reason, we strongly believe that the time-of-arrival observables constructed here are fully consistent with relativistic causality. Further work is required in order to substantiate this claim. It is necessary to extend the results of this paper to set-ups that involve multiple, spatially separated detectors---see, Ref. \cite{AnSav17} for the non-relativistic case---and show that the resulting probabilities do not
lead to superluminal propagation of information.
In this paper, we focus on the localization of particles with zero spin. However, our approach can be straightforwardly generalized to particles of any spin. We believe that such a generalization will allow us to quantify localization even in the challenging cases of massless particles with spin (photons, gravitons), and of particles in mass-eigenstate superpositions (neutrinos).
\medskip
The structure of the paper is the following. In Sec. 2, we derive the probability formula for particle detection that applies to any QFT. In Sec. 3, we specialize this formula to the case of free scalar fields. In Sec. 4, we construct time-of-arrival probability measures for spinless relativistic particles, and we analyze the properties of the localization operator. In Sec. 5, we derive an uncertainty relation for the time of arrival. In Sec. 6, we summarize and discuss our results.
\section{Relativistic covariant measurement model }
\subsection{The QTP probability formula}
In this section, we present the main probability formula, to be employed in our detection model. For a derivation, see Refs. \cite{AnSav12, AnSav13, AnSav17}, and also the appendix. This construction originates from the treatment of spacetime coarse-grainings in the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics \cite{Har91, hartlelo}.
We consider a composite physical system that consists of a microscopic and a macroscopic component. The microscopic component is the quantum system to be measured and the macroscopic component is the measuring device. We denote the Hilbert space associated to the composite system
by
${\cal H}$ and the associated Hamiltonian by $\hat{H}$.
We describe a measurement event as a transition between two complementary subspaces of ${\cal H}$. Hence, we consider a splitting of
${\cal H}$ into two subspaces: ${\cal H} = {\cal
H}_+ \oplus {\cal H}_-$. The subspace ${\cal H}_+$ describes the accessible states of the system given that the event under consideration is realized. For example, if the event is a detection of a microscopic particle by an apparatus, the subspace ${\cal H}_+$ corresponds to all states of the apparatus compatible with the macroscopic record of detection. We
denote the projection operator onto ${\cal H}_+$ as $\hat{P}$ and the projector onto ${\cal H}_-$ as $\hat{Q} := 1 - \hat{P}$.
We construct the probability density with respect to time that is associated to the transition of the system from ${\cal H}_-$ to ${\cal H}_+$. We consider transitions that are correlated with the emergence of a macroscopic record of observation. Such transitions are {\em logically
irreversible}. Once they occur, and a measurement outcome has been recorded, further time evolution of the system does not affect our knowledge that they occurred.
After the transition has occurred, a pointer variable $\lambda$ of the measurement apparatus takes a definite value. Let
$\hat{\Pi}(\lambda)$ be positive operators that correspond to the different values of $\lambda$. For example,
when considering transitions associated with particle detection, the projectors $\hat{\Pi}(\lambda)$ may be correlated to the position, or to the momentum of the microscopic particle. Since $\lambda$ has a value only under the assumption that a detection event has occurred, the alternatives
$\hat{\Pi}(\lambda)$ span the subspace
${\cal H}_+$ and not the full Hilbert space ${\cal H}$. Hence,
\begin{eqnarray}
\sum_\lambda \hat{\Pi}(\lambda) =
\hat{P}.
\end{eqnarray}
Since $\lambda$ refers to a {\em macroscopically distinguishable record} on a measurement apparatus, the observables $\hat{\Pi}(\lambda)$ are highly coarse-grained. We will denote the sampling width of $\lambda$ by $\sigma_{\lambda}$.
We assume an initial state $|\psi_0\rangle \in {\cal H}_+$, and a Hamiltonian of the form $\hat{H} = \hat{H}_0 + \hat{H}_I$, where $[\hat{H}_0, \hat{P}] = 0$ and $\hat{H}_I$ is a small perturbation. This means that the transition from ${\cal H}_-$ to ${\cal H}_+$ is effected only by the interaction Hamiltonian $\hat{H}_I$.
With the above assumptions, we derive the probability density $P(\lambda, t)$ for a transition at time $t$ that leads to a value $\lambda$ for the measured observable
\begin{eqnarray}
P(\lambda, t) = \int ds ds' \sqrt{f(t-s) f(t-s')} Tr \left[\hat{C}(\lambda, s)
\hat{\rho}_0 \hat{C}^{\dagger}(\lambda, s')\right] \label{ampl6}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\hat{\rho}_0 =|\psi_0\rangle \langle \psi_0|$, and
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{C}(\lambda, t) = e^{i \hat{H}_0t} \sqrt{\hat{\Pi}}(\lambda) \hat{H}_I e^{-i \hat{H}_0t},
\label{perturbed}
\end{eqnarray}
to leading order in the perturbation $\hat{H}_I$.
The positive functions $f(s)$ describe sampling for the transition time, with a sampling width $\sigma_T$. They
are localized around $s = 0$, and they are normalized: $\int ds f(s) = 1$.
The function $P(\lambda, t)$ is a {\em density} with respect to both $\lambda$ and $t$, i.e., it defines genuine probability distributions with respect to the time $t$ of transition.
The derivation of Eq. (\ref{ampl6}) requires a {\em decoherence condition}
\begin{eqnarray}
Tr \left[\hat{C}(\lambda', s')
\hat{\rho}_0 \hat{C}^{\dagger}(\lambda, s) \right] \simeq 0, \label{deccond}
\end{eqnarray}
if either $|s - s'| > \sigma_T $, or $|\lambda - \lambda'| > \sigma_{\lambda}$. The decoherence condition is necessary for the existence of records of observation. It holds for any system that contains a macroscopic component such as a measuring apparatus \cite{GeHa, hartlelo}.
The probability density (\ref{ampl6}) is of the form
$Tr[\hat{\rho}_0 \hat{\Pi}(\lambda, t)]$,
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{\Pi}(\lambda, t) = \int ds ds' \sqrt{f(t - s) f(t - s')} \hat{C}^{\dagger}(\lambda, s') \hat{C}(\lambda, s). \label{povm2}
\end{eqnarray}
The operator $\sum_{\lambda} \int_0^{\infty} dt \hat{\Pi} (\lambda, t)$ corresponds to the total probability that an event has been recorded in the time interval $[0, \infty)$. Consequently, the operator
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{\Pi} _{\emptyset} = \hat{1} - \sum_{\lambda} \int_0^{\infty} dt \hat{\Pi} (\lambda, t), \label{nodet}
\end{eqnarray}
corresponds to the alternative $ \emptyset$ that no detection took place. The lack of a measurement record may be due to the fact that some of the particles in the statistical ensemble "missed" the detector, or due to the non-zero probability that the interaction of the microscopic particles with the apparatus leaves no record.
In the systems considered here,
$\hat{\Pi} _{\emptyset} $ is always positive. Hence, then $\hat{\Pi} _{\emptyset} $ together with the positive operators Eq. (\ref{povm2})
define a POVM that is associated to a complete set of alternatives. These POVMs define {\em time-of-arrival observables}.
\subsection{A quantum field detector}
Next, we apply Eq. (\ref{ampl6}) to the measurement of a quantum field by a single measuring apparatus. First, we identify all mathematical objects that enter into the probability formula (\ref{ampl6}).
\bigskip
\noindent {\em Hilbert space structure.}
The quantum field is defined on a Hilbert space ${\cal F}$. We denote the Heisenberg-picture field operators as $\hat{\Phi}_r(X) := \hat{\Phi}_r({\bf x}, t)$, where
$r$ is a collective index that may include both spacetime and internal indices. The fields $\hat{\Phi}_r(X)$ may include both bosonic and fermionic components, and they may be either free or interacting.
In a relativistic system, the Hilbert space ${\cal F}$ carries a unitary representation of the Poincar\'e group. A unitary operator $\hat{U}(\Lambda, a)$ is associated to each element $(\Lambda, a)$ of the Poincar\'e group, so that the fields $\hat{\Phi}_a(X)$ transform as
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{\Phi}_r(X) \rightarrow \hat{U}^{\dagger}(\Lambda, a) \hat{\Phi}_r(X) \hat{U}(\Lambda, a) = D_{r}^{r'}(\Lambda) \hat{\Phi}_{r'}(\Lambda^{-1} X - a), \label{poincare1}
\end{eqnarray}
for some matrix $D_r^{r'}(\Lambda)$.
The measuring apparatus is described by a Hilbert space ${\cal K}$. A detection event is associated to a transition between two complementary subspaces of ${\cal K}$, i.e.,
${\cal K} = {\cal K}^- \oplus
{\cal K}^+$. The subspace ${\cal K}^-$ corresponds to the absence and the subspace ${\cal K}^+$ to the presence of a macroscopic measurement record.
We denote the projector associated to ${\cal K}^+$ by $\hat{E}$.
The Hilbert space ${\cal H}$ describing the total system including the quantum fields and the measurement devices is ${\cal H} = {\cal F} \otimes {\cal K}$.
\bigskip
\noindent {\em Dynamics.} We assume that the detector is static on a Lorentz frame with time parameter $t$. In this frame, the Hamiltonian $\hat{H}_0$ for the non-interacting system is $\hat{H}_{\phi}\otimes I + I \otimes \hat{\mathfrak{h}}$, where $\hat{H}_{\phi}$ is the Hamiltonian of the quantum field, and $\hat{\mathfrak{h}}$ the Hamiltonian of the detector.
Relativistic causality implies that the interaction term $\hat{H}_I$ is a local functional of the field operators \cite{WeinbergQFT},
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{H}_I = \int d^3 x \hat{O}_a({\bf x}) \otimes \hat{J}^a({\bf x}).
\label{vterm}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\hat{O}_a({\pmb x})$ is a composite operator on ${\cal F}$ that is a local functional of the fields $\hat{\Phi}_r$, and $\hat{J}^a({\bf x})$ are current operators defined on the Hilbert space ${\cal K}$ of the detector; $a =1, 2, \ldots n$ is a collective index for the composite operators. We will write $\hat{J}^a({\bf x}) = e^{-i\hat{ \bf \mathfrak{p}}\cdot {\bf x}}\hat{J}^a(0) e^{i\hat{ \bf \mathfrak{p}}\cdot {\bf x}}$, where $ \hat{ \bf \mathfrak{p}}$ is the generator of space translations on the detector Hilbert space ${\cal K}$.
\bigskip
\noindent {\em The initial state.}
We assume a factorized initial state for the total system\footnote{All models of quantum measurement theory presuppose a factorized initial state between detector and apparatus,
In QFT, a generic state of the system does involve correlations between field and apparatus, because their interaction cannot be switched off. The initial state of the apparatus is "dressed" with vacuum fluctuations of the field, which induce a renormalization of the physical parameters of the detector. However, in any reasonable modeling of a measurement apparatus, dressing should not affect the correlation between pointer variables and microscopic degrees of freedom. Its effect should be included into the noise that characterises the evolution of any coarse-grained observable \cite{GeHa}.
Hence, the use of factorized initial states should not significantly affect the probabilities associated to measurements. Renormalization will be needed, because, strictly speaking, the vector (\ref{factorizedpsi}) does belong in a same Hilbert space where a Hamiltonian with the interaction term (\ref{vterm}) exists. This is not necessary in this paper, because we work in the lowest order of perturbation theory. The factorization approximation, Eq. (\ref{factorizedpsi}), may lead to small terms in the probabilities that violate causality, but these correspond to higher order corrections to the probability formula.}, i.e., a state of the form
\begin{eqnarray}
|\psi_0\rangle \otimes |0\rangle \label{factorizedpsi}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\psi_0 \in {\cal F}$ and $|0\rangle \in {\cal K}_-$.
Physical detectors have an energy gap between the non-detection and the detection states; otherwise small environmental perturbations would cause a measurement signal. We assume that the Hamiltonian $\hat{\mathfrak{h}}$ of the apparatus has a unique ground state $|0\rangle$, and a continuum of states separated by a gap $\Delta$ from $|0\rangle$. Hence, the Hilbert space ${\cal K}_-$ consists only of $|0\rangle$. Without loss of generality, we take $E_0 $ to be zero. Since $[ \hat{\mathfrak{h}}, \hat{\mathfrak{p}} ] = 0$, $|0\rangle$ is also an eigenstate of the momentum $\hat{\mathfrak{p}}$. We choose a Lorentz frame so that $\hat{\mathfrak{p}}|0 \rangle = 0$.
\medskip
\noindent {\em Observables.} We will only consider position observables in this paper. Let $\hat{\pmb x}$ be a self-adjoint operator on ${\cal K}_+$, conjugate to the momentum $\hat{\mathfrak{p}}$, $[\hat{x}_i, \hat{\mathfrak{p}}_j] = i \delta_{ij}\hat{E}$. Let $|{\pmb x}, j \rangle$ be the generalized eigenvectors of $\hat{\pmb x}$, where $j$ refers to the remaining degrees of freedom in ${\cal K}_+$.
We define the position sampling operator
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{F}_{\pmb x} = \sum_j \int d^3 x' g({\pmb x} - {\pmb x}')|{\pmb x}', j\rangle \langle {\pmb x}', j|,
\end{eqnarray}
where $g({\pmb x} - {\pmb x}')$ is a sampling function of width $\sigma_X$. We assume that $\int d^3x g({\pmb x}) = 1$, so that $\int d^3x \hat{F}_{\pmb x} = \hat{E}$. By construction, $\hat{F}_{\pmb x}$
transforms covariantly under space translations,
\begin{eqnarray}
e^{i\hat{ \bf \mathfrak{p}}\cdot{\bf a}} \hat{F}_{\pmb x} e^{-i\hat{ \bf \mathfrak{p}}\cdot {\bf a}} = \hat{F}_{{\pmb x} - {\pmb a}}. \label{covar}
\end{eqnarray}
We express the positive operator $\hat{\Pi}({\pmb x})$ on the Hilbert space ${\cal H}$ of the total system as $ I \otimes \hat{F}_{\pmb x}$.
\bigskip
\noindent {\em The probability formula.}
Using the expressions above for the field-detector system, Eq. (\ref{ampl6}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P({\pmb x}, t) = \int ds ds' d^3y d^3 y' R^{ab}_{\lambda, t} ({\pmb y}, s; {\pmb y}', s') Tr \left[ \hat{O}_a({\pmb y}, s)\hat{\rho}_0 \hat{O}^{\dagger}_b({\pmb y}', s')\right], \label{probrel}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{O}_a({\pmb x}, s) = e^{i \hat{H}_{\phi}s} \hat{O}_a({\pmb x}) e^{-i \hat{H}_{\phi}s}
\end{eqnarray}
are Heisenberg-picture composite operators, and the kernel
\begin{eqnarray}
R^{ab}_{{\pmb x}, t} ({\pmb y}, s; {\pmb y}', s') =\sqrt{f(t-s)f(t - s')} \langle 0 | \hat{J}^{b\dagger}({\pmb y}') \sqrt{F}_{\pmb x} e^{i \hat{\mathfrak{h}(s-s')}} \sqrt{F}_{\pmb x} \hat{J}^a({\pmb y}) |0\rangle \label{kernelR}
\end{eqnarray}
depends only on properties of the detector.
By Eq. (\ref{covar}), $\sqrt{F}_{\pmb x} \hat{J}^a({\pmb y}) |0\rangle = e^{-i\hat{ \bf \mathfrak{p}}\cdot {\bf a}} \hat{F}_{{\pmb x} - {\pmb a}} \hat{J}^a(0)|0\rangle$. The un-normalized vector
\begin{eqnarray}
|\omega, a \rangle = \hat{J}^a(0)|0\rangle
\end{eqnarray}
describes an excitation due to particle detection localized around ${\pmb x} =0$. The associated position probability distribution is
\begin{eqnarray}
w_a({\pmb x}) = \frac{\sum_j |\langle {\pmb x}, j|\omega, a\rangle|^2}{\langle \omega, a|\omega, a\rangle}.
\end{eqnarray}
Let us denote by $\delta_a$ the localization radius of $w({\pmb x})$, defined by $\int_{|{\pmb x}| > \delta_a} d^3x w_a({\pmb x}) < \epsilon$, for some small number $\epsilon$. If the sampling width of $\hat{F}_{\pmb x}$ satisfies $\sigma_T >> \delta$, then
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{F}_{\pmb x} |\omega, a\rangle &=& \int d^3x' \sum_j g({\pmb x} - {\pmb x}') |{\pmb x}', j\rangle \langle {\pmb x}', j| \omega, a\rangle \simeq g({\pmb x}) \int d^3x' \sum_j |{\pmb x}', j\rangle \langle {\pmb x}', j| \omega, a \rangle \nonumber \\
&=& g({\pmb x}) |\omega, a\rangle.
\end{eqnarray}
Hence, $|\omega, a\rangle$ is an approximate eigenvector of $\hat{F}_{\pmb x}$. Using the mean-value theorem, we can show that, for a Gaussian $g$, the approximation has an error of order $ (\delta_a/\sigma_T)^2$.
The kernel (\ref{kernelR}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
R^{ab}_{{\pmb x}, t} ({\pmb y}, s; {\pmb y}', s') = \sqrt{f(t-s)f(t - s')g({\pmb x} - {\pmb y})g({\pmb x} - {\pmb y'})} \langle \omega, b|e^{i \mathfrak{h}(s-s') - i \mathfrak{\pmb p}\cdot ({\pmb y} - {\pmb y'})}| \omega, a\rangle. \label{kernelR2}
\end{eqnarray}
We introduce the spacetime coordinates $X = (t, {\pmb x})$, $ Y= (s, {\pmb y})$, and $ Y' = (s', {\pmb y}')$, and the detector four-momentum $\hat{\cal P} = ( \hat{\mathfrak{h}}, \hat{\mathfrak{\pmb p}})$. We also define the spacetime sampling function
$\eta(X) = f(t) g({\pmb x})$, normalized to unity $\int d^4X \eta(X) = 1$.
Then, Eq. (\ref{kernelR2}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
R^{ab}_{X}(Y, Y') = \sqrt{\eta(X-Y)\eta(X-Y')} S^{ab}(Y'-Y) ,
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent
where
\begin{eqnarray}
S^{ab}(Y-Y') \langle \omega, b|e^{-i \hat{\cal P} \cdot Y}|\omega, a\rangle.
\end{eqnarray}
We write Eq. (\ref{probrel})
\begin{eqnarray}
P(X) = \int d^4Y d^4 Y' R^{ab}_{X} (Y,Y') G_{ab}(Y, Y') , \label{covariantprob}
\end{eqnarray}
in terms of the correlation function
\begin{eqnarray}
G_{ab}(Y, Y') = Tr \left[ \hat{O}_a(Y)\hat{\rho}_0 \hat{O}^{\dagger}_b(Y')\right]. \label{two-point}
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{covariantprob}) is the main result of this section. It expresses the probability density $P(X)$ for particle detection as a linear functional of the two-point correlation function (\ref{two-point}).
We emphasize that no particle concepts were introduced in the derivation of Eq. (\ref{covariantprob}). All information about the measured quantum system is contained in the field
correlation function $G_{ab}(Y, Y')$.
We emphasise that Eq. (\ref{covariantprob}) applies only for measurement events, i.e., it presupposes that a macroscopic measuring apparatus has been included in the quantum description. The variable $X$ is a decoherent macroscopic pointer variable defined by the apparatus's degrees of freedom. In absence of the apparatus (or analogous decoherence mechanisms \cite{HaZa}) spacetime probabilities like Eq. (\ref{covariantprob}) cannot be defined for general initial states \cite{YaTa}.
\subsection{The detector Hilbert space}
Let ${\cal V} = L^2({\pmb R}^4) \otimes {\pmb C}^n$ be the Hilbert space that contains the test functions $f^a(X)$, that smear the composite operators $\hat{O}_a(X)$, $a = 1, 2, \ldots, n$. The inner product on ${\cal V}$ is defined by
\begin{eqnarray}
(g,f)_{\cal V} = \int d^4X f^a(X) [g^b(X)]^* m_{ab}, \label{innerproduct}
\end{eqnarray}
for some positive definite matric $m_{ab}$ on ${\pmb C}^n$ that is used to raise and lower the indices $a$ and $b$.
The kernel $R^{ab}_{X}$ defines an operator on ${\cal V}$,
\begin{eqnarray}
(\hat{R}_Xf)^a(Y) = \int d^4Y' R^{ab}_X(Y, Y') m_{bc} f^c(Y').
\end{eqnarray}
By Eq. (\ref{kernelR}), $\hat{R}_X$ is the Gram matrix associated to the vectors $\sqrt{\eta(X-Y) } e^{i \hat{\cal P} \cdot Y} |\omega, a \rangle$; hence, it is a non-negative operator. It is also trace-class
\begin{eqnarray}
Tr_{\cal V} \hat{R}_X = \sum_{a,b} m_{ab} \langle \omega, a |\omega, b\rangle < \infty. \label{trvr}
\end{eqnarray}
Hence, $\hat{R}_X$ is a density matrix on ${\cal V}$, modulo a proportionality constant that can be set to unity by appropriate normalization of the probabilities.
The two-point function $G_{ab}(Y, Y')$
also defines a operator $\hat{G}$ on ${\cal V}$. Being a Gram matrix, $\hat{G}$ is positive, but not necessarily trace-class.
The probability density (\ref{covariantprob}) can be written in the suggestive form
\begin{eqnarray}
P(X) = Tr_{\cal V} \left( \hat{R}_X \hat{G}\right). \label{probmain}
\end{eqnarray}
We emphasize that the Hilbert space ${\cal V}$ where the operators $\hat{R}_X$ and $\hat{G}$ are defined is {\em not} the Hilbert space ${\cal F}$ of field quantum states. ${\cal V}$ is associated to the detector; hence, we call it {\em detector Hilbert space}. Density matrices on ${\cal V}$ define time-extended measurements, not single-time states. All information about initial state and dynamics of the quantum field is encoded in $\hat{G}$.
\subsection{Probabilities in the Weyl-Wigner picture}
The Weyl-Wigner (WW) symbol $\tilde{A} (X, K)$ of any operator $\hat{A}$ on $L^2({\pmb R}^4)$ is a function of the `position' $X^{\mu}$ and its conjugate momentum $K_{\mu}$, defined by
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde{ A}(X, K) = \int \frac{d^4\xi}{(2\pi)^4} e^{i K\cdot \xi} (X+\frac{1}{2}\xi|\hat{A}| X - \frac{1}{2}\xi).
\end{eqnarray}
A key-property of the Weyl-Wigner transform is that for any two operators $\hat{A}$ and $\hat{B}$ on $L^2({\pmb R}^4)$.
\begin{eqnarray}
Tr(\hat{A}\hat{B}) = \int \frac{d^4X d^4K}{(2\pi)^4} \tilde{A}(X, K) \tilde{B}(X, K).
\end{eqnarray}
So far, we have not specified the sampling function $\eta(X)$. We choose Gaussian samplings,
\begin{eqnarray}
\eta(X) = \frac{\sqrt{ \det M}}{4\pi^2}\exp(-\frac{1}{2} M_{\mu \nu} X^{\mu}X^{\nu}), \label{Gaussian}
\end{eqnarray}
where $M_{\mu \nu}$ is a positive definite matrix on ${\pmb R}^4$. For example, in a Lorentz frame that is defined by a normal unit time-like vector $n = \frac{\partial}{\partial t}$,
\begin{eqnarray}
M_{\mu\nu} = \frac{1}{\sigma_T^2} n_{\mu} n_{\nu} + \frac{1}{\sigma_X^2}(n_{\mu} n_{\nu}- \eta_{\mu \nu})
\end{eqnarray}
where $\sigma_T$ is the width of the temporal sampling and $\sigma_X$ the width of the position sampling.
Gaussian sampling functions have two desired properties. First, they introduce no spurious correlation between $X$ and $K$ in the WW symbol of $\hat{R}_X$. Second, they remain Gaussian sampling functions in all Lorentz frames---the positivity of $M_{\mu \nu}$ is preserved under Lorentz transformations.
For Gaussian sampling functions, the WW symbol $\tilde{R}_X$ factorizes
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde {R}^{ab}_X(Y, K) = \eta(Y-X) \tilde{S}^{ab}(K),
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde{S}^{ab}(K) = \int \frac{d^4\xi}{(2\pi)^4} e^{- \frac{1}{8}M_{\mu \nu}\xi^{\mu} \xi^{\nu}} e^{ i K\cdot \xi} S^{ab}(\xi). \label{lambdadef}
\end{eqnarray}
The function $S^{ab}(Y)$ quantifies correlations between excitations that are localized at different spacetime points. Since the detector is a macroscopic system with a large number of particles, $S(Y)$ decays for times larger than some characteristic microscopic decoherence time $\tau$ and for distances larger than a microscopic correlation length $\delta$.
The decoherence condition (\ref{deccond}) is satisfied for samplings, such that
\begin{eqnarray}
\sigma_T >> \tau, \hspace{1cm} \sigma_X >> \delta. \label{sepscales}
\end{eqnarray}
Assuming Eq. (\ref{sepscales}), the Gaussian in Eq. (\ref{lambdadef}) can be set to unity. Then, $\tilde{S}^{ab}(K)$ does not depend on the sampling parameters, and it is simply the Fourier transform of $S^{ab}$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde{S}^{ab}(K) = \int \frac{d^4\xi}{(2\pi)^4} e^{ i K\cdot \xi} S(\xi) = \langle \omega, b|\delta^4(\hat{\cal P} - K) |\omega, a\rangle. \label{lambdadef2}
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{probmain}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P(X) = \int d^4Y \eta (Y-X) P_0(Y).
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(X) = \int \frac{ d^4K}{(2\pi)^4}\tilde{G}_{ab}(X, K)\tilde{S}^{ab}(K). \label{P0X}
\end{eqnarray}
If $P_0(X)$ is positive, then $P(X)$ is the convolution of an underlying probability distribution $P_0(X)$ due to finite-width sampling. However, unlike $P(X)$, $P_0(X)$ is not guaranteed to be positive for any $G_{ab}$ and any $\tilde{S}^{ab}$.
We expect that in the regime where Eq. (\ref{lambdadef2}) holds, $P_0(X)$ is positive. A heuristic argument is the following.
Eq. (\ref{lambdadef2}) implies that $P_0(X)$ is independent of the sampling parameters. But then $\sigma_X$ and $\sigma_T$ appear in $P(X)$ only through $\eta$, and they can be varied arbitrarily. For sufficiently small values, $P_0(X)$ comes arbitrarily close to $P(X)$, and is therefore positive. This expectation is physically intuitive. It is common in studies of emergent classicality \cite{Omn1, GeHa, An95}, where a separation of scales like Eq. (\ref{sepscales}) implies the definition of sampling-independent
probability distributions.
We will refer to detectors characterized by positive $P_0(X)$ for a large class of physically relevant states as {\em regular detectors}, meaning that they can be assigned probabilities that are independent of the sampling.
Equation (\ref{P0X}) applies to any QFT (free or interacting), and for any field-apparatus coupling. In what follows, we will consider measurements of relativistic spinless particles.
\section{Measurements on a scalar field }
We apply the measurement theory of Sec. 2, to a QFT containing only a single scalar field
$\hat{\phi}(X)$, describing particles of mass $m$. Possible choices for the composite operators $\hat{O}_a(X)$ that describe the field-apparatus coupling are the following.
\begin{enumerate}[(i)]
\item $\hat{O}(X) = \hat{\phi}(X)$. This coupling characterizes Unruh-DeWitt detectors \cite{Dewitt}. It is the scalar-field analogue of the electromagnetic (EM) dipole coupling. It describes particle detection by absorption.
\item $\hat{O}(X) = \hat{\phi}^{(+)}(X)$. The detector couples to the positive frequency part $\hat{\phi}^{(+)}(X)$ of the quantum field. This is an analogue of the Glauber EM field-detector coupling in quantum optics \cite{Glauber}. A drawback of this coupling is that the splitting of the field into positive and negative frequency parts is a non-local operation; hence, it could lead to causality violation in set-ups that involve multiple measurements.
\item $\hat{O}(X) = :\hat{\phi}^2(X):$. This coupling describes particle detection by scattering through a scalar interaction. The double dots denote normal ordering.
\item $\hat{O}_{\mu}(X) = :\hat{\phi}(X)\partial_{\mu} \hat{\phi}(X):$. This coupling describes particle detection by scattering through a vector interaction.
\end{enumerate}
In what follows, we consider {\em scalar} composite operators $\hat{O}(X)$, i.e., cases (i)---(iii) above. We drop the indices $a, b$ that appear in the detector kernel $R_X(Y, Y')$, the two-point function $G(X, X')$, and the correlation function $S(Y)$. The probability formula, Eq. (\ref{P0X}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(X) = \int \frac{ d^4K}{(2\pi)^4}\tilde{G}(X, K)\tilde{S}(K), \label{P0X2}
\end{eqnarray}
The detector Hilbert space is $L^2({\pmb R}^4)$. The matrix $m_{ab}$ of Eq. (\ref{innerproduct}) is unity, and there is a single vector $|\omega\rangle = \hat{J}(0)|0\rangle$.
Eq. (\ref{trvr}) becomes $Tr_{\cal V} \hat{R}_X = \langle \omega|\omega\rangle$. Hence,
by normalizing $|\omega\rangle$ to unity, $Tr_{\cal V} \hat{R}_X = 1$. With this normalization, $S(0) = 1$.
A quantum scalar field that satisfies a linear wave equation can be analysed in terms of creation and annihilation operators
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{\phi}(X) = \sum_a \left[ \hat{a}_a \chi_a(X) + \hat{a}^{\dagger}_a \chi_a^*(X)\right], \label{fieldphi}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\chi_a(X)$ are positive-frequency mode solutions to the wave equation, $a$ an index that labels the modes, and the creation and annihilation operators satisfy the canonical commutation relations,
\begin{eqnarray}
[\hat{a}_a, \hat{a}_b] = [\hat{a}^{\dagger}_a, \hat{a}^{\dagger}_b] = 0, \hspace{0.1cm} [\hat{a}_a, \hat{a}^{\dagger}_b] = \delta_{ab}.
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{fieldphi}) applies also in presence of external time-dependent fields and non-trivial boundary conditions.
For a Glauber-type coupling, $\hat{O}(X) = \hat{\phi}^{(+)}(X)$, the two-point function (\ref{two-point}) is
\begin{eqnarray}
G_0(X, X') = \sum_{ab} \rho_{ab} \chi_a(X) \chi_b^*(X'), \label{GXX}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\rho_{ab} = Tr\left( \hat{a}_a\hat{\rho}_0 \hat{a}_b^{\dagger}\right)$ is the one-particle reduced density matrix. We assumed an initial state with a definite number of particles.
The one-particle density matrix can be determined in terms of external operations on the quantum field vacuum $|\Omega\rangle$. For example, assume that the system is initially ($t \rightarrow -\infty$) in the vacuum state and it is acted upon by an classical external source $J(X)$ with support at times $t < 0$. Then the quantum field state at $t = 0$ is $\exp[ -i \int d^4X J(X) \hat{\phi}(X)]|\Omega\rangle$, and the one-particle reduced density matrix is pure, $\rho_{ab} = \psi_a \psi^*_b$, with
\begin{eqnarray}
\psi_a = \int d^4X J(X) \chi_a(X).
\end{eqnarray}
For an Unruh-deWitt type coupling, $\hat{O}(X) = \hat{\phi}(X)$, the two-point function (\ref{two-point}) is
\begin{eqnarray}
G(X,X') = G_0(X, X') + G_0(X', X) + \sum_a \chi_a(X) \chi_a^*(X'), \label{Wight}
\end{eqnarray}
where $G_0(X, X')$ is given by Eq. (\ref{GXX}). The last term is state-independent and corresponds to particle creation by the vacuum. In absence of strong time-dependent external fields, it is a small background noise term that can be ignored. Given the fact that the probabilities are defined up to a normalization constant, the term $G_0(X,X') + G_0(X', X)$ leads to the same probabilities with $G_0(X, X')$. Hence, we can use the two-point function (\ref{GXX}) for both Glauber and Unruh-DeWitt couplings.
For a free field in Minkowski spacetime, the index $a$ corresponds to particle three-momentum ${\pmb p}$, the summation $\sum_a$ to $\int d^3p $ for $\epsilon_{\pmb p} = \sqrt{m^2 + {\pmb p}^2}$, and the mode functions are
\begin{eqnarray}
\chi_{\pmb p} = \frac{1}{(2\pi)^{3/2}\sqrt{2\epsilon_{\pmb p}}} e^{-i P\cdot X}, \label{mode3d}
\end{eqnarray}
where $P^{\mu} = (\epsilon_{\pmb p}, {\pmb p})$. Hilbert space vectors $\psi({\pmb p})$ are normalized as $\int d^3p |\psi({\pmb p})|^2 = 1$.
For a pure state $\psi({\pmb p})$, the probability density (\ref{P0X}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(X) = \int d^4 \xi \psi_{Ph}(X - \frac{1}{2} \xi) \psi_{Ph}^*(X + \frac{1}{2} \xi) S(\xi), \label{pnw}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\psi_{Ph}(X) := \int \frac{d^3p}{(2\pi)^{3/2}} \frac{\psi({\pmb p}) }{\sqrt{2\epsilon_{\pmb p}}} e^{-i P\cdot X},
\end{eqnarray}
is the Phillips wave function \cite{Phil}.
For the scattering coupling (iii) and for a single-particle initial state, the two-point function
(\ref{two-point}) is
\begin{eqnarray}
G(X,X') = G_0(X, X') \left[\sum_a \chi_a(X) \chi_a^*(X')\right].
\end{eqnarray}
For a free field, substitution into Eq. (\ref{P0X2}) yields
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(X) = \int \frac{ d^4K}{(2\pi)^4}\tilde{G}_0(X, K)\tilde{S}_1(K),
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde{S}_1(K) = \int \frac{d^3q}{(2\pi)^3 (2 \epsilon_{\pmb q})} \tilde{S}(Q+K),
\end{eqnarray}
where $Q^{\mu} = (\epsilon_{\pmb q}, {\pmb q})$.
Hence, we can use the two point function (\ref{GXX}) also for a coupling of type (iii), modulo a redefinition of the function $\tilde{S}$.
\section{Time-of-arrival measurements}
In this section, we construct probability distributions for time-of-arrival measurements on spinless particles.
\subsection{Localization operator}
In a time-of-arrival measurement, a detector is placed at a macroscopic distance $x$ from the particle source. If $x$ is much larger than the size of the detector, only particles with momenta along the axis that connects the source to the detector are recorded. Hence, the problem is reduced to two spacetime dimensions. We set the spacetime coordinate $X = (t, x)$, the mode functions are labeled by a single momentum coordinate, the summation over $a$ in (\ref{GXX}) becomes $\int dp$, and the on-shell four-momentum is $P^{\mu} = (\epsilon_p, p)$ with $\epsilon_p = \sqrt{p^2+m^2}$. We also express the off-shell momentum $K^{\mu} = (E, K)$, and write the function $\tilde{S}(K^{\mu})$ as $\tilde{S}(K, E)$; $E$ and $K$ are independent parameters. Then, Eq. (\ref{P0X}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(t, x) = \int \frac{dpdp'}{2\pi } \frac{\rho(p,p')}{2\sqrt{\epsilon_p \epsilon_{p'}}} \; \tilde{S}\left( \frac{p+p'}{2}, \frac{\epsilon_p + \epsilon_{p'}}{2}\right) e^{i(p-p')x - i (\epsilon_p - \epsilon_{p'})t}, \label{ptx}
\end{eqnarray}
modulo an overall multiplicative constant.
We normalize Eq. (\ref{ptx}) following a prescription, common to non-relativistic treatments of the time of arrival \cite{Kij}. We fix the value of $x > 0$, so that the location of the detector is a parameter and not a random variable. Then, we require that
\begin{eqnarray}
\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} dt P_0(t, x) = 1, \label{normal}
\end{eqnarray}
for all states with support only on positive momenta. The integration is extended to the full real axis for time, because $P_0(t, x)$ for $t <0$ is negligibly small for any wave function with strictly positive momentum.
We evaluate the time-integrated probability density,
\begin{eqnarray}
p_{tot} = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} dt P(t,x) = \int_0^{\infty} dp \rho(p,p) \frac{\tilde{S}(p, \epsilon_p)}{2p}. \label{normalization}
\end{eqnarray}
Hence,
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{\tilde{S}(p, \epsilon_p)}{2p} = \alpha(p), \label{alphap}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\alpha(p)$ is the {\em absorption coefficient} of the detector, namely, the fraction of particles at momentum $p$ that are absorbed when crossing the detector\footnote{For an
elementary detecting element of length $d$, the absorption coefficient is the product of the linear attenuation coefficient of the material with $d$. It is therefore a directly measurable quantity.
}. The normalization condition (\ref{normal}) is implemented by dividing $P_0(t, x)$ with $p_{tot}$.
We also redefine the initial state by
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho(p, p') \rightarrow \tilde{\rho}(p, p') = \frac{ \sqrt{\alpha(p) \alpha(p')} \rho(p,p')}{\int_0^{\infty} dp \rho(p,p) \alpha(p)}.
\end{eqnarray}
Then,
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(t, x) = \int \frac{dpdp'}{2\pi } \tilde{\rho}(p,p') \sqrt{v_p v_{p'}} L(p,p') e^{i(p-p')x - i (\epsilon_p - \epsilon_{p'})t}, \label{ptxb}
\end{eqnarray}
where $v_p = p/\epsilon_p$ is the particle velocity. $L(p, p')$ are the matrix elements $\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle$ of the {\em localization operator} $\hat{L}$, defined by
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle := \frac{\tilde{S}\left( \frac{p+p'}{2}, \frac{\epsilon_p + \epsilon_{p'}}{2}\right)}{\sqrt{\tilde{S}(p, \epsilon_p) \tilde{S}(p', \epsilon_{p'})}}. \label{lpp}
\end{eqnarray}
By definition, $\langle p|\hat{L}|\hat{p'}\rangle \geq 0 $, and
\begin{eqnarray}
L(p, p) = 1. \label{norm2}
\end{eqnarray}
For a pure state initial state $|\psi\rangle$, Eq. (\ref{ptx}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(t, x) = \langle \psi|\hat{U}^{\dagger}(t, x) \sqrt{|\hat{v}|}\hat{L}\sqrt{|\hat{v}|}\hat{U}(t, x)|\psi\rangle, \label{ptxc}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\hat{U}(t, x) = \hat{U}(X)$ is the spacetime-translation operator
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{U}(t, x) = e^{i \hat{p} x - i \hat{H} t} = e^{ -i X\cdot \hat{P}},
\end{eqnarray}
and $\hat{v} = \hat{p}\hat{H}^{-1}$ is the velocity operator.
In regular detectors, $P_0(t, x)$ is positive for all initial states. Εq. (\ref{ptxc}) implies that $\hat{L}$ is a positive operator. Then, the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality applies,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle \leq \sqrt{\langle p|\hat{L}|p\rangle \langle p'|\hat{L}|p'\rangle} = 1. \label{CSa}
\end{eqnarray}
\noindent Eq. (\ref{CSa}) is always satisfied if $\ln \tilde{S}(p, \epsilon_p)$ is a convex function of $p$.
The operator $\hat{L}$ determines the localization of the detection event. To see this, consider the Weyl-Wigner transform $\tilde{L}(x, p)$ of $\hat{L}$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde{L}(x, p) = \int \frac{d \xi}{2 \pi} \langle p+\frac{\xi}{2}|\hat{L}|p-\frac{\xi}{2}\rangle e^{-i\xi x}
\end{eqnarray}
By Bochner's theorem \cite{RS2}, the positivity of the matrix elements $\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle$ implies that $\tilde{L}$ is non-negative. Furthermore,
\begin{eqnarray}
\int dx \tilde{L}(x, p) = \langle p|\hat{L}|p\rangle = 1.
\end{eqnarray}
Hence, $\tilde{L}(x, p)$ is a probability density with respect to $x$ in which $p$ appears as a parameter, and not a random variable. To highlight this key point, we will write $\tilde{L}(x, p)$ as $u_p(x)$. The probability density $u_p(x)$ describes the irreducible spread of the measurement record due to the physics of the detector. If $u_p(x)$ is $p$-independent, i.e., the spread is the same at all momenta, then $L(p,p')$ is a function of $p-p'$.
The Fourier transform $\tilde{u}_p(\xi)$ equals $\langle p - \frac{\xi}{2}|\hat{L}|p + \frac{\xi}{2}\rangle$. It is straightforward to show that $\tilde{u}'_p(0) = 0$, which means that the average of $x$ vanishes.
The associated variance $\sigma^2(p):= - \tilde{u}_p''(0)$ quantifies the width of the detection record,
\begin{eqnarray}
\sigma^2 (p) = \frac{1}{4} \frac{d^2 \ln \tilde{S}(p, \epsilon_p)}{d p^2} - \frac{m^2}{4\epsilon_p^3} (\partial_E\ln \tilde{S})(p, \epsilon_p) =
\frac{1}{4} (\ln \alpha)''(p) - \frac{1}{4 p^2} - \frac{m^2}{4\epsilon_p^3} (\partial_E\ln \tilde{S})(p, \epsilon_p).
\label{detectorsigma}
\end{eqnarray}
The probability density (\ref{ptxb}) is defined only for initial states $\hat{\rho}$ with support on positive momenta. It can straightforwardly be extended to all initial states, by inserting a multiplicative term $\theta(pp')$ into the integral (\ref{ptxb}), and extending the integration over the full range of $p$ and $p'$ \cite{Kij}. The resulting probability density is normalized to unity. This prescription drops the contributions from off-diagonal elements of the density matrix $\rho(p, p')$ with $pp' < 0$. The contribution of such terms to the total probability is negligible for macroscopically large source-detector distance $x$.
\subsection{Maximal localization}
Maximal localization is achieved when Eq. (\ref{CSa}) is saturated, i.e., for $\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle = 1$. This means that $\hat{L} = \delta(\hat{x})$, where $\hat{x}$ is the Newton-Wigner position operator $i \frac{\partial}{\partial p}$. Equivalently, $u_p(x) = \delta(x)$.
The probability density for maximal localization is
\begin{eqnarray}
P_{m.l.}(t,x) = \langle \psi|\hat{U}^{\dagger}(t, x)\sqrt{|\hat{v}|}\delta(\hat{x})\sqrt{|\hat{v}|} \hat{U}(t, x)|\psi\rangle, \label{ptxmax}
\end{eqnarray}
or
\begin{eqnarray}
P_{m.l.}(t, x) = \left| \int \frac{dp}{2\pi } \psi(p) \sqrt{\frac{|p|}{\epsilon_p}} e^{ipx - i \epsilon_p t} \right|^2. \label{POVM3}
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{POVM3}) was identified in Ref. \cite{AnSav12} using the QTP method. The same expression had previously been found by Le\'on \cite{Leon}, in terms of the eigenvectors of a non-self-adjoint time-of-arrival operator. In the non-relativistic limit, Eq. (\ref{POVM3}) reduces to Kijowski's probability distribution \cite{Kij}.
The condition $\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle = 1$ that leads to Eq.
(\ref{ptxmax}) implies that $\ln \tilde{S}$ is a linear function, i.e.,
\begin{eqnarray}
\tilde{S}(E, K) = C e^{- \tau E - \delta K}, \;\; E, K > 0.
\end{eqnarray}
where $C$ is a positive constant, $\tau$ is the decoherence time and $\delta$ the localization length of the record. This implies that
\begin{eqnarray}
S(t, x) = \frac{1}{(1 + \frac{it}{\tau})(1 - \frac{i x}{\delta})},
\end{eqnarray}
where the constant $C = \tau \delta $ was determined by the requirement that $S(0, 0)= 1$.
By Eq. (\ref{alphap}), the absorption coefficient for maximal localization is
\begin{eqnarray}
\alpha(p) = \frac{\tau \delta e^{- \tau \epsilon_p - \delta p}}{2 p}.
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{ptxmax}) can also be written as
\begin{eqnarray}
P_{m.l.}(t, x) = |\langle 0_x|\sqrt{\hat{v}_p} \hat{U}(x, t)|\psi\rangle|^2. \label{ptxmax2}
\end{eqnarray}
where $| 0_x \rangle$ is the generalized eigenvector of $\hat{x}$ with zero eigenvalue: $\langle p|0_x\rangle = (2\pi)^{-1/2}$.
The probability density $P_{m.l.}(t, x)$ is the only one that can be factorized as the modulus square of an amplitude. Factorization requires a localization operator of the form $L(p, p') = c(p) c(p')$, for real-valued functions $c(p)$. The condition $L(p, p) = 1$ implies that $c(p)^2 = 1$, hence $L(p, p') =1$.
The probability density (\ref{ptxmax}) cannot be expressed as a local functional of any wave-function $\psi(t, x)$. However, for almost monochromatic initial states, it approximates a probability current
$- \mbox{Im} \psi^*_{Ph}(t,x) \partial_x \psi_{Ph}(t, x)$ with respect to the Phillips wave function
\begin{eqnarray}
\psi_{Ph}(t, x) := \int \frac{dp}{\sqrt{2\pi} \epsilon_p} \psi(p) e^{ipx-i \epsilon_pt}.
\end{eqnarray}
\subsection{Other detector types}
The localization operator $\hat{L}$ is determined by a function $\tilde{S}(K, E)$ of two independent variables. Of particular interest are the cases that $\tilde{S}$ depends non-trivially on only one variable. Then, $\hat{L}$ is uniquely determined by the absorption coefficient.
\medskip
\noindent {\em 1. Fully decoherent detectors.} Assume that the spatial localization scale $\delta$ is much larger than the decoherence time $\tau$, so that we can take $\tau \rightarrow 0$. Then, $\tilde{S}$ is a function only of $K$.
By Eq. (\ref{alphap}), $\tilde{S}(K) = 2K \alpha(K)$, hence,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle = \frac{p+p'}{2\sqrt{pp'}} \frac{\alpha(\frac{1}{2}(p+p'))}{\sqrt{\alpha(p)\alpha(p')}}. \label{locspc}
\end{eqnarray}
The detection width is
\begin{eqnarray}
\sigma^2 (p) =
\frac{1}{4} (\ln \alpha)''(p) - \frac{1}{4 p^2}.
\end{eqnarray}
In the non-relativistic limit and for $\alpha = 1$, the localization operator (\ref{locspc}) corresponds to the time-of-arrival probability distribution generated by the probability current and by a non-self adjoint time operator \cite{DeMu97, mals, BEMS, DEHM}. However, for $\alpha = 1$, $\hat{L}$ is not a positive operator. Not only is $\sigma^2(p)$ negative but it can be made arbitrarily large in absolute value for states with momentum support near zero.
\medskip
\noindent {\em 2. Coherent detectors.} In the regime $\delta << \tau$, $\tilde{S}$ is a function only of $E$. By Eq. (\ref{alphap}), $\tilde{S}(E) = 2\sqrt{E^2-m^2}\alpha(\sqrt{E^2-m^2})$, hence,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle = \frac{\sqrt{\frac{1}{4} (\epsilon_p+\epsilon_{p'})^2-m^2}}{\sqrt{pp'}} \frac{\alpha( \sqrt{\frac{1}{4} (\epsilon_p+\epsilon_{p'})^2-m^2})}{\sqrt{\alpha(p)\alpha(p')}}. \label{locspcc}
\end{eqnarray}
The detection width is
\begin{eqnarray}
\sigma^2 (p) =
\frac{1}{4} (\ln \alpha)''(p) - \frac{m^2}{4 \epsilon_p^3} (\ln \alpha)'(p) - \frac{1}{4 \epsilon_p^2}.
\end{eqnarray}
In the non-relativistic limit and for $\alpha = 1$, the localization operator (\ref{locspcc}) corresponds to the time of arrival probability distribution derived in Ref. \cite{AnSav17}. Again, for $\alpha = 1$, the localization operator is non-positive. However, its negative values are negligible in the non-relativistic limit: $\sigma^2(p) $ is always greater than $-(4m)^{-2}$. For example, the negative contributions of $\sigma^2(p) $ to the time-of-arrival variance (\ref{uncert}) can be ignored.
\medskip
\noindent {\em 3. Covariant detectors.} If the initial state $|0\rangle$ of the detector is Lorentz invariant (e.g., it is a QFT vacuum), and the current operator $\hat{J}(X) $ is a Lorentz scalar, then $S$ is a Lorentz scalar. Its Fourier transform
$\tilde{S}$
is a function only of $z = E^2 - K^2$. We therefore write $\tilde{S}$ as $\Sigma(z)$. Eq. (\ref{alphap}) implies that $\alpha(p) = \Sigma(m^2)/(2p)$, hence,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle p|\hat{L}|p'\rangle = \frac{\Sigma\left[\frac{1}{2}(m^2+P\cdot P')\right] }{\Sigma(m^2)}.
\end{eqnarray}
The detection width is
\begin{eqnarray}
\sigma^2(p) = (\ln \Sigma)'(m^2)\frac{m^2}{\epsilon_p^2}.
\end{eqnarray}
\medskip
\noindent {\em 4. Ideal detectors.} Any momentum-dependent probability distribution $u_p(x)$ defines a localization operator, and, hence, a POVM for the time of arrival. In an ideal detector, the localization operator does not depend on any parameter that characterizes the detector, such as the correlation length $\delta$ or the decoherence time $\tau$. This is the case, for example, if $u_p(x) = p f(px)$, where $f(s)$ is a probability distribution with respect to the dimensionless variable $s$. Then, $L(p, p')$ is a function solely of the variable $\frac{p-p'}{p+p'}$. A class of such POVMs in the non-relativistic regime has been studied in Ref. \cite{AnSav17}.
\subsection{Poincar\'e covariance and associated position operators}
Next, we examine how the time-of-arrival probability densities transform under the action of the Poincar\'e group.
The probability density $P_0(X)$ Eq. (\ref{ptx}), transforms covariantly under spacetime translations. The transformation $|\psi\rangle \rightarrow e^{-i\hat{p}a + i \hat{H}b} |\psi\rangle $ induces a transformation $P_0(t, x) \rightarrow P_0(t - a, x - b)$.
A Lorentz transformation $\hat{U}(\Lambda)$ transforms a state $\psi(p)$ to $\sqrt{\frac{\epsilon_{\Lambda^{-1} p}}{\epsilon_p}}\psi(\Lambda^{-1}p)$. Then, $P_0(X)$ is a Lorentz scalar, $P_0(X) \rightarrow P_0(\Lambda X)$, only if $\tilde{S}$ is Lorentz invariant. As shown in Sec. 4.3, this property characterizes only a special class of detectors. It is also not a necessary condition, an actual particle detector defines a specific Lorentz frame (the laboratory frame).
However, even if $P_0(X)$ is a spacetime scalar, the probability density (\ref{ptxb}) for the time-of-arrival is not. In deriving Eq. (\ref{ptxb}), we restricted to a statistical sub-ensemble of particles detected at $x$, and we transformed the state accordingly. This restriction broke the Lorentz symmetry. Indeed, in Eq. (\ref{ptxb}), the time $t$ is a random variable and $x$ is a parameter, so, by definition, $P_0(t, x)$ cannot be a spacetime scalar.
This remark also explains the non-covariance of relativistic position operators. A position operator describes a subensemble of particles detected at any $x$, but at a fixed moment of time $t$. The normalization condition relevant to this subensemble is $\int dx P(t, x) = 1$.
By Eq. (\ref{ptx}), $\int dx P_0(t, x) = \int dp \rho(p, p) v_p \alpha(p)$, where we used Eq. (\ref{alphap}). We redefine the initial state
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho(p, p') \rightarrow \tilde{\rho}(p, p') = \frac{ \sqrt{v_pv_{p'}\alpha(p) \alpha(p')} \rho(p,p')}{\int_0^{\infty} dp \rho(p,p) v_p\alpha(p)}.
\end{eqnarray}
Then, Eq. (\ref{ptx}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(t, x) = \int \frac{dpdp'}{2\pi } \tilde{\rho}(p,p') L(p,p') e^{i(p-p')x - i (\epsilon_p - \epsilon_{p'})t}. \label{ptxb3}
\end{eqnarray}
For a pure initial state $|\psi\rangle$,
\begin{eqnarray}
P_0(t, x) = \langle \psi_t| e^{-i\hat{p}x}\hat{L} e^{i \hat{p}x}|\psi_t\rangle, \label{pxtr}
\end{eqnarray}
where $|\psi_t\rangle = e^{-i \hat{H}t} |\psi\rangle$. Hence, the translated localization operator
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{P}_x = e^{-i\hat{p}x}\hat{L} e^{i \hat{p}x}
\end{eqnarray}
defines a position POVM. For maximal localization, $\hat{P}_x = \delta(\hat{x}-x)$ corresponds to projective position measurements, and Eq. (\ref{pxtr}) gives the Newton-Wigner probability distribution.
Hence, there is a duality between position and time-of-arrival measurements. Each detector defines particular localization operator $\hat{L}$. When restricting to a sub-ensemble of particles recorded at fixed location $x$, the localization operator defines a time-of-arrival POVM by Eq. (\ref{ptxc}). When restricting to a sub-ensemble of particles recorded at fixed time $t$, the localization operator defines a position POVM by Eq. (\ref{pxtr}). The two sub-ensembles are distinct, and they require {\em different transformations} of the initial state in order to define normalized probabilities. This is the reason why neither the time-of-arrival nor the position probabilities transform covariantly under the Lorentz group, even when the probability density $P_0(X)$ of Eq. (\ref{ptx}) does.
\section{Uncertainty relations and particle localization}
In this section, we show that the variance of the time of arrival defines a measure for the localizability of relativistic particles.
\subsection{Moment generating function}
First, we evaluate the moment-generating function $Z(\mu, x) = \int dt P(t, x) e^{i \mu t}$
associated to Eq. (\ref{ptx}),
\begin{eqnarray}
Z(\mu, x) = \int dpdp' \rho(p,p') \sqrt{v_p v_{p'}} \langle p|\hat{L} |p'\rangle e^{i(p-p')x} \delta(\epsilon_p - \epsilon_{p'} - \mu). \label{zmx}
\end{eqnarray}
We solve the equation $\epsilon_p - \epsilon_{p'} = \mu$, by expressing $\xi := p - p'$ as a function of $\bar{p} = \frac{1}{2}(p + p')$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\xi = \frac{\mu}{v_{\bar{p}}}\left[ 1 + g(\mu, \bar{p})\right],
\end{eqnarray}
where $g(\mu, \bar{p}) = \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} c_n(\bar{p}) \left(\frac{\mu}{\bar{p}}\right)^{2n}$ is a series in $\mu^2$. The explicit form of $g(\mu, \bar{p})$ will not be needed in this paper, only the fact that $ \left( \partial g/\partial \mu\right)_{\mu=0} = 0$.
Eq. (\ref{zmx}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
Z(\mu, x) = \int dpdp' \rho(p,p') \frac{2\sqrt{v_p v_{p'}}}{v_p+v_{p'}} \langle p|\hat{L} |p'\rangle e^{i(p-p')x} \delta\left(p-p' - \frac{\mu}{v_{\bar{p}}}\left[ 1 + g(\mu, \bar{p})\right]\right). \label{zmx3}
\end{eqnarray}
We express $\rho(p, p')$ in terms of its associated Wigner function $W(\bar{x}, \bar{p})$. For this calculation, we expand the term $\frac{2\sqrt{v_p v_{p'}}}{v_p+v_{p'}}$ as a power series in $\xi^2$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{2\sqrt{v_p v_{p'}}}{v_p+v_{p'}} = 1 - \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} d_n(\bar{p})\xi^{2n}.
\end{eqnarray}
In what follows, we will need only the first term in the series,
\begin{eqnarray}
d_1(\bar{p}) = \frac{m^4}{8\epsilon_{\bar{p}}^4 \bar{p}^2}.
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{zmx3}) becomes
\begin{eqnarray}
Z(\mu, x) = \int d\bar{x} d \bar{p} W(\bar{x}, \bar{p}) e^{iT_c\mu \left[ 1 + g(\mu, \bar{p})\right]} \left[ 1 - \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} d_n(\bar{p})\left(\frac{\mu}{v_{\bar{p}}}\right)^{2n}\left[ 1 + g(\mu, \bar{p})\right]^{2n}\right] \nonumber \\ \times \tilde{u}_{\bar{p}} \left( \frac{\mu}{v_{\bar{p}}}\left[ 1 + g(\mu, \bar{p})\right]\right), \label{zmx4}
\end{eqnarray}
where
\begin{eqnarray}
T_c (\bar{x}, \bar{p}) = \frac{x - \bar{x}}{v_{\bar{p}}}
\end{eqnarray}
is the classical time-of-arrival observable.
All moments of the time of arrival distribution can be obtained by successive differentiations of the moment generating functional (\ref{zmx4}).
\subsection{Uncertainty relation}
We evaluate the expectation value of the arrival time $\langle t\rangle = - i \left(\frac{\partial \ln Z}{\partial \mu}\right)_{\mu=0}$,
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle t\rangle = \langle T_c\rangle,
\end{eqnarray}
where the expectation of any classical observable
$F$ is $\langle F \rangle = \int d\bar{x} d \bar{p} W(\bar{x}, \bar{p})F (\bar{x}, \bar{p}) $. Hence, the quantum expectation value agrees with the classical one.
The expectation value $\langle T_c\rangle$ is of the form $Tr (\hat{\rho}\hat{T}_c)$, where
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{T}_c = \frac{1}{2}\left[ (x - \hat{x})\hat{v}^{-1} + \hat{v}^{-1} (x - \hat{x})\right].
\end{eqnarray}
Like its non-relativistic counterpart, the operator $\hat{T}_c$ is symmetric but not self-adjoint \cite{Kij14}. However, its domain $D_{\hat{T}_c}$ includes all vectors with {\em strictly positive} momentum content, i.e., functions $\psi(p)$ with positive momentum that vanish faster than any power of $p$ as $p\rightarrow 0$.
Next, we evaluate the variance $(\Delta t)^2 = - \left(\frac{\partial^2 \ln Z}{\partial \mu^2}\right)_{\mu=0}$ to the time of arrival
\begin{eqnarray}
(\Delta t)^2 &=& (\Delta T_c)^2 + 2\langle d_1(p)v_p^{-2} \rangle - \langle \tilde{u}''_p(0)v_p^{-2}\rangle \nonumber \\
&=& (\Delta T_c)^2 + \frac{m^4}{4} \langle \frac{1}{\epsilon_p^2p^4}\rangle + \langle \frac{\sigma^2(p)}{v_p^2}\rangle, \label{uncert}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\sigma^2(p)$ is given by Eq. (\ref{detectorsigma}).
The first term in the right-hand-side of Eq. (\ref{uncert}) is the variance of $\hat{T}_c$. For any $|\psi\rangle \in D_{\hat{T}_c}$, $[\hat{H}, \hat{T}_c]|\psi\rangle = i |\psi\rangle$, and therefore, $\Delta T_c > \frac{1}{2 \Delta H}$. Since $\sigma^2(p) \geq 0 $, we obtain the inequality
\begin{eqnarray}
(\Delta t)^2 \geq \frac{1}{4 (\Delta H)^2} + \frac{m^4}{4} \langle \frac{1}{\epsilon_p^2p^4}\rangle \label{ineqq}
\end{eqnarray}
that applies for all detectors and for all initial states with strictly positive momentum. All terms that appear in the r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) are determined solely by the momentum probability distribution associated to the quantum state.
Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) does not define a speed limit of time evolution \cite{timenerv}, as in the common
interpretation of the time-energy uncertainty relation. Here, $\Delta t$ is the deviation of the time-of-arrival, a quantity that is straightforwardly defined in a time-of-arrival experiment.
The r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) never vanishes and it is finite for all states with positive momentum content. Furthermore, it does not depend on the properties or the location of the detector.
Therefore, it defines an operational measure for the maximal localization of a quantum state.
The second term in the r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) is crucial for this interpretation, because it never vanishes. The first term dominates for almost monochromatic states with $\langle H \rangle >> \Delta H$. However, for any energy probability distribution that drops slower than $E^{-3}$, $\Delta H = \infty$, and localization is solely determined by the second term. For example, assume that
the energy $E \geq m$ follows a
L\'evy distribution
\begin{eqnarray}
P(E) = \sqrt{\frac{c_E}{2\pi}} \frac{e^{- \frac{c_E}{2(E-m)}}}{(E-m)^{3/2}},
\end{eqnarray}
with scale parameter $c_E$. Then, $\Delta H = \infty$. However, $\langle \epsilon_p^{-2}p^{-4} \rangle$ is non-zero. In the non-relativistic limit ($c_E << m$), $\Delta t > \frac{\sqrt{3}}{2c_E}$, and in the ultra-relativistic limit ($c_E >> m$), $\Delta t > 51.0 \frac{m^2}{c_E^3}$. Localization is determined by the scale parameter $c_E$.
\subsection{Implications}
In the non-relativistic limit, the second term in the r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) becomes $\frac{1}{16}\langle \hat{E}_k^{-2}\rangle$, where $\hat{E}_k = \frac{\hat{p}^2}{2m}$ is the kinetic energy. By Jensen's inequality, $\langle\hat{E}_k^{-2}\rangle \geq \langle \hat{E}_k\rangle^{-2}$. Hence, Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) implies that
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle \hat{E}_k \rangle \Delta t > \frac{1}{4} \label{ineqq2}
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{ineqq2}) for Kijowski's POVM was derived in Ref. \cite{AnSav17}, in reference to an earlier inequality---without the factor $\frac{1}{4}$---of Ref. \cite{BSPME}. We conjecture that the greatest lower bound $C$ to $\langle \hat{E}_k \rangle \Delta t$ is greater than $\frac{1}{4}$--- our best guess is that $C = \frac{1}{2}$---but we have not found a proof.
Inequalities analogous to (\ref{ineqq2}), but with a different physical interpretation, have appeared before.
Peierls and Landau argued that particles can be localized only with uncertainty $\Delta x \gtrsim \langle E\rangle^{-1}$ \cite{LP31}. Margolus and Levitin proved that $\langle \hat{H} \rangle \tau > \frac{\pi}{2}$, where $\tau$ is the time it takes a quantum system to evolve
between two orthogonal states \cite{MaLe98}.
The second term in the r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) is greater than $\frac{m^4}{4} \langle \epsilon_p^{-6}\rangle$. Hence, Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) implies the weaker inequality
\begin{eqnarray}
(\Delta t)^2 \geq \frac{1}{4 (\Delta H)^2} +\frac{m^4}{4} \langle\hat{H}^{-6}\rangle \label{ineqq3}
\end{eqnarray}
that is sharper in the ultra-relativistic limit. Using Jensen's inequality on (\ref{ineqq3}), we find
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle \hat{H} \rangle^3 \Delta t > \frac{m^2}{2}. \label{ineqq3b}
\end{eqnarray}
We estimate the relative size of the two terms in the r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{ineqq}), by evaluating them for a two-parameter family of probability densities for the dimensionless kinetic energy $\xi = (\epsilon_p/m - 1)$,
\begin{eqnarray}
P(\xi) = \sqrt{\frac{\xi_0^3}{2 \pi \xi^3}} \exp \left[ - \frac{\xi_0(\xi -\xi_0)^2}{2 \sigma_{\xi}^2 \xi}\right]. \label{invgaus}
\end{eqnarray}
Eq. (\ref{invgaus}) defines an inverse Gaussian distribution \cite{invgaus} for $\xi \geq 0$, with mean $\xi_0$ and variance $\sigma_{\xi}^2$. It has finite moments $\langle \xi^{n}\rangle$, for all integers $n$ (including negative ones).
In the non-relativistic limit, Eq. (\ref{ineqq}) gives
\begin{eqnarray}
(\Delta t)^2 \geq \frac{1}{4m^2 \xi_0^2} \left[ b + \frac{1}{4}\left(1 +\frac{3}{b}+ \frac{3}{b^2}\right)\right], \label{uncnonr}
\end{eqnarray}
where $b = (\xi_0/\sigma_{\xi})^2$. The term $(\Delta H)^{-2}$ is proportional to $b$, and thus dominates for almost monochromatic states, where $b \rightarrow \infty$. The other term dominates for states with a large momentum spread, $b \rightarrow 0$. Minimizing the r.h.s. of Eq. (\ref{uncnonr}) with respect to $b$ gives a variational estimate to the greatest lower bound of $\langle \hat{E}_k\rangle \Delta t$. We obtain $\langle \hat{E}_k\rangle \Delta t \gtrsim 0.8$.
For the ultra-relativistic limit, where $\hat{H} \simeq \hat{E}_k$, we use (\ref{ineqq3}) to obtain
\begin{eqnarray}
(\Delta t)^2 \geq \frac{1}{4m^2 \xi_0^2} \left[ b + \frac{1}{\xi_0^4}[1+ 21 q(b^{-1})]\right] \label{unceroo}
\end{eqnarray}
where $q(x) = x +10x^2+60x^3 +225 x^4 +495x^5+495x^6$. For $\xi_0 >> 1$, the dominant contribution to $q(x)$ is the $x^6$ term. Then, minimization with respect to $b$ gives
\begin{eqnarray}
\langle H \rangle^{9/7} \Delta t \gtrsim 1.7 m^{2/7}.
\end{eqnarray}
\section{Conclusions}
In this paper, we described the localization of relativistic particles in terms of time-of-arrival observables. The latter are defined in terms of the interaction between the associated quantum field
and the measuring apparatus. The apparatus is described by QFT at the microscopic level; however, its records are macroscopic and they are expressed in terms of classical spacetime coordinates $X$. We derived a probability density $P(X)$ for particle detection that is a genuine density with respect to $X$ and applies to any QFT.
Then, we specialized to the simplest case of a neutral scalar field, hence, spinless particles. We obtained a family of time-of-arrival POVMs for the relativistic particle that differ on the way that the apparatus effects localization. We found that there is a unique POVM that leads to maximal localization. This POVM is related to the Newton-Wigner position operator, and it reduces to Kijowski's POVM in the non-relativistic limit. Finally, we derived an uncertainty relation for the time-of-arrival that provides a lower bound to the spacetime localization of relativistic particles.
The methods developed in this paper can be straightforwardly applied to particles of other spin, including photons, gravitons and neutrinos. We expect that their localization properties are more elaborate, because spin strongly affects the localization operator. Our results can also be adapted for studying localization in interacting theories (e.g., QCD), as the only input to the analysis is a QFT two-point function.
The time-of-arrival probabilities derived here are expressed in terms of causal QFT correlation functions. For this reason, we believe that their description of particle localization is consistent with relativistic causality. To prove this, we must study signal propagation in set-ups that involve multiple measurements, for example, by generalizing the analysis of Ref. \cite{AnSav17} to relativistic systems.
\section*{Acknowledgements}
C. A acknowledges support by Grant No. E611 from the Research Committee of the University of Patras via the "K. Karatheodoris" program.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 7,219 |
{"url":"https:\/\/brilliant.org\/daily-problems\/reflection-box\/","text":"Back\n\n## House of Mirrors\n\nCovering the walls of a room with mirrors exposes an infinite abyss \u2014 an explosion of reflections trailing off as far as the eye can see!\n\nBetween bounces, light usually travels in straight lines called rays. This fact is hardwired into your brain, and it's how you form a mental picture of the world around you from an image.\n\nWhat exactly happens when a ray of light hits a mirror? Smooth surfaces, like polished glass or metal, reflect almost all light that lands on them.\n\nA light ray that hits a mirror is traveling in one direction before the reflection and in a different direction afterwards. These directions obey a simple relationship.\n\nLet's follow a ray of light coming toward a mirror at an angle. To figure out which direction it goes after it's reflected, we first draw a line that makes a right angle to the mirror's surface (the dashed line on the diagram below).\n\nThe angle between the incoming ray and the dashed line is called the angle of incidence $\\theta_\\text{i}.$ The angle between the ray after it's reflected is $\\theta_\\text{r}.$ The reflected ray always makes the same angle with the dashed line as the incoming ray: $\\theta_\\text{i}=\\theta_\\text{r}$. This is often stated as the law of reflection:\n\nLaw of reflection: The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.\n\nFor a ray that's reflected just once, this law seems pretty uninteresting. But in a house of mirrors or a kaleidoscope, a ray may bounce hundreds of times before you see it. Even so, this law is so accurate that you can pinpoint its exact source.\n\nFor example, here is a box with three mirrored walls. The fourth wall (on the right) is covered by three light sources \u2014 LED panels that emit red, green, and blue lights.\n\nA thin eyepiece, which makes an angle of $60^\\circ$ with the bottom wall, lets you view any ray parallel to the long axis of the eyepiece. What color do you see?\n\nThe source of the ray entering the eyepiece can be found by tracing it backwards using the law of reflection. You can adjust the sliders on the diagram to ensure that the law is satisfied for each reflection from the source to the eyepiece.\n\nSince the eyepiece makes a $60^\\circ$ with the bottom wall, the angle of reflection of the ray that bounces off the top wall is $90^\\circ-60^\\circ=30^\\circ.$ The incident angle equals the reflected angle, so the incident angle of the first bounce $\\theta_1$ is $30^\\circ$ (which we've set for you already).\n\nIf you continue tracing the ray backwards, setting the reflected angle equal to the incident angle for each reflection, you'll find that the source of the ray entering the eyepiece is the $\\textcolor{#20A900}{\\text{green}}$ light!\n\nReflection isn't the only behavior of light when it encounters an object \u2014 it can also be absorbed. Now that you have the mechanics of adjusting the reflected rays on the diagram, try to solve Today's Challenge featuring a box both reflecting and absorbing surfaces.\n\n# Today's Challenge\n\nSources of red, green, and blue lights cover one of the walls of this box. Five other walls are mirrored. The last two walls are painted black and absorb all light. If a ray touches an absorbing wall, it ends.\n\nThe eyepiece in this box can be set to $6$ different angles. Trace the ray that enters the eyepiece at each setting to its source. The black line is a tool to help you trace the path.\n\nWhich colors can you see through the eyepiece? (You may select more than one color.)\n\nSelect one or more\n\n\u00d7","date":"2020-09-24 15:14:48","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 10, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.5149951577186584, \"perplexity\": 499.42674526513474}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-40\/segments\/1600400219221.53\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200924132241-20200924162241-00369.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
In this tutorial, we'll be using illustrator to create psychedelic reptile art. I'll show you my process for using overlapping vector shapes to create a painterly style illustration. You can view more of this style of artwork on my portfolio site. Let's get started on this tutorial!
Even when creating vector art, you're drawing is the basic guide for your final illustration. Spend a fair amount of time getting your drawing perfect before you scan it into the computer.
Once your drawing is scanned in, start by using the Pencil tool or Pen tool (whichever you prefer), and trace the basic shapes of your drawing. Use transparency to see what your drawing looks like while your tracing.
Each element of your drawing is important, so pay attention to little details such as the under belly of the snake. The Pen tool is useful for this area of the illustration.
Once you have the basic elements of your drawing finished, experiment with colors and add a basic color for your background.
With the Pencil tool or Pen tool, add some tonal values in the head of the snake. Once you have a shape you're happy with, scale back the Opacity to around 20%.
Spend a little time shading the head. You can achieve shading by drawing tones and adjust the opacity. If you have ever had a painting class, shade the same way in illustrator, as if you were painting on a canvas. Add darker tones with a higher opacity near the edges of the head and light tones near the middle.
Now spend more time drawing in the spots of the snakes. Have fun by loosely drawing spots throughout the snake. Since these spots are still part of the drawing, they can be done on the same layer as the overall snake drawing.
Double-clicking the Pencil tool will bring up options for controlling the tool more accurately. Experiment with these setting until you're happy with the results. Now create a new layer and start adding more color to the snake by adding some yellow tones around the basic red tones added before. Add color around each shape, which will help move the color around adding life to the piece.
Continue this process throughout the snake.
Once you're finished adding the yellow your layer will look somewhat like this figure below.
To help blend the two tones, select a color that will help soften up the hard edge between the two colors. I choice an another orange color. Draw an abstract shape, which will overlap the yellow and red. Then change the Opacity to about 55%. This will soften the edges.
Once your finished, your layer should look like this figure below.
Create a new layer and label it "shadows." Instead of using a black, pick a color like purple. Next, draw shades around the edges of the snake with the Pen tool. After drawing them, change the Opacity to 10% or 15%. Draw many of these swoosh shapes around the edges of the snake. This will help add depth to the illustration.
Now that the snake is almost complete, lets play around with adding some texture to the background. Draw a few basic objects in the background. Then, select the Twirl tool, then twirl the objects which you drew until your happy with the results.
Now for the finishing touches. Add some finishing highlights to the snake by drawing a few swoosh shapes with the Pen tool. Next from the Effects Options, click on the Blur section, and select Gaussian Blur. Only add a few points to add just slight burr to the edges.
Now look over your finished illustration and add any additional highlights or shadows you mite need. Our finished illustration is shown below. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 6,832 |
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:introduction}
\setcounter{equation}{0}
In models with low-energy supersymmetry (SUSY), there may exist
various long-lived particles (which we call $X$) which have very weak
interactions with the particles in the minimal SUSY standard model
(MSSM). The examples include moduli fields, Polonyi field
(responsible for SUSY breaking), gravitino (which is the superpartner
of graviton), axino (which is the superpartner of axion in SUSY
Peccei-Quinn model), and so on. In most of the cases, these particles
are irrelevant for low-energy phenomenology because of the weakness of
their interactions.
Cosmologically, however, they often cause serious problems
\cite{Coughlan:1983ci, Ellis:1986zt, Goncharov:1984qm, Banks:1993en,
de Carlos:1993jw} because, even though their interactions are very
weak, a sizable amount of them may be produced in the early universe.
If they are stable, they survive until today, resulting in the
overclosure of the universe. Even if they are unstable, their
lifetimes are often so long that they decay at a very late stage of
the evolution of the universe. If they decay after the big-bang
nucleosynthesis (BBN) starts, hadro- and photo-dissociation processes
of light elements induced by their decay products may spoil the
success of the BBN scenario. In order to avoid such a problem, the
lifetime of $X$ is required to be shorter than $\sim 1\ {\rm sec}$;
otherwise, the abundance of $X$ is bounded above
\cite{Kawasaki:2004yh, Kawasaki:2004qu}.
Even with lifetime shorter than $\sim 1\ {\rm sec}$, $X$ may cause
other cosmological difficulties. In our study, we consider one of
such problems: the overproduction of the lightest superparticle (LSP)
due to its decay. In many cases, $X$ decays into superparticles which
cascade down to the LSP. Then, if all the produced LSPs survive until
today, it is often the case that the resultant mass density of the LSP
becomes much larger than the present energy density of dark matter.
In particular, the universe may be once dominated by $X$ before the
decay of $X$; in such a case, the overproduction of the LSP is a
serious problem.
If the pair annihilation cross section of the LSP is large enough, the
LSPs produced by the decay of $X$ may annihilate and the abundance of
the LSP can be suppressed. There exists a viable and well-motivated
candidate of such LSP, the neutral Wino $\tilde{W}^0$. In models with
the naive grand-unified-theory (GUT) relation among gaugino masses,
the Wino cannot be the LSP. However, even if the unification of the
gauge group is realized, the GUT relation can be easily violated in
various cases, for example, in the anomaly-mediation model
\cite{Giudice:1998xp, Randall:1998uk}, product-group unification
\cite{Yanagida:1994vq}, and so on. In particular, in the light of the
recent discovery of the Higgs-like particle at the LHC
\cite{Aad:2012gk, Chatrchyan:2012gu}, the anomaly-mediation model with
large scalar masses \cite{Giudice:1998xp} (as large as $\sim 10-100\
{\rm TeV}$) is well-motivated because the relatively large SUSY Higgs
mass of $\sim 126\ {\rm GeV}$ can be realized if the scalar tops are
so heavy \cite{Giudice:2011cg}. It is well-known that the Wino can
naturally be the LSP in anomaly-mediation model.
In this paper, we reconsider the possibility of the non-thermally
produced Wino being dark matter. In particular, we precisely
calculate the relic abundance of the neutral Wino. The possibility of
Wino dark matter from the decay of long-lived particles was first
discussed in \cite{Giudice:1998xp, Moroi:1999zb}, in which it was
shown that the relic density of the Wino can be consistent with the
dark matter density. Then, such a scenario has been applied to
various cases \cite{Acharya:2008zi, Acharya:2008bk, Baer:2011hx,
Baer:2011uz, Moroi:2011ab}. (For the case where the LSP is not
Wino-like, see also \cite{Gelmini:2006pw, Gelmini:2006pq,
Nagai:2007ud, Nagai:2008se}.) Compared to the previous studies, we
have carefully taken into account the following in the calculation of
the relic Wino abundance:
\begin{itemize}
\item[(i)] Coannihilation effect among neutral and charged Winos,
which becomes important when the decay temperature of $X$ is higher
than the mass difference between charged and neutral Winos.
\item[(ii)] Sommerfeld enhancement of the pair annihilation cross
section, which is large when the Wino is heavier than $\sim 1\ {\rm
TeV}$.
\end{itemize}
The organization of this paper is as follows. In Section
\ref{sec:formulas}, we show relevant formulas to calculate the relic
abundance of neutral Wino. In Section \ref{sec:numerical}, we
numerically calculate the relic abundance of the Wino for several
situations and discuss implications. Section \ref{sec:conclusions} is
devoted to conclusions and discussion.
\section{Formulas}
\label{sec:formulas}
In this section, we summarize the basic formulas to calculate the
thermal relic abundance of the neutral Wino through the decay of a
heavy particle $X$.
The Wino is $SU(2)_L$-triplet, and there exist neutral and charged
Winos, denoted as $\tilde{W}^0$ and $\tilde{W}^\pm$, respectively. In
the present study, we consider the case where the neutral Wino is the
LSP; in the following, we assume that superparticles other than Winos
are so heavy that they are irrelevant at the time of the freeze-out of
Winos. This is the case in the anomaly-mediated model, which is one
of the important motivations of our study. In addition, because we
assume that the Higgsinos are much heavier than Winos, the mass
difference between $\tilde{W}^0$ and $\tilde{W}^\pm$ are dominantly
from one-loop diagrams with gauge bosons (i.e., $\gamma$, $Z$, and
$W^\pm$) and Winos inside the loop. Then, if the Wino mass is much
smaller than the Higgsino mass, the mass difference is typically
$150-165\ {\rm MeV}$ \cite{Feng:1999fu, Ibe:2012sx}, which is
insensitive to the Wino mass.
Because the mass difference is much smaller than the Wino mass, the
number density of the charged Wino at the time of the freeze-out of
Winos may be sizable. Thus, in the calculation of the relic
density of $\tilde{W}^0$, we include effects of all the possible
channels of Wino annihilation. We consider the case where Winos
are much lighter than other superparticles, so the coannihilation
with those are neglected in the calculation of the relic density.
Now we discuss the evolution of the number density of Wino. As we
mentioned, we consider the case with a long-lived particle $X$ which
decays into MSSM particles. Using the fact that all the MSSM
superparticles eventually decay into charged or neutral Wino, the
relevant set of Boltzmann equations to calculate the relic abundance
of Wino LSP is given by
\begin{eqnarray}
\frac{d n_{\tilde{W}}}{d t} + 3 H n_{\tilde{W}}
&=& - \langle \sigma_{\rm eff} v \rangle
( n_{\tilde{W}}^2 - n_{\tilde{W}, {\rm eq}}^2)
+ N_{\tilde W} \Gamma_X n_X,
\label{nwinodot} \\
\frac{d n_X}{d t} + 3 H n_X
&=& - \Gamma_X n_X ,
\label{nxdot} \\
\frac{d \rho_{\rm rad}}{d t}
\left(
1+\frac{1}{3} \frac{\partial \ln g_{\ast}}{\partial \ln T}
\right) &=&
\left( -4H{\rho}_{\rm rad}+q \right) \left( 1+\frac{1}{4}\frac{\partial \ln g_{\ast}}{\partial \ln T}\right),
\label{rhoraddot}
\end{eqnarray}
where $n_{\tilde{W}}$ is the sum of the number densities of neutral
and charged Winos, $n_X$ is the number density of $X$, and $q$ is a
heat injection into radiation as
\begin{eqnarray}
q&=&(m_X - N_{\tilde W} m_{{\tilde W}})\Gamma_X n_X
+ m_{\tilde W} \langle \sigma_{\rm eff} v \rangle n_{\tilde{W}}^2,
\label{heat}
\end{eqnarray}
with $N_{\tilde W}$ being the averaged number of SUSY particles
produced by the decay of one $X$. In addition, $\rho_{\rm rad}$ is
the energy density of the relativistic component, and is related to
the cosmic temperature $T$ as
\begin{eqnarray}
\rho_R = \frac{\pi^2}{30} g_*(T) T^4,
\end{eqnarray}
where $g_*(T)$ is the effective number of relativistic degrees of
freedom.\footnote
{We use the fact that $g_{*s}(T)$ is numerically very close to
$g_{*}(T)$, and approximate $g_{*s}(T)\simeq g_{*}(T)$ in our
calculation, where $g_{*s}(T)$ is the effective number of massless
degrees of freedom for the calculation of entropy density, which is
related to the entropy density as
\begin{eqnarray*}
s(T) = \frac{2\pi^2}{45} g_{*s}(T) T^3.
\end{eqnarray*}
}
In our calculation, we approximated that the full particle content at
the temperature above the QCD scale (which is taken to be $200\ {\rm
MeV}$ in our analysis) is that of the MSSM, while that at the
temperature below the QCD scale consists of photon, three generations
of leptons, and pions. Furthermore, $n_{\tilde{W}, {\rm eq}}$ denotes
the thermal-equilibrium value of $n_{\tilde{W}}$, $H$ is the expansion
rate of the universe, $\Gamma_X$ is the decay rate of $X$, and $m_X$
and $m_{\tilde{W}}$ are the masses of $X$ and Wino,
respectively.\footnote
{Because we are interested in the case where charged and neutral Winos
are quite degenerate, we denote the Wino masses as $m_{\tilde{W}}$
as far as we discuss the quantities which are insensitive to the
mass difference.}
In the above Boltzmann equations, the thermally-averaged effective
annihilation cross section $\langle \sigma_{\rm eff} v \rangle$
accounts both for the coannihilation effect and the Sommerfeld effect,
which were not fully taken into accounts in previous analyses.
The coannihilation processes are included by summing up the cross
sections of all the relevant modes with appropriate weights:
\begin{equation}
\langle \sigma_{\rm eff} v \rangle =
\sum_{i,j} r_i r_j
\langle \sigma_{ij} v \rangle ,
\end{equation}
where $i,j = {\tilde W}^0$, ${\tilde W}^+$ and ${\tilde W}^-$, and
\begin{eqnarray}
r_i = \frac{n_i}{n_{\tilde{W}}},
\end{eqnarray}
with $n_i$ being the number density of $i$. We assume that Winos are
in kinetic equilibrium;\footnote
{ The energetic Winos produced by the $X$ decay show non-trivial
velocity distribution at first. However, charged Winos soon lose
their energies through the electromagnetic interactions with the
thermal background (in particular, electron and positron) as well as
through the decay. In addition, sizable fractions of neutral Winos
can be thermalized through the inelastic interactions
\cite{Hisano:2000dz, Ibe:2012hr}. In particular, as we see
below, $T_X$ is required to be higher than $\sim \Delta
m_{\tilde{W}}$ in order to realize
$\Omega_{\tilde{{W}}}=\Omega_{\rm c}$ in the parameter region
where the pair annihilation of the Wino becomes effective; in such
a case, the neutral and charged Winos are efficiently converted to
each other by the charged current processes in the thermal bath,
and the charged Wino efficently loses its energy by the decay
process (as well as the scattering processes with charged
particles in the thermal bath). Thus, we expect that the Winos
reach the kinetic equilibrium.}
when $T\ll m_{\tilde{W}}$,
\begin{eqnarray}
r_{\tilde{W}^0} = \frac{1}{1 + 2e^{-\Delta m_{\tilde{W}}/T}},
~~~
r_{\tilde{W}^+} = r_{\tilde{W}^-} =
\frac{e^{-\Delta m_{\tilde{W}}/T}}{1 + 2e^{-\Delta m_{\tilde{W}}/T}}.
\end{eqnarray}
If the mass difference between charged and neutral Winos $\Delta
m_{\tilde{W}}$ is much larger than the background temperature $T$,
only the lightest neutral Wino is relevant in the annihilation
process. On the other hand, the coannihilation becomes effective for
the temperature $T \gtrsim \Delta m_{\tilde{W}}$.
For each annihilation process, thermally averaged cross section is
obtained by
\begin{equation}
\langle \sigma_{ij} v \rangle =
\left( \frac{m_{{\tilde W}}}{4\pi T} \right)^{3/2}
\int d^3 v (\sigma_{ij} v)
e^{-m_{{\tilde W}} v^2/4T}.
\end{equation}
Once the temperature of the universe decreases and the neutral and
charged Winos become non-relativistic, the wave functions of
annihilating Wino pairs are significantly deformed by the electroweak
potential generated by the electroweak gauge boson exchanges. The
resultant annihilation cross sections, $\sigma_{ij} v$, are
significantly enhanced or suppressed due to the Sommerfeld effect
\cite{Hisano:2004ds, Hisano:2005ec, Hisano:2006nn}. The Sommerfeld
effect is more important for larger Wino mass, $m_{{\tilde W}}\stackrel{>}{_\sim} 1\
{\rm TeV}$, because the electroweak potential behaves as a long range
force in such a mass region. As a result, the thermally-averaged
cross sections show non-trivial dependence on the cosmic temperature
$T$ and the Wino mass $m_{{\tilde W}}$. A two-body system of Winos
can be classified by the quantum numbers $Q$ (electric charge) and $S$
(spin), and the Sommerfeld enhancement factors are evaluated for fixed
values of these quantum numbers. For each set of $(Q, S)$, possible
decay modes and the decay widths are summarized in Appendix. (See
Table \ref{Tab:cs}.)
\begin{figure}[t]
\label{fig:cs}
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.6\textwidth\epsfbox{cs.eps}}
\caption{Thermally averaged total cross section $\langle \sigma_{\rm
eff} v \rangle$ for $T= 10^{-5}m_{{\tilde W}}$ (pink line),
$10^{-4}m_{{\tilde W}}$ (blue line), $10^{-3}m_{{\tilde W}}$ (green line),
$10^{-2}m_{{\tilde W}}$ (light blue line),
and $T\gg m_{{\tilde W}}$ (red line). For comparison, we also show
the annihilation cross section of neutral Wino without the
Sommerfeld effect (black line). The vertical axis is the the Wino mass,
and we take $\Delta m_{{\tilde W}}=160\ {\rm MeV}$.}
\end{figure}
In Fig.\ \ref{fig:cs}, we show the effective annihilation cross
section for several cosmic temperatures, $T= 10^{-5}m_{{\tilde W}},\
10^{-4}m_{{\tilde W}},\ 10^{-3}m_{{\tilde W}}$, and $T\gg m_{{\tilde
W}}$. (Here and hereafter, we take $\Delta m_{{\tilde W}}=160\
{\rm MeV}$ in our numerical calculation; even if we vary $\Delta
m_{{\tilde W}}$ by $5\ {\rm MeV}$ or so, the resultant value of the
Wino abundance is almost the same. ) For
comparison, we also show the annihilation cross section of neutral
Wino without the Sommerfeld effect in the same figure. Obviously, the
cross section is significantly enhanced in particular for the Wino
mass larger than $\sim 1\ {\rm TeV}$, and the enhancement factor
becomes larger for lower temperature. In addition, we can see the
resonance structure at around $m_{{\tilde W}}\simeq 2.4\ {\rm TeV}$,
which occurs due to the existence of zero-energy bound states. The
precise position of the resonance is determined by the structure of
the electroweak potential, and depends on the mass difference between
charged and neutral Winos, $\Delta m_{\tilde W}$. For larger $\Delta
m_{\tilde W}$, the resonance peak is shifted to the heavier Wino mass.
As is seen from the Fig.\ \ref{fig:cs}, the annihilation cross section
at the decay temperature can be significantly enhanced by the
Sommerfeld effect. We stress here again that once coannihilation and
Sommerfeld effects are included, the cross sections show non-trivial
dependence on $T$. In order to precisely take into account these
effects, we solve the Boltzmann equations numerically.
The relic density of the neutral Wino can be calculated by solving
Eqs.\ \eqref{nwinodot} $-$ \eqref{rhoraddot} with relevant initial
condition. The initial values of $n_{\tilde{W}}$, $n_X$, and
$\rho_{\rm rad}$ depend on cosmological scenarios and the properties
of $X$. In the next section, we consider several well-motivated
scenarios and calculate the relic density by numerically solving the
Boltzmann equations.
\section{Relic Abundance of Neutral Wino}
\label{sec:numerical}
\subsection{Case with $X$ domination in the early universe}
First, we consider the case where the particle $X$ once dominates the
universe. In such a case, at the cosmic time $t\ll \Gamma_X^{-1}$,
the energy density of $X$ is much larger than that of radiation, while
the energy density of radiation (i.e., so-called ``dilute plasma'')
scales as $a^{-3/8}$ (with $a$ being the scale factor). With such an
initial condition, we solve the Boltzmann equations to calculate the
relic abundance of $\tilde{W}^0$. In the parameter region of our analysis the maximal
temperature of the dilute plasma is much higher than the Wino mass;
then, the pair annihilation rate is initially much larger than the
expansion rate of the universe. In such a case, the production and
annihilation terms in the right-hand side of Eq.\ \eqref{nwinodot}
(almost) balance, so we take the initial value of the number density
of the Wino as $n_{\tilde{W}}^{\rm (init)} = \sqrt{n_{\tilde{W}, {\rm
eq}}^2+N_{\tilde W} \Gamma_X n_X\langle \sigma_{\rm eff} v
\rangle^{-1}}$. (However, the resultant relic abundance is
insensitive to the initial value of $n_{\tilde{W}}$ as far as the
initial condition is set at the cosmic time with the background
temperature much higher than $m_{\tilde{W}}$.) With the initial
condition given above, we calculate the number density of the Wino
after the completion of the decay of $X$, and evaluate the yield
variable of the Wino
\begin{eqnarray}
Y_{\tilde{W}} \equiv \frac{n_{\tilde{W}}}{s},
\end{eqnarray}
where $s$ is the entropy density. Using the fact that $Y_{\tilde{W}}$
becomes constant of time at low enough temperature, we calculate the
density parameter as
\begin{eqnarray}
\Omega_{\tilde{W}} = m_{\tilde{W}}
\left[ Y_{\tilde{W}} \right]_{t\gg \Gamma_X^{-1}}
\left( \frac{\rho_{\rm crit}}{s_{\rm now}} \right)^{-1},
\end{eqnarray}
where $\rho_{\rm crit}$ is the critical density of the universe while
$s_{\rm now}$ is the present entropy density, and their ratio is given
by $\rho_{\rm crit}/s_{\rm now} \simeq 3.6 h^2 \times 10^{-9} {\rm
GeV}$, with $h$ being the Hubble constant in units of $100\ {\rm
km/sec/Mpc}$. (In our numerical calculation, we use $h=0.697$
\cite{Hinshaw:2012fq}.) Comparing $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}$ with the
present density parameter of dark matter, we derive constraints on the
model parameters. We use the following value of the dark matter
density as the canonical value \cite{Hinshaw:2012fq}:
\begin{eqnarray}
\Omega_{\rm c} h^2 = 0.1146.
\end{eqnarray}
In the case where $X$ once dominates the universe, the relic density
of the Wino depends on the following parameters: $\Gamma_X$ (decay
rate of $X$), $m_X$ (mass of $X$), $m_{\tilde{W}}$ (Wino mass), and
$N_{\tilde{W}}$ (averaged number of the Winos produced by the decay of
one $X$). In particular, the relic density depends on the decay rate
$\Gamma_X$. To discuss the dependence on $\Gamma_X$, it is convenient
to define the ``decay temperature'' as
\begin{eqnarray}
T_X \equiv
\left(
\frac{10}{g_*(T_X) \pi^2} M_{\rm Pl}^2 \Gamma_{X}^2
\right)^{1/4},
\label{T_R}
\end{eqnarray}
where $M_{\rm Pl}\simeq 2.4\times 10^{18}\ {\rm GeV}$ is the reduced
Planck scale. Notice that $T_X$ corresponds to the cosmic temperature
at the time of $X$ decay.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{mo_N1.eps}}
\caption{Contours of constant $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ for
$N_{\tilde{W}}=1$ and $m_X=5m_{\tilde{W}}$ for the case where $X$
once dominates the universe. Numbers in the figure are
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$.}
\label{fig:N1moju}
\end{figure}
In Fig.\ \ref{fig:N1moju}, we show the contours of constant
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ for the case with $N_{\tilde{W}}=1$.
(In this subsection, we take $m_X/m_{\tilde{W}}=5$; even if we vary
this ratio, the resultant value of $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ is almost
unchanged if the annihilation of the Winos becomes effective.) As
one can see, $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ is insensitive to $T_X$ when the
decay temperature is high, while $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ increases as
$T_X$ becomes lower when the decay temperature is relatively low.
Such behaviors can be easily understood. With high enough decay
temperature, the Winos are still in chemical equilibrium after the
completion of the $X$ decay, and hence the relic abundance of the Wino
is given by the thermal relic density. On the contrary, with low
decay temperature, the Winos cannot be in chemical equilibrium. Even
in such a case, the pair annihilation of the Wino proceeds as far as
the annihilation rate is larger than the expansion rate of the
universe. In such a case, the yield value of the Wino is approximated
by
\begin{eqnarray}
Y_{\tilde{W}} \sim
{\rm min} \left[
\frac{3\Gamma_X}{\langle \sigma_{\rm eff} v \rangle s(T_X)},
\frac{N_{\tilde W} n_X (T_X)}{s(T_X)}
\right],
\label{Ywino(approx)}
\end{eqnarray}
where $n_X (T_X)$ represents the number density of $X$ just before the
decay.
Notice that the first (second) term in the
right-hand side of Eq.\ \eqref{Ywino(approx)} is relevant for the
case where the effect of the annihilation
of the Wino is effective (ineffective).
The first term, which is approximately
proportional to $T_X^{-1}$, is smaller than the second one, resulting
in the enhancement of $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ with lower decay
temperature.
In order to realize the Wino dark matter scenario (i.e.,
$\Omega_{\tilde{{W}}}=\Omega_{\rm c}$), relatively high value of $T_X$
is needed. For $m_{\tilde{W}}=300\ {\rm GeV}$ ($500\ {\rm GeV}$, $1\
{\rm TeV}$, $2\ {\rm TeV}$), $T_X= 1.3\ {\rm GeV}$ ($4.0\ {\rm GeV}$,
$23\ {\rm GeV}$, $150\ {\rm GeV}$) is necessary. If $T_X$ is lower,
the universe is overclosed. This has an important implication when
the cosmological moduli fields play the role of $X$, as we discuss
below. In addition, we can see a significant suppression of
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ when $m_{\tilde{W}}\simeq 2.4\ {\rm TeV}$.
Such a suppression is due to the significant enhancement of the
annihilation cross section by the Sommerfeld effect.
In order to see the importance of Sommerfeld enhancement, we also
calculate $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ neglecting the Sommerfeld
enhancement. In addition, for comparison, we also show the result
without the effect of coannihilation, for which we use
$\langle\sigma_{\rm eff}v\rangle=
\langle\sigma_{\tilde{W}^0\tilde{W}^0\rightarrow W^+W^-} v\rangle$
(without Sommerfeld effect). The results are shown in Fig.\
\ref{fig:hikaku_eff} for $N_{\tilde{W}}=1$ and $T_X=10\ {\rm GeV}$.
The Sommerfeld effect significantly changes ${\Omega}_{\tilde{W}}h^2$
when $m_{\tilde{W}}\gtrsim 1\ {\rm TeV}$.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{method_compare.eps}}
\caption{${\Omega}_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ as a function of $m_{\tilde{W}}$
for $N_{\tilde{W}}=1$ and $T_X=10\ {\rm GeV}$ with Sommerfeld and
coannihilation effects (red line), with coannihilation effect only
(green line) and without neither Sommerfeld nor coannihilation
effects (blue line).
}
\label{fig:hikaku_eff}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{mo_N6.eps}}
\caption{Same as Fig.\ \ref{fig:N1moju}, except for
$N_{\tilde{W}}=10^{-6}$.}
\label{fig:N04moju}
\end{figure}
In the case where $X$ dominates the universe, the $N_{\tilde{W}}$
dependence of $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ is very weak unless
$N_{\tilde{W}}$ is significantly suppressed. In Fig.\
\ref{fig:N04moju}, we plot contours of constant
${\Omega}_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ with $N_{\tilde{W}}=10^{-6}$. Even with
such a small value of $N_{\tilde{W}}$, the contour of
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ does not change much compared to that
given in Fig.\ \ref{fig:N1moju}. Thus, unless $N_{\tilde{W}}\ll
10^{-6}$, $T_X$ should be higher than $0.6\ {\rm GeV}$ ($2\ {\rm
GeV}$, $10\ {\rm GeV}$, and $90\ {\rm GeV}$) for $m_{\tilde{W}}=300\
{\rm GeV}$ ($m_{\tilde{W}}=500\ {\rm GeV}$, $m_{\tilde{W}}=1\ {\rm
TeV}$, and $m_{\tilde{W}}=2\ {\rm TeV}$). In Fig.\ \ref{fig:mhi},
we show the contours of the upper bound on $N_{\tilde{W}}$ on the
$m_{\tilde{W}}$ vs.\ $T_X$ plane, requiring
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}<\Omega_{\rm c}$. As a result, we can see that
$N_{\tilde{W}}\lesssim O(10^{-8})$ is required if $T_X$ is so small
that the pair annihilation of the Winos is ineffective.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{mo_N_compare.eps}}
\caption{Contours of ${\Omega}_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ for
$N_{\tilde{W}}=1$ (blue line), $N_{\tilde{W}}=10^{-6}$ (green
line) and $N_{\tilde{W}}=10^{-8}$ (red line).}
\label{fig:mhi}
\end{figure}
One of the important applications of our study is to the case with
weakly interacting late decaying scalar fields, like scalar fields
responsible for the SUSY breaking (i.e., so-called the Polonyi field)
and the moduli fields in string theory. (Hereafter, we call them
``moduli fields.'') Moduli fields are expected to have interactions
suppressed by the Planck scale. A modulus field may have a large
initial amplitude. Because of the weakness of the interaction, the
lifetime of the modulus may be so long that its decay occurs at a late
stage of the evolution of the universe. It is well known that the
late-time decay of the modulus field is dangerous because it destroys
the light elements produced by the BBN reactions, resulting in the
spoil of the success of the BBN scenario. Such a problem can be
avoided if the decay rate of the modulus is somehow enhanced so that
the lifetime of the modulus becomes shorter than $\sim 1\ {\rm sec}$.
Even so, the decay of the modulus field produces significant amount of
superparticles, which may result in the overproduction of the LSP.
With the Wino LSP, this problem may be avoided.
The decay rate of a modulus field depends on how it interacts with the
MSSM fields. For example, it may interact as
\begin{eqnarray}
{\cal L}_{\rm int} =
\frac{\lambda_{\rm G}}{M_{\rm Pl}}
\int d^2 \theta
\hat{X} \hat{\cal W}^\alpha \hat{\cal W}_\alpha + {\rm h.c.},
\label{XWW}
\end{eqnarray}
where the ``hat'' stands for superfields, $\hat{\cal W}$ is the gauge
field strength superfield, and $\lambda_{\rm G}$ is a coupling
constant. Then, the scalar component $X$ decays into a pair of vector
boson $V$ with the following decay rate:
\begin{eqnarray}
\Gamma_{X\rightarrow VV} &=&
\frac{N_{\rm f}\lambda_{\rm G}^2}{4\pi}
\frac{m_X^3}{M_{\rm Pl}^2},
\end{eqnarray}
where $N_{\rm f}$ is the number of the possible final states; for
example, $N_{\rm f}=N^2-1$ for an SU($N$) gauge group. (Here, we
assume that the vector boson is much lighter than $X$.) In addition,
with the interaction given in Eq.\ \eqref{XWW}, $X$ may decay into a
pair of gauginos $\lambda$. The decay rate is model-dependent, and is
typically $\Gamma_{X\rightarrow \lambda \lambda}\sim
\Gamma_{X\rightarrow VV}$ \cite{Endo:2006zj, Nakamura:2006uc}.
Approximating $\Gamma_X\sim\Gamma_{X\rightarrow VV}$, the decay
temperature is estimated to be
\begin{eqnarray}
T_X \sim 0.01\ {\rm GeV} \times
\lambda_{\rm G}
\left( \frac{m_X}{100\ {\rm TeV}} \right)^{3/2},
\end{eqnarray}
where we have used $N_{\rm f}=12$, which is the number of the gauge
bosons in the standard model. For $m_{\tilde{W}}=300\ {\rm GeV}$ ($1\
{\rm TeV}$), the $\lambda_{\rm G}$-parameter is required to be larger
than $430$, $130$, and $42$ ($7600$, $2300$, and $74$) for $m_X=10\
{\rm TeV}$, $100\ {\rm TeV}$, and $1000\ {\rm TeV}$, respectively,
where we have assumed $N_{\tilde{W}}\sim 1$. It seems that if such a
modulus with ${\lambda}_{G}\sim O(1)$ once dominates the universe it
tends to cause overproduction of the Winos. In order for the Winos
not to overclose the universe, large $m_X$ or enhanced $\lambda_{\rm
G}$ is needed.
\subsection{Case with gravitino}
Next, we consider the case where gravitino plays the role of $X$.
Even though the gravitino may not dominate the universe, a significant
amount of $\tilde{W}$ may be produced by its decay.
The gravitino is the superpartner of graviton, and it couples to the
supercurrent so it interacts with all the supermultiplets. If
unstable, the gravitino decays into an ordinary (visible-sector)
particle and its superpartner. Thus, decay of the gravitino results
in the production of the LSP because all the produced superparticles
cascade down to the LSP. The interactions of the gravitino are
suppressed by inverse powers of the Planck scale so that the decay
rate of the gravitino is extremely small. It is well known that the
late-time decay of the gravitino may spoil the success of the BBN if
the lifetimes of the gravitino is longer than $\sim 1\ {\rm sec}$
\cite{Kawasaki:2004yh, Kawasaki:2004qu, Kawasaki:2008qe}. In order to
avoid such a problem, we concentrate on the case where the lifetime is
shorter than $\sim 1\ {\rm sec}$, which is realized if the gravitino
mass is larger than $\sim O(10\ {\rm TeV})$. Assuming that the
gaugino masses are at the TeV scale and are much smaller than the
gravitino mass, the lifetime of the gravitino is estimated as
\begin{eqnarray}
\tau_{3/2} = 0.4\ {\rm sec} \times N_{\rm G}^{-1}
\left(\frac{m_{3/2}}{100\ {\rm TeV}}\right)^{-3},
\end{eqnarray}
where $m_{3/2}$ is gravitino mass. In addition, $N_{\rm G}$ is the
number of gauge multiplets to which the gravitino decays. (In the
following numerical study, we take the MSSM value of $N_{\rm G}=12$.)
We also assume that the superparticles other than gauginos are as
heavy as the gravitino so that the decay modes into those
superparticles are negligible.
Even though the gravitino is very weakly interacting, gravitinos are
produced by scattering processes of particles in thermal bath. The
abundance of the gravitino (before its decay) is approximately
proportional to the reheating temperature after inflation; for the
case where the gravitino mass is significantly larger than gaugino
masses, the yield variable of the gravitino, which is defined as
$Y_{3/2}=n_{3/2}/s$ with $n_{3/2}$ being the number density of the
gravitino, is given by \cite{Kawasaki:2008qe}\footnote
{If there exists condensation of a scalar field (like inflaton, moduli
fields, and so on), the gravitino may be produced by the decay
process \cite{Endo:2006zj, Nakamura:2006uc, Kawasaki:2006gs}. We
assume that the abundance of the gravitino from such a decay
process, which is highly model-dependent, is negligible.}
\begin{eqnarray}
\left[ Y_{3/2} \right]_{t\ll \tau_{3/2}}
\simeq
2.3 \times 10^{-14} \times T_{\rm R}^{(8)}
\left[ 1 + 0.015 \ln T_{\rm R}^{(8)} - 0.0009 \ln^2 T_{\rm R}^{(8)}
\right],
\label{Ygrav}
\end{eqnarray}
where $T_{\rm R}^{(8)}\equiv T_{\rm R}/10^8\ {\rm GeV}$, with $T_{\rm
R}$ being the reheating temperature after inflation,\footnote
{Here, we assume that there is no significant entropy production after
inflation.}
which is related to the decay rate of the inflaton $\Gamma_{\rm inf}$
as
\begin{eqnarray}
T_{\rm R} \equiv
\left(
\frac{10}{g_*(T_{\rm R}) \pi^2} M_{\rm Pl}^2 \Gamma_{\rm inf}^2
\right)^{1/4}.
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{gn_TR.eps}}
\caption{Contours of $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ for several
values of the reheating temperature. Here we take $N_{\rm G}=12$.
Numbers in the figure are $T_{\rm R}$ in units of GeV.}
\label{fig:grvn}
\end{figure}
We calculate the density parameter of the Wino by numerically solving
the Boltzmann equations given in Section \ref{sec:formulas}. Because
the primordial abundance of the gravitino is approximately
proportional to the reheating temperature, $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}$ also
increases with higher reheating temperature.
In Fig.\ \ref{fig:grvn}, we show the contours of
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ for several values of $T_{\rm R}$ on
$m_{\tilde{W}}$ vs.\ $m_{3/2}$ plane.\footnote
{In the anomaly-mediation scenario with $m_{\tilde{W}}\sim O(100\ {\rm
GeV}-1\ {\rm TeV})$, the gravitino mass is expected to be of
$O(100\ {\rm TeV})$. Here, however, we vary $m_{3/2}$ up to
$O(10^5\ {\rm TeV})$ to provide information about the case with
extremely heavy gravitino.}
The contour of $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_{\rm c}$ is almost
independent of the reheating temperature if $T_{\rm R}$ is high
enough. This is due to the fact that, with high enough reheating
temperature and large enough gravitino mass, the Wino abundance at the
time of the gravitino decay is so large that the pair annihilation of
Wino becomes effective. Then, as discussed in the previous
subsection, $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}$ is determined by the decay
temperature which is determined by $m_{3/2}$ and becomes insensitive
to the primordial abundance of the gravitino. On the contrary, if the
gravitino mass is smaller than $\sim 10^3\ {\rm TeV}$, the contour of
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_{\rm c}$ becomes insensitive to the
gravitino mass. This is because, if the gravitino mass is small, the
decay temperature of the gravitino becomes so low that the
annihilation of the Wino is inefficient. Then, almost all Winos
produced by the gravitino decay survive until today, and the relic
density of the Wino is approximately given by the sum of thermal relic
density and the non-thermal one from the gravitino decay:
$Y_{\tilde{W}}\simeq Y_{\tilde{W}}^{\rm (th)}+[Y_{3/2}]_{t\ll
\tau_{3/2}}$, with $Y_{\tilde{W}}^{\rm (th)}$ being the thermal
abundance of the Wino. The thermal relic density becomes larger than
the present dark matter density if $m_{\tilde{W}}\gtrsim 2.9\ {\rm
TeV}$, so the Wino mass larger than $\sim 2.9\ {\rm TeV}$ is
forbidden irrespective of $T_{\rm R}$. On the contrary, with smaller
Wino mass, we obtain upper bound on the reheating temperature by
requiring $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}<\Omega_c$, using the fact that the
primordial number density of the gravitino is approximately
proportional to $T_{\rm R}$. Such a bound is shown in Fig.\
\ref{fig:grvnTR} for several values of the gravitino mass.
One implication of our result is on the leptogenesis scenario
\cite{Fukugita:1986hr}. The leptogenesis scenario requires the
reheating temperature to be higher than $\sim 10^9\ {\rm GeV}$ in
order to generate large enough amount of the baryon asymmetry of the
universe \cite{Buchmuller:2004nz, Giudice:2003jh}. We have seen that
such a high reheating temperature can be realized in the Wino LSP
case.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{gn_mass.eps}}
\caption{Upper bound on the reheating temperature as a function of
the Wino mass for several values of the gravitino mass. Numbers
in the figure are the gravitino mass in units of TeV. (The bound
for $m_{3/2}=10^2\ {\rm TeV}$ (blue line) almost overlaps with
that of $m_{3/2}=10\ {\rm TeV}$.)}
\label{fig:grvnTR}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Case with SUSY Peccei-Quinn model}
The Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism \cite{Peccei:1977hh, Peccei:1977ur} is
an attractive solution to the strong CP problem. If we embed the PQ
mechanism into supersymmetric model, there exists the fermionic
superpartner of the axion called axino. Axinos are copiously produced
in the thermal bath of early universe and decay into MSSM particles at
a late stage of the cosmic expansion. In this subsection, we consider
the case where the axino $\tilde{a}$ plays the role of $X$, which is
embedded in the axion multiplet $\hat{\cal A}$ as\footnote
{The real scalar component of $\hat{\cal A}$ (i.e., saxion) may also
cause cosmological difficulties. Cosmology with saxion depends on
the model of PQ sector as well as on thermal history. See
\cite{Kim:2008yu, Kawasaki:2010gv, Kawasaki:2011ym, Moroi:2012vu,
Mukaida:2012qn} for more detailed discussion.}
\begin{eqnarray}
\hat{\cal A} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} (\sigma + ia)
+ \sqrt{2} \theta \tilde{a}
+ (\mbox{$F$-term}).
\end{eqnarray}
(In this subsection, the field $X$ is denoted as $\tilde{a}$.)
To make our discussion concrete, we assume that the PQ charges of all
the MSSM fields are zero, and that the PQ fermions are embedded into
full multiplets of $SU(5)$ grand unified gauge group. In such a
model, denoting the PQ scale as $f_a$, the axion multiplet $\hat{\cal
A}$ has the following interaction term:
\begin{eqnarray}
{\cal L}_{\rm int} = \frac{1}{4\sqrt{2}\pi f_a}
\int d^2 \theta
\left[
\alpha_3 \hat{\cal A} \hat{\cal G}^\alpha \hat{\cal G}_\alpha
+ \alpha_2 \hat{\cal A} \hat{\cal W}^\alpha \hat{\cal W}_\alpha
+ \frac{5}{3}
\alpha_1 \hat{\cal A} \hat{\cal B}^\alpha \hat{\cal B}_\alpha
\right]
+ {\rm h.c.},
\label{AWW}
\end{eqnarray}
where $\hat{\cal G}$, $\hat{\cal W}$, and $\hat{\cal B}$ are
field strength superfields for $SU(3)_C$, $SU(2)_L$, and $U(1)_Y$,
respectively, and $\alpha_a\equiv g_a^2/4\pi$ with $g_a$ ($a=1-3$)
being gauge coupling constants. (The summation over the gauge indices
are implicit for $SU(3)_C$ and $SU(2)_L$.)
As in the case of the gravitino, the primordial abundance of the axino
depends on the reheating temperature after inflation
\cite{Covi:2001nw}. We adopt the yield variable of axino (i.e.,
$Y_{\tilde{a}}=n_{\tilde{a}}/s$, with $n_{\tilde{a}}$ being the number
density of axino) evaluated in \cite{Brandenburg:2004du}:
\begin{eqnarray}
\left[ Y_{\tilde{a}} \right]_{t\ll \Gamma_{\tilde{a}}^{-1}}
\simeq
\mbox{min} \left[
Y_{\tilde{a}}^{\rm (eq)},
0.20 \times \alpha_3^3
\ln \left( \frac{0.0977}{\alpha_3} \right)
\left( \frac{T_{\rm R}}{10^{7}\ {\rm GeV}} \right)
\left( \frac{f_a}{10^{11}\ {\rm GeV}} \right)^{-2}
\right],
\label{Y(axino)}
\end{eqnarray}
where $Y_{\tilde{a}}^{\rm (eq)}\simeq 1.8\times 10^{-3}$ is the
thermal abundance of axino. If the axino is stable, the axinos
produced in the early universe survive until today. Then, in order
not to overclose the universe with the mass density of axino, severe
upper bound on the reheating temperature is obtained
\cite{Covi:2001nw, Brandenburg:2004du, Bae:2011jb, Choi:2011yf}. Even
if all the LSPs produced by the axino decay remain until today, which
is the case if the annihilation cross section of the LSP is small, a
stringent upper bound on $T_{\rm R}$ still exists. With a large
annihilation cross section of dark matter, this problem may be avoided
\cite{Choi:2008zq}.
One of the important parameters to calculate the relic Wino abundance
produced by the axino decay is the decay rate of axino. In the
present setup, the axino decays dominantly into gauge boson and
gaugino pair; with the interaction terms given in Eq.\ \eqref{AWW},
the decay rate is given by
\begin{eqnarray}
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}} =
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow g\tilde{g}} +
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow W^\pm\tilde{W}^\mp} +
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow Z\tilde{W}^0} +
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow \gamma\tilde{W}^0} +
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow Z\tilde{B}} +
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow \gamma\tilde{B}},
\end{eqnarray}
where, if kinematically allowed \cite{Baer:2011hx},
\begin{eqnarray}
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow g\tilde{g}} &=&
\frac{8{\alpha_3}^2}{128{\pi}^3 }\frac{{m_{\tilde{a}}}^3}{{f_a}^2}
\left( 1 - {y_{{\tilde{g}}}}^2 \right)^3,
\label{axino2gluino}
\\
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow W^\pm\tilde{W}^\mp} &=&
\frac{2{\alpha}_2^2}{128{\pi}^3 }\frac{{m_{\tilde{a}}}^3}{{f_a}^2}
K(y_{\tilde{W}},y_W),
\\
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow Z\tilde{W}^0} &=&
\frac{{\alpha}_2^2{\cos}^2{\theta}_{W}}{128 {\pi}^3}
\frac{{m_{\tilde{a}}}^3}{{f_a}^2}
K(y_{\tilde{W}},y_{Z}),
\\
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow \gamma\tilde{W}^0} &=&
\frac{{\alpha}_2^2{\sin}^2{\theta}_{W}}{128 {\pi}^3 }
\frac{{m_{\tilde{a}}}^3}{{f_a}^2}
\left( 1 - {y_{\tilde{W}}}^2 \right)^3 ,
\\
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow Z\tilde{B}} &=&
\left( \frac{5}{3} \right)^2
\frac{{\alpha}_1^2{\sin}^2{\theta}_{W}}{128 {\pi}^3 }
\frac{{m_{\tilde{a}}}^3}{{f_a}^2}K(y_{\tilde{B}},y_Z),
\\
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}\rightarrow \gamma\tilde{B}} &=&
\left( \frac{5}{3} \right)^2
\frac{{\alpha}_1^2 {\cos}^2{\theta}_{W}}{128
{\pi}^3}
\frac{{m_{\tilde{a}}}^3}{{f_a}^2} \left( 1 - {y_{\tilde{B}}}^2 \right)^3 ,
\label{axino2gammabino}
\end{eqnarray}
where ${\theta}_W$ is the Weinberg angle, $y_I\equiv
m_I/m_{\tilde{a}}$ denotes the mass of the particle $I$ normalized by the
axino mass $m_{\tilde{a}}$, and
\begin{eqnarray}
K(y_1,y_2)\! =\! \sqrt{1+y_1^4+y_2^4-2y_1^2-2y_2^2-2y_1^2 y_2^2}
\left[ (1-y_1^2)^2\! +3y_1y_2^2-\frac{y_2^2}{2}(1+y_1^2+y_2^2) \right].
\end{eqnarray}
\begin{figure}
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{an10.eps}}
\caption{Contour of $ \Omega_{ \tilde{W}} h^2$ of the present
universe for mass ratio
$m_{\tilde{W}}:m_{\tilde{B}}:m_{\tilde{g}}:m_{\tilde{a}}=1:3:7:10$.
Here, we take $\left[ Y_{\tilde{a}} \right]_{t\ll
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}}^{-1}}=Y_{\tilde{a}}^{\rm (eq)}$. Numbers in
the figure are the values of $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$.}
\label{Fig:an7_10}
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{an5.eps}}
\caption{Same as Fig.\ \ref{Fig:an7_10}, except for
$m_{\tilde{W}}:m_{\tilde{B}}:m_{\tilde{g}}:m_{\tilde{a}}=1:3:7:5$.}
\label{Fig:an7_5}
\end{figure}
The decay temperature, and hence the resultant Wino abundance, depend
on the mass spectrum of superparticles, in particular, that of
gauginos. In the case where the gluino is lighter than the axino, the
axino dominantly decays into gluon and gluino pair. In such a case,
the decay rate of the axino becomes relatively large. In the opposite
case, the dominant decay modes of the axino are $\tilde{a}\rightarrow
W^\pm\tilde{W}^\mp$, $\tilde{a}\rightarrow Z\tilde{W}^0$, and
$\tilde{a}\rightarrow \gamma\tilde{W}^0$, and the decay rate of the
axino is suppressed. So, in the latter case, $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}$
becomes larger compared to the former case.
In Fig.\ \ref{Fig:an7_10}, we show the contours of constant
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}h^2$ for the case with high enough reheating
temperature ($ \left[ Y_{\tilde{a}} \right]_{t\ll
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}}^{-1}}=Y_{\tilde{a}}^{\rm (eq)}$), taking
$m_{\tilde{W}}:m_{\tilde{B}}:m_{\tilde{g}}:m_{\tilde{a}}=1:3:7:10$.
(The gaugino masses are assumed to obey the anomaly-mediation relation
\cite{Giudice:1998xp, Randall:1998uk}.) With such a mass spectrum,
the axino dominantly decays into gluon and gluino pair. Then,
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ is realized with $f_a=1.9\times10^{11}\
{\rm GeV}$ ($1.3\times10^{11} {\rm GeV}$, $6.3\times10^{10} {\rm
GeV}$, $2.7\times 10^{10} {\rm GeV}$) for $m_{\tilde{W}}=300\ {\rm
GeV}$ ($m_{\tilde{W}}=500\ {\rm GeV}$, $m_{\tilde{W}}=1\ {\rm TeV}$,
and $m_{\tilde{W}}=2\ {\rm TeV}$).
If we consider the case where the decay mode into the gluon and gluino
pair is kinematically blocked, the decay rate is suppressed. In such a
case, the PQ scale which realizes the Wino dark matter becomes
smaller. In Fig.\ \ref{Fig:an7_5}, we show the result taking
$m_{\tilde{W}}:m_{\tilde{B}}:m_{\tilde{g}}:m_{\tilde{a}}=1:3:7:5$.
Then, the value of $f_a$ giving rise to $\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$
is given by $1.5\times 10^{10} {\rm GeV}$ ($1.0\times 10^{10} {\rm
GeV}$, $5.1\times 10^9 {\rm GeV}$, $2.2\times 10^9 {\rm GeV}$) for
$m_{\tilde{W}}=300\ {\rm GeV}$ ($m_{\tilde{W}}=500\ {\rm GeV}$,
$m_{\tilde{W}}=1\ {\rm TeV}$, and $m_{\tilde{W}}=2\ {\rm TeV}$).
We have also studied how the required value of $f_a$ to realize the
Wino dark matter depends on the axino mass. In Fig.\ \ref{Fig:famax},
we show contours of constant $f_a$ which gives
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ for $\left[ Y_{\tilde{a}} \right]_{t\ll
\Gamma_{\tilde{a}}^{-1}}=Y_{\tilde{a}}^{\rm (eq)}$ on
$m_{\tilde{W}}$ vs.\ $m_{\tilde{a}}/m_{\tilde{W}}$ plane.
So far, we have adopted the thermal abundance of axino. Even if the
primordial abundance of axino is smaller, the resultant Wino density
does not change as far as Winos produced by decay of axino are
much enough to pair-annihilate. We also performed the calculation
with lower reheating temperature, and checked that the results are
more or less unchanged.
\begin{figure}[t]
\centerline{\epsfxsize=0.75\textwidth\epsfbox{an_fa.eps}}
\caption{Contours of constant $f_a$ which gives
$\Omega_{\tilde{W}}=\Omega_c$ for $\left[ Y_{\tilde{a}}
\right]_{t\ll \Gamma_{\tilde{a}}^{-1}}=Y_{\tilde{a}}^{\rm (eq)}$.
The horizontal axis is the Wino mass while the vertical one is the
ratio $m_{\tilde{a}}/m_{\tilde{W}}$. The gaugino masses are
assumed to obey the anomaly-mediation relation
$m_{\tilde{W}}:m_{\tilde{B}}:m_{\tilde{g}}=1:3:7$.}
\label{Fig:famax}
\end{figure}
\section{Conclusions and Discussion}
\label{sec:conclusions}
In this paper, we have studied the possibility of the Wino cold dark
matter in supersymmetric models, paying particular attentions to the
scenario in which the decay of a long-lived particle $X$ produces
significant amount of the Wino LSP. We have numerically calculated
the relic abundance of the neutral Wino, carefully taking account of
the effects of coannihilation and Sommerfeld effects. We have seen
that the Sommerfeld effect drastically enhances the pair annihilation
cross section of the Wino if $m_{\tilde{W}}\gtrsim 1\ {\rm TeV}$. We
have studied the cases where moduli fields, gravitino, or axino plays
the role of $X$, and derived the constraints on the model parameters
in each case.
So far, we have not discussed cosmological and astrophysical
constraints on the Wino dark matter. Because the neutral Wino has
large annihilation cross section, the Wino dark matter scenario
conflicts with astrophysical and cosmological constraints if the Wino
mass is too small. One of the constraints is from the negative
observation of high energy $\gamma$-ray from dwarf galaxies, from
which the mass regions $m_{\tilde{W}}\lesssim 400\ {\rm GeV}$ are
disfavored \cite{Ackermann:2011wa, Abazajian:2011ak} although
astrophysical uncertainties exist. Another constraint is from
BBN. The relic Wino may pair annihilated during and after the BBN
epoch, which causes photo- and hadro-dissociation processes. In order
not to spoil the success of the BBN scenario, the Wino mass is
required to be larger than $\sim 200\ {\rm GeV}$ \cite{Hisano:2008ti}.
Thus, these astrophysical and cosmological constraints do not exclude
most of the parameter regions we have studied.
\vspace{1em}
\noindent {\it Acknowledgements}: This work is supported in part by
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific research from the Ministry of Education,
Science, Sports, and Culture (MEXT), Japan, No.\ 22244021, No.\
22540263, and No.\ 23104008.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 4,767 |
{"url":"https:\/\/www.groundai.com\/project\/efficient-steganography-with-provable-security-guarantees\/","text":"Efficient Steganography with Provable Security Guarantees\n\n# Efficient Steganography with Provable Security Guarantees\n\n## Abstract\n\nWe provide a new provably-secure steganographic encryption protocol that is proven secure in the complexity-theoretic framework of Hopper et al.\n\nThe fundamental building block of our steganographic encryption protocol is a \u201cone-time stegosystem\u201d that allows two parties to transmit messages of length shorter than the shared key with information-theoretic security guarantees. The employment of a pseudorandom generator (PRG) permits secure transmission of longer messages in the same way that such a generator allows the use of one-time pad encryption for messages longer than the key in symmetric encryption. The advantage of our construction, compared to that of Hopper et al., is that it avoids the use of a pseudorandom function family and instead relies (directly) on a pseudorandom generator in a way that provides linear improvement in the number of applications of the underlying one-way permutation per transmitted bit. This advantageous trade-off is achieved by substituting the pseudorandom function family employed in the previous construction with an appropriate combinatorial construction that has been used extensively in derandomization, namely almost -wise independent function families.\n\nKeywords: Information hiding, steganography, data hiding, steganalysis, covert communication.\n\n## 1 Introduction\n\nIn a canonical steganographic scenario, Alice and Bob wish to communicate securely in the presence of an adversary, called the \u201cWarden,\u201d who monitors whether they exchange \u201cconspicuous\u201d messages. In particular, Alice and Bob may exchange messages that adhere to a certain channel distributions that represents \u201cinconspicuous\u201d communication. By controlling the messages that are transmitted over such a channel, Alice and Bob may exchange messages that cannot be detected by the Warden. There have been two approaches in formalizing this problem, one based on information theory\u00a0[2, 13, 7] and one based on complexity theory\u00a0[6]. The latter approach is more concrete and has the potential of allowing more efficient constructions. Most steganographic constructions supported by provable security guarantees are instantiations of the following basic procedure (often referred to as \u201crejection-sampling\u201d).\n\nThe problem specifies a family of message distributions (the \u201cchannel distributions\u201d) that provide a number of possible options for a so-called \u201ccovertext\u201d to be transmitted. Additionally, the sender and the receiver possess some sort of private information (typically a keyed hash function, MAC, or other similar function) that maps channel messages to a single bit. In order to send a message bit , the sender draws a covertext from the channel distribution, applies the function to the covertext and checks whether it happens to produce the \u201cstegotext\u201d he originally wished to transmit. If this is the case, the covertext is transmitted. In case of failure, this procedure is repeated. While this is a fairly concrete procedure, there are a number of choices to be made with both practical and theoretical significance. From the security viewpoint, one is primarily interested in the choice of the function that is shared between the sender and the receiver. From a practical viewpoint, one is primarily interested in how the channel is implemented and whether it conforms to the various constraints that are imposed on it by the steganographic protocol specifications (e.g., are independent draws from the channel allowed? does the channel remember previous draws? etc.).\n\nAs mentioned above, the security of a stegosystem can be naturally phrased in information-theoretic terms (cf.\u00a0[2]) or in complexity-theoretic terms\u00a0[6]. Informally, the latter approach considers the following experiment for the warden-adversary: The adversary selects a message to be embedded and receives either covertexts that embed the message or covertexts simply drawn from the channel distribution (without any embedding). The adversary is then asked to distinguish between the two cases. Clearly, if the probability of success is very close to it is natural to claim that the stegosystem provides security against such (eavesdropping) adversarial activity. Formulation of stronger attacks (such as active attacks) is also possible. Given the above framework, Hopper et al.\u00a0[6] provided a provably secure stegosystem that pairs rejection sampling with a pseudorandom function family. Given that rejection sampling, when implemented properly and paired with a truly random function, is indistinguishable from the channel distribution, the security of their construction followed from the pseudorandom function family assumption. From the efficiency viewpoint, this construction required about 2 evaluations of the pseudorandom function per bit transmission. Constructing efficient pseudorandom functions is possible either generically\u00a0[5] or, more efficiently, based on specific number-theoretic assumptions\u00a0[9]. Nevertheless, pseudorandom function families are a conceptually complex and fairly expensive cryptographic primitive. For example, the evaluation of the Naor-Reingold pseudorandom function on an input requires modular exponentiations. Similarly, the generic construction\u00a0[5] requires PRG doublings of the input string where is the length of the key.\n\nIn this article we take an alternative approach to the design of provably secure stegosystems. Our main contribution is the design of a building block that we call a one-time stegosystem: this is a steganographic protocol that is meant to be used for a single message transmission and is proven secure in an information-theoretic sense, provided that the key that is shared between the sender and the receiver is of sufficient length (this length analysis is part of our result). In particular we show that we can securely transmit an bit message with a key of length ; here is the size of the channel alphabet (see Section\u00a03.4 for more details regarding the exact complexity). Our basic building block is a natural analogue of a one time-pad for steganography. It is based on the rejection sampling technique outlined above in combination with an explicit almost -wise independent\u00a0[1] family of functions. We note that such combinatorial constructions have been extremely useful for derandomization methods and here, to the best of our knowledge, are employed for the first time in the design of steganographic protocols. Given a one-time stegosystem, it is fairly straightforward to construct provably secure steganographic encryption for longer messages by using a pseudorandom generator (PRG) to stretch a random seed that is shared by the sender and the receiver to sufficient length.\n\nThe resulting stegosystem is provably secure in the computational sense of Hopper et al.\u00a0[6] and is in fact much more efficient: in particular, while the Hopper, et al. stegosystem requires 2 evaluations per bit of a pseudorandom function, amounting to a linear (in the key-size) number of applications of the underlying PRG (in the standard construction for pseudorandom functions of\u00a0[5]), in our stegosystem we require per bit a constant number of PRG applications.\n\n## 2 Definitions and Tools\n\nWe say that a function is negligible if for every positive polynomial there exists an such that for all , .\n\nWe let denote an alphabet and treat the channel, which will be used for data transmission, as a family of random variables ; each is supported on . These channel distributions model a history-dependent notion of channel data: if have been sent along the channel thus far, determines the distribution of the next channel element.\n\n###### Definition 1.\n\nA one-time stegosystem consists of three probabilistic polynomial time algorithms\n\n S=(SK,SE,SD)\n\nwhere:\n\n\u2022 is the key generation algorithm; we write . It takes as input, the security parameter and the length of the message and produces a key of length . (We typically assume that is a monotonically increasing function of .)\n\n\u2022 is the embedding procedure, which can access the channel; . It takes as input the length of the message , the key , a message to be embedded, and the history of previously drawn covertexts. The output is the stegotext .\n\n\u2022 is the extraction procedure; . It takes as input , , and some . The output is a message or the token fail.\n\nRecall that the min entropy of a random variable , taking values in a set , is the quantity\n\n H\u221e(X)\u225cminv\u2208V(\u2212logPr[X=v]).\n\nWe say that a channel has min entropy if for all , .\n\n###### Definition 2 (Soundness).\n\nA stegosystem is said to be -sound provided that for all channels of minimum entropy ,\n\n \u2200m\u2208Mn,Pr[SD(1n,k,SE(1\u03ba,k,m,h))\u2260m\u2223k\u2190SK(1n,log(1\/\u03f5sec))]\u2264\u00a0s(\u03ba).\n\nOne-time stegosystem security is based on the indistinguishability between a transmission that contains a steganographically embedded message and a transmission that contains no embedded messages. An adversary against a one-time stegosystem is a pair of algorithms , that plays the following game, denoted :\n\n1. A key is generated by .\n\n2. Algorithm receives as input the length of the message and outputs a triple , where is some additional information that will be passed to . is provided access to via an oracle , which takes the history as input.\n\n, on input , returns to an element selected according to .\n\n3. A bit is chosen uniformly at random.\n\n\u2022 If let , so is a stegotext.\n\n\u2022 If let , where denotes string concatenation and .\n\n4. The input for is , , and . outputs a bit . If then we say that succeeded and write .\n\nThe probability includes the coin tosses of and , as well as the coin tosses of . The (information-theoretic) insecurity of the stegosystem is defined as\n\nthis maximum taken over all (time unbounded) adversaries .\n\n###### Definition 3.\n\n(Security) We say that a stegosystem is -secure if for all channels with min entropy we have .\n\n### 2.1 Error-correcting Codes\n\nOur steganographic construction requires an efficient family of codes that can recover from errors introduced by certain binary symmetric channels. In particular, we require an efficient version of the Shannon coding theorem\u00a0[11, 10]. For an element , we let be the random variable equal to , where is a random error vector defined by independently assigning each with probability . (Here denotes the vector with th coordinate equal to .)\n\nThe classical coding theorem asserts that for every pair of real numbers and , there is a binary code , with , so that for each , maximum-likelihood decoding recovers from with probability , where\n\n H(p)=plogp\u22121+(1\u2212p)log(1\u2212p)\u22121=1\u2212C.\n\nThe quantity (determined by ), is the capacity of the binary symmetric channel induced by ; the quantity is the rate of the code . In this language, the coding theorem asserts that at rates lower than capacity, codes exist that correct random errors with exponentially decaying failure probability.\n\nWe formalize our requirements below:\n\n###### Definition 4.\n\nAn error-correcting code is a pair of functions , where is the encoding function and the corresponding decoding function. Specifically, we say that is a -code if for all ,\n\n Pr[Dec(Enc(m)\u2295e)=m]\u22651\u2212\u03f5\n\nwhere and each is independently distributed in so that . We say that E is efficient if both and are computable in polynomial time.\n\n###### Proposition 1.\n\nLet lie in the interval , , and . Let be a message length for which Then there is an efficient family of -error-correcting codes for which\n\n \u03f5(n)\u2264e\u22124n\/lognand\u2113(n)\u2264(1+57\/3\u221a\u03c42logn)2n\/R\u2032.\n###### Proof.\n\nThis is a consequence of Forney\u2019s\u00a0[3] efficient realizations of the Shannon coding theorem\u00a0[11, 10]; we work out the technical details in the full version of the paper.\n\nWe refer to\u00a0[12, 4] for detailed discussions of error-correcting codes over binary symmetric channels.\n\n### 2.2 Function Families and Almost t-wise Independence\n\nWe will employ the notion of (almost) -wise independent function families (cf.\u00a0[1], [8]).\n\n###### Definition 5.\n\nA family of Boolean functions on is said to be -away from -wise independent or -independent if for any distinct domain elements we have\n\n \u2211\u03b1\u2208{0,1}t\u2223\u2223\u2223Prf[fk(q1)fk(q2)\u22effk(qt)=\u03b1]\u221212t\u2223\u2223\u2223\u2264\u03f5, (1)\n\nwhere chosen uniformly from .\n\nThe above is equivalent to the following formulation quantified over all computationally unbounded adversaries :\n\n \u2223\u2223Prf\\lx@stackrelr\u2190F[GAf[t](1\u03ba)=1]\u2212Prf\\lx@stackrelr\u2190R[GAf[t](1\u03ba)=1]\u2223\u2223\u2264\u03f5, (2)\n\nwhere is the collection of all functions from to and is an unbounded adversary that is allowed to determine up to queries to the function before he outputs his bit.\n\n###### Lemma 2.\n\nis -away from -wise independence according to equation (1) if and only if is -away from -wise independence according to equation (2) above.\n\nWe employ the construction of almost -wise independent sample spaces given by [8], [1].\n\n###### Theorem 3 ([8], [1]).\n\nThere exist families of Boolean functions on that are -away from -wise independent, are indexed by keys of length , and are computable in polynomial time.\n\n### 2.3 Rejection Sampling\n\nA common method used in steganography employing a channel distribution is that of rejection sampling (cf. [2, 6]). Assuming that one wishes to transmit a single bit and employs a random function that is secret from the adversary, one performs the following \u201crejection sampling\u201d process:\n\nrejsam\n\nif\nthen\nOutput:\n\nHere, as above, denotes the output alphabet of the channel, denotes the history of the channel data at the start of the process, and denotes the distribution on given by the channel after history . The receiver (also privy to the function ) applies the function to the received message and recovers with probability greater than . The sender and the receiver may employ a joint state denoted by in the above process (e.g., a counter), that need not be secret from the adversary. Note that the above process performs only two draws from the channel with the same history (more draws could, in principle, be performed). These draws are assumed to be independent. One basic property of rejection sampling that we use is:\n\n###### Lemma 4.\n\nIf is drawn uniformly at random from the collection of all functions and has min entropy , then\n\n Prf\u2190R[f(rejsamfh(m))=m]\u226512+\u03c4,\n\nwhere .\n\n###### Proof.\n\nDefine the event to be\n\n E=[f(c1)=m]\u2228[f(c1)\u2260m\u2227f(c2)=m];\n\nthus is the event that rejection sampling is successful for . Here are two independent random variables distributed according to the channel distribution and is determined by the history of channel usage. Recalling that is the support of the channel distribution , let denote the probability that occurs. As is chosen uniformly at random,\n\n Pr[f(c1)=m]=1\/2.\n\nThen , where is the event that . To bound , let denote the event that . Observe that conditioned on , occurs with probability exactly ; on the other hand, cannot occur simultaneously with . Thus\n\n Pr[E]=12+Pr[A\u2223D]\u22c5Pr[D]+Pr[A\u2223\u00af\u00af\u00af\u00af\u00afD]\u22c5Pr[\u00af\u00af\u00af\u00af\u00afD]=12+14Pr[D].\n\nTo bound , note that\n\n Pr[\u00afD]=\u2211ip2i\u2264maxipi\u2211ipi=maxipi\n\nand hence that . Considering that , we have and the success probability is\n\n Pr[E]\u226512+14\u22c5(1\u2212pi)\u226512+14(1\u221212\u03b4)=12+\u03c4,\n\nwhere . \u220e\n\n## 3 The construction\n\nIn this section we outline our construction of a one-time stegosystem as an interaction between Alice (the sender) and Bob (the receiver). Alice and Bob wish to communicate over a channel with distribution . We assume that has min entropy , so that , . As above, let . For simplicity, we assume that the support of is of size .\n\n### 3.1 A one-time stegosystem\n\nFix an alphabet for the channel and choose a message length and security parameter . Alice and Bob agree on the following:\n\nAn error-correcting code.\n\nLet be an efficient -error-correcting code;\n\nA pseudorandom function family.\n\nLet be a function family that is -independent. We treat elements of as Boolean functions on and, for such a function we let denote the function .\n\nWe will analyze the stegosystem below in terms of arbitrary parameters , , and , relegating discussion of how these parameters determine the overall efficiency of the system to Section\u00a03.4.\n\nKey generation consists of selecting an element . Alice and Bob then communicate using the algorithms for embedding and for extracting as described in Figure\u00a01.\n\nIn , after applying the error-correcting code , we use rejsam to obtain an element of the channel for each bit of the message. The resulting stegotext is denoted . In the received stegotext is parsed block by block by evaluating the key function at ; this results in a message bit. After performing this for each received block, a message of size is received, which is subjected to decoding via Dec. Note that we sample at most twice from the channel for each bit we wish to send. The error-correcting code is needed to recover from the errors introduced by this process. The detailed security and correctness analysis follow in the next two sections.\n\n### 3.2 Correctness\n\nWe focus on the mapping between and determined by the procedure of the one-time stegosystem. In particular, for an initial history and a key function ,\n\nrecall that the covertext of the message is given by the procedure , described in Figure\u00a02; here is the initial history. We remark now that the procedure defining samples at no more than points and that the family used in is -away from -wise independent. For a string and a function , let . If were chosen uniformly among all Boolean functions on then we could conclude from Lemma\u00a04 above that each bit is independently recovered by this process with probability at least . As E is an -error-correcting code, this would imply that\n\n Prf\u2190R[Rf(Pfh(m))=m]\u22651\u2212\u03f5enc.\n\nThis is a restatement of the correctness analysis of Hopper, et al [6]. Recalling that the procedure defining involves no more than samples of , condition\u00a0(2) following Definition\u00a05 implies that\n\n Prf\u2190F[Rf(Pfh(m))=m]\u22651\u2212\u03f5enc\u2212\u03f5F (3)\n\nso long as is -independent. (We remark that as described above, the procedure depends on the behavior of channel; note, however, that if there were a sequence of channel distributions which violated\u00a0(3) then there would be a fixed sequence of channel responses, and thus a deterministic process , which also violated\u00a0(3).) To summarize\n\n###### Lemma 5.\n\nWith and described as above, the probability that a message is recovered from the stegosystem is at least .\n\n### 3.3 Security\n\nIn this section we argue about the security of our one-time stegosystem. First we will observe that the output of the rejection sampling function , with a truly random function , is indistinguishable from the channel distribution . (This is a folklore result implicit in previous work.) We then show that if is selected from a family that is -away from -wise independent, the advantage of an adversary to distinguish between the output of the protocol and is bounded above by . Let . First we characterize the probability distribution of the rejection sampling function:\n\n###### Proposition 6.\n\nThe function is a random variable with probability distribution expressed by the following function: Let and . Let and . Then\n\n Pr[rejsamfh(m)=c]={pc\u22c5(1+missf(m))iff(c)=m,pc\u22c5missf(m)iff(c)\u2260m.\n###### Proof.\n\nLet and be the two (independent) samples drawn from during rejection sampling. (For simplicity, we treat the process as having drawn two samples even in the case where it succeeds on the first draw.) Note, now, that in the case where , the value is the result of the rejection sampling process precisely when and ; as these samples are independent, this occurs with probability .\n\nIn the case where , however, we observe whenever or and . As these events are disjoint, their union occurs with probability , as desired. \u220e\n\n###### Lemma 7.\n\nFor any , the random variable is perfectly indistinguishable from the channel distribution when is drawn uniformly at random from the space of .\n\n###### Proof.\n\nLet be a random function, as described in the statement of the lemma. Fixing the elements , and , we condition on the event , that . In light of Proposition\u00a06, for any drawn under this conditioning we shall have that is equal to\n\n Prc\u2032\u2190Ch[c\u2032=c]\u22c5missf(m)=pc\u22c5missf(m),\n\nwhere we have written and . Conditioned on , then, the probability of observing is\n\n Ef[pc\u22c5missf(m)\u2223E\u2260]=pc(pc+12(1\u2212pc)).\n\nLetting be the event that , we similarly compute\n\n Ef[pc\u22c5missf(m)\u2223E=]=pc(1+12(1\u2212pc)).\n\nAs , we conclude that the probability of observing is exactly\n\n 12(pc(pc+1\u2212pc2)+pc(1+1\u2212pc2))=pc,\n\nas desired. \u220e\n\nThe following corollary follows immediately from the lemma above.\n\n###### Corollary 8.\n\nFor any , the random variable is perfectly indistinguishable from the channel distribution when is drawn uniformly at random from the space of all Boolean functions on .\n\nHaving established the behavior of the rejection sampling function when a truly random function is used, we proceed to examine the behavior of rejection sampling in our setting where the function is drawn from a function family that is -away from -wise independence. In particular we will show that the insecurity of the defined stegosystem is characterized as follows:\n\n###### Lemma 9.\n\nThe insecurity of the stegosystem of Section\u00a03.1 is bound by , i.e., , where is the bias of the almost -wise independent function family employed; recall that is the stretching of the input incurred due to the error-correcting code.\n\n###### Proof.\n\nLet us play the following game with the adversary .\n\nIn each round we either select or :\n\n) 1. 2. , 3. 4. = 5. 6. if then success\n1. 2. , 3. 4. = 5. 6. if then success\nand the lemma follows by the definition of insecurity. \u220e\n\n### 3.4 Putting it all together\n\nThe objective of this section is to integrate the results of the previous sections of the paper into one unifying theorem. As our system is built over two-sample rejection sampling, a process that faithfully transmits each bit with probability , we cannot hope to achieve rate exceeding\n\n R\u2032=1\u2212H(1\/2+\u03c4)=1\u2212H(1\/4+2\u2212\u03b4\/4).\n\nIndeed, as described in the theorem below, the system asymptotically converges to the rate of this underlying rejection sampling channel. (We remark that with sufficiently large channel entropy, one can draw more samples during rejection sampling without interfering with security; this can control the noise introduced by rejection sampling.)\n\n###### Theorem 10.\n\nFor the stegosystem uses private keys of length no more than\n\n (2+o(1))[\u03bb(n)+log1\/\u03f5F+logloglog|\u03a3|]\n\nand is both -sound and -secure. The length of the stegotext is\n\n \u03bb(n)\u2264(1+1log(logn))2nR\u2032,\n\nwhere and .\n\n###### Proof.\n\nLet denote an alphabet and define the channel as a family of random variables ; each supported on . Also, the channel has min entropy , so that , . Fix an alphabet for the channel and choose a message length such that\n\n \u2212log(1\u22124\u221a104log(logn)3\/logn)\u2264\u03b4.\n\nUnder the assumption that the channel has min entropy , the binary symmetric channel induced by the rejection sampling process of Lemma\u00a04 has transition probability no more than . We have an efficient error-correcting code as discussed in Section\u00a02.1 that encodes messages of length as codewords of length\n\n \u03bb(n)=(1+573\u221a\u03c42logn)2nR\u2032\u2264(1+1log(logn))2nR\u2032\u00a0bits\n (2+o(1))[\u03bb(n)+log1\/\u03f5F+logloglog|\u03a3|]\n\nrandom bits; these serve as the key for the stegosystem. In light of the conclusions of Lemma\u00a09 and Lemma\u00a05, this system achieves the -soundness and -security.\u220e\n\nFor concreteness, we record two corollaries:\n\n###### Corollary 11.\n\nThere exists a function so that the stego system , using private keys of length no more than\n\n O(n+log|\u03a3|+log1\/\u03f5F),\n\nis both -sound and -secure. Here, the length of the stegotext is\n\n \u03bb(n)=(1+o(1))nR\u2032\n\nwhere .\n\n###### Corollary 12.\n\nFor any constant , the stegosystem uses private keys of length and transmits no more than symbols.\n\n## 4 A provably secure stegosystem for longer messages\n\nIn this section we show how to apply the \u201cone-time\u201d stegosystem of Section\u00a03.1 together with a pseudorandom number generator so that longer messages can be transmitted.\n\n###### Definition 6.\n\nLet denote the uniform distribution over . A polynomial time deterministic program is a pseudorandom generator (PRG) if the following conditions are satisfied:\n\nVariable output\n\nFor all seeds and , and, furthermore, is a prefix of .\n\nPseudorandomness\n\nFor every polynomial the set of random variables is computationally indistinguishable from the uniform distribution .\n\nNote that there is a procedure that if it holds that (i.e., if one maintains , one can extract the bits that follow the first bits without starting from the beginning). For a PRG , if is some statistical test, then we define the advantage of over the PRNG as follows:\n\nThe insecurity of the PRNG is then defined\n\nNote that typically in PRGs there is a procedure as well as the process produces some auxiliary data of small length so that the rightmost bits of may be sampled directly as . Consider now the following stegosystem that can be used for arbitrary many and long messages and employs a PRG and the one-time stegosystem of Section\u00a03.1. The two players Alice and Bob, share a key of length denoted by . They also maintain a state that holds the number of bits that have been transmitted already as well the auxiliary information (initially empty). The function is given input where is the message to be transmitted. in turn employs the PRG to extract a number of bits as follows . The length is selected to match the number of key bits that are required to transmit the message using the one-time stegosystem of section\u00a03.1. Once the key is produced by the PRG the procedure invokes the one-time stegosystem on input . After the transmission is completed the history , the count , as well as the auxiliary PRG information are updated accordingly. The function is defined in a straightforward way based on .\n\n###### Theorem 13.\n\nThe stegosystem is provably secure in the model of [6] (universally steganographically secret against chosen hiddentext attacks); in particular\n\n InSecSSS\u2032(t,q,l)\u2264InSecPRG(t+\u03b3(\u2113(l)),\u2113(l)+polylog(l))\n\n(where is the time required by the adversary, is the number of chosen hiddentext queries it makes, is the total number of bits across all queries and is the time required to simulate the oracle for bits).\n\n### 4.1 Performance Comparison of the Stegosystem S\u2032 and the Hopper, Langford, von Ahn System\n\nThe system of Hopper, et al.\u00a0[6] concerns a situation where the min entropy of all is at least 1 bit. In this case, we may select an -error-correcting code E. Then the system of Hopper, et al. correctly decodes a given message with probability at least and makes no more than calls to a pseudorandom function family. Were one to use the pseudorandom function family of Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Micali\u00a0[5], then this involves production of pseudorandom bits, where is the security parameter of the pseudorandom function family. Of course, the security of the system depends on the security of the underlying pseudorandom generator. On the other hand, with the same error-correcting code, the steganographic system described above utilizes pseudorandom bits, correctly decodes a given message with probability , and possesses insecurity no more than . In order to compare the two schemes, note that by selecting , both the decoding error and the security of the two systems differ by at most , a negligible function in terms of the security parameter . (Note also that pseudorandom functions utilized in the above scheme have security no better than with security parameter .) In this case, the number of pseudorandom bits used by our system,\n\n (2+o(1))[\u03bb(n)+log1\/\u03f5F+logloglog|\u03a3|],\n\nis a dramatic improvement over the bits of the scheme above.\n\n### References\n\n1. Noga Alon, Oded Goldreich, Johan H\u00e5stad, and Ren\u00e9 Peralta. Simple construction of almost k-wise independent random variables. Random Struct. Algorithms, 3(3):289\u2013304, 1992.\n2. Christian Cachin. An information-theoretic model for steganography. In Information Hiding, pages 306\u2013318, 1998.\n3. G.\u00a0D. Forney, Jr. Concatenated Codes. Research Monograph No. 37. MIT Press, 1966.\n4. R.\u00a0G. Gallager. A simple derivation of the coding theorem and some applications. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-11:3\u201318, Jan. 1965.\n5. Oded Goldreich, Shafi Goldwasser, and Silvio Micali. How to construct random functions. J. ACM, 33(4):792\u2013807, 1986.\n6. Nicholas\u00a0J. Hopper, John Langford, and Luis von Ahn. Provably secure steganography. In CRYPTO, pages 77\u201392, 2002.\n7. Thomas Mittelholzer. An information-theoretic approach to steganography and watermarking. In Information Hiding, pages 1\u201316, 1999.\n8. Joseph Naor and Moni Naor. Small-bias probability spaces: Efficient constructions and applications. SIAM J. Comput., 22(4):838\u2013856, 1993.\n9. Moni Naor and Omer Reingold. Number-theoretic constructions of efficient pseudo-random functions. J. ACM, 51(2):231\u2013262, 2004.\n10. C.\u00a0E. Shannon. A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal, 27:379\u2013423 and 623\u2013656, July and October, 1948.\n11. C.\u00a0E. Shannon and W.\u00a0Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Illinois, 1949.\n12. J. H. van Lint. Introduction to Coding Theory. Number\u00a086 in Graduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer-Verlag, 3rd edition edition, 1998.\n13. Jan Z\u00f6llner, Hannes Federrath, Herbert Klimant, Andreas Pfitzmann, Rudi Piotraschke, Andreas Westfeld, Guntram Wicke, and Gritta Wolf. Modeling the security of steganographic systems. In Information Hiding, pages 344\u2013354, 1998.\nYou are adding the first comment!\nHow to quickly get a good reply:\n\u2022 Give credit where it\u2019s due by listing out the positive aspects of a paper before getting into which changes should be made.\n\u2022 Be specific in your critique, and provide supporting evidence with appropriate references to substantiate general statements.\n\u2022 Your comment should inspire ideas to flow and help the author improves the paper.\n\nThe better we are at sharing our knowledge with each other, the faster we move forward.\nThe feedback must be of minimum 40 characters and the title a minimum of 5 characters","date":"2021-03-02 17:50:39","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": false, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.8912009000778198, \"perplexity\": 872.7583262225611}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-10\/segments\/1614178364027.59\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210302160319-20210302190319-00581.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
\section{Introduction}
\IEEEoverridecommandlockouts\IEEEPARstart{T}{he need} to create writing systems has been with humankind since the dawn of time, and they always evolved based on the concrete challenges the writers faced. For example, the angular shapes of the runes are very convenient to be carved in wood or stone~\cite{williams1996origin}. The rapid increase of available mediums in the recent decades determined the need for many more alphabets, for very different use cases, such as controlling computers using touchpads, mouse gestures or eye tracking cameras. It is especially important for elderly care applications~\cite{gordienko2017augmented} on the basis of the newly available information and communication technologies based on multimodal interaction through human-computer interfaces like wearable computing, augmented reality, brain-computing interfaces~\cite{stirenko2017user}, etc.
Many approaches for the manual creation of alphabets have been used, but we are not familiar with a formalized system for their generation. Manually created alphabets are usually suboptimal. For example, it might be argued that the Latin alphabet favours the writer more than the
reader, since it evolved under the constraints of pen and paper, and those constraints are much less relevant in the computer age. Fonts which try to overcome this limitation exist~\cite{dotsies}. In a similar fashion, many systems do not use the possibilities given by the medium or context, electing to base themselves on already existing (familiar to the user, but suboptimal context-wise) symbols. A formalized framework capable of gathering requirements, generating symbols, grading them on a set of criteria and mapping them to meanings may be able to overcome many of those limitations.
The main aim of this paper is to propose a formalized framework capable of gathering requirements,
generating symbols, grading them on a set of criteria and mapping them to meanings, which potentially may overcome many of these limitations. \emph{The section II. Characteristics of a Rational Alphabet} contains the short characterization of basic terms and parameters of alphabets. The section \emph{III. Requirements for the needed alphabet} includes an example description of the requirements posed for alphabets used for shorthand systems. The section \emph{IV. Generation of
Glyphs} proposes
a method for the generation of glyphs with examples. The section \emph{V. Evaluation of Glyphs and Alphabets} contains discussion of fitness of glyphs/alphabets in relation to machine learning methods. The section \emph{VI. Discussion and future work} dedicated to discussion of the results obtained and lessons learned.
\section{Characteristics of a rational alphabet}
"Glyph" is defined as unique mark/symbol in a given medium. "Symbol" is defined as a glyph with a meaning attached to it. "Alphabet" is defined as a system of such symbols, including possible modifiers and conventions.
Glyphs are generated and rated first, and meanings are assigned later; the alphabet as a whole is rated at the very end. This two-step process design choice is based on performance reasons (mutating individual glyphs and their meanings at the same time is too complex for any reasonably-sized alphabet) and is meant as a starting point for further research and adaptation.
The following characteristics should generalize well for almost any alphabet, independently from the medium, dimensionality, and purpose. The vocabulary related to writing 2D characters with a pen or stylus is used, but this can be replaced with any other device.
\subsection{Writing comfort and ergonomics}
For our purposes, we define comfort as "how easy and enjoyable is to use the alphabet".
\begin{itemize}
\item How much mental effort does the recall of the symbols require (ease of recall)
\begin{itemize}
\item How familiar are the symbols to the user at the moment he is writing.
\begin{itemize}
\item Similarity to already known stimuli
\item Availability of a mnemonic system
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}
\item Fluency/flow, both for individual letters and their usual combinations.
\item Physical limitations. For example, some strokes might be easier to write if someone is right-handed, or holds his pen in a certain way.
\end{itemize}
We suggest the following metrics as starting points for future research and discussion:
\subsubsection{Mental effort}
We think that this would be best measured via existing methods and some new methods of fatigue estimation on the basis of machine learning methods~\cite{gordienko2017ccp}. Changes in pupil size might be an especially interesting avenue in this aspect~\cite{Alns2014PupilSS}, as something objective and easy to measure.
If memory is more an issue than cognitive load, than generating the alphabet in such a way so that the glyphs can be "calculated" at writing time might help; as a very example of this, when we were manually creating our shorthand system, we decided to encode
time, modality, and person via a single glyph consisting of three parts.
\subsubsection{Fluency}
Possible metrics for fluency could be:
\begin{itemize}
\item Number of shap angles per glyph.
\item Curvature per glyph. Both can be defined as sum the sum of absolute changes in direction per unit of distance.
\item Ratio of strokes that mean something semantically, as opposed to "connecting one glyph with another", to the entire number.
\item Number of easily connectable glyphs following each other in an average text, so that as little unnecessary movements are made. For example, given a representative source text,
\[c=\sum_{i=1}^n\sum_{j=1}^nE(g_i, g_j)P(g_i,g_j)\], where \(n\) is the number of existing glyphs, \(E(g_i, g_j)\) is how "easy" are the two glyph to connect, \(P(g_i, g_j)\) is how the probability \(g_i\) will be directly before \(g_j\).
\end{itemize}
\subsection{Writing speed}
Defined not as "how fast the pen moves", but rather "how much time is needed to convey the needed information".
\begin{itemize}
\item How fast are individual glyphs to write. This intersects heavily with "Fluency".
\begin{itemize}
\item Fluency from the subsection above.
\item How much the pen needs to travel to form the glyph.
\end{itemize}
\item How much "meaning" can be encoded in one glyph. This is directly related to redundancy and entropy, discussed in the following sections.
\item The more simple glyphs should be mapped to the most common symbols.
\end{itemize}
A potentially interesting experiment would be timing people using the system, and dividing the amount of information written by the time taken; but this would raise questions about the input information. Accurately calculating the entropy of the conveyed information for this purpose would be practical only for alphabets used in very narrow and formalized contexts.
\subsection{Ease of recognition}
\begin{itemize}
\item How different are the glyphs between each other
\item how much are distortions likely to worsen the recognition of the glyphs.
\end{itemize}
Additionally, here various memory biases and characteristics of human memory will be at play (see, for example,the Von Restorff effect~\cite{hunt1995subtlety}).
\subsection{Universality}
Ideally, the glyphs should generalize well. That means that once learned for styluses,the same alphabet shouldn't be too hard to port to other mediums without losing many of the above mentioned characteristics. Excepting changes of dimensionality (3D-gestures might be hard to port to a 2D-stylus), this is probably the hardest to quantify and account for.
\section{Requirements for the needed alphabet}
Most writing systems have been heavily influenced by the constraints inherent in their area of use --- purpose, characteristics of the information they needed to convey, materials. Even naturally evolving systems tend to converge towards local optima rather than a global optimum. Requirements and use patterns may gradually change, while the systems may be stuck in a state that is not optimal anymore. Therefore, a very careful analysis of the requirements and limitations is needed.
As example of applying our requirements above to our case of shorthand system, we can consider the following:
\begin{enumerate}
\item On a purely symbolic level:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Writing letters
\begin{enumerate}
\item number of strokes needed to encode individual letters
\item complexity of the resulting glyph
\end{enumerate}
\item Writing words
\begin{enumerate}
\item connections between individual letters (glyphs)
\item how likely are letters that are easy to connect to each to be represented by easily connectable glyphs
\item if all existing glyphs are not identical in complexity, what is the ratio of easy-to-write glyphs to the complex ones in a typical text (the bigger the ratio, the better)
\end{enumerate}
\end{enumerate}
\item Writing sentences:
\begin{enumerate}
\item are there any often-repeating words or groups of words which, when replaced by a shorter, even if complex, symbol, would lead to a gain in time? ("The" as a typical example).
\end{enumerate}
\item On a semantic level: Are there any grammatical categories or modalities that are represented in natural text with many letters, that when replaced by a single glyph or a modifier, would lead to a gain in time? (tenses, number, gender, hypotheticals, ...). The above mentioned symbol encoding time, modality, and person, to shorten words like "they would have been able to", happened at this level of abstraction.
\item On an information theoretical level: How much redundancy is needed? How many errors in transcription can happen before the message becomes either unreadable or its meaning is distorted? (Natural languages are redundant via multiple mechanisms, notably via agreement in person, gender, case... Errors or interferences will still allow to understand what's being said, up to a certain point. This may not be the case for constructed writing systems, if they
are built with low redundancy.)~\cite{reza1961introduction}
\end{enumerate}
One way to quantify some of the above would be analyzing source texts. At the end, at least the following information should be available:
\begin{itemize}
\item frequencies of individual letters \(p_i\)
\item most-needed connections \(c_{ij}\)
\end{itemize}
As example of how the information can be used, let's consider again our hypothetical shorthand system. Each of the generated glyphs can have three possible starting and ending strokes, represented by integers, and positioned at different heights.\(I_s, I_e=\{0, 1, 2\}\) Glyphs \(i, j\) where \(i_e=j_s\) are considered easily connectable. Using this information, later we can map the glyphs to meanings in such a way, that the letters that are most likely to follow each other are more likely to be
represented by easily connectable glyphs. The problem would be trivially solvable by having all glyphs start and end at the same point, but this would make it harder to differentiate the individual glyphs.
\section{Generation of the glyphs}
The second part of the proposed framework is the generation of possible glyphs. In this paper, Bezier curves have been used to generate the glyphs and calculate some of the needed metrics.
During the generation of the example glyphs, we made the following assumptions about the alphabet for which the glyphs are generated:
\begin{enumerate}
\item The glyphs have a definite starting and ending point; the number of such points is limited, to facilitate connecting the symbols to each other.
\item The stroke width does not vary (as, for example, in the case of Pitman shorthand), because of the low availability of pens able to convey even two levels of thickness and of low average penmanship skill in most people. (Though using it as a third or fourth dimension would certainly be possible.)
\item The symbols will fit into a square bounding box.
\end{enumerate}
The generation of glyphs starts by fixing a definite starting and ending point and then adding a semi-random number of control points. Figures 1-3 are examples of glyphs generated using the above rules.
\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\hsize]{e1.pdf}
\caption{Example of generated glyph with low fitness}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\hsize]{e3.pdf}
\caption{Glyph with higher fitness }
\end{figure}
\begin{figure}[tbp]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=0.75\hsize]{e2.pdf}
\caption{The simpler a glyph is, the higher fitness it has}
\end{figure}
\balance
\section{Evaluation of Glyphs and Alphabets}
In this stage, the fitness of each glyph is determined. Many approaches are possible, and they heavily depend on the context and the medium for which the generation is being done. For our shorthand system, the main criteria were length and simplicity. The number of control points has been used as a proxy of fitness and has been partly accounted for in the generation phase (empirically, the more control points the more chaotic the glyph is). The second metric is complexity, which may be loosely
defined as "how hard it would be to write this symbol using a pen". For our purposes, complexity is defined as \(\frac{c}{l}\), where \(c\) is the sum of the angles in the polygonal representation of the curve (informally, how curved the glyph is; the more curves there are and the sharper the individual curves are, the bigger the value is), and \(l\) is the length of the curve (a certain amount of curves on a large glyph should not be penalized as much as the same amount on a smaller one). C is calculated by converting the curve between the first adjoining control points to a polygon, summing the absolute value of the angles between all adjoining lines, and repeating the process for all the successive control points.
\(c=\sum_{i=1}^n\sum_{j=2}^{p}L_n(j_i, j_i-1)\), where \(n\) is the number of control points, \(p\) is the number of lines used to approximate the curve, L is the angle between two lines, and \(j_i\) is the line after the control point \(i\).
The reasons for defining \(c\) as we did are manifold, one of them being that a very similar metric is used for evaluating the similarity of the two glyphs to each other. Much better metrics are possible.
The subjective reactions to signs might vary between people, differences due to age, cultural and/or language background are probable. This might be a promising area to study with the help of machine learning. Data like "Symbols similar to X perform poorly with demographic Y" would be valuable for creating alphabets when something about the probable users is known.
Additionally, machine learning would open the doors for custom-tailored systems, where users rate some symbols and based on their feedback predictions are made about what other symbols they might like, remember and use.
The first mapping of the generated glyphs, before its fitness is rated, is necessarily very tentative. In this paper we have not touched grammatical modalities and ways to shorten them in great detail, as they would merit quite a lot more research and space (and, probably, their own paper); regardless, they would have their place at this step of the framework.
For an alphabet, our goals could be the following:
\begin{enumerate}
\item As much high-fitness letters as possible
\item Letters which are found the most often should have the highest fitness (that is, be as simple as possible).
\item The letters should be unlike to each other
\item The letters should be easily connectable
\end{enumerate}
The most important requirement is for the letters to be unlike each other. This is needed both for the resulting text to be readable (the existance of a 1-to-1 mapping between a text written in shorthand and a normal text, or at least for the resulting text being readable using contextual clues) and for improving the memorization of the glyphs (memorizing many similar stimuli is much harder than many different ones, unless a good framework for memorization is given, such as dividing symbols in parts).
For our purposes histogram comparison was the most straight-forward to implement. The data for the histogram is provided by the angles computed at the previous step. Basic shapes and turns would be recognizable, and the difference between the two makeshift histograms would approximate the difference between the glyphs. Here, \(D_{ij}\) is the difference between glyphs \(i, j\).
Therefore, one formula for the fitness could be:
\[
f=\sum^{n}_{i=1}f_i+
\sum^{n}_{i=1}\sum^{n}_{i=1}D_{ij}+
\sum^{n}_{i=1}f_ip_i
\]
and the glyphs are picked so that the above formula is maximized. (The formula above does not include connections.)
A genetic algorithm at this point would attempt adding/removing/moving control points, switching glyphs between letters, introducing mirror-distortions etc. etc.
\section{Discussion and future work}
The basic ideas of this framework can be applied for the generation of any alphabet used in the real world. For touchpads, for example, connections may be built not using three possible endings, but 2D-points on the screen instead, and multitouch and weight-sensitivity may be included in the generation. By adding dimensions, 3D-gestures alphabets may be created. Much better heuristics for fitness may be created by more precise algorithms, machine learning and use of biology and cognitive science. The approaches demonstrated here are general enough to allow an enormous amount of flexibility in the kind of alphabets they may be used to create.
One of the more interesting avenues of further research would be creating algorithms for mapping glyphs to semantics, both to letters and to more complex grammar categories or structures. Finding (with AI?) the categories which could be shortened to one or two symbols is challenging by itself, but not all of the possible patterns found by an AI would be intuitive enough for a person to use or even to understand.
\section*{Acknowledgment}
The work was partially supported by Ukraine-France Collaboration Project (Programme PHC DNIPRO) (http://www.campusfrance.org/fr/dnipro)
\bibliographystyle{myIEEEtran}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 2,291 |
Q: pdfpages and linktodoc I'm trying to link to a specific page in an external document. This has been discussed previously under the topic, How to link to specified page of an outer pdf document?, and the answer suggests including the page into this document, and then link to it internally. I'd rather not include the external pages in my document.
I have tried the following from various hints on this site. The following do not work.
\href{doc/mydoc.pdf#page=5}{thedoc}
\href{doc/mydoc.pdf#page.5}{thedoc}
\hyperref{foo.pdf}{page}{2}{some text}
\hyperlink{foo.pdf.2}{some text}
However, pdfpages and the linktodoc option to includepdf does work both internally and externally. I get a copy of a specific page of an external document in my local document, and when I click on that page it jumps to the exact page in the external document. This works with Preview.app and Skim.app on OS X.
\includepdf[pages={2},linktodoc]{foo.pdf}
So this is proof it is possible at least with Preview.app and/or Skim.app to link to specific external pages.
Unfortunately, this link is in the form of an included full page. Is there a way to have this link be some small amount of text of my choosing?
A: You need to use \href with the new optional argument:
\href[page=2]{doc/mydoc.pdf}{thedoc}
This requires a relative new version of hyperref:
\usepackage{hyperref}[2010/09/11]
More advanced options exist, like zooming the external PDF. See the hyperref manual in section 4 "Additional user macros" on page 13.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,660 |
Bird Dog Chocolate exudes a luscious, rich milk chocolate scent and smooth taste.
It's actually good. You can taste the chocolate flavor, but it's not overwhelming. Fairly sweet...good after dinner drink. I'd imagine it would be good in Coffee or warm in general. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 673 |
{"url":"https:\/\/math.stackexchange.com\/questions\/808148\/is-every-continuous-function-measurable","text":"# Is every continuous function measurable?\n\nIn non-Hausdorff topology it is standard to define the Borel algebra of a topological space $X$ as the $\\sigma$-algebra generated by the open subsets and the compact saturated subsets. Recall that a subset is saturated if it is an intersection of open subsets, and that compact saturated subsets play the role of compact subsets when the space $X$ is not $T_1$ (which is typically the case for a partially ordered set equipped with the Scott topology for instance).\n\nIn this situation, for a continuous function $f : X \\to Y$ between topological spaces, is $f$ necessarily measurable?\n\nThis question is equivalent to the following. If we write $\\uparrow y$ for the intersection of all open subsets containing $y$, which happens to be compact saturated, is it true that $f^{-1}(\\uparrow y)$ is measurable for all $y \\in Y$?\n\nThank you very much for your help. Paul\n\nEdit: this question has now been migrated to MathOverflow, see here.\n\n\u2022 Inverse image under a continuous map preserves openness (definitionally) and inverse image under a function preserves arbitrary intersections, so the only remaining criterion is properness (inverse image of a compact set being compact). Given that continuous functions aren't usually proper, I expect this not to be the case. \u2013\u00a0jdc May 24 '14 at 20:57\n\u2022 Dear jdc, since indeed the inverse image of a compact by a compact needs not to be compact, I do not expect this to happen. Without being compact, the inverse image of a compact saturated subset could still be measurable. \u2013\u00a0polmath May 25 '14 at 10:18\n\u2022 Not to be nitpicky, but migration is when the question is moved. What you did is to crosspost the question on MathOverflow. \u2013\u00a0Asaf Karagila Sep 26 '14 at 12:58\n\u2022 @AsafKaragila: thanks. Indeed I asked for \"official\" migration\" but the post was too old for that; talking about \"crossposting\" is certainly more correct. \u2013\u00a0polmath Sep 26 '14 at 13:19\n\nLet $X$ be a topological space with a compact, saturated, non-open set $S$ and $Z$ a space that is not itself the union of countably many compact subsets. Consider the projection $X \\times Z \\to X$. I suspect the inverse image $S \\times Z$ will not behave as hoped. I think it would be as you wanted under the product Borel algebra but not under that of the Borel algebra associated to the product topology.\n\nOr I'm missing something.\n\nI would like to complete my question with the following elements.\n\nIf $Y$ is $T_1$, then every subset $\\uparrow y$ is closed (it coincides with the singleton $\\{ y \\}$ which itself coincides with its closure), so the continuous map $f : X \\to Y$ is measurable.\n\nIf $Y$ is first-countable, then every subset $\\uparrow y$ can be written as a countable intersection of open subsets, so again $f$ is measurable.\n\nIf $f$ is open and bijective, one can show that the inverse image of $\\uparrow y$ is of the form $\\uparrow x$, $x \\in X$, so $f$ is measurable.\n\nDo we know other such situations? (sufficient conditions on $X$, $Y$ or $f$ in order for $f$ to be measurable?)","date":"2020-02-22 17:25:21","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.882623553276062, \"perplexity\": 122.3706994545488}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2020-10\/segments\/1581875145708.59\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20200222150029-20200222180029-00508.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Asbestos has gotten a lot of bad publicity over the last century, but isn't that just because it's so incredibly dangerous for humans to inhale? Isn't that just another case of bias? As the current American administration seems to be clearing a path for asbestos to return to the spotlight, Justin and Dr. Sydnee looked into this misunderstood extremely hazardous substance.
Justin and Dr. Sydnee explore the history of Perkins' Tractors which are both 1. not what they sound like and 2. not what they claim to be. Mysterious!
If the pill you've been taking has been helping you, but it's really made of sugar, would you want to know? Those and other thrilling ethical questions await in our discussion of the placebo effect.
CBD oil is collecting a lot of adherents and getting a lot of buzz due to, in part, it being derived from cannabis. It won't get you high, but is CBD oil the panacea many are promoting it as? Let's discuss on this week's Sawbones!
This week on Sawbones, we explore a completely groundless testing method based on the same science as Ouija boards that's used by over a third of American chiropractors.
In honor of the rescue of 12 boys and their coach from a cave in Thailand, we're discussing the history of dive medicine research that helped make it possible.
Ozone provides a helpful layer of sunscreen for Earth, but it's toxic to humans. It will come as no surprise to regular Sawbones listeners that we've spent the past couple hundred years trying to jam it in every possible orifice.
Imagine an incredible pill that could give you nausea and diarrhea and then once ejected from your body could be reused an endless number of times. Dream no more! Antimony is here!
You've likely heard a lot about the ketogenic diet lately, but have you heard it wasn't created for weight loss? Maybe you did, Justin didn't. Either way, we'll talk about it and so much more on this week's episode of Sawbones.
This week on Sawbones, Dr. Sydnee and Justin talk about their struggles with mental health. Trigger warning for discussion of depression, anxiety and suicide. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 5,860 |
Hepatitis Australia
Info line Donate
Hepatitis information
Hepatitis Statistics
Hepatitis Infoline
Local hepatitis organisations
Hepatitis B Program
Hepatitis C Program
If tatts could talk
Leading organisations unite to discuss COVID-19 impact on hepatitis C elimination in Australia on World Hepatitis Day
Australia's leading drug and infectious disease organisations will join forces to call for a re-engagement in elimination of hepatitis C in an online event on World Hepatitis Day, Tuesday, 28 July 2020.
Australia is on track to become one of the first countries to eliminate hepatitis C, which is part of the global goal from the World Health Organisation (WHO) to eliminate hepatitis C as a public health threat by 2030.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic and related social isolation has impacted drug use, drug and hepatitis C treatment services, and the health of people who use drugs. This puts an increased risk on new hepatitis transmission, access to treatment, and the elimination goals for 2030.
The Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League (AIVL), Hepatitis Australia, the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol & other Drugs (APSAD), the Kirby Institute and National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC) at UNSW Sydney, have partnered to address what COVID-19 will mean for hepatitis C elimination in Australia.
CEO of Hepatitis Australia, Carrie Fowlie said, "Hepatitis C is a blood borne virus and people who inject drugs are a crucial priority population."
"Not only is there a risk that the WHO 2030 elimination goal could be set back, but more immediate negative impacts could be experienced by people at risk of contracting hepatitis or seeking hepatitis treatment in Australia due to current and future social, health, and policy changes."
CEO of AIVL, Melanie Walker said some of the new regulations and social requirements are impossible for people who use drugs to abide by.
"People who use drugs need to attend needle and syringe programs (NSPs) and be able to have ongoing access to the full range of harm reduction, pharmacotherapy and other drug and hepatitis treatments," said Ms Walker.
"If people who use drugs cannot access these services, we could see an increase in sharing of injecting equipment, which could lead to increased cases of hepatitis C and compound the negative health outcomes already experienced by this group."
In the newly released National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2019, illicit drug use was responsible for 75 percent of Australia's acute hepatitis C burden of disease.
Professor Greg Dore, Head of Viral Hepatitis Clinical Research Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, said there had been encouraging recent data from the Australian Needle Syringe Program Survey on prevalence of active hepatitis C infection in people who inject drugs which had declined from 51 percent to 18 percent between 2015 and 2019.
"However, despite these declines in number of people with hepatitis C, continued declines in numbers being treated through 2019 and into 2020 compromises the achievement of WHO elimination goals," said Professor Dore.
"More strategies are needed to raise awareness of the need for testing and availability of new hepatitis C treatments to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030."
In a new NDARC study of 702 people who used drugs during COVID-19 restrictions and lockdown, it was found only 24 percent were able to avoid sharing drug injecting equipment.
Professor Michael Farrell, Director of NDARC, UNSW Sydney, said the research shows that people who use drugs want to limit their risk of contracting viral diseases like COVID-19 and hepatitis C, but this can be challenging due to a range of factors.
"We need to continue to find solutions that support people who use drugs to ensure hepatitis C elimination remains a priority."
About the online event
Facilitated by health reporter Dr Norman Swan, this event brings together affected communities, doctors, scientists, health and community workers, researchers and the public to discuss the immense challenges COVID-19 brings to hepatitis C elimination and the health of people who use drugs, and to discuss strategies to ensure Australia stays on track to become one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C.
Date: Tuesday, 28 July 2020
Time: 12:30pm – 2:30pm
Book here.
Jude Byrne, National Project Coordinator, Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League
Sione Crawford, Chief Executive Officer, Harm Reduction Victoria
Greg Dore, Head, Viral Hepatitis Clinical Research Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney
Carrie Fowlie, Chief Executive Officer, Hepatitis Australia
Jules Kim, Chief Executive Officer, Scarlet Alliance, Australian Sex Workers Association
Andrew Lloyd, Head, Viral Immunology Systems Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney
Stuart Manoj-Margison, Director, BBV, STI and Torres Strait Health Policy Section, Australian Government Department of Health
Amy Peacock, Senior Research Fellow, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney
Melanie Walker, CEO, Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League
Michael Farrell, Director, The National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (NDARC), UNSW Sydney
Author: Kevin Marriott
Parliamentary Morning Tea: We can eliminate hepatitis C!
The Parliamentary Friends Group for Action of Blood Borne Viruses Co-Chairs, Tim Wilson, MP and Senator Louise Pratt invite you to a Parliamentary Morning Tea on Thursday 12 November.
Renewed calls for Needle & Syringe Programs in prisons ahead of International Drug Users Day
The Australian Injecting and Illicit Drug Users League (AIVL) and Hepatitis Australia are highlighting international calls for Needle and Syringe Programs (NSPs) in prisons, along with a greater focus on harm reduction initiatives, ahead of International Drug Users Day on 1 November.
Investment in hepatitis research needs to be accompanied by National Strategy implementation funding
6 October 2020 - Hepatitis Australia welcomes the Australian Government's commitment to diverse hepatitis research, however we remain concerned that the 2019 Health Budget funding for hepatitis commitments is yet to hit the ground.
Investment in liver cancer medicines matched with prevention are changing Australian lives
6 October 2020 - Hepatitis Australia welcomes the Australian Government's significant investment of $230 million to expand the listing of Tecentriq® and Avastin® (atezolizumab and bevacizumab) on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).
2020 Nobel Prize awarded for discovery of hepatitis C virus
6 October 2020 - Hepatitis Australia is celebrating the news that the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 has been awarded jointly to Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice 'for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus'.
Not seeking help may place your health, or your life, at risk.
Patient safety and continuity of care is extremely important, particularly for people who have chronic and complex diseases or conditions, which is why Hepatitis Australia has joined the Continuity of Care Collaboration
Australian First for Network Nurse
22 September 2020: Hepatology Nurse Practitioner, Tracey Jones, has become the first Australian nurse to be awarded the Associate Fellow designation from the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases
Let's Talk Hep on World Hepatitis Day – 28 July
As Australia grapples with COVID-19 outbreaks, it is important to remember that viral hepatitis is also a pandemic. Viral hepatitis can lead to liver cancer and directly impacts nearly 360,000 people in Australia.
Hepatitis C outbreak ignites debate on needle exchange in Queensland correctional centres
23 July 2020 - Except from article from ABC Far North about hepatitis C outbreak in Queensland correctional centre.
No, you're not being tested for hepatitis as part of a routine blood test
Hepatitis B and C are the most common blood borne viruses in Australia but testing for them is not part of normal blood tests—you generally have to ask your doctor.
Coronavirus COVID-19 factsheet for people with hepatitis B and hepatitis C
Hepatitis Australia has put together a brief factsheet with information about the coronavirus COVID-19 for people living with hepatitis B and hepatitis C.
Information on the coronavirus COVID-19 for people affected by hepatitis B or hepatitis C.
Basic information about hepatitis A in Australia
A cure for hepatitis C
New highly effective medicines are now available in Australia to cure hepatitis C
Hepatitis B and relationships
Although most people get hepatitis B at birth, it can be transmitted in other ways including sex. This article contains information about how it is spreads, and how you can keep your partner safe.
What is hepatitis C?
Basic information about hepatitis C and how it can effect you.
Who needs treatment for hepatitis B and what is involved.
Hepatitis B vaccination
Hepatitis B can be prevented with a safe and effective vaccine.
Changes to immigration health requirement a positive move for migrants with hepatitis B
21 August 2019 - Changes to the immigration health requirement will have a significant and positive impact for people with hepatitis B seeking to migrate permanently to Australia.
What is hepatitis B?
Basic information about hepatitis B transmission and how it affects people.
Health Care Worker / Educator
Hepatitis Australia is a registered charity.
© Copyright 2019 Hepatitis Australia.
View our copyright statement here
Information provided on this website is for general information only and not intended as medical advice. Hepatitis Australia encourages all readers to seek independent medical advice before making any decisions based on the information provided on this website.
Hepatitis Australia is a partner organisation of healthdirect Australia.
Images used on this site may include stock photos and the associated messaging may not represent the personal situation, views or beliefs of the people in the images. | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 4,087 |
package org.apach3.http.impl.nio.reactor;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InterruptedIOException;
import java.nio.channels.CancelledKeyException;
import java.nio.channels.ClosedChannelException;
import java.nio.channels.ClosedSelectorException;
import java.nio.channels.SelectionKey;
import java.nio.channels.Selector;
import java.nio.channels.SocketChannel;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.Queue;
import java.util.Set;
import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentLinkedQueue;
import org.apach3.http.annotation.ThreadSafe;
import org.apach3.http.nio.reactor.IOReactor;
import org.apach3.http.nio.reactor.IOReactorException;
import org.apach3.http.nio.reactor.IOReactorStatus;
import org.apach3.http.nio.reactor.IOSession;
/**
* Generic implementation of {@link IOReactor} that can used as a subclass
* for more specialized I/O reactors. It is based on a single {@link Selector}
* instance.
*
* @since 4.0
*/
@ThreadSafe // public methods only
public abstract class AbstractIOReactor implements IOReactor {
private volatile IOReactorStatus status;
private final Object statusMutex;
private final long selectTimeout;
private final boolean interestOpsQueueing;
private final Selector selector;
private final Set<IOSession> sessions;
private final Queue<InterestOpEntry> interestOpsQueue;
private final Queue<IOSession> closedSessions;
private final Queue<ChannelEntry> newChannels;
/**
* Creates new AbstractIOReactor instance.
*
* @param selectTimeout the select timeout.
* @throws IOReactorException in case if a non-recoverable I/O error.
*/
public AbstractIOReactor(long selectTimeout) throws IOReactorException {
this(selectTimeout, false);
}
/**
* Creates new AbstractIOReactor instance.
*
* @param selectTimeout the select timeout.
* @param interestOpsQueueing Ops queueing flag.
*
* @throws IOReactorException in case if a non-recoverable I/O error.
*
* @since 4.1
*/
public AbstractIOReactor(long selectTimeout, boolean interestOpsQueueing) throws IOReactorException {
super();
if (selectTimeout <= 0) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Select timeout may not be negative or zero");
}
this.selectTimeout = selectTimeout;
this.interestOpsQueueing = interestOpsQueueing;
this.sessions = Collections.synchronizedSet(new HashSet<IOSession>());
this.interestOpsQueue = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<InterestOpEntry>();
this.closedSessions = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<IOSession>();
this.newChannels = new ConcurrentLinkedQueue<ChannelEntry>();
try {
this.selector = Selector.open();
} catch (IOException ex) {
throw new IOReactorException("Failure opening selector", ex);
}
this.statusMutex = new Object();
this.status = IOReactorStatus.INACTIVE;
}
/**
* Triggered when the key signals {@link SelectionKey#OP_ACCEPT} readiness.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param key the selection key.
*/
protected abstract void acceptable(SelectionKey key);
/**
* Triggered when the key signals {@link SelectionKey#OP_CONNECT} readiness.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param key the selection key.
*/
protected abstract void connectable(SelectionKey key);
/**
* Triggered when the key signals {@link SelectionKey#OP_READ} readiness.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param key the selection key.
*/
protected abstract void readable(SelectionKey key);
/**
* Triggered when the key signals {@link SelectionKey#OP_WRITE} readiness.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param key the selection key.
*/
protected abstract void writable(SelectionKey key);
/**
* Triggered to validate keys currently registered with the selector. This
* method is called after each I/O select loop.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to run validity checks on
* active sessions and include additional processing that needs to be
* executed after each I/O select loop.
*
* @param keys all selection keys registered with the selector.
*/
protected abstract void validate(Set<SelectionKey> keys);
/**
* Triggered when new session has been created.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param key the selection key.
* @param session new I/O session.
*/
protected void sessionCreated(final SelectionKey key, final IOSession session) {
}
/**
* Triggered when a session has been closed.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param session closed I/O session.
*/
protected void sessionClosed(final IOSession session) {
}
/**
* Triggered when a session has timed out.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param session timed out I/O session.
*/
protected void sessionTimedOut(final IOSession session) {
}
/**
* Obtains {@link IOSession} instance associated with the given selection
* key.
*
* @param key the selection key.
* @return I/O session.
*/
protected IOSession getSession(final SelectionKey key) {
return (IOSession) key.attachment();
}
public IOReactorStatus getStatus() {
return this.status;
}
/**
* Returns <code>true</code> if interest Ops queueing is enabled, <code>false</code> otherwise.
*
* @since 4.1
*/
public boolean getInterestOpsQueueing() {
return this.interestOpsQueueing;
}
/**
* Adds new channel entry. The channel will be asynchronously registered
* with the selector.
*
* @param channelEntry the channel entry.
*/
public void addChannel(final ChannelEntry channelEntry) {
if (channelEntry == null) {
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Channel entry may not be null");
}
this.newChannels.add(channelEntry);
this.selector.wakeup();
}
/**
* Activates the I/O reactor. The I/O reactor will start reacting to
* I/O events and triggering notification methods.
* <p>
* This method will enter the infinite I/O select loop on
* the {@link Selector} instance associated with this I/O reactor.
* <p>
* The method will remain blocked unto the I/O reactor is shut down or the
* execution thread is interrupted.
*
* @see #acceptable(SelectionKey)
* @see #connectable(SelectionKey)
* @see #readable(SelectionKey)
* @see #writable(SelectionKey)
* @see #timeoutCheck(SelectionKey, long)
* @see #validate(Set)
* @see #sessionCreated(SelectionKey, IOSession)
* @see #sessionClosed(IOSession)
*
* @throws InterruptedIOException if the dispatch thread is interrupted.
* @throws IOReactorException in case if a non-recoverable I/O error.
*/
protected void execute() throws InterruptedIOException, IOReactorException {
this.status = IOReactorStatus.ACTIVE;
try {
for (;;) {
int readyCount;
try {
readyCount = this.selector.select(this.selectTimeout);
} catch (InterruptedIOException ex) {
throw ex;
} catch (IOException ex) {
throw new IOReactorException("Unexpected selector failure", ex);
}
if (this.status == IOReactorStatus.SHUT_DOWN) {
// Hard shut down. Exit select loop immediately
break;
}
if (this.status == IOReactorStatus.SHUTTING_DOWN) {
// Graceful shutdown in process
// Try to close things out nicely
closeSessions();
closeNewChannels();
}
// Process selected I/O events
if (readyCount > 0) {
processEvents(this.selector.selectedKeys());
}
// Validate active channels
validate(this.selector.keys());
// Process closed sessions
processClosedSessions();
// If active process new channels
if (this.status == IOReactorStatus.ACTIVE) {
processNewChannels();
}
// Exit select loop if graceful shutdown has been completed
if (this.status.compareTo(IOReactorStatus.ACTIVE) > 0
&& this.sessions.isEmpty()) {
break;
}
if (this.interestOpsQueueing) {
// process all pending interestOps() operations
processPendingInterestOps();
}
}
} catch (ClosedSelectorException ex) {
} finally {
hardShutdown();
synchronized (this.statusMutex) {
this.statusMutex.notifyAll();
}
}
}
private void processEvents(final Set<SelectionKey> selectedKeys) {
for (Iterator<SelectionKey> it = selectedKeys.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {
SelectionKey key = it.next();
processEvent(key);
}
selectedKeys.clear();
}
/**
* Processes new event on the given selection key.
*
* @param key the selection key that triggered an event.
*/
protected void processEvent(final SelectionKey key) {
IOSessionImpl session = (IOSessionImpl) key.attachment();
try {
if (key.isAcceptable()) {
acceptable(key);
}
if (key.isConnectable()) {
connectable(key);
}
if (key.isReadable()) {
session.resetLastRead();
readable(key);
}
if (key.isWritable()) {
session.resetLastWrite();
writable(key);
}
} catch (CancelledKeyException ex) {
queueClosedSession(session);
key.attach(null);
}
}
/**
* Queues the given I/O session to be processed asynchronously as closed.
*
* @param session the closed I/O session.
*/
protected void queueClosedSession(final IOSession session) {
if (session != null) {
this.closedSessions.add(session);
}
}
private void processNewChannels() throws IOReactorException {
ChannelEntry entry;
while ((entry = this.newChannels.poll()) != null) {
SocketChannel channel;
SelectionKey key;
try {
channel = entry.getChannel();
channel.configureBlocking(false);
key = channel.register(this.selector, SelectionKey.OP_READ);
} catch (ClosedChannelException ex) {
SessionRequestImpl sessionRequest = entry.getSessionRequest();
if (sessionRequest != null) {
sessionRequest.failed(ex);
}
return;
} catch (IOException ex) {
throw new IOReactorException("Failure registering channel " +
"with the selector", ex);
}
SessionClosedCallback sessionClosedCallback = new SessionClosedCallback() {
public void sessionClosed(IOSession session) {
queueClosedSession(session);
}
};
InterestOpsCallback interestOpsCallback = null;
if (this.interestOpsQueueing) {
interestOpsCallback = new InterestOpsCallback() {
public void addInterestOps(final InterestOpEntry entry) {
queueInterestOps(entry);
}
};
}
IOSession session = new IOSessionImpl(key, interestOpsCallback, sessionClosedCallback);
int timeout = 0;
try {
timeout = channel.socket().getSoTimeout();
} catch (IOException ex) {
// Very unlikely to happen and is not fatal
// as the protocol layer is expected to overwrite
// this value anyways
}
session.setAttribute(IOSession.ATTACHMENT_KEY, entry.getAttachment());
session.setSocketTimeout(timeout);
this.sessions.add(session);
try {
SessionRequestImpl sessionRequest = entry.getSessionRequest();
if (sessionRequest != null) {
sessionRequest.completed(session);
}
key.attach(session);
sessionCreated(key, session);
} catch (CancelledKeyException ex) {
queueClosedSession(session);
key.attach(null);
}
}
}
private void processClosedSessions() {
IOSession session;
while ((session = this.closedSessions.poll()) != null) {
if (this.sessions.remove(session)) {
try {
sessionClosed(session);
} catch (CancelledKeyException ex) {
// ignore and move on
}
}
}
}
private void processPendingInterestOps() {
// validity check
if (!this.interestOpsQueueing) {
return;
}
InterestOpEntry entry;
while ((entry = this.interestOpsQueue.poll()) != null) {
// obtain the operation's details
SelectionKey key = entry.getSelectionKey();
int eventMask = entry.getEventMask();
if (key.isValid()) {
key.interestOps(eventMask);
}
}
}
private boolean queueInterestOps(final InterestOpEntry entry) {
// validity checks
if (!this.interestOpsQueueing) {
throw new IllegalStateException("Interest ops queueing not enabled");
}
if (entry == null) {
return false;
}
// add this operation to the interestOps() queue
this.interestOpsQueue.add(entry);
return true;
}
/**
* Triggered to verify whether the I/O session associated with the
* given selection key has not timed out.
* <p>
* Super-classes can implement this method to react to the event.
*
* @param key the selection key.
* @param now current time as long value.
*/
protected void timeoutCheck(final SelectionKey key, long now) {
IOSessionImpl session = (IOSessionImpl) key.attachment();
if (session != null) {
int timeout = session.getSocketTimeout();
if (timeout > 0) {
if (session.getLastAccessTime() + timeout < now) {
sessionTimedOut(session);
}
}
}
}
/**
* Closes out all I/O sessions maintained by this I/O reactor.
*/
protected void closeSessions() {
synchronized (this.sessions) {
for (Iterator<IOSession> it = this.sessions.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {
IOSession session = it.next();
session.close();
}
}
}
/**
* Closes out all new channels pending registration with the selector of
* this I/O reactor.
* @throws IOReactorException - not thrown currently
*/
protected void closeNewChannels() throws IOReactorException {
ChannelEntry entry;
while ((entry = this.newChannels.poll()) != null) {
SessionRequestImpl sessionRequest = entry.getSessionRequest();
if (sessionRequest != null) {
sessionRequest.cancel();
}
SocketChannel channel = entry.getChannel();
try {
channel.close();
} catch (IOException ignore) {
}
}
}
/**
* Closes out all active channels registered with the selector of
* this I/O reactor.
* @throws IOReactorException - not thrown currently
*/
protected void closeActiveChannels() throws IOReactorException {
try {
Set<SelectionKey> keys = this.selector.keys();
for (Iterator<SelectionKey> it = keys.iterator(); it.hasNext(); ) {
SelectionKey key = it.next();
IOSession session = getSession(key);
if (session != null) {
session.close();
}
}
this.selector.close();
} catch (IOException ignore) {
}
}
/**
* Attempts graceful shutdown of this I/O reactor.
*/
public void gracefulShutdown() {
synchronized (this.statusMutex) {
if (this.status != IOReactorStatus.ACTIVE) {
// Already shutting down
return;
}
this.status = IOReactorStatus.SHUTTING_DOWN;
}
this.selector.wakeup();
}
/**
* Attempts force-shutdown of this I/O reactor.
*/
public void hardShutdown() throws IOReactorException {
synchronized (this.statusMutex) {
if (this.status == IOReactorStatus.SHUT_DOWN) {
// Already shut down
return;
}
this.status = IOReactorStatus.SHUT_DOWN;
}
closeNewChannels();
closeActiveChannels();
processClosedSessions();
}
/**
* Blocks for the given period of time in milliseconds awaiting
* the completion of the reactor shutdown.
*
* @param timeout the maximum wait time.
* @throws InterruptedException if interrupted.
*/
public void awaitShutdown(long timeout) throws InterruptedException {
synchronized (this.statusMutex) {
long deadline = System.currentTimeMillis() + timeout;
long remaining = timeout;
while (this.status != IOReactorStatus.SHUT_DOWN) {
this.statusMutex.wait(remaining);
if (timeout > 0) {
remaining = deadline - System.currentTimeMillis();
if (remaining <= 0) {
break;
}
}
}
}
}
public void shutdown(long gracePeriod) throws IOReactorException {
if (this.status != IOReactorStatus.INACTIVE) {
gracefulShutdown();
try {
awaitShutdown(gracePeriod);
} catch (InterruptedException ignore) {
}
}
if (this.status != IOReactorStatus.SHUT_DOWN) {
hardShutdown();
}
}
public void shutdown() throws IOReactorException {
shutdown(1000);
}
}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaGithub"
} | 6,584 |
Q: Dell precision 7510 fails to suspend: xhci_hcd timeout My Dell Precision 7510 with Ubuntu 17.10 will often fail to suspend.
Warning messages are displayed, then the login screen comes back.
dmesg gives:
thermal thermal_zone10: failed to read out thermal zone (-5)
[26797.500002] PM: Syncing filesystems ... done.
[26797.502461] PM: Preparing system for sleep (freeze)
[26797.552411] Freezing user space processes ... (elapsed 0.001 seconds) done.
[26797.554190] OOM killer disabled.
[26797.554190] Freezing remaining freezable tasks ... (elapsed 0.001 seconds) done.
[26797.555319] PM: Suspending system (freeze)
[26797.555320] Suspending console(s) (use no_console_suspend to debug)
[26797.555526] xhci_hcd 0000:3c:00.0: WARN: xHC CMD_RUN timeout
[26797.555530] suspend_common(): xhci_pci_suspend+0x0/0xd0 returns -110
[26797.555532] pci_pm_suspend(): hcd_pci_suspend+0x0/0x30 returns -110
[26797.555535] dpm_run_callback(): pci_pm_suspend+0x0/0x130 returns -110
[26797.555536] PM: Device 0000:3c:00.0 failed to suspend async: error -110
[26798.055512] thunderbolt 0000:06:00.0: Ignoring mailbox command error (-110) in icm_suspend
[26798.055645] PM: Some devices failed to suspend, or early wake event detected
[26798.055740] PM: resume of devices complete after 0.092 msecs
[26818.437218] PM: Finishing wakeup.
[26818.437219] OOM killer enabled.
[26818.437221] Restarting tasks ... done.
I tried a solution from this site (can't find it back) where I added a script in /etc/pm/config.d/ with SUSPEND_MODULES=xhci_hcd but it doesn't seem to work.
Edit: Here is the info from lshw about that device:
*-generic:4
description: Unassigned class
product: Illegal Vendor ID
vendor: Illegal Vendor ID
physical id: 5
bus info: pci@0000:3c:00.0
version: ff
width: 32 bits
clock: 66MHz
capabilities: bus_master vga_palette cap_list
configuration: driver=xhci_hcd latency=255 maxlatency=255 mingnt=255
resources: irq:138 memory:d9f00000-d9f0ffff
*-usbhost:0
product: xHCI Host Controller
vendor: Linux 4.13.0-32-generic xhci-hcd
physical id: 0
bus info: usb@3
logical name: usb3
version: 4.13
capabilities: usb-2.00
configuration: driver=hub slots=2 speed=480Mbit/s
*-usbhost:1
product: xHCI Host Controller
vendor: Linux 4.13.0-32-generic xhci-hcd
physical id: 1
bus info: usb@4
logical name: usb4
version: 4.13
capabilities: usb-3.10
configuration: driver=hub slots=2 speed=10000Mbit/s
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaStackExchange"
} | 1,339 |
English Soccer
Sportswoman of the Year
Irishracing.com
Liverpool's long wait for the title goes on despite Wolves win
Sadio Mane on target again but events on the south coast mean victory proves in vain
Sun, May 12, 2019, 17:15 Updated: Mon, May 13, 2019, 09:03
Daniel Taylor at Anfield
Liverpool's 29-year wait for a league title will continue after they had to settle for runners-up spot behind Manchester City despite Sunday's 2-0 win over Wolverhampton Wanderers on the final day of the Premier League season. Video: Reuters
Sadio Mane scored twice in Liverpool's 2-0 win over Wolves. Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty
Liverpool 2 Wolverhampton Wanderers 0
The first anybody knew about it was the tinny roar from the Wolves end. It was the news every Liverpool supporter had been dreading and, football being the sport of schadenfreude, there was not a great deal of sympathy coming from the supporters who, for one day only, had chosen to serenade Manchester City, champions of England once again.
That was the moment when everyone associated with Liverpool had to confront the harsh realities of trying to catch, and overhaul, a side of City's durability, knowing now that 97 points was not going to be enough and that a season of sustained brilliance was not going to get its happy ending. Not in the Premier League, anyway.
A few minutes earlier, the updates from Brighton had told a desperate, longing crowd that City were losing. Now everything had been turned upside down. The Wolves fans were singing about Sergio Agüero, as well as "City! City!" and, cruelly, "You nearly won the league." Later, the same thing happened all over again – twice, in fact – and by that stage everybody knew that Liverpool's long wait for a league title, stretching all the way back to 1990, was not going to end here.
Andy Robertson during Liverpool's 2-0 win over Wolves. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
Of course, Liverpool being Liverpool, they were determined not to let everything fizzle out with a sudden, damp silence. Anfield was far too proud to sulk or stew. Liverpool won, again, courtesy of Sadio Mané's latest two goals and it is the first time in 39 years they have gone successive seasons without losing a single league fixture on their own ground. Liverpool have equalled their club record of winning 30 times, the last time that happened being 1978-79 over a 42-match season, and there is the small matter of a Champions League final to come.
Ultimately, though, the only detail that mattered here is they had finished second – the best runners-up, undoubtedly, there have ever been, but second, all the same – and at the final whistle it cannot have been easy for Jürgen Klopp and his players to try to disguise all that raw disappointment.
They certainly had a lot to take in bearing in mind all the different emotions of a day in which Liverpool, for 21 minutes, had been top on the 'as-it-stands' table we have now in the modern sport.
Mané's opening goal arrived in the 16th minute and, in that first half, it was difficult to comprehend how the afternoon would finish – or , indeed, what could be believed and what could not.
For starters, how about that moment, 25 minutes in, when the drama suddenly went up several notches? The noise started in the corner of the main stand: a gargled roar that suddenly spread, left to right, growing louder and louder. It was the roar of a crowd that believed Brighton had gone ahead.
But it was a deception, a false alarm, a cruel way to play with everyone's nerves and leave the vast majority of this crowd cursing whoever had started the rumour.
For two minutes, at least. The next roar crackled round the stadium like electricity and this time it was real. Up in the directors' box, John Barnes was pumping his fists. Kenny Dalglish was checking his phone, grabbing the arm of the person in the next seat. Liverpool were winning and his phone told him: Brighton 1 Manchester City 0.
Briefly, there was pandemonium but, as far as Liverpool were concerned, it was not for long enough. The next update came barely a minute later: a goal for City. Soon afterwards, there was another one. In between, a pocket of Liverpool fans started to celebrate another phantom Brighton goal. But the reality was that City were winning and the next updates, for Liverpool, were all grievous setbacks.
Sadio Mane opens the scoring for Liverpool against Wolves. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
Amid this bran-tub of fluctuating emotions, it was difficult at times to concentrate on what was happening on the pitch. It must have been strange for the Liverpool players, too, to know what was going on, what they could believe and what it meant. All they could really worry about was making sure they did their part and that was not straightforward when Wolves wanted to show why their seventh-placed finish is the best of any promoted side since Ipswich were fifth in 2001.
To begin with, it was difficult for Liverpool to get through. Wolves defended deeply, looking to spring on the counterattack, and looked relatively comfortable until Trent Alexander-Arnold's low and deflected cross set up the opening goal. Mané turned it in, first time, from six yards out and at that stage Liverpool's supporters could have been forgiven for wondering whether the ribbons on the trophy might end up being red, after all.
Until, at least, the updates started coming in from the south coast. "Brighton came very close to an equaliser on the stroke of half-time,"George Sephton told the crowd at half-time, trying to soothe the mood. They know George here as the Voice of Anfield. "So fingers crossed for the next 45," he added.
Wolves had also come close to equalising, when Matt Doherty's shot skimmed the crossbar, and for the first 20 minutes of the second half they looked the more dangerous side. Liverpool looked weary, worn down possibly by all the drama and emotion of what happened here against Barcelona last Tuesday.
But they kept going. Mané's next goal was a header in the 81st minute and, again, it came from one of Alexander-Arnold's right-sided deliveries. It was the 13th goal Liverpool's right-back had set up this season, a record for any defender in the Premier League era, and it meant Mané pulling level with Mohamed Salah as the team's leading scorer. That, however, was not the prize either of them wanted. - Guardian
John Barnes
Kenny Dalglish
Matt Doherty
Sadio Mane
Trent Alexander Arnold
Champions Celtic lose final Old Firm derby of the season
Waterford and Sligo Rovers share six goals and the points
Fifa delegation to meet FAI next week
Advantage Leeds after they edge Derby in first leg of playoffs
Hourihane screamer sparks Villa comeback against West Brom
Former Fifa boss Sepp Blatter says money risks ruining football
Ander Herrera confirms Manchester United departure
LOI round-up: Derry City held by St Pat's at the Brandywell
Dundalk move ominously to the top of Premier Division
Michael Walker: Man City and Liverpool now on another level
St Michael's conveyor belt showing no signs of slowing down
Welcome to Iten in Kenya – home of champions and cheats
Matt Williams: No easy way to earn your spurs as a top coach
19 Bournemouth 22 20
Full English Soccer standings
James Lowe enjoying Leinster's unbeaten run, the secret to TJ Reid's longevity
Rashford an injury doubt for Liverpool clash; Johnny Sexton named as Ireland captain
Manchester United set for FA Cup replay; Andy Farrell to name his first Ireland squad
Ulster look to secure quarter-final place with win against Bath 06:00
Leo Cullen: Benetton will play hard to beat in Treviso 06:00
Un De Sceaux bids to become rare 12-year-old Grade One winner 06:00
GAA hopeful club finals crowd will not be hit by date change 06:00
Connacht determined to make Montpellier clash count for something 06:00
Ian O'Riordan
Joanne O'Riordan
Joanne O'Riordan: So sport and politics don't mix? Not true
Connacht's Gavin Thornbury has attributes to join Ireland ranks
1 St Michael's conveyor belt showing no signs of slowing down
2 Welcome to Iten in Kenya – home of champions and cheats
3 Saracens to accept second 35-point deduction and effective relegation
4 Leinster lead the Irish charge on defining weekend for provinces
5 Munster mood will be determined before kick-off | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaCommonCrawl"
} | 6,857 |
\section{Introduction}
One of the paramount problems manifest in modern cosmological theories
is that of the initial singularity. Gasperini and Veneziano have proposed
the pre-big-bang (PBB) model$^{\cite{GasperiniET1992b}}$ based on the
assumption that the Universe evolved out
of a ten-dimensional Minkowski space-time which is an exact vacuum of string
theory, in hopes of resolving the singularity problem. Recently, Brandenberger,
Easther and Maia$^{\cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}}$ managed to construct
nonsingular cosmological solutions based
on initial conditions resembling those of the pre-big-bang scenario. They
began with dilaton gravity and the low energy effective action of string
theory in the Einstein frame, adding to it specially constructed higher
derivative terms. As the string frame is the fundamental frame with
respect to
string theory$^{\cite{Veneziano1997a}}$, it is important to reconsider the analysis of \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}, performing
the calculations directly
in the string frame. The Einstein frame metric $\tilde g_{\mu\nu}$ is
related to the string frame metric $g_{\mu\nu}$ via a conformal transformation
$^{\cite{Dicke1961a}}$
\begin{equation} \label{eq:conft}
\tilde g_{\mu\nu} = e^{- \varphi} g_{\mu\nu}\,,
\end{equation}
where $\varphi$ is the dilaton.
The (PBB) model is constructed from the low energy effective action of string
theory. In the string frame, after compactification to four dimensions, the
action is given by$^{\cite{Polchinski1998a}}$
\begin{equation} \label{eq:sfaction}
S = - \frac{1}{2\kappa^2}\int{d^4\!x \,\sqrt{-g} \, e^{-\varphi}
\left\{ R + (\nabla \varphi)^2 + \cdots \right\}}\,,
\end{equation}
where $\kappa^2 = 8 \pi G = 8 \pi m_{pl}^{-2}$.
The PBB model gives us hope of finding a nonsingular cosmology in which
in the Einstein frame the Universe starts out in a cold dilaton-dominated contracting phase,
goes through a bounce and then emerges as an expanding FRW
Universe.\footnote{See http://www.to.infn.it/$\sim$gasperin/ for an updated
collection of papers on pre-big-bang cosmology.} In the string frame this
corresponds to$^{\cite{GasperiniET1993a}}$ a Universe starting in a superinflationary phase with ${\dot H} > 0$ and emerging as a usual FRW Universe with ${\dot H} < 0$.
As is well known, it is impossible to smoothly connect the contracting and expanding
branches of the PBB model using only the tree-level action
$^{\cite{BrusteinET1994b,EastherET1995a,KaloperET1995a,KaloperET1995b}}$.
These branches are separated by a future and past singularity of the branches respectively.
However, one-loop effects in superstring cosmology are capable of regulating the
singularities$^{\cite{EastherET1996a}}$ and smoothly connecting a
contracting phase to an expanding phase in the presence of
spatial curvature. Refs
\cite{AntoniadisET1993a,%
LarsenET1996a,%
Rey1996a,%
GasperiniET1996b,%
GasperiniET1996c,%
GasperiniET1997a,%
Bose1997a,%
BoseET1997a,%
KalyanaRama1997a,%
DabrowskiET1997a,%
LukasET1997b,%
BrusteinET1997a,%
Maggiore1997a,%
Gasperini1998a,%
BrusteinET1997c,%
KantiET1998a}
describe other attempts to regulate the singularities of pre-big-bang
cosmology. Most of these approaches, however, have the drawback of being
perturbative in nature, and that their consequences are only felt in the
region of the theory which can only be described by the full non-perturbative physics. We wish to discuss a mechanism to solve the graceful exit problem which involves non-perturbative physics. In the absence of a non-perturbative definition of string theory we will discuss a toy model which only contains
gravity and the dilaton.
It is natural to assume that any effective theory
of gravity obtained from string
theory, quantum gravity, or by integrating out matter fields, will
contain higher derivative terms in the action. The question we wish to
address is if by adding specially chosen
higher derivative terms to the Ricci scalar of the Einstein action we
are able to cancel the divergences of classical gravity present at extremely
large curvatures.
Hence, our general approach will be to construct a higher order theory
of gravity admitting cosmological solutions which are everywhere nonsingular
and compatible with the PBB scenario.
One such construction is carried out in
Refs \cite{MukhanovET1992a,BrandenbergerET1993a}. The
resulting action includes a particular combination of quadratic
invariants of the Riemann tensor, similar to a Gauss-Bonnett term
added to the usual Einstein-Hilbert action for gravity.
The inclusion of this invariant causes all solutions of the equations
of motion to approach de Sitter space-time at high curvature, which is
naturally nonsingular. Although in general most higher-derivative theories of
gravity have much worse singularity properties than Einstein gravity,
this particular construction stems from the ``limiting curvature hypothesis"
(which we will discuss more below) and is entirely nonsingular.
The most elementary way to formulate a nonsingular gravitational
theory is to add an
invariant $I_2$ to the action, with the property that $I_2 = 0$ is
true if and only if the spacetime is de Sitter. By coupling
$I_2$ into the gravitational action via a Lagrange multiplier field
$\psi$ with a potential chosen to ensure that $I_2 \rightarrow 0$ at
large curvatures we can force all solutions to approach de Sitter
space in this regime. For
homogeneous and isotropic spacetimes, a simple choice for $I_2$ which
satisfies the aforementioned criteria$^{\cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}}$ is
\begin{equation}
I_2 = \sqrt{4 R_{\mu \nu} R^{\mu \nu} - R^2} \, .
\label{I2}
\end{equation}
Recall that the physically measurable curvature invariants
such as $R$ and $R_{\mu \nu} R^{\mu \nu}$ are constructed from
the {\it string frame} metric, $g_{\mu\nu}$.
The simplest desired action including $I_2$ is
\begin{equation} \label{action}
S(g_{\mu \nu}, \psi) = \int d^4\!x \sqrt{-g} \, e^{-\varphi}(R + \psi I_2
- V(\psi))
\end{equation}
where $V(\psi)$ is a function chosen such that the action has
the correct Einsteinian low curvature
limit for $\psi \rightarrow 0$, whereas for $|\psi| \rightarrow \infty$
the constraint equation forces $I_2 \rightarrow 0$. After integrating out
$\psi$, we obtain a higher derivative gravity theory which is nonpolynomial in
the curvature.
Note that introducing the Lagrange multiplier field $\psi$ is a convenient way of writing a non-polynomial higher derivative gravity action in a polynomial form. $\psi$ has no independent physical meaning. By itself, it neither represents a new matter field, nor does it stand for a particular symmetry. The situation is analogous to the construction \cite{MukhanovET1992a} of the action $S_R \, = \, \int dt \sqrt{1 - {\dot x}^2}$ for point particle motion in special relativity from the corresponding action $S_{NR} \, = \, \int dt {1 \over 2} {\dot x}^2$ for point particle motion in Newtonian mechanics. If the Lagrange multiplier construction analogous to the one employed in this paper is used to construct the new theory, with a general potential satisfying the asymptotic conditions required, then the resulting theory will have bounded velocity but will not be the theory for point particle motion in the Special Relativity,
i.e. in the theory with the new symmetry. $S_R$ can only
be obtained by means of a very special choice of the coefficients of the
potential for $\psi$. In analogy, we cannot expect to be able to extract any
new stringy symmetry from the ad-hoc construction of this work.
In this paper, we will show that the addition of the same higher
derivative terms as used above in (\ref{action}) to the action of PBB cosmology results in the
elimination of singularities and connects the (in the Einstein frame) dilaton driven contracting phase with the expanding phase via a bounce.
{F}rom the point of view of string theory our construction appears, unfortunately, rather artificial in that we are picking out a particular narrow class of (nonpolynomial) higher derivative gravity actions from the infinite dimensional space of such actions. Our work should be viewed as an existence
proof (in the string frame) of a higher derivative dilaton gravity theory with nonsingular cosmological solutions rather than as a realistic string-motivated model.
In particular, the invariant $I_2$ which plays a crucial role in our construction is not one of the curvature invariants which appears in the next to leading order in derivatives of the low energy effective action of string theory. The role of the invariant $I_2$ and of the associated Lagrange multiplier field is to implement the limiting curvature hypothesis. There are indications that this hypothesis is realized in nonperturbative string theory (see e.g. \cite{BV}), as a consequence of t-duality. This duality is broken when considering the low energy effective action of string theory, and it is therefore not to be expected that the curvature invariants which arise in this low energy effective action can be used in place of $I_2$. The invariant $I_2$ plays the role of non-perturbative information about the theory. Obviously, since the non-perturbative definition of string theory is still unknown, we cannot hope that $I_2$ yields more than a toy model for what string theory will
eventually tell us. Since the limiting curvature hypothesis plays an important
role in both our construction and in string theory, we can hope that our model
may eventually turn out to contain some of the relevant physics.
We should also warn the reader that our work has nothing to say concerning the initial condition problem$^{\cite{KLB}}$ of the pre-big-bang scenario.
\section{Action and Equations of Motion}
We begin with the string frame action for dilaton gravity,
adding to it the higher derivative
term given by $I_2$, in analogy to what was done in the absence of the
dilaton in Refs \cite{MukhanovET1992a,BrandenbergerET1993a} and in the
Einstein frame in Ref \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}:
\begin{equation} \label{E4}
S = \frac{-1}{2\kappa^2} \int{ d^4\!x \,\sqrt{-g} \, e^{-\varphi} \left\{
R + (\nabla \varphi)^2 + c \psi e^{\gamma\varphi} I_2 - V(\psi)
\right\}}.
\end{equation}
For the moment, we allow a general coupling between $I_2$ and the
dilaton. Minimal coupling corresponds to setting the constant
$\gamma$ equal to zero. The constant $c$ rescales the Lagrange
multiplier field $\psi$, and will be chosen to simplify the equations
of motion.
Consider a homogeneous and isotropic metric of FRW type
\begin{equation}
ds^2 = n^2(t)dt^2 - a(t)^2 \bigl( {1 \over {1 - kr^2}}dr^2 + r^2 d\Omega^2
\bigr) \, ,
\end{equation}
where $d\Omega^2$ is the metric on $S^2$ and $n(t)$ is an arbitrary lapse function
which we will set to unity in the EOM below. The equations of motion
resulting from varying (\ref{E4}) with respect to $\varphi$, $\psi$ and $n$
become
$$\ddot{\varphi} + 3 H \dot{\varphi} - \frac{1}{2} \dot\varphi^2 +
\frac{(1-\gamma)}{2} c \psi e^{\gamma\varphi}\sqrt{12}
\left(\frac{k}{a^2} - \dot{H} \right) = 0 $$
$$\dot{H} = \frac{k}{a^2} - \frac{e^{-\gamma\varphi}}{c \sqrt{12}}
\frac{\partial V}{\partial \psi} $$
\begin{eqnarray}
&6 \frac{k}{a^2} + 6H^2 + \dot{\varphi}^2 - 6H\dot\varphi - V(\psi)
= &\nonumber\\
&c e^{\gamma\varphi}\sqrt{12} \left(3 H^2 \psi -\frac{k}{a^2}\psi +
H(\dot{\psi} + (\gamma-1) \dot{\varphi}\psi)\right), & \label{E6}
\end{eqnarray}
respectively, where dots denote differentiation with respect to time, $t$.
For a spatially flat, bouncing
Universe, we set the curvature constant $k = 0$. We will simplify things
further by considering minimal coupling of $\varphi$ to $I_2$, i.e.
$\gamma = 0$. To eliminate useless constant coefficients in the
equations of motion, it is convenient to choose $c = 1/\sqrt{12} $. The
resulting equations of motion become
\begin{eqnarray} \label{EOM}
\dot{\psi} \, &=& \, - 3 H \psi \, + 6 H \, + (\chi - 6)\psi \,+ \, {1 \over H}
\bigl( \chi^2 \, - \, V(\psi) \bigr), \nonumber \\
\dot{H} \, &=& \, \ -V^{\prime}(\psi) , \nonumber \\
\dot{\chi} \, &=& \, - 3 H \chi + \frac{1}{2}(\chi^2 + \psi\dot H), \label{E7}
\end{eqnarray}
with $\chi = \dot{\varphi}$ and the prime ($\prime$) denoting differentiation
with respect to $\psi$.
Now let us focus on the construction of the potential
$V(\psi)$. Once again, our arguments are the same as in
Ref \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}. When the curvature is small, the terms
in the action
(\ref{E4}) with Lagrange multiplier field $\psi$ dependence must be negligible
compared to the usual terms of dilaton gravity. This is made manifest by
the condition
\begin{equation}
V(\psi) \, \sim \, \psi^2 \,\,\,\,\,\, |\psi| \rightarrow 0 \label{E8}
\end{equation}
since the region of small $|\psi|$ will correspond to the low curvature
regime.$^{\cite{BrandenbergerET1993a}}$ In order to implement the
limiting curvature hypothesis, the invariant $I_2$ must tend to zero,
and hence the metric $g_{\mu \nu}$ will approach a de Sitter metric at
large curvatures, i.e. for $|\psi| \rightarrow \infty$. From the
variational equation with respect to $\psi$, we find the requirement
\begin{equation}
V(\psi) \, \rightarrow \, {\rm const} \,\,\,\,\,\, |\psi| \rightarrow
\infty \, . \label{E9}
\end{equation}
As in \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a} we add a third condition in order to ensure that there is a bouncing solution for $k=0$. The equations must allow a configuration with $H = 0$ and $\psi \neq 0$. From the equation of motion for $\psi$ in (\ref{E7}) (and considering the region of small $\chi$) it follows that $V(\psi)$ must become negative, assuming that it is positive for small $|\psi|$. Let $\psi_b$ denote the value of $\psi$ at the bounce. This will occur when
\begin{equation} V(\psi_b) \, = \, \chi^2 \, , \label{E10}
\end{equation}
as can be seen from the equation of motion for $\psi$ setting
$H = 0$.
A simple potential which satisfies the conditions (\ref{E8}), (\ref{E9})
and goes negative beyond some critical value of $\psi$ is
\begin{equation}
V(\psi) = \frac{\psi^2 - \frac{1}{16}\psi^4}{1+\frac{1}{32} \psi^4}.
\end{equation}
Note that the specific values of the coefficients of the terms in $V(\psi)$ are not important as long as the three criteria discussed above are satisfied.
\section{Phase Diagram of Solutions}
The condition (\ref{E10}) on the potential $V(\psi)$
ensures that our model is nonsingular and geodesically complete for large values of $|\psi|$ but says nothing about geodesic completeness of
solutions which always remain within the small $|\psi|$ regime. Hence
it is necessary to study the small $|\psi|$ region in order to prove
that our model is everywhere nonsingular.
In this section we discuss the projection of the three dimensional phase space
$(\psi, H, \chi)$ of our model into the two dimensional
phase plane $(\psi, H)$ for small values of $\chi$. By projecting out the $\chi$ axis we lose no relevant
information about the system since the curvature invariants are not affected by $\chi$. Both analytical and numerical methods are used to
study the trajectories of solutions of (\ref{E7}) in the phase plane
and thus explicitly demonstrate the absence of singularities. Furthermore, and
unlike in the model of Refs. \cite{MukhanovET1992a,BrandenbergerET1993a},
we shall show that our theory admits spatially flat bouncing
solutions as in the Einstein frame model of \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}.
We need to demonstrate that all solutions tend to a known nonsingular and geodesically complete space-time at large positive and negative times. With the symmetries of our problem, these asymptotic space-times are either Minkowski or de Sitter. We need to show that all phase space trajectories either tend to the origin of phase space or else to $|\psi| \rightarrow \infty$ for finite values of $H$. We will first analyze the phase space trajectories for small values of $|\chi|$. In Section 4 we then discuss the case of large $|\chi|$.
There are many interesting points and curves on the phase plane $(\psi, H)$ which demand special attention.
First, the point
$(\psi, H, \chi) = (0, 0, 0)$ corresponds to Minkowski space-time.
The potential $V(\psi)$ vanishes at this point, but it also vanishes at
the values
\begin{equation}
\psi_b = \pm 4 \, .
\end{equation}
{}From the first equation in (\ref{EOM}) it follows that the phase plane points $(\psi_b, 0,0)$ correspond
to bouncing points of cosmological trajectories. The general equation for a possible bounce is
\begin{equation}
V(\psi) \, = \, \chi^2 \, .
\end{equation}
To prove that this is in fact a bounce, we need to show that contracting solutions are attracted to it. This will be done below.
$\dot H$ vanishes when the derivative of $V$ does, i.e. at the values
\begin{equation}\label{eq:psid}
\psi_d = \pm 2 \,.
\end{equation}
Trajectories which cross the phase space planes $(\psi_d, H, \chi)$ have $\dot H = 0$ at the points where they cross.
To show that the curves through $(\psi, H, \chi) = (4 - f(\chi), 0, \chi)$, with $f(\chi)$ chosen such that $(\chi^2 - V) = 0$, represent
bounce solutions, we expand the $\psi$ equation of motion near
$H = 0$, which gives
\begin{equation} \label{eq:bnce}
H ({\dot \psi} + 6 \psi - \chi \psi) \, = \, \chi^2 - V \,.
\end{equation}
First note that contracting solutions with $|H| \ll 1$ and
$2< \psi < 4 - f(\chi)$ have $\dot \psi > 0$ and approach the bounce $(4 - f(\chi), 0, \chi)$
in finite time since $\dot H$ is positive and does not go to zero. If the trajectories reach $\psi > 4 - f(\chi)$ before hitting the $\psi$ axis, then ${\dot \psi}$ changes sign. This shows that the bounce is an attractor on the contracting branch. By taking the time derivative of the $\psi$ equation in (\ref{EOM}) and using the other two equations to eliminate $\dot \chi$ and $\dot H$ and after expanding near the bounce it can be verified that on the expanding side of the branch $\ddot \psi < 0$ and that therefore the trajectories will eventually turn around (i.e. $\dot \psi < 0$) (see Figure 1).
\begin{figure}[tbp]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c}
\epsfxsize=8cm
\epsfbox{easson1.eps}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption[fig1]{Projection of a set of trajectories onto the $\psi$ - $H$ plane of phase space for small values of $|H|$ and $\chi$. The Hubble parameter, $H$, is plotted on the vertical axis, while $\psi$ is plotted on the horizontal. Shown are a set of solutions which oscillate about Minkowski space-time $H = 0$, $\psi = 0$ as well as solutions through the bounce points $H = 0$ and $\psi \simeq \pm 4$.}
\end{figure}
By expanding the equations about the origin we find that
\begin{equation}\label{eq:critp}
\frac{d\psi}{dH} \simeq \frac{1}{2H}(\psi - \frac{6H^2 + \chi^2}{\psi} + 6H)
\end{equation}
which defines the critical surface
\begin{equation} \label{csurf}
\psi^2 + 6 \psi H - 6H^2 - \chi^2 = 0
\end{equation}
Note that lines on the critical surface are not phase space trajectories of
the equations of motion. Such trajectories would point in the vertical
direction at the critical surface since $d\psi/dH =0$. Note also that as $\chi^2$ increases, the critical surface approaches the $\psi$ axis.
{}For the contracting solutions we find that the equation of motion
for $\dot H$ becomes
\begin{equation} \label{eq:eoh}
\dot H \simeq -2 \psi \, .
\end{equation}
Hence contracting solutions with $\psi > 0$ which are above the critical surface have $\dot H<0$ and from Eq. (\ref{eq:critp}) $\dot \psi > 0$. These
trajectories are pulled toward the $\psi = 2$ curve where $\dot H$
changes sign. Trajectories which start out in this region, do
not cross the critical surface and reach the $\psi = 2$ surface at a value $|H| \ll 1$ are good candidates for spatially flat bouncing Universes (see Figure 1). The analysis of trajectories through $(\psi, H, \chi) = (- 4 + f(\chi), 0, \chi)$ is similar. Trajectories near the origin below the critical surface correspond to solution which oscillate about Minkowski space-time (see Figure 1).
There is a separatrix surface in the lower right quadrangle of the phase plane which separates trajectories which reach $\psi = 2$ from those which do not and which eventually cross the critical line. The solutions for trajectories above this separatrix line close to the origin can be obtained by taking the time derivative of the second equation in (\ref{EOM}) and inserting the first equation and by considering terms which dominate near the origin. For small values of $\chi^2$ we obtain
\begin{equation}
H {\ddot H} \, = \, - 6 {\dot H} H + {1 \over 2} {\dot H}^2 \, ,
\end{equation}
which is the same equation as the corresponding one in
\cite{BrandenbergerET1998a} except for the first term on the right hand side.
However, by inserting as an ansatz the solutions found in \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}
\begin{equation}
H(t) \, = \, - c t^2
\end{equation}
where $c$ is a constant, it is not hard to show that for small values of $t$, the extra term in our equation gives negligible corrections to these trajectories. For sufficiently small values of $c$, the trajectories lead
to bouncing solutions, whereas for somewhat larger values of $c$, the trajectories cross the $\psi = 2$ plane at $|H| > 1$.
{}For the latter solutions, the $\psi$ equation of motion for $\psi \gg 2$ becomes
\begin{equation}
{\dot \psi} \, = \, - (3 H + 6) \psi + {1 \over H} \chi^2 \, .
\end{equation}
{}For large values of $|H|$ and not too large values of $\chi^2$, ${\dot \psi} > 0$ and $H \rightarrow 0$ and the trajectory tends to de Sitter space. However, as will be discussed in Section 4, $\chi$ is rapidly growing, and eventually (unless the dilaton is stabilized), the $\chi^2$ term in the above equation takes over and leads to ${\dot \psi} < 0$, in which case these solutions also tend to de Sitter space, but at large negative values of $\psi$. The bottom line is that there are no singularities in the phase space region $\psi > 2$ and $H < 0$.
{}From Figure 2 we see a potentially troublesome feature
of the phase space near $\psi = 2$. There are critical lines with ${\dot \psi} = 0$ which converge to $\psi = 2$ and $H = \infty$ from the left, and to $\psi = 2$ and $H = - \infty$ from the right. Along these critical lines, the trajectories appear to head
off to infinity (for negative $H$) or emerge from infinity (for positive $H$), suggesting a singularity is present in the model.
Upon a more detailed analysis of the EOM it becomes clear that the
solutions in this region are repelled by the critical line. To see
this
begin with the critical line obtained by setting $\dot \psi = 0$. Considering
the lower right quadrant of the phase plane, to the left of the critical
line, we have
\begin{equation}
\psi = \frac{6 H^2 + \chi^2 - V}{H(3H + 6 - \chi)} \, .
\end{equation}
The critical line for small values of $\chi^2$ approaches the surface $\psi = 2$ from the right (note that in the Einstein frame model of \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a} it approached from the left, the difference being due to the extra term in the $\psi$ equation of motion in (\ref{EOM})). Differentiating the $\psi$ equation of motion with respect to time and evaluating the result along the critical line we see that
\begin{equation}
\ddot \psi < 0
\end{equation}
and hence the
critical line is a repeller, sending the trajectories away from the
line and toward the asymptotic de Sitter region. To the right of
the critical line $\dot \psi > 0$ and the trajectories are again pushed
away from $\psi = 2$.
\begin{figure}[tbp]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c}
\epsfxsize=8cm
\epsfbox{easson2.eps}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption[fig2]{Projection of a set of trajectories onto the $\psi$ - $H$ plane of phase space for larger values of $|H|$. The axes are the same as in Fig. 1. The only regions in phase space where trajectories tend to $|H| = \infty$, i.e. to curvature singularities, are near the two critical lines which tend to $\psi = 2$. As shown in the text, these lines repel trajectories, and hence there are no singular trajectories even in these regions.}
\end{figure}
Consider the example of a frozen dilaton, $\chi \rightarrow 0$.
Hence, for $|H| >> |\psi|$ we find
\begin{equation}
\ddot \psi \simeq (V' + 3H^2)(\psi - 2)
\end{equation}
and $\ddot \psi < 0 $ as expected.
Solutions to the left of the critical line peel away to the
de Sitter region while those to the right of the critical line
approach from de Sitter.
We also wish to show that $|H| \rightarrow \infty$ if and only if
$\psi \rightarrow \infty$. For this we will consider the specific
example of the small negative $\psi$, large negative $H$ behavior.
In this region the change in $\psi$ with respect to $H$
is given by
\begin{equation}\label{eq:sheri6310777}
\frac{d\psi}{dH} \simeq \frac{3H(\psi - 2)}{V'} \, .
\end{equation}
Hence we see that the slope of the solutions increase and begin to level off
as $|H|$ increases.
To conclude this section, we have shown at this point that there are no
singularities for small values of $\chi^2$ and that all solutions can be continued to arbitrary large proper time, which demonstrates geodesic completeness. In this following section we turn to the discussion of the
dynamics for large $\chi^2$.
\section{Dilaton Evolution and Stabilization} \label{dilstab}
The dilaton is the massless scalar field with gravitational
strength couplings, found in all perturbative string theories.
It is generally believed that dynamical effects will generate
a mass for the dilaton in vacua with broken supersymmetry
$^{\cite{Polchinski1998a}}$. If the dilaton were to
remain massless$^{\cite{DamourET1996a}}$ it would affect the
values of gauge couplings, and produce potentially observable
consequences.
In our model there are singularities in $\chi$. Consider
the EOM for $\chi$ in the large $\chi^2$ limit
\begin{equation}\label{eq:chisin}
\dot\chi = \frac{1}{2} \chi^2 \, .
\end{equation}
This has solution
\begin{equation}\label{eq:solu}
\chi(t) = \frac{1}{\chi^{-1}(t_0) - \frac{1}{2}(t - t_0)} \,,
\end{equation}
which blows up when
\begin{equation}\label{eq:blow}
\chi(t_0) = \frac{2}{(t-t_0)} \,.
\end{equation}
This singularity does not concern us however, since it can
be avoided by adding a simple potential $U(\varphi)$ to the
dilaton equation in order to freeze the dilaton in a manner consistent
with the above argument. Where this potential comes from is the usual
problem of any theory with a dilaton, a problem to which we have no answer
either.
What happens to the projection of the phase space trajectories onto the $\psi - H$ plane in the large $\chi$ regime? Here we have
\begin{equation}\label{eq:lgchi}
\dot \psi= \chi \psi + \frac{\chi^2}{H}
\end{equation}
and the $H$ equation of motion remains the same. Immediately
we see that for $H \ne 0$, $|\dot \psi| \rightarrow \infty$ which
implies that $\psi \rightarrow \infty$ and hence $H \rightarrow$ const.
Further insight is gained by noticing that
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eq:kate}
&\dot \psi > 0 \quad \rm{for} \quad H>0& \\
&\dot \psi < 0 \quad \rm{for} \quad H<0 &.
\end{eqnarray}
We know that $V'$ vanishes for $\psi = 0$ and $\psi = \pm 2$.
Thus
\begin{eqnarray} \label{eq:chameleon}
& \psi = 0: \quad \dot \psi = \frac{\chi^2}{H}& \\
& \psi = \pm 2: \quad \dot \psi = \pm 2\chi + \frac{\chi^2}{H}& \,.
\end{eqnarray}
Therefore, solutions above $H=0$ stretch straight (more or less)
across the $\psi-H$ plane
from left to right, and those below the $H = 0$ line stretch from
right to left, as can be seen in Figure 3.
In the large $\chi^2$ limit, the equation for the critical surface ${\dot \psi} = 0$ becomes
\begin{equation}
\psi \, \simeq \, - {{\chi^2} \over {3 H^2}} \, .
\end{equation}
However, since for any solution of the equations of motion in this regime $\chi^2$ grows much faster than $\psi$, trajectories do not reach the critical surface. Instead, ${\dot H} \rightarrow 0$. This completes the proof that there are no curvature singularities for large $\chi^2$, and that the solutions asymptotically approach either Minkowksi or de Sitter.
\begin{figure}[tbp]
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{c}
\epsfxsize=8cm
\epsfbox{easson3.eps}
\end{tabular}
\end{center}
\caption[fig3]{The phase portrait for solutions of the equations of
motion for fixed dilaton. The axes are the same as in Figs. 1 and 2. Due to
the extra terms in the equations of motion, the phase portrait is not symmetric under reflections about the $\psi$ axis as it was in \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a}. Clearly visible are the three critical lines. As discussed in the text, there are no singular trajectories even in the vicinity of these critical lines.}
\end{figure}
{}Finally, let us assume that the dilaton has been fixed. In this case, $\chi = 0$ and the remaining equations of motion become almost identical to the ones
studied in \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a} (for $\chi = 0$) except for the
$- 6 \psi$ term on the right hand side of the $\psi$ equation of motion in (\ref{EOM}). This term, however, is subdominant in the large $|H|$ region,
and hence the conclusions of \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a} concerning the
absence of singularities carry over to our case. The extra term does, however,
lead to asymmetries in the phase portrait under reflections about the
$\psi$ axis. There are now three critical lines where ${\dot \psi} = 0$. The first line occurs for $0 < \psi < 2$ for positive values of $H$, and with $H \rightarrow \infty$ as $\psi \rightarrow \infty$. The second line occurs for $2 < \psi < \infty$ and for negative values of $H$ with $H \rightarrow - \infty$ as $\psi \rightarrow 2$. Finally, for $\psi < 0$ there is a harmless critical line which remains at small negative values of $H$ (see Figure 3). As in Section 3 it can be shown that the two first critical lines repel the trajectories. Hence, the proof of non-singularity of the model carries over.
\section{Conclusions}
We have extended the model of nonsingular dilaton cosmology
presented in \cite{BrandenbergerET1998a} to the string frame.
Using the limiting curvature construction of \cite{MukhanovET1992a,BrandenbergerET1993a} applied to dilaton
gravity formulated in the string frame, we have obtained spatially flat
bouncing cosmological solutions. The construction consists of adding
specially chosen higher derivative gravity terms in the form of a
curvature invariant $I_2$ to the string frame action.
The invariant $I_2$ is made up of invariants quadratic in
the Riemann curvature and has the property that $I_2 = 0$ singles out the
maximally symmetric de Sitter space-times among all homogeneous and isotropic solutions. It is coupled to dilaton gravity via
a Lagrange multiplier field $\psi$. The $\psi$ field is nondynamical but
has a potential $V(\psi)$, which was
chosen to allow non-singular bouncing solutions.
The three dimensional phase space of trajectories was studied
both analytically and numerically to demonstrate that all
solutions are nonsingular. Specifically we studied a large
class of solutions which lead to bouncing cosmologies.
The dynamics of the bounce are governed by the higher derivative
gravity terms introduced by the limiting curvature construction.
The connection with pre-big-bang cosmology appears in a different form than in the Einstein frame. In the string frame picture of pre-big-bang cosmology, the Universe starts in a superexponentially expanding dilaton-dominated phase with $H > 0$ and ${\dot H} > 0$, i.e. in the upper left quadrangle of the projected phase space of Figures 2 and 3. In the absence of the higher derivate terms, the trajectories would diverge to $H = \infty$. However, as is obvious from Figures 2 and 3, the new terms we have added lead to a graceful exit from this phase. The trajectories cross the $\psi = 0$ axis and go over to trajectories which are like the usual expanding FRW solutions with $H > 0$ and ${\dot H} < 0$. This happens independent of whether the dilaton is frozen at late times or not.
There is a singularity in the dilaton equation of motion but it is assumed that
this problem can be solved by the introduction of a dilaton potential
$U(\varphi)$. Although we do not propose a specific form for
this potential, such a potential is physically necessary in all theories with a dilaton in order to generate a mass for the dilaton.
The most obvious criticism of this model is that the higher order
terms in the action are artificially constructed rather than
derived from fundamental physics. However it is important to
recall that our method is well motivated. For one, all effective
theories of gravity, including those produced by string theory,
quantum gravity, or from quantizing matter fields in curved spacetime
must contain higher derivative terms in the action. Furthermore, it
is natural to assume that physical invariants must be limited in
such theories to avoid singularities. We have found that in both
the Einstein frame and the string frame, the method proposed here
ensures that all physical invariants remain finite, and produces
bouncing nonsingular cosmological solutions. The graceful exit problem
of pre-big-bang cosmology is solved naturally by our construction both in
the Einstein and string frames. The connection with
pre-big-bang cosmology will be explored further in a future publication.
\section*{Acknowledgments}
This work is supported in part by the DOE contract DE-FG0291ER40688 (Task A), and by a Department of Education award to Brown University under the GAANN program. DE would like to thank Richard Easther and Matthew Parry for many helpful discussions throughout this work, and in particular Richard Easther
for the use of his computer program to generate the phase portraits. DE also
acknowledges support during the summer of 1998 from a NASA Space Grant to Brown University.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 4,115 |
\section{Introduction}
\label{sec:intro}
The Automated Audio Captioning task is a cross-modal task where the model is trained to generate a descriptive sentence for an input audio. This task has many practical real world use cases, such as closed captioning for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Automated Audio Captioning describes the sound events that are happening in both the foreground and background of the audio, as opposed to Automated Speech Recognition, which predicts the low time frame phonemes and utterances.
The Automated Audio Captioning task requires the model to be able to capture both high time frame and low time frame events that are occurring throughout the audio. As such, previous work have often used pretrained models such as PANNs that have already been trained on audio tagging in order to aid the model in generating factually correct caption. In a similar vein, several authors \cite{koizumi_transformer-based_2020, zhonjie2021integrating} have used keyword estimation, a supplementary and intermediate objective where the model has to predict one or a few keywords from the encoder to help the decoder to generate better captions. The keyword estimation task has shown to have potential in helping the model perform better. However, the keyword estimation task requires heavy preprocessing to create the audio-keywords pairs for training. Furthermore, while the different authors have the same motivation behind keyword estimation task, their implementations and audio-keywords pairs are often different and subject to their own interpretation. This makes it hard to compare results and methods across different papers. We find that there is an elegant solution to this. Epochal Difficult Captions modify the training targets directly during the training loop. Based on a curriculum, the training captions start off with a higher keywords to sentence ratio during the earlier epochs in the the training run. This is done by removing stopwords directly from the batched training targets. As the training progresses, the keywords to sentence ratio will be gradually reduced until the sentence reverts to its original unmodified sentence.
We test Epochal Difficult Captions using two different publicly available systems \cite{koh2021automated, Mei2021} from previous work. Both systems are of the typical encoder-decoder structure. The encoder consists of either a single \cite{Mei2021} pretrained CNN or both \cite{koh2021automated} a pretrained CNN and transformer encoder. The decoder used is a 2 layer transformer decoder. The extracted audio features from the encoder is passed to the decoder for cross attention. Both systems are trained using cross entropy, but \cite{Mei2021} has the additional option of using reinforcement learning to optimize the metrics directly. We experiment using both cross entropy, and reinforcement learning where available. We find that using Epochal Difficult Captions consistently improves performance across these settings with no noticeable extra compute time and power needed. Epochal Difficult Captions is used only during training and hence does not affect any part of the inference process.
The rest of this paper follows this structure. In section \ref{sec:related_work }, we introduce related work pertaining to Automated Audio Captioning datasets, popular model architectures and training objectives. We also discuss the keyword estimation task, a popular intermediate task in Automated Audio Captioning. In Section \ref{sec:epochal_difficult_captions}, we explain our approach, Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning. This section shows how we derive our difficulty curve and levels, and how stopwords are removed as an function of the difficulty level. In Section \ref{sec:experimental_details}, we specify our experimental settings, details, and process to evaluate the effectiveness of Epochal Difficult Captions. In Section \ref{sec:experimental_results_analysis}, we examine the performance of the models trained with Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning. Finally, we give our concluding remarks in Section \ref{sec:conclusion}.
\section{Related Work} \label{sec:related_work }
\subsection{Audio Captioning Datasets}
\label{audio_cap_dataset}
The Clotho Dataset v2.1 \cite{drossos_clotho_2019} consists of 6974 audio samples of duration from 15 to 30 seconds. Each audio clip has 5 corresponding captions annotated by humans. Each caption has a length of 8 to 20 words, and the captions describe the events in that audio. The Clotho Dataset v1 was augmented by including more training samples and a validation split to form Clotho v2.1. The Clotho Dataset was created to address the critiques of the larger Audiocaps dataset \cite{kim_audiocaps_2019}, which was found to contain biases in the annotation process. There are also other niche datasets like the Hospital Scene and Car Scene dataset \cite{xu_audio_2020} which are Mandarin annotated.
In this work, we focus only on the Clotho Dataset v2.1, henceforth referred to as the Clotho Dataset.
\subsection{Model Architectures and Objectives}
\label{model_arch_objectives}
Most work use an encoder-decoder model architecture. The encoder is used to encode audio information to produce audio features, which is then passed to the decoder for cross attention and to generate the caption. Most architectures converge to a similar theme - using a pretrained convolutional neural network such as PANNs for encoding, and a transformer decoder for decoding. However, the training process often differs from the pretraining stage and an intermediate or supplementary objective.
For instance, the AT-CNN \cite{xu:2021:ICASSP:02}, and the Audio Captioning Transformer \cite{mei2021audio} pretrains their model encoder on audio tagging as an pretraining task before finetuning their model directly on Automated Audio Captioning. Other authors also use self supervised supplementary objectives \cite{koh2021automated} or caption retrieval \cite{zhang2020bertscore} to guide the model training. Self-Critical Sequence
Training \cite{scst_rl}, a reinforcement learning tactic used in Image Captioning, has also been used to optimize the model for Audio Captioning. Keyword Estimation, which we will go into detail in Section \ref{subsec:keyword_estimation}, has also been a popular choice \cite{koizumi_audio_2020, zhonjie2021integrating} of an intermediate objective.
In this work, we build on the work of \cite{koh2021automated} and \cite{Mei2021} by using their model architectures that has been proven to achieve competitive results. Henceforth, we refer \cite{Mei2021} and \cite{koh2021automated} as System 1 and System 2 respectively. Figure \ref{fig:system12} delineates their system architectures.
\begin{figure}[ht!]
\centering
\includegraphics[scale=0.03]{images/system12.png}
\caption{Detailed overview of System 1 and System 2. Both System 1 and 2 uses a pretrained CNN10 in the encoder. System 2 has an additional 2 layer transformer appended to the CNN10 in the encoder. For the decoder, both System 1 and 2 uses a transformer decoder. However, System 1 uses pretrained word2vec word embeddings, while System 2 trains the word embeddings from scratch.}
\label{fig:system12}
\end{figure}
\subsection{Keyword Estimation} \label{subsec:keyword_estimation}
Several authors have applied the Keyword Estimation task as a intermediate task to aid the training of the model for Automated Audio Captioning. This is done by decomposing the Automated Audio Captioning task into two smaller tasks, Keyword Estimation and Caption Generation. The model encoder then performs Keyword Estimation to predict a set of keywords, which is then passed to the decoder for generation. The Keyword Estimation task helps to mitigate the problem of indeterminacy in word selection \cite{koizumi_audio_2020} hence reducing the solution space for the decoder to generate better captions.
Since the Clotho Dataset does not come with labels for keywords, authors often use their own interpretation to create labels for the keyword Estimation task. \cite{koizumi_audio_2020} uses a rule based keyword extraction method to produce keywords labels for training. Frequent word lemmas of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs as regarded as keywords. On the other hand, \cite{zhonjie2021integrating} extracts their keywords by using the Natural Language Toolkit\footnote{https://github.com/nltk/nltk} to discard `useless words' such as make, go, etc. Remaining verbs are used in their original forms, and the nouns are not changed.
Firstly, given keyword estimation requires some form of pre-processing subject to the interpretation of the researcher, it is difficult to compare the effectiveness of the keyword estimation task across different pieces of work. Secondly, decomposing the Automated Audio Captioning task into subtasks keyword estimation and caption generation requires the decoder to rely on the prediction of the keywords from the encoder. This might result in error propagation if the keywords are inaccurate. With these considerations, we propose the Epochal Difficult Captions for curriculum learning, which has the same motivation behind keyword estimation, but does not require the decomposition of Automated Audio Captioning into subtasks.
\section{Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning} \label{sec:epochal_difficult_captions}
Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning is an algorithm to modify the target captions relative to the current stage of the training setup. The difficulty level, $D$, is a function of the current epoch. $D$ indicates how the curriculum modifies the target captions. In this paper, we use the stopwords curriculum. While we have another frequency-based curriculum, we omitted it due to space constraints.
\subsection{Difficulty level as a function of epoch}
The difficulty level in curriculum learning dictates the complexity of the captions and it should increase from a lower to a higher magnitude relative to the current epoch. We use an exponential function (Equation \ref{eq:diff}) followed by a floor and ceiling function (Equation \ref{eq:diff2}) to generate a difficulty value $D$ for all non-negative epoch values \(D \in (0, 1)\).
\begin{equation} \label{eq:diff}
D^{\prime} = 1 - e^{( -\alpha * epoch )}
\end{equation}
\begin{equation} \label{eq:diff2}
D=\begin{cases}
0.05, & \text{if } D < 0.05 \\
D^{\prime}, & \text{otherwise}
\end{cases}
\end{equation}
where the hyperparameter \(\alpha\) in Equation \ref{eq:diff} controls the rate of increase of difficulty. At $D = 1$, the original captions are not modified. The difficulty level should asymptotically tend to 1 nearing the max epoch. Therefore, \(\alpha\) requires the max epoch hyperparameter to be taken into consideration. In our experiments, we use \(\alpha = 0.20\) when max epoch is 30, \(\alpha = 0.10\) when max epoch is 60, and \(\alpha = 0.05\) when max epoch is 100.
\begin{figure*}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.33\linewidth}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.62]
\begin{axis}[
axis y line*=left,
xlabel=$D$,
ylabel=\text{total tokens per epoch},
legend pos=south east
]
\addplot+[
only marks,
line,
mark= *,
mark size=1pt]
table[x=difficulty, y=total_tokens_per_epoch]
{100epoch.dat}; \label{plot_epoch_d_100}
\end{axis}
\begin{axis}[
axis y line*=right,
axis x line=none,
ylabel=\text{average unique tokens per batch},
legend pos=south east
]
\addplot+[
only marks,
color=red,
line,
mark= x,
mark size=2pt]
table[x=difficulty, y=avg_tokens_per_batch]
{100epoch.dat};\label{plot_epoch_avgtokensperbatch_100}
\addlegendimage{refstyle=plot_epoch_d_100}\addlegendentry{\text{total tokens per epoch}}
\addlegendimage{refstyle=plot_epoch_avgtokensperbatch_100}\addlegendentry{average unique tokens per batch}
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{100 epochs} \label{plot:100_epoch_avgtokensperbatch}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.33\linewidth}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.62]
\begin{axis}[
axis y line*=left,
xlabel=$D$,
ylabel=\text{total tokens per epoch},
legend pos=south east
]
\addplot+[
only marks,
line,
mark= *,
mark size=1pt]
table[x=difficulty, y=total_tokens_per_epoch]
{60epoch.dat}; \label{plot_epoch_d_60}
\end{axis}
\begin{axis}[
axis y line*=right,
axis x line=none,
ylabel=\text{average unique tokens per batch},
legend pos=south east
]
\addplot+[
only marks,
color=red,
line,
mark= x,
mark size=2pt]
table[x=difficulty, y=avg_tokens_per_batch]
{60epoch.dat};\label{plot_epoch_avgtokensperbatch_60}
\addlegendimage{refstyle=plot_epoch_d_60}\addlegendentry{\text{total tokens per epoch}}
\addlegendimage{refstyle=plot_epoch_avgtokensperbatch_60}\addlegendentry{average unique tokens per batch}
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{60 epochs} \label{plot:60_epoch_avgtokensperbatch}
\end{subfigure}
\begin{subfigure}[b]{0.33\linewidth}
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=0.62]
\begin{axis}[
axis y line*=left,
xlabel=$D$,
ylabel=\text{total tokens per epoch},
legend pos=south east
]
\addplot+[
only marks,
line,
mark= *,
mark size=1pt]
table[x=difficulty, y=total_tokens_per_epoch]
{30epoch.dat}; \label{plot_epoch_d_30}
\end{axis}
\begin{axis}[
axis y line*=right,
axis x line=none,
ylabel=\text{average unique tokens per batch},
legend pos=south east
]
\addplot+[
only marks,
color=red,
line,
mark= x,
mark size=2pt]
table[x=difficulty, y=avg_tokens_per_batch]
{30epoch.dat};\label{plot_epoch_avgtokensperbatch_30}
\addlegendimage{refstyle=plot_epoch_d_30}\addlegendentry{\text{total tokens per epoch}}
\addlegendimage{refstyle=plot_epoch_avgtokensperbatch_30}\addlegendentry{average unique tokens per batch}
\end{axis}
\end{tikzpicture}
\caption{30 epochs} \label{plot:30_epoch_avgtokensperbatch}
\end{subfigure}
\caption{Scatter plot of $D$ (x-axis) against total tokens per epoch (left y-axis) and average unique tokens per batch (right y-axis) for different epoch values 100 (a), 60(b), 30(c)} \label{fig:D_vs_unique_tokens_vs_total_tokens}
\end{figure*}
\subsection{Stopwords Curriculum}
In the stopwords curriculum, the target captions for each audio are modified by removing stopwords. Stopwords are common words that carry little useful information and can be obtained from the public nltk library. Some examples of stopwords are 'for', 'do', 'its', 'yours', 'such', 'into'. Removal of these stopwords mimic the keyword estimation task described in Section \ref{subsec:keyword_estimation} by only including unique and less prevalent words in the caption.
\begin{algorithm}
\caption{Stopwords Curriculum}
\label{alg:stopwords}
\begin{algorithmic}[1]
\Require $y$ - the original target caption
\Require $D$ - difficulty value (Equation \ref{eq:diff}, \ref{eq:diff2})
\Require $SW$ - list of stopwords.
\Ensure $y^\prime$ - modified caption.
\State $P(remove) \gets (1 - D)$
\State {$y^\prime \gets []$}
\For{$word \in y$}
\If{$word \in stop\_words$}
\State{$s \gets$ sample uniform(0,1)}
\If{$s < P(remove)$}
\State {$y^\prime \gets new\_sentence$}
\Else
\State {$y^\prime \gets y^\prime + word$}
\EndIf
\Else
\State {$y^\prime \gets y^\prime + word$}
\EndIf
\EndFor
\State \Return $y^\prime$
\end{algorithmic}
\end{algorithm}
Algorithm \ref{alg:stopwords} describes the stopwords curriculum. Each stopword in the caption is an candidate for removal depending on the current difficulty level of the current epoch. The greater the difficulty level $D$ is, the lower the probability of removing a stopword from the caption.
In Figure \ref{fig:D_vs_unique_tokens_vs_total_tokens}, we plot the relationship between $D$, the total number of words used per epoch in training, and the average number of unique words per batch during training. At low difficulty levels, the total number of tokens per epoch increases rapidly with each epoch at low difficulty levels. At higher difficulty levels above 0.9, the total number of tokens fluctuates around the same range. Using such a token distribution based on a fixed curriculum allows us to gradually expose the model to progressively more unique words.
\begin{table*}[!ht]
\centering
\resizebox{\textwidth}{!}{%
\begin{tabular}{@{}llllllllll@{}}
\toprule
Model & BLEU\textsubscript{1} & BLEU\textsubscript{2} & BLEU\textsubscript{3} & BLEU\textsubscript{4} & ROUGE\textsubscript{L} & METEOR & CIDEr & SPICE & SPIDEr \\ \midrule
System 1 - cross entropy& 0.559& 0.358& 0.237& 0.153& 0.169& 0.374& 0.382& 0.116& 0.249\\
System 1 - cross entropy + stopwords& 0.558& \textbf{0.362}& \textbf{0.242}& \textbf{0.159}& \textbf{0.170}& \textbf{0.375}& \textbf{0.391}& 0.115& \textbf{0.253}\\
\midrule
System 1 - scst& 0.641& 0.417& 0.277& 0.174& 0.182& 0.407& 0.432& 0.124& 0.278 \\
System 1 - scst + stopwords &\textbf{0.642}& 0.409& 0.272& 0.172& 0.182& \textbf{0.402}& \textbf{0.444}& 0.124& \textbf{0.284}\\
\midrule
System 2 - cross entropy & 0.553 & 0.367 & 0.248 & 0.160 & 0.162 & 0.372 & 0.359 & 0.111 & 0.235 \\
System 2 - cross entropy + stopwords & \textbf{0.558}& \textbf{0.376}& \textbf{0.258} & \textbf{0.172}& \textbf{0.167}& \textbf{0.376}& \textbf{0.381}& \textbf{0.115}& \textbf{0.248} \\
\bottomrule
\end{tabular}
}
\caption{Comparison of performance of systems trained on Epochal Difficult Captions with the Stopwords curriculum against their counterpart}
\label{tab:results_stopwords}
\end{table*}
\section{Experimental Details} \label{sec:experimental_details}
\subsection{Data}
We use Clotho dataset v2.1 for all our experiments as mentioned in Section \ref{audio_cap_dataset}. Since we are building on the previous systems of two authors \cite{koh2021automated, Mei2021}, we use the same settings to preprocess the waveforms into the spectrograms as inputs into the models. For both systems, we use 64 Mel-bands, sampling rate of 44100, FFT window length of 1024, and a hop size of 512.
\subsection{Training and Evaluation}
For our experiments on both System 1 and System 2, we try to replicate the original work without using Epochal Difficult Captions to act as a control experiment, then rerun the same experiments with Epochal Difficult Captions. Where possible, we use the original hyperparameters.
For System 1 \cite{Mei2021}, we use a batch size of 32 with no gradient accumulation for 30 epochs and 60 epoch with no early stopping. System 1 has two different training setups. The first setup first optimizes on a cross entropy loss for 30 epochs, then uses a reinforcement learning technique, Self Critical Sequence Training (SCST) \cite{scst_rl}, to train the model for 60 epochs. Learning rate is set to $1 \times 10^{-4}$ for the cross entropy loss and $5 \times 10^{-5}$ for the reinforcement training. SpecAugmentation \cite{specaug} is applied to all log mel-spectrogram inputs as an data augmentation tactic. We do apply label smoothing. For inference, we perform beam search with beam size of 3 for decoding.
For System 2 \cite{koh2021automated}, we use a batch size of 64 with a gradient accumulation steps of 4 for 100 epochs. Learning rate is set to $3 \times 10^{-4}$ and SpecAugmentation \cite{specaug} is applied to all log mel-spectrogram inputs as an data augmentation tactic. We do not apply label smoothing. For inference, we perform beam search with beam size of 4 for decoding.
The COCO image captioning evaluation process \cite{coco_dataset} is used to evaluate the generated caption. There are a few metrics used. The BLEU\textsubscript{n} scores \cite{bleu_cite} measures of n-gram overlap between the generated and reference caption, while ROUGE\textsubscript{L} \cite{lin-2004-rouge} bases its score off the longest common sequence. METEOR \cite{denkowski:lavie:meteor-wmt:2014} uses a harmonic mean of unigram precision and recall to score the generated sequence. CIDEr \cite{cider_cite} uses the average cosine similarity between the candidate sentence and the reference sentences to produce a score. Next, SPICE \cite{anderson2016spice} uses semantic propositional information to score the generated captions. Finally, the SPIDEr metric is a combination of both SPICE and CIDEr. We use all the aforementioned metrics for evaluation. The SPIDEr metric is however the metric that researchers try to beat.
\section{Experimental Results and Analysis} \label{sec:experimental_results_analysis}
We compare the effectiveness of using Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning in 3 different settings. The results are shown in Table \ref{tab:results_stopwords}. From the table, we observe that the most meaningful metric, the SPIDEr score, increases across all 3 systems. For System 2 particularly, the effect of using Epochal Difficult Captions leads to an improvement of all metrics.
As described in Section \ref{sec:epochal_difficult_captions}, Epochal Difficult Captions allows the model to gradually transit from training on prominent keywords to the original unmodified caption. We believe this allows the model to focus on more important words such as nouns and action verbs in the earlier stage of the training, thus providing the model with a better ability to recognize objects and actions from the log mel spectrogram. As the training proceeds, filler words and syntactically important terms are consecutively added epoch-wise to enable the model to generate grammatically sound sentences.
\section{Conclusion} \label{sec:conclusion}
This work introduces the use of Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning. Epochal Difficult Captions is an elegant evolution to the keyword estimation problem. We have examined the difficulty curve for Curriculum Learning and specified the stopwords Curriculum. We have shown that Epochal Difficult Captions can be easily added into any Automated Audio Captioning system during the training stage. Using Epochal Difficult Captions for Curriculum Learning, performance across 3 different settings in 2 systems improves across multiple metrics and the SPIDEr score.
\bibliographystyle{IEEEbib}
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 8,493 |
50 Lbs. Lost Using Ideal Protein!
I have gained lots of weight in the past. I tried cleansing with vegetable juice fasts and weight watchers and neither worked well for me. Other things like exercise did not work for me. I would either diet or exercise, not both. So I got no results. Read more..
If you're reading this, chances are you've considered dieting before…and probably have tried a few. Perhaps you lost a few pounds (did you gain it back?), or quit because you found it too difficult or expensive. Whatever your dieting history is, it's in the past…and starting today you can stop letting your past dictate your future, because Ideal Protein offers dieters what they really want…a structured plan that can put an end to constant dieting.
Additionally, Ideal Protein empowers dieters with the knowledge to develop better eating habits and smarter lifestyle choices by providing an education on the relationship of carbohydrates to insulin production, how weight gain occurs, and what to do to avoid it. Our dieters are not left with the "Now what?" question after their excess weight has been lost.
The Ideal Nutrition Diet Center has been serving clients in the Metropolitan Washington DC area since 2007. Ruth and Nina first met the Ideal Protein folks from Canada at the Natural Products Expo in Baltimore that year, and we were one of the first Ideal Protein clinics to open in the US. Immediately drawn to their superior products and weight loss method, we knew from the start that joining their team meant we would have great ongoing support and professionalism from a world-class company.
Our clinic is dedicated to weight loss education and strategies to help dieters be successful in controlling their weight after dieting has ended.
Pictured here are Nina and Ruth keeping the shelves stocked with Ideal Protein products.
Contact us today, we'll help you discover your inner confidence as we teach you to shed your excess pounds and maintain a stable weight! | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaC4"
} | 9,035 |
CONTENTS
_Introduction_
_A Note on the Text_
_Acknowledgements_
_Overture: Vienna_
A
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
B
Walter Benjamin
Marc Bloch
Jorge Luis Borges
Robert Brasillach
Sir Thomas Browne
C
Albert Camus
Dick Cavett
Paul Celan
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
G. K. Chesterton
Jean Cocteau
Gianfranco Contini
Benedetto Croce
Tony Curtis
Ernst Robert Curtius
D
Miles Davis
Sergei Diaghilev
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
E
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
F
Federico Fellini
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
G
Charles de Gaulle
Edward Gibbon
Terry Gilliam
Josef Goebbels
Witold Gombrowicz
H
William Hazlitt
Hegel
Heinrich Heine
Adolf Hitler
Ricarda Huch
J
Ernst Jünger
K
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Leszek Kolakowski
Alexandra Kollontai
Heda Margolius Kovaly
Karl Kraus
L
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
M
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czeslaw Milosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
N
Lewis Namier
O
Grigory Ordzhonokidze
P
Octavio Paz
Alfred Polgar
Beatrix Potter
Jean Prévost
Marcel Proust
Q
Edgar Quinet
R
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
S
Ernesto Sabato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
T
Tacitus
Margaret Thatcher
Henning von Tresckow
Leon Trotsky
Karl Tschuppik
U
Dubravka Ugresic
Miguel de Unamuno
Pedro Henriquez Ureña
V
Paul Valéry
Mario Vargas Llosa
W
Evelyn Waugh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Y
Isoroku Yamamoto
Z
Aleksandr Zinoviev
Carl Zuckmayer
Stefan Zweig
_Coda: Kun-Han-Su Eckstein and the Egyptian Kinghopper_
_Illustration Credits_
_Index_
To
Aung San Suu Kyi, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ingrid Betancourt
and to the memory of
Sophie Scholl
INTRODUCTION
IN THE FORTY years it took me to write this book, I only gradually realized that the finished work, if it were going to be true to the pattern of my experience, would have no pattern. It would be organized like the top of my desk, from which the last assistant I hired to sort it out has yet to reappear. The book I wanted to write had its origins in the books I was reading. Several times, in my early days, I had to sell my best books to buy food, so I never underlined anything. When conditions improved I became less fastidious. Not long after I began marking passages for future consideration, I also began keeping notes in the margin beside the markings, and then longer notes on the endpapers. Those were the very means by which Montaigne invented the modern essay, and at first I must have had an essay of my own in mind: a long essay, but one with the usual shape, a single line of argument moving through selected perceptions to a neat conclusion.
In the short term, many of my annotations went into book reviews and pieces for periodicals: writings which took an essay form, and which, when I collected them into volumes, I unblushingly dignified with that term. But there were always annotations that struck me as not fitting any scheme except a much larger one, to be attempted far in the future, probably towards the end of my life. By the time that terminus was in clear sight, however, I had begun to live with the possibility that there could be no scheme.
There could only be a linear cluster of nodal points, working the way the mind—or at any rate my mind, such as it is—works as it moves through time: a trail of clarities variously illuminating a dark sea of unrelenting turbulence, like the phosphorescent wake of a phantom ship. Far from a single argument, there would be scores of arguments. I wanted to write about philosophy, history, politics and the arts all at once, and about what had happened to those things during the course of the multiple catastrophes into whose second principal outburst (World War I was the first) I had been born in 1939, and which continued to shake the world as I grew to adulthood. Even in an ideal world, none of those subjects would be an easily separable category, and in the far from ideal world we had been given to live in they were inextricably mixed. Each of them, it seemed to me, could have no overt order at the best of times: its order could only be internal, complex, organic. And in the worst of times, which has become our time, any two or more of them taken together must show the same effect dizzily multiplied: the organic complexities intermingled into a texture so intricate that any order extracted from it could be called only provisional.
Well, that would fit. Modern history had given us enough warning against treating simplifications as real. The totalitarian states, the great sponsors of mass atrocity against innocent human beings, had been propelled by ideologies, and what else was an ideology except a premature synthesis? As the time for assembling my reflections approached, I resolved that a premature synthesis was the thing to be avoided.
SO THIS IS a book about how not to reach one. If I have done my job properly, themes will emerge from the apparent randomness and make this work intelligible. But it will undoubtedly be a turbulent read. The times from which it emerged were hard on the nerves, even for those of us who were lucky enough to lead charmed lives. I hope that the episodically intermixed account of direct experience from my own charmed life will alleviate the difficulties of a densely woven text, but I make no excuse for them. If this book were not difficult, it would not be true.
To younger readers who might find themselves wondering why it is so full of forgotten names, and takes such a violently unpredictable course, the first thing to say is: welcome to the twentieth century, out of which your century grew as surely as a column of black smoke grows from an oil fire. The second thing, though an adjunct of the first, is even more important: there is a lot at stake here. In the nineteenth century, in the time of the great philologist Ernest Renan, and despite the contrary evidence already provided by the French Revolution, _Studia humanitatis_ was still thought of as an unmixed blessing. If the eighteenth century had meant to usher in the age of reason, the nineteenth century, with the cold snick of the guillotine ringing in its ears, meant to supply some of the regrettable deficiencies of reason by the addition of science. Apart from the prophets—Dickens, despite his inborn optimism, was one of them—few people with any aspirations to a philosophical view doubted that the extension of human knowledge would, in Renan's typically generous phrase, _élargir la grande famille_ : produce a race of the enlightened to lead a life of mathematically calculable justice. By now, after the twentieth century has done its cruel work, that is exactly what we doubt. The future of science, Renan's cherished _avenir de la science_ , can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don't yet know about it, one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent. But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all.
That beckoning, however, grows increasingly feeble. The arts and their attendant scholarship are everywhere—imperishable consumer goods which a self-selecting elite can possess while priding itself as being beyond materialism; they have a glamour unprecedented in history—but humanism is hard to find. For that, science is one of the culprits: not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doctors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. By putting the humanities to careerist use, they set a bad example even to those who still love what they study. Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. Too often used for ill, it is now asked about its use for good, and usually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity. The idea that humanism has no immediately ascertainable use at all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a hard sell in an age when the word "invaluable," simply by the way it looks, is begging to be construed as "valueless" even by the sophisticated. In fact, especially by them. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.
It was terrible, that age. Bright, sympathetic young people who now face a time when innocent human beings are killed by the thousand can be excused for thinking that their elders do not care enough, and indeed it is true that complacency tends to creep in as the hair falls out. But their elders grew to maturity in a time when innocent human beings were killed by the million. The full facts about Nazi Germany came out quite quickly, and were more than enough to induce despair. The full facts about the Soviet Union were slower to become generally appreciated, but when they at last were, the despair was compounded. The full facts about Mao's China left that compounded despair looking like an inadequate response. After Mao, not even Pol Pot came as a surprise. Sadly, he was a cliché.
Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir. But the accumulated destruction yielded one constructive effect, salutary even if solitary. It made us think hard about the way we thought. For my own part, it made me think hard about all the fields of creativity that I seemed to love equally, whatever their place in a supposed hierarchy. I loved poetry, but such towering figures as Brecht and Neruda were only two of the gifted poets who had given aid and comfort to totalitarian power. I loved classical music, but so did Reinhard Heydrich and the ineffable Dr. Mengele. I loved modern fiction in all its fearless inclusiveness, but Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the author of that amazing phantasmagoria _Voyage au bout de la nuit_ , had also written _Bagatelles pour un massacre_ , a breviary for racialist fanatics. On examination, none of these exalted activities was a sure antidote in itself to the poison of irrationality, which is inseparable from human affairs, but fatal to them if granted a life of its own. And for the less exalted activities, examination was scarcely necessary. I loved popular music, but one look at Johnny Rotten was enough to show you why even the SS occasionally court-martialled a few of its personnel for nihilistic behaviour beyond the call of duty, and more recently there have been rap lyrics distinguishable from the "Horst Wessel Song" only in being less well written. I loved the art sports, but so had Leni Riefenstahl, who also provided evidence that there was nothing necessarily humanist about the movies: _Triumph of the Will_ is a spectacle everyone should see, but no one should adore. It would have been nice to believe that comedy, one of my fields of employment, was of its nature opposed to political horror, but there were too many well-attested instances of Stalin and Molotov cracking each other up while they signed death warrants, and there was all too much evidence that Hitler told quite good jokes. If there was no field of creativity that was incorruptibly pure, where did that leave humanism?
GRADUALLY I REALIZED that I had been looking in the wrong place. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers (in my daydreams, I astonish the Olympic medalist Greg Louganis) as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humanism wasn't in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them. Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. In the connection between all the outlets of the creative impulse in mankind, humanism made itself manifest, and to be concerned with understanding and maintaining that intricate linkage necessarily entailed an opposition to any political order that worked to weaken it.
SUCH WAS THE conclusion I had already reached after thirty-seven years of preparation. I was doing other things to earn a crust, but the book was never out of my mind, somewhere at the back of the building between the storeroom and the laundry. In the three years it took to compose the actual text, I was faced more and more, as it moved forward, with the consequences of not having isolated my themes. If I was determined on avoiding those broad divisions that I thought not only artificial but actively inimical to my view, the question was bound to keep on arising of where the book's unity was to come from. Answering that question over and over in the course of long days and longer nights, I had to intensify a faith that I had always kept throughout my writing life: the faith that the unity would come from the style. From the beginning of my career, whenever I had written an essay, it was most likely to come alive when its planned progression of points was interrupted by a notion which surprised me, and which could be brought to order only by making the manner of writing more inclusive instead of less. In other words, I took the same approach to prose as to a poem. When young and cocky, I had defined a poem as any piece of writing that could not be quoted from _except_ out of context. Older but even more ambitious, I had the temerity to define prose in the same way: a prose work of whatever length should be dependent, in each part, on every other part of what was included, and so respect the importance even of what had been left out. From the force of cohesion would come the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices.
THERE ARE HUNDREDS of voices in this book, and hundreds more which, although not cited directly, are nevertheless present in the way its author speaks. In that sense, the best sense, there is no such thing as an individual voice: there is only an individual responsibility. The writer represents all the expressive people to whom he has ever paid attention, even if he disapproved of what they expressed. If anything in this book seems not to fit, it isn't, I hope, because it is irrelevant, but because I have written about it in the wrong tone, or the wrong measure. The polemicist has the privilege of unifying his tone by leaving out the complications. I have tried to unify it while encompassing the whole range of a contemporary mind. The mind in question happens to be mine, and any psychologist could argue persuasively that mine is the mind I am least likely to know much about. This much, however, I do know: it would not be a mind at all if its owner had allowed his multiplicity of interests to be restricted by a formula. He might have been more comfortable had he done so. But we have to do better than just seek comfort, or the Exterminating Angel will overwhelm us when he returns. He is unlikely to return at the head of a totalitarian state: even after the final and irreversible discrediting of their ideological pretensions, there are still a few totalitarian states left, but their days are surely numbered.
Totalitarianism, however, is not over. It survives as residues, some of them all the more virulent because they are no longer hemmed in by borders; and some of them are within our own borders. Liberal democracy deserved, and still deserves, to prevail—one of the aims of this book is to help stave off any insidious doubts on that point—but in both components of liberal democracy's name there are opportunities for the ideologist: in the first component lies inspiration for the blind devotee of economic determinism, and in the second for the dogmatic egalitarian. From within as well as without, the Procrustean enemies of our provokingly multifarious free society are bound to come, sometimes merely to preach obscurantist doctrine in our universities, at other times to fly our own airliners into towers of commerce. What they hate is the bewildering complexity of civilized life, which we will find hard to defend if we share the same aversion. We shouldn't. There is too much to appreciate. If it can't be sorted into satisfactory categories, that should make us take heart: it wouldn't be the work of human beings if it could.
There was never a time like now to be a lover of the arts. Mozart never heard most of Bach. We can hear everything by both of them. Brahms was so bowled over by _Carmen_ that he saw twenty performances, but he had to buy twenty opera tickets to do so. Manet never saw all his paintings in one place: we can. While Darcey Bussell dances at Covent Garden, the next Darcey Bussell can watch her from Alice Springs. Technology not only has given us a permanent present, but has given it the furniture of eternity. We can cocoon ourselves, if we wish, in a new provincialism more powerful than any of the past empires. English is this new world's lingua franca, not because it was once spoken in the British Empire but because it is spoken now in the American international cultural hegemony. Born to speak it, we can view the whole world as a dubbed movie, and not even have to bother with subtitles. Should we wish, we can even savour the tang of alien tongues: a translation will be provided on a separate page, to be dialled up at a touch. We can be world citizens without leaving home. If that seems too static, we can travel without leaving home. The world is prepared to receive us, with all its fruits laid out for our consumption, and wrapped in cling film to meet our sanitary standards. Gresham's law, that the bad drives out the good, has acquired a counter-law, that the bad draws in the good: there are British football hooligans who can sing Puccini's _"Nessun dorma."_ It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one's leisure hours improving one's aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters. The times are not long gone when nobody could aspire to that—not even Egon Friedell, a man once famous for being better informed than anybody in Vienna. In a city stiff with polymaths, he was the polymath's polymath.
Egon Friedell looms large in this book. Active from the early years of the twentieth century until the Nazis turned off the lights in Austria, the Viennese prodigy knew everything, or talked as if he did. There was nothing he could not talk about brilliantly. Some thought him a charlatan, but no charlatan is ever remembered for making clever remarks: only for trying to make them. One of the most famous cabaret artists of his day, Friedell in the 1920s combined his career in show business with a monkish dedication to his library, in which he produced a book of his own that must count as one of the strangest and most wonderful of the twentieth century: _Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (The Cultural History of the Modern Age_ ). A fabulous effort of style and concentration, a prestidigitator's trick box packed with epigrammatic summaries of all the creativity in every field of art and science since the Renaissance, a prose epic raised to the level of poetry, Friedell's magic show of a book remains a fantastic demonstration of the mind at serious play. At the time, he left people wondering if there was nothing he might not do next. That kind of expectation can easily breed envy. Though he did his best to be humble, there were many in his audience who thought him not humble enough. Friedell believed that an artist of his type needed "a magnetic field" in which to operate. He was well aware that he was surrounded by the kind of people whose only ambition was to cut off the electricity. They were Nazis, and he was a Jew. On the day of the _Anschluβ_ in 1938, Friedell saw the storm troopers marching down the street, on their way to the building in which he had his apartment full of books. He was only a few floors up but it was high enough to do the job. On his way out of the window he called a warning, in case his falling body hit an innocent passer-by.
I CAN'T IMAGINE being brave enough to copy the way Egon Friedell made an exit, but there was something about the way he made an entrance that could be a model for us all. He came on as a combination of actor and thinker. We are all doomed to be actors, in the sense that our abilities and deficiencies will guide us, in certain ways if not in others, to becoming active participants in a productive society, whether we like that society or not. Alas, we will be participants even if we hate it: terrorism, which will not tolerate a passive audience, is already part of the show. But to palliate that condition, we are nowadays much more free to be thinkers than is commonly supposed. The usual division is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. But the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success. Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the Picasso, and envied its owner: I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso's second mistress, although they were on different sides of her nose. But I didn't envy the man his job. In the same week, I was filming in Greenwich Village, and spent an hour of down-time sitting in a café making my first acquaintance with the poetry of Anthony Hecht. I couldn't imagine living better. The real adventure is no longer in the job. In the job we can have a profile written about us, and be summed up: all the profiles will be the same, and all the summaries add up to the same thing. The real adventure is in what we do to entertain ourselves, a truth which the profile writers concede by trying to draw us out on our supposed addictions to shark fishing, fast cars, extreme skiing and expensive young women. But even the entertainment can no longer be adventurous if it serves a purpose. It will be adventurous only if it serves itself. In other words, it will not be utilitarian. It has always been part of the definition of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.
What this book then proposes—what it embodies, I hope—is something difficult enough to be satisfactory for an age in which to be presented with nothing except reassurance is ceasing to be tolerable. As the late Edward W. Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, Western humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism. I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can't be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized. When the doomed Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said that he was nostalgic for a world culture, he didn't mean that it would be a world culture if everyone could live in Switzerland.
THE IDEOLOGISTS THOUGHT they understood history. They thought history had a shape, a predictable outcome, a direction that could be joined. They were wrong. Some of them were intellectuals who shamed themselves and their calling by bringing superior mental powers to the defence of misbegotten political systems that were already known to be dispensing agony to the helpless. Young readers will find some of that story here, and try to convince themselves that they would have behaved differently. But the way to avoid the same error now is not through understanding less. It can only be through understanding more. And the beginning of understanding more is to realize that there is more than can be understood. As an aid to that end, this book is not a testament to my capabilities, but to the lack of them. Proust talked about "that long flight from our own lives that we call erudition." There is nothing inherently wrong with erudition: it's not as if we're drowning in it, and anyway Proust himself wrote the most erudite book in the whole of French literature. But this book is the reverse of erudite. It does not just record what I have learned. It also suggests what I have failed to learn, and now will probably never learn, because it is getting late. The student who flicks through these pages in the bookshop will see many strange names, and perhaps be impressed. But what impresses me is all the names that are missing. I would never have taken a note in the first place except out of the fear that what I was reading would soon slip away: a fear all too well founded. The Russian symbolist writer Andrei Bely once said that what we keep in our heads is the _sum_ of a writer: a "composite quotation." But the only reason I still know that Bely once said that is that I wrote it down.
There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese about my special subject, the war in the Pacific. I hope to get Russian back, but the written version of Japanese is the kind of language that you can study hard for five years and yet can't neglect for a week without its leaving you like a flock of birds. I hope they return as easily as they went, but I remember how long they took to arrive in the first place. I have always loved the title of Milan Kundera's _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_. I hope this is a book of laughter, at least in places. But it is everywhere a book of forgetting. I am not urging young people to follow me on the path to a success. I am showing them the way to a necessary failure: the grim but edifying realization that a complete picture of reality is not to be had. If we realize that, we can begin to be realistic. Thinking otherwise, we doom ourselves to spinning fantasies, which might well be fluent, but could equally be lethal. Stalin and Hitler both thought that they could see the whole picture, and look what happened.
WHATEVER WE SAY, it is bound to be dependent on what has been said before. In this book can be heard the merest outside edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room. Or perhaps they are on a terrace, under the stars. They are wearing name tags in case they don't recognize each other. Some of them recognize each other all too well, but they avoid contact. Thomas Mann, with the family poodle snuffling petulantly at his knee, would rather not talk to Brecht, and Sartre is keen to avoid Solzhenitsyn. Kafka tells Puccini that he would have approached him at the Brescia flying display in 1909, but he was too shy. Nabokov tells Pavlova that he never forgot the time he danced the waltz with her. Yeats has failed to convince Wittgenstein about the importance of the Mystic Rose. All over the place there are little dramas. Standing beside the piano, Stravinsky refuses to believe that Duke Ellington is improvising. Robert Lowell has cornered Freud and is telling him that when he, Lowell, has a depressive phase he imagines he is Adolf Hitler. With barely concealed impatience, Freud mutters that Hitler spends very little time imagining he is Robert Lowell. Anna Akhmatova at her most beautiful, a catwalk model with the nose of an unsuccessful pugilist, has moved in on Tony Curtis at his most handsome, dressed for his role as Sidney Falco in _Sweet Smell of Success_. Curtis looks frightened. Akhmatova's friend and rival Nadezhda Mandelstam, on the other hand, seems delighted to have met Albert Camus: she distrusts the way he turns on the automatic charm even for an old lady, but she approves of his opinions.
Not all the figures are from the twentieth century. Some have been invited because what they said was prescient, or at least portentous. Heine and Wagner are getting on better than Nietzsche expected: neither has yet strangled the other. Montesquieu is doing his best to put up with Talleyrand. It is not a fancy dress party, but "come as you are" means that Tacitus has arrived in a toga, and the poet Juana Inés de la Cruz in a nun's habit. One of the great beauties of the seventeenth-century Spanish world, Juana Inés is a ringer for Isabella Rossellini. Tacitus seems quite taken with her, perhaps partly because she speaks fluent Latin. Never a million laughs, he tells her his story about the daughter of Sejanus: a story which the reader will find in this book. Tacitus thought it was the most terrible story he could imagine. We know what he doesn't: that in the twentieth century the story of Sejanus's daughter will be repeated several million times.
MY HEROES AND heroines are here. The reader will recognize some of their names: Albert Camus, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka. Other names will be more obscure: Miguel de Unamuno, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Leszek Kolakowski, Golo Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Witold Gombrowicz, Manès Sperber, Raymond Aron, Hans Sahl, Jean Prévost, Stefan Zweig. My intellectual _bêtes noires_ are here too, and the same division might apply. Everyone has heard of Sartre, Brecht, Céline. Not everyone has heard of Georg Lukács, Robert Brasillach, Ernst Jünger, Louis Aragon. There is a category of super-villain easy to assess: Hitler, Stalin, Mao. But although Hitler and Stalin both talked like maniacs from the start, Mao was capable of something like human reason early in his career; a fact to remind us that the merely verbalizing villains—those benighted intellectuals who truckled to power—were not always without a spark of reason. It might have been better if they had been: they would have done less damage. As it happened, not even Sartre could be wrong all the time, although he tried hard. And there were heroes who were not always right: Thomas Mann, in his youth, was terrifically wrong about militarized nationalism, and part of his later anguish was that he had lived to see the destructive consequences of a passion that he had once believed to be self-evidently creative. George Orwell thought, and said, that the bourgeoisie was the enemy of the proletariat, until the practical evidence persuaded him that anyone who believed the two classes could not be reconciled was the deadly enemy of both. When we talk about the imponderables of life, we don't really mean that we can't ponder them. We mean that we can't stop. Hence the conversation: a Sargasso of monologues that were all attracted to the noise.
Some of the voices are talking murder while thinking it to be medicine. Others, the blessed ones, are talking reason. Almost always it is because they know their own limitations. But unless they were born as saints, they had to find out they were not infallible by listening to the words of others. Most of the words were written down, and most of the listening was done by reading. Certainly it was in my case, during all those intervals in a busy life when I escaped to be alone in the café, and found that I was never alone for a moment. Because, as a journalist and television presenter, I travelled professionally for more than twenty years on end, the café was in many different cities: Sydney, London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Rome, Venice, Paris, Biarritz, Cannes, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Moscow, Madrid, Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima, Bombay, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cairo, Jerusalem, Valletta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Miami, Mexico City, Havana, Rio, Buenos Aires, Auckland, Wellington, Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney again. But the café table always looked the same once I had piled it high with books. Out of the pages they came: those who thought they were wise and those who really were. So many of the first, and so very few of the second. Just enough, however, to make me thankful to have lived, and want to join them. If this book makes the reader want the same, it will have done its work. What I propose is a sum of appreciations that includes an appreciation of their interdependence: a new humanism. If I could put it into a sentence, I would say that it relies on the conviction that nothing creative should be excluded for the sake of any other conviction. Another way of putting it is this book.
—Clive James
London, 2006
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
MAINLY BECAUSE A thematic classification would be impossible, the essays are arranged in alphabetical order by author of the heading quotation. Any other rhyme or reason is meant to emerge in the reading. This might well be the only serious book to explore the relationship between Hitler's campaign on the eastern front and Richard Burton's pageboy hairstyle in _Where Eagles Dare_ , but such an exploration is fundamental to its plan, which is to follow the paths that lead on from the citations, and try to go on following them when they cross. As for the citations, page references are given where a scholar might wish to check my interpretation. Otherwise, in the interests of readability, such notations have been kept to a minimum. Qualified linguists will quickly detect that I command only smatterings in any language except my own, but I remain convinced that tinkering with foreign tongues has stood me in better stead than concerning myself with literary theory, which would have taken just as much time and left me knowing nothing at all, instead of merely not enough. With a view to the impatience of the monoglot young reader I once was myself, almost every foreign phrase is translated on the spot; but the occasional single foreign word is left to stand alone when its meaning can be easily inferred. Sometimes a quoted phrase, or the account of an incident, is repeated when there seems a genuine benefit to be gained by seeing it from a different angle. (One of my models, Eugenio Montale, favoured that practice, and as a reader I was always grateful for it.) Fiction and poetry are seldom drawn upon for the heading quotations; partly out of a wish not to injure an organic context; mainly out of a conviction that it is in their ancillary writings that authors are more likely to state their opinions in a detachable form. (The argument that we should not want to detach the opinions of an artist is familiar to me: we shouldn't, but we do.) An autobiographical element is mixed in when the concrete information seems pertinent to one of the general themes.
Believing that "they" is no fit substitute for "he" in the singular, and finding "he or she" cumbersome, I have stuck with the traditional masculine dominance of the indeterminate gender. I have also availed myself of the European tradition by which sufficiently distinguished females are honoured through being referred to by their first names. I can quite see—or, anyway, I can almost see—how gallantry might be patronizing, but I don't see how confusion counts as a blow for justice. Nadezhda Mandelstam, for example, is actually insulted by being called just Mandelstam, because that surname belongs to her husband, Osip, in the first instance. I would rather convey my reverence for her by my argument than pay her the empty compliment of a modern formula that to me seems hollow.
Female readers can put all this down to unreconstructed chauvinism if they wish, but I don't think they will find their representatives slighted in this book: merely outnumbered. Female readers might find themselves grateful for that. This is a book about a world men made, and it taught plenty of us to wish that women had made it instead.
CULTURAL
AMNESIA
OVERTURE
VIENNA
IN THE LATE nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Vienna was the best evidence that the most accommodating and fruitful ground for the life of the mind can be something more broad than a university campus. More broad, and in many ways more fun. In Vienna there were no exams to pass, learning was a voluntary passion, and wit was a form of currency. Reading about old Vienna now, you are taken back to a time that should come again: a time when education was a lifelong process. You didn't complete your education and then start your career. Your education _was_ your career, and it was never completed. For generations of writers, artists, musicians, journalists and mind-workers of every type, the Vienna café was a way of life. There were many cafés, although in each generation there tended to be only a precious few that were regarded as centres of the action for the creative elite. The habitués might have had homes to go to when they wanted to sleep, but otherwise where they lived was in the café. For some of them, the café was an actual address. Most, though not all, of the café population was Jewish, which explains why the great age of the café as an informal campus abruptly terminated in March 1938, when the _Anschluβ_ wrote the finish— _finis Austriae_ , as Freud put it—to an era. It also partly explains why the great age had come to fruition in the first place.
Even in Germany, where the Jews had full civil rights until Hitler repealed them, there was a de facto quota system in academic life which made it hard for people of Jewish background to be appointed to the faculty, no matter how well qualified they were. (The prejudice affected priorities even within the faculty: nuclear physics, for example, featured so many Jewish personnel mainly because it was considered a secondary field.) In Austria the quota system was built into every area of society as a set of laws, limits and exclusions. As an inevitable result, in Austria even more than in Germany there was a tendency for scholarship and humanism to be pursued more outside the university than inside it. A case could be made—among the Austrian privileged class you can still hear it being made—that the Jews thus benefited from having doors closed against them. It would be a bad case. The humiliations were real and the resentments lasting. But there was one undoubted benefit to us all. Whole generations of Jewish literati were denied the opportunity of wasting their energies on compiling abstruse doctoral theses. They were driven instead to journalism, plain speech, direct observation and the necessity to entertain. The necessity to entertain could sometimes be the enemy of learning, but not as often as the deadly freedom to write as if nobody would ever read the results except a faculty supervisor who owed his post to the same exemption.
In 1938, the flight from the _Anschluβ_ —and if only all of them had fled in time—was not the first case of a Jewish intellectual community scattering to the world. It had happened before, in the German cities in 1933, and it happened before that, in Poland under Russian persecution, and in Russia both before and after the Revolution. In each case, the suppression of liberalism worked like a shell-burst, with the Jews as the fragments of the shell's casing, the fragments that travelled furthest. These local disasters added up to a benefit for the world, so we need to change the metaphor, and think of an exploding seed-pod. In the reception of first-rate minds driven into exile, Britain and America were the most prominent beneficiaries, but we should not forget smaller countries like my own, Australia. The intellectual and artistic life of Australia was transformed by the arrival of those Jews who managed to make the distance. In New Zealand, the exiled professor Karl Popper was able to develop the principles contained in _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ because he was at last living in an open society, and remembered the enemies. In those democracies that were sensible enough to let at least some of the Jews in, the growth of a humanist culture was immeasurably accelerated. It hardly needs adding that the enforced new diaspora was an immense factor in turning Israel from an idea to a burgeoning fact. The idea had earlier been developed in Vienna, by Theodor Herzl. Just as Lenin's idea for a Communist nation left from Vienna for its long journey to Russia, Herzl's idea for a Jewish nation left from Vienna for its long journey to Palestine. Had history worked out otherwise, Herzl's idea might have retained the same status as Freud's ideas about the subconscious—a mere theory, though a seductive one. The same could even be said of Adolf Hitler, whose early years in Vienna confirmed him in his own idea: the idea of a world without Jews.
The Jews in the first half of the twentieth century were not the only persecuted minority on Earth, and indeed the time would come, after the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, when they would begin to be regarded—sometimes correctly—as persecutors in their turn. As liberal Jews have had increasing cause to observe, one of the penalties for becoming another state was to become a state like any other. But the fate of the Jews, and its accompanying achievements, will be a recurring theme in this book for a good reason. There could be no clearer proof that the mind is hard to kill. Nor could there be a more frightening demonstration of the virulent power of the forces which can combine to kill it. There is some room for hope, then, but none for sentimentality. A book about culture in the twentieth century which did not deal constantly with just how close culture came to being eradicated altogether would not be worth reading, although there is an ineradicable demand for uplift which would always make it worth writing. There could be a feel-good storybook about Vienna called, say, _It Takes a Village_. But it took a lot more than that. As a place to begin studying what happened to twentieth-century culture, Vienna is ideal, but only on the understanding that the ideal was real, with all the complications of reality, and none of the consolations of a therapeutic dream.
Apart from the numerous picture books—which should never be despised as introductory tools, and in the case of Vienna are especially enchanting—probably the best first book to read in order to get the atmosphere would be Stefan Zweig's _Die Welt von Gestern_ , which has been translated into English as _The World of Yesterday_. But there is lot of atmosphere to get, and with Zweig's memoirs you have to take it for granted that the great names did great things. A shorter and less allusive account, George Clare's _Last Waltz in Vienna_ , is an admirably direct introduction to the triumph of Vienna and the tragedy that was waiting to ruin it. The triumph was a sense of civilization; a civilization that the Jews had a right to feel they had been instrumental in creating; and the tragedy was that their feelings of safe assimilation were falsely based. The triumph might have continued; the Nazis might never have arrived; but they did arrive, and everything went to hell. Clare's book is unbeatable at showing that one of the consequences of cultural success can be political naivety. The lesson still applies today, when so many members of the international intelligentsia—which, broadly interpreted, means us—continue to believe that culture can automatically hold civilization together. But there is nothing automatic about it, because nothing can be held together without the rule of law.
On what might seem a more exalted level, Carl E. Schorske's book _Fin-de-Siècle Vienna_ brings on the first wave of great names: Freud, Herzl, Hofmannsthal, Klimt, Kokoschka, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Mahler, Musil, Schnitzler, Schoenberg, Otto Wagner and others. It is an impressive work, deserving of its prestige, but tends to encourage the misleading assumption that greatness is everything. In the long run it might seem so, but in the shorter run, which is the run of everyday life, a civilization is irrigated and sustained by its common interchange of ordinary intelligence. After the turn of the century, in Vienna's case, this more ordinary intelligence began to make itself extraordinary through the essays and remembered wit that came out of the cafés. Of its nature, such a multifarious achievement is less susceptible to being summed up in a single treatise. Friedrich Torberg's memoir _Die Tante Jolesch_ ( _Aunt Jolesch_ ), published after World War II, looks back fondly and funnily on a vanished world. A peal of laughter ringing in the ruins, Torberg's book can be recommended with a whole heart. (It can also be recommended as a way for a student to make a beginning with German, because all the anecdotes that sound so attractive in English sound even more so in the original. Keep the original and the translation open beside each other and you've got the perfect parallel text.) But many of the names that shone brightest are destined to go on doing so from the far side of the language barrier. Half genius and half flimflam man, the polymath Egon Friedell—already mentioned in my preface, but being introduced twice fits his act—was a towering figure among the coffee-house wits. Somehow, in between cabaret engagements, Friedell found time to write _Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit_ , a mesmerizing claim to the totality of knowledge. It was translated, in three whopping volumes from Alfred A. Knopf, as _The Cultural History of the Modern Age_ in 1931, but it never took on outside the German-speaking countries. (In those, it came back into print after the fall of the Nazis and has been in print ever since.) His omniscient tone of voice was at least partly a put-up job, but the universality of his gusto remains an enduring ideal. The finest wit of all, the essayist and theatre critic Alfred Polgar, has never been substantially translated, and probably never will be, because his prose has the compression and precision of the finest poetry. But both men can still be appreciated for what they represent, and their names will crop up often in this book. What they had in common was a brilliant sensitivity to all the achievements of culture at whatever level of respectability—although not even Friedell was receptive enough to realize that jazz might be music—and what all the coffee-house intellectuals had in common was that they knew Peter Altenberg, who by their standards hardly achieved anything at all. Altenberg was a bum, and I place him near the beginning of this book—preceded only by Anna Akhmatova, whom he probably would have hit for a small loan—not just because the initial of his name is at the beginning of the alphabet, but because he was living proof, in all his flakiness and unreliability, that the life of the mind doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. In his case it didn't even get him a job. Though he occasionally made some money from publishing his collections of bits and pieces, the money was soon spent, and he had to borrow more. But his very existence was a reminder to more prosperous practitioners that what they did was done from love.
Vienna feels empty now. You can have a good night at the opera, and in spring you can drink Heurige Wein in the gardens, and the Klimt and Schiele rooms in the Belvedere are still among the great rooms of the museum that covers the world, and on the walls of the Café Hawelka are still to be seen the drawings with which Picabia once paid his bills. But after World War II the eternally fresh impulse of humanism came back to Vienna only in the form of the zither playing on the soundtrack of the _The Third Man_. The creative spirit of the city had been poisoned by the corrupted penicillin of Harry Lime—the juice of irreversible psychic damage. Nor did Paris ever fully recover from the Occupation, although that contention can still buy you a verbal fight with resident intellectuals who are certain that it did. Humanism had a better chance of recovery in cities where its roots had never been deep enough to be thought part of the foundations. Post-war Berlin, whose civilization before the rise of the Nazis had been shallow and frantic, grew more fruitful than Vienna after the last Nazis of either city prudently shed their uniforms. In Tokyo, the pre-war coffee-house culture—so eerily mimetic of Vienna, even down to its brass-framed bow windows echoing the spare forms of Adolf Loos—melted in the firestorm of March 1945. But that culture had been the merest touch of the West, and before General MacArthur had barely begun his reign as visiting emperor, the influence of Western liberal creativity was back like a new kind of storm, a storm that put up buildings instead of knocking them flat, and turned on lights instead of switching them off, and accelerated, and this time in a less disastrous direction, the transformative process that had begun with the Meiji restoration in 1870, the process of a culture becoming conscious of itself—a process that will turn any culture towards humanism, even when its right wing, as Japan's does, gives up its convictions only at the rate of a tea ceremony in slow motion.
Today, in the second decade after the Berlin Wall came down, the still miraculously lovely Petersburg is only beginning to have again what it had before the Revolution: the magic of a poetic imagination on a civic scale. Moscow, which always had less of that, seems to have come further faster. If Rome was the only one-time seat of totalitarian power that recovered instantly a glory that it had before, it was because the Italian brand of totalitarianism was less total: its bullhorn rhetoric and slovely inefficiency left too much of the humanist tradition intact. But the great burgeoning, on a world scale, of the post-Nazi liberal humanist impulse, a burgeoning which continues in the new post-Soviet era, took place and is still taking place in London and New York. The subsidiary English-speaking cities—Los Angeles, Chicago, Dublin, Sydney, Melbourne and many more—follow those two, and of those two, even London must follow New York. The reasons are so simple they often escape notice. Outstripping even Britain in its magnetic attraction for those who fled, America had the greater number of creative refugees, especially in their role as teachers: in New York, to stay alive, they taught music, painting, acting, everything. And America had the GI Bill of Rights. The ideal teachers met the ideal pupils, and the resulting story made Eleanor Roosevelt, whose idea the GI Bill was, into the most effective woman in the history of world culture up until that time, and continues to make her name a radiant touchstone for those who believe, as I do, that the potential liberation of the feminine principle is currently the decisive factor lending an element of constructive hope to the seething tumult within the world's vast Muslim hegemony, and within the Arab world in particular. The secret of American cultural imperialism—the only version of American imperialism that really is irresistible, because it works by consent—is its concentration of all the world's artistic and intellectual qualities in their most accessible form. The danger of American cultural imperialism is that it gives Americans a plausible reason for thinking that they can do without the world. But the world helped to make them what they now are—even Hollywood, the nation's single most pervasive cultural influence, would be unimaginable without its immigrant personnel. One of the intentions of this book is to help establish a possible line of resistance against the cultural amnesia by which it suits us to forget that the convulsive mental life of the twentieth century, which gave the United States so much of the cultural power that it now enjoys, was a complex, global event that can be simplified only at the cost of making it unreal. If we can't remember it all, we should at least have some idea of what we have forgotten. We could, if we wished, do without remembering, and gain all the advantages of travelling light; but a deep instinct, not very different from love, reminds us that the efficiency would be bought at the cost of emptiness. Finally the reason we go on thinking is because of a feeling. We have to keep that feeling pure if we can, and, if we ever lose it, try to get it back.
A
Anna Akhmatova
Peter Altenberg
Louis Armstrong
Raymond Aron
ANNA AKHMATOVA
Born in Odessa, educated in Kiev and launched into poetic immortality as the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was the most famous Russian poet of her time, but the time was out of joint. Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Anna Andreyevna Gorenko, called Akhmatova, already wore the Russian literary world's most glittering French verbal decorations: her work was avant-garde, and in person she was a femme fatale. Love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets, one of whom, Nikolay Gumilev, she married. After the Revolution, Gumilev was one of the new regime's first victims among the literati: the persecution of artists, still thought of today as a Stalinist speciality, began under Lenin. Later on, under Stalin, Akhmatova included a reference to Gumilev's fate in the most often quoted part of her poem "Requiem." ("Husband dead, son in gaol / Pray for me.") In the last gasp of the Tsarist era she had known no persecution worse than routine incomprehension for her impressionistic poetry and condemnation by women for her effect on their men. The Russia of Lenin and Stalin made her first a tragic, then an heroic, figure. After 1922 she was condemned as a bourgeois element and severely restricted in what she could publish. After World War II, in 1946, she was personally condemned by Andrey Zhdanov, Stalin's plug-ugly in charge of culture. She was allowed to publish nothing new, and everything she had ever written in verse form was dismissed as "remote from socialist reconstruction." Her prestige abroad helped to keep her alive at home, but also ensured that her life could never be comfortable: the security police were always on her case. In the 1950s she was rehabilitated to the extent that a censored edition of her collected poems was officially published. ("Requiem" was among the poems missing: Isaiah Berlin, who visited her in Moscow in 1946, was correct when he predicted that it would never be published in Russia as long as the Soviet Union lasted.) Unofficially, however, her work had always circulated, whether in samizdat or, in that peculiarly Russian tribute to greatness, from mouth to mouth, by memory. Akhmatova was the embodiment of the Russian liberal heritage that the authoritarians felt bound to go on threatening long after it had surrendered. As such, she was an inspiring symbol, but when a poet becomes better known than her poems it usually means that she is being sacrificed, for extraneous reasons, on the altar of her own glory. In Akhmatova's case, the extraneous reasons were political. It should be a mark of reasonable politics that a woman like her is not called upon to be a heroine.
This lyrical wealth of Pushkin . . .
—ANNA AKHMATOVA, "PUSHKIN'S "STONE GHOST' "
SOME LANGUAGES ARE inherently more beautiful than others, and Russian is among the most beautiful of all. For anyone learning Russian, a phrase like "lyrical wealth" comes singing out of the page like a two-word aria from an opera by Moussorgsky. I noted it down as a soon as I saw it. In 1968 the West German publishing house that called itself Inter-Language Literary Associates produced a magnificent two-volume collection of Akhmatova's works in verse and prose. I bought those books in London in 1978, when I was in my first stage of learning to read the language. I never got to the last stage, or anywhere near it: but I did reach the point where I could read an essay without too much help from the dictionary. (Memo to any student making a raid on the culture of another language: essays are always the easiest way in.) Reading Akhmatova's essays, it was soon apparent that she would have been an excellent full-time critic of literature if she had been given permission. But of course she wasn't, which brings us immediately to the point.
If the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution had never happened, the cafés of Petersburg and Moscow would probably have dominated this book. Petersburg, in particular, would have rivalled Vienna. (If the Nazis had never come to power, Vienna and Berlin would have continued to rival Paris, but that's another matter, although one we are bound to get to soon enough.) The Russian cultural upsurge in the years before the Revolution was so powerful that after the Revolution it took a while to slow down. (In the emigration, it never slowed down, but it did thin out as time went on: whereas Diaghilev was a whole movement in the arts, Balanchine's influence was confined to the ballet, and Nureyev and Baryshnikov, though they could create contexts, did so mainly for themselves—wonderful as they both were, they were just dancers.) Largely because the new regime took some time to purge itself of apparatchiks with a taste for the artistically vital, the Revolution, inheriting an unprecedented cultural efflorescence, spent its first decade or so looking like the benevolent guardian of a realized dream. Left-leaning culturati in the West were able to fool themselves for decades afterwards that a totalitarian regime had somehow opened up new possibilities for making art a political weapon in the eternal struggle to free the people's creative will. The dazzle-painted agitprop trains and the snappily edited newsreels of Dziga Vertov were seen as signs of vigour, which they were, and of truth, which they were not.
Among the Soviet Union's apologists in the West, it was commonly supposed that, while the self-exiled Stravinsky no doubt enjoyed his personal freedom, Prokofiev and Shostakovich gained from being thought important by the power that paid them, and that this putatively fruitful relationship between creativity and a centralized state had been established in the early years after the Revolution. In reality, the intelligentsia was already doomed, simply because Anatoly Luna-charsky, the commissar for culture, wielded absolute power over the artists. He could wield it benevolently only with the indulgence of his superiors, which was withdrawn in 1929, the year the nightmare began to unfold unmistakably even to those who had been carried away when they thought it was a dream. (Awareness could be fatal: Mayakovsky, the poet most famous for transmitting state policy through works of art, shot himself not because he was mad, but because he was mad no longer—he had suddenly woken up to the dreadful fact that his creative enthusiasm had been used to cosmeticize mass murder.)
Akhmatova, to her credit, had always tried to stay aloof from the Revolution. But the Revolution was never likely to pay her the courtesy of staying aloof from her. As early as 1922, her poetry had been correctly identified as politically unhelpful, and she was forbidden to publish any more of it. The ban was relaxed temporarily in 1940, but we need to remember that Akhmatova, as a poet, was never really allowed to function. She earned her living mainly from translation and journey-work in prose. (As a consequence, a threat in 1947 to expel her from the Writers' Union was tantamount to a sentence of death.) Praising Pushkin, as she did in the essay that mentioned his "lyrical wealth," was as close as she was allowed to get to saying something subversive. As it happened, it was permissible to place a value on a poet's specifically poetic gifts as long as the poet was accepted as exemplifying—or, in Pushkin's case, heralding—the correct political direction. If she had been caught even thinking about the "lyrical wealth" of, say, Osip Mandelstam, she would have been in even more trouble than usual. Osip Mandelstam had been murdered by Stalin in 1938. There had been a time when Osip, like most of the male poets of his generation, had been in love with Akhmatova. She had returned his affection, much to the annoyance of his wife Nadezhda, who, in her essential book _Hope Against Hope_ , can be found forgiving Akhmatova for alienating Osip's affections. Nadezhda Mandelstam knew that the glamorous Akhmatova, like Tolstoy's Natasha Rostova, needed to be adored: she was a vamp by nature. If there had been no revolution, Akhmatova could have made her seductive nature her subject, in the manner of Edna St. Vincent Millay but to even greater effect. History denied her the opportunity to sublimate her frailties. It made her a heroine instead. There were crueller fates available in Stalinist Russia, but that one was cruel enough.
What we have to grasp is that it needn't have happened to her. History needn't have been like that. That's what history is: the story of everything that needn't have been like that. We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more. For the Russians, Akhmatova was iconic not just for what she had done, but for the majesty of what she had not been allowed to do. An admirer of Akhmatova, the writer and intellectual Nina Berberova, left the Soviet Union in 1921, the very year that Gumilev was shot and Akhmatova was proscribed. Written in her last years, Berberova's delightful book about her life in the Russian emigration, _The Italics Are Mine_ (1991), traces the whole tragically fascinating experience of exile far into her old age (she died in America in 1993). In the book she tells the story of the Writers' Library, the bookshop in Moscow where the books of the old intelligentsia were traded for food after the Revolution. If there had been no revolution, the Writers' Library would have gone on being one of the most enchanting bookshops in the world. You could eat there, have a drink, write a poem, fall in love, and, above all, speak freely. It was a literary café. All too soon, there were no such places left in Russian cities. There was nowhere to lead the life of the mind except the mind. That thought would reduce us to despair if it were not for the evidence that humanist values are real, not notional: they persist even in conditions of calculated deprivation. 1947 was a particularly bad year for Akhmatova. Every effort was made to deprive her of almost everything except life. Yet she could call herself rich. With Pushkin to read, she still had "lyrical wealth." The belief that such wealth is our real and inextinguishable fortune is the belief behind this book.
PETER ALTENBERG
In the café life that was such a feature of old Vienna from before the turn of the nineteenth century until the triumph of the Nazis, Peter Altenberg (1859–1919) was the key figure. His name now is not much mentioned outside the German-speaking lands, but for all the greater names on the scene who went on to acquire international reputations, Altenberg remained a touchstone, perhaps partly because he knew no worldly success at all. He had been born into a prosperous family but chose to be a panhandler. To his fellow Jews he was a _Schnorrer_ : a borrower of money. He slept in flophouses and had no real address beyond his favourite café. But all the writers knew that he was carrying a treasure. He had an unrivalled capacity to pour a whole view of life, a few cupfuls at a time, into the briefest of paragraphs, and I am glad that his quotation appears so early on. It comes from an early World War I collection of his bits and pieces that I found in a warehouse on Staten Island in 1983, so when I sat down to read the book in a café on Columbus Avenue, this miniature masterpiece had been nearly seventy years on its journey before it hit me between the eyes like a micro-meteorite.
There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man: love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe. And that's already three things, and there are a lot more.
—PETER ALTENBERG, _F ECHSUNG_
ALTENBERG SPENT A lot of time scratching for a living, but when he wrote at all, he could write like that: a world view in two sentences. Sometimes he could do it in four words. One of Altenberg's many young loves had tearfully protested that his interest in her was based only ( _nur_ ) on sexual attraction. Altenberg asked, _"Was ist so nur?"_ (What's so only?) In Vienna before, during and after World War I, Altenberg was everybody's favourite scrounger, saloon barfly and no-hoper. Far outstripping him in prestige as recognized writers, Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal both admired him. So did Robert Musil. The supreme stylist Alfred Polgar—later acknowledged by even Thomas Mann as the greatest master of German in modern times—often acknowledged a creative debt to Alternberg and edited his unpublished papers after his death. Kafka said that Altenberg could discover "the splendours of this world like cigarette butts in the ashtrays of coffee houses." The great satirist Karl Kraus, himself a Jew but equivocal about it, suspended his usual intolerance of Jewish-born writers in Altenberg's case, treating his mentally unstable protégé with patience, love and financial support. All these established writers had talents big enough to light a fire. Altenberg produced only sparks, but the sparks were dazzling.
Not many of Alternberg's writings extended for more than a few paragraphs, scribbled at the café table in the intervals between cadging drinks. More diligent writers and intellectuals cherished him as their other, less trammelled self, devoid of ambition and the obligations of honesty. He was an ideal for men weighed down with ideals. Later on in New York, the semi-mythical Little Joe Gould was celebrated by E. E. Cummings and Joseph Mitchell for the same reason, with the difference that Little Joe Gould was always "working on" a magnum opus that would never see the light of day, whereas Altenberg was a real literary figure. In the late twentieth century, Jeffrey Bernard played the same part in London, but Bernard, by the end, was a man more written about than writing. Collections of Altenberg's scraps and shavings were published regularly, even during World War I, and café-based philosophers would quote the best bits.
Even by real scholars—the majestic polymath Egon Friedell was only one example—Altenberg was much envied as a Falstaffian scholar gypsy, and envied not least for his hit status with beautiful young women. His deadbeat eyes, drooping moustache and chaotic personal arrangements had their inevitable success with trainee bluestockings inexperienced enough to want the mature male artist of their dreams to look the part. Though he had a questionable taste for prostitutes, and an even more questionable taste for underage working-class girls, he did not withhold his attention from the aspiring young female intellectuals. Thus many a well-favoured daughter of good family was inveigled back to his cheap hotel by Altenberg, where she would find to her disillusionment that the scrutinizing of her poems was only the second item on his agenda. Altenberg sugared the pill for his male audience by making his amatory conquests sound like disasters, but nobody was fooled. As a literary stratagem, however, self-deprecation had the advantage of releasing him into comedy. With due allowance for the intervening ocean, he was Ring Lardner's equal in getting a lifetime of failure into a short written span. You would think that there could be no match for the compression of Lardner's question-and-answer dialogue about the family in the car (" 'Daddy, are we lost?' 'Shut up,' he explained"). But "What's so only?" is even neater. Altenberg amply fulfilled Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's requirement that the best writers should make passing remarks lesser spirits might turn into a book. Altenberg made nothing except the passing remarks. They were rarely aphorisms—too much like hard work—but they had resonance. "What's so only?" resonates. He says just that much, but he commands us to say more. The rest of the story is in our own heads. It might be continued as follows.
The saying goes that men play at love to get sex while women play at sex to get love. The second half of the antithesis is the more likely to be found interesting, because the first sounds closer to the truth. There are reasons, however, for questioning it further. Lenny Bruce said, "A man will fuck mud." He also said that a man will have sex with a venetian blind. He would not have got the laugh if it had not been a laugh of recognition. A lot of men will do a lot to get laid. But that doesn't necessarily mean they play at love. It seems far more likely that love plays with them. Theories of male genetic programming have long been under assault from feminists, who would like to believe that men's behaviour is socially determined, including the claims they make to be impelled by instinct. The belief is understandable and even commendable: justice benefits when a man can't blame biology after doing the wrong thing, even if it suffers when thinking the wrong thing becomes a crime too. But there can be no serious doubt, except from those who do not feel it, that the initial attraction of a man towards a woman is felt with the comprehensive force of a revelation. The sentimental view is not the romantic one, but the supposedly realistic one that love follows lust and grows through knowledge. It would be better for all concerned to admit that love hits with full force straight away.
Nor does the view that romantic love is a modern idea quite wash. Leaving aside Virgil's Dido and Aeneas, there is not much transcendental romantic love in Latin poetry. In Lucretius, lovers tear strips off each other, but with no hint of the spiritual either before or after. Propertius complained of how he was made to suffer. "Cynthia to my great undoing first ensnared me with her eyes / Though no other woman had ever touched me." Nobody was raised to a higher state unless you count Catullus, who, while he was clearly mad for women, never showed the same tenderness for any of them that he did for his dead brother. But there is at least one incandescent instance of it in Greek poetry, which came first. Troy burned because Paris was smitten by Helen's beauty: it is practically the first thing that happens in literature. It was to happen again often. David saw Bathsheba bathing and was ready to kill for her. The event is refined by Dante and Petrarch but the initial impact is the same: Beatrice, seen from a distance, inspires _The Divine Comedy_ , and Laura, never possessed, possesses the author throughout the cycle of the _Canzoniere_ , Petrarch's long series of incrementally varying viewpoints on the one event, written down as if he were walking very slowly around a diamond mounted for exhibition. And the two greatest Italian poets were not founding a tradition: they were giving a new impetus to one that already existed. The courtly love tradition, which has continued to our own day and at all levels—the most touching Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songs are about not getting the girl—has for its chief concern the stricken poet's _visione amorosa_ of the woman who remains unknown. Love has not been increased through intimacy with her qualities and might well, had it happened, have been reduced by it. (Until Carmen made his life hell, Don Jose thought she was heaven on earth.) In Shakespeare, the reward for adoration is the interchange of enchanted speech, and for possession it is trouble and death.
Donne and Marvell get the beloved into bed, but lavish all their lyricism on reassuring her that she remains as attractive as she was when she played it coy. Pope's poetry might seem to scorn courtly love, but the poet's mockery of trivial young ladies is a clear attempt to offset the boggling effect of their beauty on a mind deprived of the bodily means to do anything else about it. His prattling sweethearts are so interchangeable that a part will do for the whole. _The Rape of the Lock_ comes close to fetishism: a lock of hair has the same effect that a curved shape under the bed-covers had on Casanova if he thought it might be female. Pushkin felt the same way about a pretty woman's feet. Yeats, the great self-examining poet of modern times, fell in love often and with ease, granting his wife the cold comfort that he was unworthy of her steadfastness. On the strength of their appearance he would attribute qualities to his young companions that they did not really have: a common response, which would hardly happen unless the emotion were so complete in itself that the imagination had to be called in to help supply its object. The tendency for the love object to grow younger as the genius grows older was exemplified with embarrassing clarity by Goethe, who was in his seventy-fourth year when he fancied his chances with the nineteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow. The embarrassment was enormous, but one of the results of the embarrassment was the great poem we call "The Marienbad Elegy." The most intelligent man of his time was obviously in the grip of a soul-consuming passion that had not much to do with the intellect, which was an accomplice—he thought her mind as beautiful as her face—but scarcely the instigator. Instinct looks the more likely culprit: an instinct that can draw on the complete aesthetic apparatus of the brain. The greater the mind, the bigger the fool. Hazlitt's _Liber amoris_ is an anatomy of the subject: an operation on himself, without anaesthetic.
Men who fall in love easily and often should do the world the favour of not taking their own passions personally. Above all they should do that favour to womankind. Albert Camus, in the week before he was killed, wrote to five different women and addressed each of them as the great love of his life. He probably meant it every time, but had long ago learned the dire consequences for those he adored of making them pay the emotional price for his laughably transferable fixation. His women forgave him because his unforced charm was infinite and when it came to a scene he was ready to concede that he was frivolous. A realistic self-appraisal brought with it the blessing of a fair-minded benevolence: he might cast a pretty young actress in one of his plays because she had gained his favour, but he never threw one out because she had lost it. George Balanchine, pitiably, was less civilized. The great choreographer ruled the New York City Ballet as a feifdom, with the _droit de seigneur_ among his privileges. The older he became, the more consuming his love affairs with his young ballerinas. Often, by their own testimony, it was to their benefit, but his behaviour towards the sublimely gifted Suzanne Farrell was despicable. When Farrell fell in love with and married a young dancer, Balanchine dismissed her from the company, thereby injuring her career for a crucial decade. By the time she came back, it had become clear that he had injured his own as well. Still vivid in the dance world, the memory of Diaghilev's artistically ruinous paroxysm of jealousy about Nijinsky—previously Diaghilev's obedient lover, Nijinsky went straight in order to marry a ballerina, whereupon Diaghilev dismissed him from the company, thereby irretrievably weakening its future—should have told Balanchine he was making an unforgivable mistake. It probably did, but he made the mistake anyway. Balanchine being an undoubted genius, the fact that he could let even one among his many idealized passions dislocate his creativity is a sure measure of the brain-curdling intensity with which an old man can be drawn to a young woman. His great ballet for Farrell, _Don Quixote_ , in which he cast himself as the Don, was a clear attempt to lay the ghost. The _pas de deux_ in which the raddled hidalgo declares his hopeless love is sad beyond expression, although insufficiently expiatory: he should have lashed himself for penitence.
In our own day, Philip Larkin had the least courtly, or anyway least courtly-love, of mentalities: enslaving himself by handing his heart and soul to a female was the last thing on his mind. The submissiveness that began with the troubadors ended with him. When it came to love (or "love again" as he called it in his last years), he saved himself in advance, by writing a poem. Writing the poem was not his way in, it was his ticket out. But the revelatory power of love at first sight was one of his constant themes. "Latest face" meant what it said: just one more in a succession of beautiful faces was enough to make the whole tumult start again. Throughout history, all the literary evidence suggests that men are fools for beauty and will attribute every virtue to comeliness until experience disabuses them of the illusion. Acumen is no protection, because the initial effect is not assembled from particular judgements: it happens all at once, with the holistic suddenness of a baby reacting to its mother's voice. Female beauty has always been interpreted by men as the earthly incarnation of a divine benevolence. The occasional evil angel, from Salome to Kundry and from Lilith to Lulu, is a consciously perverse thematic variation, and would have no artistic value if the expectation were not the opposite. For men, the first and shamefully unthinking flood of worship is the opposite of casual. It is monumental, and Peter Altenberg got it in a phrase. What's so only? He had self-knowledge. He could have added the lack of it to his long list of the two things that can ruin a man's life.
LOUIS ARMSTRONG
Louis Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1900 and died at home in New York in 1971, having done, in the intervening years, as much as anyone since Lincoln to change the history of the United States. The theory that art can have no direct impact on politics has the advantage of staving off wishful thinking, but it takes a beating when you think of what Armstrong did, or helped to do. Jazz would not have been the same without him, and the whole artistic history of the United States in the twentieth century, quite apart from the country's political history leading up to the civil rights movement, would not have been the same without jazz. There was no easy conquest, and Armstrong himself was the object of prejudice right to the end. He had to be brave every night he went to work. All the more edifying, then, that he himself was colour-blind when it came to the music he had helped to invent.
Those pretty notes went right through me.
—LOUIS ARMSTRONG, TALKING ABOUT BIX BEIDERBECKE
BEFORE WE LET these words stir up bad memories, we should console ourselves with how they once started the long process of putting fallacies to rest. The first fallacy was that white men could not play jazz. Bix Beiderbecke was white; Louis Armstrong was the strongest creative force in the early history of the music; so if Armstrong thought this highly of Beiderbecke, it follows that at least one white man could play jazz. Everything was against Armstrong's forming an objective judgement. Armstrong had good cause to believe that jazz had been invented by black musicians, who had been systematically robbed of the rewards. Segregation dictated that it would have been inconceivable for Armstrong to hold Beiderbecke's chair with the touring orchestra of Paul Whiteman, whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against. Armstrong and Beiderbecke would never have been allowed to play together in public. The magnitude of the insult would have excused a bitter view. Yet Armstrong thought Beiderbecke was wonderful, and said so.
Nevertheless, and sometimes all the more, the fallacy lingered on until long after World War II. At Sydney University in the late fifties I was introduced to New Orleans jazz by well-heeled college students who had been brought up listening to the shellac record collections of their well-travelled fathers. These were still the early days of vinyl. The definitive Jelly Roll Morton LP had just come out and was used as a teaching aid by proselytes for New Orleans jazz, with the Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Hot Seven collections waiting further up the line for advanced students. It was held to be axiomatic that you had to appreciate the drive and syncopation of Morton's Red Hot Peppers playing "Black Bottom Stomp" and "The Chant" before you could move on to the challenging, ensemble-shattering solo subtleties of Armstrong playing "West End Blues." It went without question that jazz was black music. One of the set books of our informal jazz faculty actually said so: _Shining Trumpets_ by Rudi Blesh. In retrospect, Blesh's book is a touching example of inverse racism: a white scholar, himself from a beleaguered minority, he was claiming, on behalf of blacks, exclusive rights to an art form. The white clarinettist Mezz Mezzrow had done the same by immersing himself in a black culture: he did everything but black up. It was Jim Crow in reverse. Mezzrow's barely coherent book _Really the Blues_ was on the course. Fated to supply the dull passages in some of the finest records Sidney Bechet ever made, Mezzrow was an average player and a worse than average writer, but his sacrificial passion was food for thought.
Unfortunately the thought was likely to be scrambled by self-indulgent, unearned empathy. The emotion was admirable—disgust at racial inequality—but the speculative edifice that arose from it was painfully shaky on its base. Later on, Terry Southern questioned even the emotion, when he wrote a short story about a white jazz fan trying to make up for his inadequacies by hanging out with the black musicians. But it didn't need Southern to put the whole idea into doubt. The idea was Jim Crow—white prejudice against blacks—stood on its head, and would have seemed so from the beginning if there had not been such a concerted effort on the part of white liberal commentators to play a role in fighting Jim Crow when it was standing the right way up. The effort was commendable, but it depended on the suppression of evidence. Black creativity in jazz was everything the inverted racists said it was, and more. But white creativity was real, and could be discounted only at the cost of obfuscation—a high price to pay for feeling virtuous. By the end of my Sydney University years, the pre-war Benny Goodman small group recordings had been collected onto an LP and were among my regular listening. The crisp ensemble playing and the lilting sequences of short solos were just as dazzling as anything from Morton or Armstrong. Goodman was white. End of argument. But the argument had been over for more than thirty years. It was over when Armstrong went to hear Beiderbecke at the Savoy. If Armstrong hadn't known something was up, he would never have gone.
Even without Armstrong's generous testimony, it would be foolish to admit unquestioned the assumption of automatic black supremacy in a given musical art-form. It cuts out too much white achievement. You can still hear, from black ideologues and their white sympathizers, that Fred Astaire couldn't really dance. He is held not to have possessed the proper, syncopated improvisational skills of Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, who could lead and drag the beat with different strata of his body simultaneously. There might be something to it. Astaire rarely swayed a hip. Even in mid-miracle, the armature of his body was upright: underneath, he was strictly ballroom. But when you consider what Astaire could do, the idea that he should be measured by what he couldn't is absurd. It should have been patently absurd, but there was a political aspect, which applied beyond the kingdom of the dance to the world of American music in general. White men were in control, and they robbed the blacks. Armstrong never saw a dollar of royalties from all his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings: there were more than sixty of them, they sold in the millions, but for too much of the rest of his life they didn't save him from a single week of one-night stands. His Hollywood earnings bought him the occasional vacation, but the royalties from his early masterpieces never materialized.
The white men not only took the money, they took the opportunites. Bojangles never got the chance to be Fred Astaire. Billie Holiday bravely refused the demeaning coon-turn roles that Hollywood offered her. On top of the ravages of her abused childhood, her frustrations as an artist drove her to drugs, and her whole tragedy—the tragedy of black talent in a white business—was part of the picture evoked by her signature tune "Strange Fruit." The song is about lynch law but so was her life. Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Charlie Christian—you could make a long list of victims just on the level of genius, let alone of mere talent. Even when you take due note of the equally long list of those who never lost control of their lives—Ella Fitzgerald is a long list all by herself—the cruel scope of the injustice still shrieks to heaven. The joy of the music is populated with unsleeping ghosts, and anyone who doesn't see them isn't using his eyes. But it's a bad reason not to use our ears, which will hear, if we let them, an awkward truth. Nothing can redress the flagrant inequalities of the past.
We can, however, refrain from compounding the insult. A man like Benny Goodman, for example, can't possibly be fitted into a schematic history that would base itself on the white exploitation of a black invention. He carried within himself the only answer to the conflict, and, as things have turned out, he presaged the outcome: a measure of tolerance and mutual respect, and at least a step towards a colour-blind creative world. He was born as poor as any black; he was Chicago, meat-packing poor; as poor as you could get. Being white, he was able to translate his prodigious talent into economic power: the very power to which black musicians, however successful, were always denied access. But Goodman used his power to break the race barrier. Though his mixed small groups existed mainly in the recording studios and only rarely on stage—the Carnegie Hall appearance with Count Basie was strictly an interlude—the music they made was the emblem of a political future, and in the aesthetic present it was a revelation. It is still a revelation, because in aesthetics the present is the only tense there is. There will always be a few diehards who deduce from those three-minute masterworks that Goodman's clarinet was metronomic compared to Charlie Christian's guitar. But the diehards were born dead. They have had no living thing to say since Armstrong heard Beiderbecke's pretty notes and saluted an equal.
If the two avatars had the same stature, how could they sound so different? It raises another question. Armstrong, with everything against him, knew how to lead an ordered life. Beiderbecke put as much energy into self-destruction as into creation. His father didn't want him to play jazz. Trying to prove to his father that his music would get him somewhere, the prodigal son sent home copies of all his records. His father never listened to them. You could call that a psychological obstacle: but there were no other obstacles that began to compare with what Armstrong had to put up with every day. The main reason Beiderbecke could not stop drinking was that he was an alcoholic. His short adult life was a long suicide. But the cautionary tale had an awkward corollary: his underlying melancholy got into his tone, and helped to make it unmistakable. Armstrong could play blues with unmatched inventiveness, but his soul moved in jump-time: a sharp, staccato attack was basic to him. Crackling excitement was his natural mode. Beiderbecke, on the other hand, was blue to the roots. Even his upbeat solos were saturated with prescient grief, and the slow numbers remind you of Ford Madox Ford's catchline for _The Good Soldier_ : this is the saddest story ever told.
I listened to most of Beiderbecke's Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman sides before I left Sydney (even the most fanatical New Orleans purists among my friends seemed to have them on hand), but it wasn't until I was down and out in London in the early 1960s that I first heard "I'm Coming, Virginia." An Australian homosexual ballet buff—a lot of Australian homosexuals were still prudently sending themselves into exile in those days—persuaded me to sit down and listen to a piece of music he held to be the most beautiful thing in his life: better even than _Swan Lake_. (I wonder if he lived long enough to see _Swan Lake_ danced by boys: I hope so.) For a while "I'm Coming, Virginia"—I used to make rude jokes about the title, but they conveyed my appreciation—became the most beautiful thing in my life too. The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping. Armstrong could probably have done that too, but he didn't want to. He wasn't like that. Beiderbecke was, always: his loveliest-ever outpouring was an example of the artistic freedom that can be attained through being trapped in a personality. Perhaps for personal reasons, I took it as an encouragement. I wanted to write prose sentences that way, and lines of poetry: as a shining sequence of desolate exuberance, of playful grief. I loved the spareness of his technique: a wordless song with one note per syllable and no lapses into mere virtuosity. It helped me to conceive the notion that the only permissible obscurity is an excess of vividness, or the suggestive hiatus that comes from removing the connecting tissue between transparencies. In my last two years before I left Sydney I had moved on to bebop and modern jazz in general, but although I tried to enjoy some of the headlong _sprezzatura_ stuff I always thought that it was only in the slow numbers that the virtuosi really showed what they could do. I liked it best when Thelonious Monk dragged his hands like tired feet in "Round Midnight," and my favourite Charlie Parker number was the last-ditch, half-ruined but drenchingly lyrical "My Old Flame." At Cambridge I was still listening to that one almost every night.
Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer's ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his rebuilt motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie. Jazz was a brimming reservoir of these contending qualities. Eventually I was listening to so much classical music that I left jazz aside, but I never thought that I had left it behind. Later on, when I took holidays from classical music, it was Tin Pan Alley and Broadway that attracted me, and there were years on end when I listened to everything happening in pop and rock. The second lustrum of the sixties was a particularly good time for that: you could slide a coin into a jukebox and hear Marvin Gaye singing "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," and wonder whether there had ever been, or would ever be again, anything quite so addictive as the triumphal march of a Tamla anthem.
Jazz, however, was always there underneath all that, and begging to be revisited. I couldn't muster an affection for John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins—I don't think I was meant to—but the tradition that led up to them still had many glories to reveal. The great period of Duke Ellington was a constellation of glories that made Berg and Webern seem very thin gruel. Listening on the same day to the Lester Young quintet and a string quintet by Ravel, I could hear no incongruity: they seemed comparable events to me, although there was not much evidence at the time to suggest that the same was true for anybody else. Such catholicity of taste has only recently become respectable. At the time when the divinely gifted and cruelly doomed cellist Jacqueline du Pré was breaking our hearts with Elgar, the boys around her were thought rather daring when they vamped and jammed a few jazz figures on their strings. But the argument about a supposed hierarchy of genres would have continued much longer if Leonard Bernstein had not put a stop to it. In the first chapter of his television series about music, after giving brief, instantly enchanting examples from the classical repertoire, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, rock and pop, he said the only thing that mattered: "I love it all." He had jazz in his blood. His show song "Lonely Town" is a melody that Bix Beiderbecke would have loved to play, and it would not have been composed in quite the same way if the broken heroes of jazz had not first lived their dangerous lives. The paradox was that the most persuasive witness to the lyrical distillation of Bix's broken life, Louis Armstrong, was a man whose life was never broken, even by the full force of America's most tenacious social malignancy, white prejudice. If it is a political nightmare no longer, Armstrong's shining trumpet certainly contributed to the wake-up call. But there is only so much art can do against injustice, and the blues, from which jazz took flight, were an embodiment of the sad truth that much beauty begins as a consolation for what can't be mended.
RAYMOND ARON
Raymond Aron (1905–1983) began as a sociologist but made it clear from the start that the subject would not restrict him to social facts. Instead, it would release him into political analysis, and from there into general philosophy on the scale of Durkheim, Pareto and Max Weber. The strength of his voluminous theoretical work, however, would always be that his wider views were backed up by minutely observed concrete detail: his journalism was his bedrock. One of the few French thinkers who were equally at home in Germany, he saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse. As George Orwell did later, Aron realized that the professed enemy of Nazi totalitarianism was itself totalitarian. He carried this insight with him into exile in London during World War II.
After the war, he emerged as the great opponent of the French left wing, and especially of its most illustrious figurehead, Jean-Paul Sartre. Beyond their respective deaths, the contest between the two great names continued to define the frontiers of argument in French political thought right up to recent times. "Better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron" is still meant to be a slogan testifying to political seriousness, rather than to intellectual suicide. For French _gauchiste_ thinkers, even after they had given up hope on the Soviet Union, liberal democracy was fundamentally suspect because it had capitalism for an economic motor. For Aron, liberal democracy was the only way ahead to social justice: it could be, and had to be, criticized in detail, but never dismissed in its entirety. Since ideologists of every stamp would always attempt to do so, that made ideology itself the perpetual enemy of realism. Liberal democracy, based on an historic consciousness, could afford to reveal even the most unpalatable truths, whereas ideology was bound to conceal them. Of the comparatively small proportion of Aron's enormous body of work that has been translated into English, _The Opium of the Intellectuals_ (1955) can still be regarded as the best introduction to his thought, and indeed to modern intellectual history in its entirety. For readers of French, he can be met more briefly, but almost as effectively, in _Le Spectateur engagé_ (1981), a long interview of the type that French publishers do so well.
. . . the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity's imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state.
—RAYMOND ARON, _L' OPIUM DES INTELLECTUELS, P_. 292
SUCH WAS THE central belief that put Aron on a collision course with all the radical thinkers in Paris after World War II. He couldn't have put it more clearly; and if he couldn't, nobody could. Essayists who stake everything on writing the kind of spangled style that glitters in the limelight near the top of the tent must sometimes wish, as they sweat to keep a sentence alive, that the tightrope could be laid out along the ground. There are essayists who write plainly and yet are duller still because of it. But the most enviable essayists are those who can write plainly and generate an extra thrill from doing so, demonstrating a capacity to clarify an intricate line of thought in their heads before laying it out sequentially on the page. Always matching a decorum of procedure to their weight of argument, they can make the more spectacular practitioner look meretricious. Foremost among these cool masters of expository prose must be ranked Raymond Aron.
Most of Aron's vast output remains untranslated in the original French, but enough of his books have been brought into English to give some idea of his importance, and some of those books are indispensable—most prominently _The Opium of the Intellectuals_ , which remains to this day, after all the years since it first appeared in 1955, the best debunking of Marxism as a theology, and the most piercing analysis of why that theology, during the twentieth century, should have had so pervasive and baleful an influence in the free nations. Even now, every first-year university student in the world should read that book, if only because the poised force of Aron's prose style gives such a precise idea of the strength and passion of the consensus he was trying to rebut.
It should be said straight away that his clarity of view was not attained from a right-wing viewpoint. Though many a prominent figure of international anti-communism paid tribute to him after his death—Henry Kissinger, McGeorge-Bundy, Norman Podhoretz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were among the Americans who acknowledged his example—Aron himself began on the left and stayed there until the end. But he was always disgusted by the thirst of putatively humanitarian intellectuals for the lethal certitudes of Marxist dogma. As early as the 1950s he was proclaiming the need for a new party, _de la gauche non conformiste_. A sizeable party of the nonconformist left never really arrived, but the massed ranks of the conformist left were not fond of the idea that somebody so prominent had called for one. Many of his fellow French intellectuals never forgave him for his heresy. (Sartre, who respected Aron's credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.) A few of them were grateful, and they were among the best. Jean-François Revel, François Furet, Alain Finkielkraut and the small handful of other French writers on politics who have managed to defend their independence of thought while surrounded by a tenaciously lingering pseudo-progressive consensus have all had Raymond Aron as a forebear, and have usually been polite enough to acknowledge his pioneering faith in the strength, and not just the virtues, of liberal democracy.
There had always been plenty of intellectuals ready to pay lip service to the virtues, but they doubted the strength. Because, from the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute power—the Soviet brand—could fill the vacuum. The erroneous view that the Red Army had won the war all on its own helped to reinforce this illusion. In Czechoslavakia, in 1948, the same misguided humility led the whole liberal intelligentsia to abdicate from its responsibilities in advance. It never came to that in France, but it came close enough. At this distance it is hard to conjure up just how thick and poisonous a miasma of bad faith a man like Aron was trying to fight his way through, and just how honest, patient and brave he had to be in order to do so. He succeeded in the end. Though the French will probably go on thinking proudly of Sartre as the Victor Hugo of political philosophy—the most mentions, the most mistresses, the biggest funeral—Aron's name is nowadays quite often invoked by those who believe that there is an alternative to getting everything brazenly wrong. The alternative is to get a few things modestly right. Bernard-Henri Lévy will probably not find it expedient to drop his posturing slogan that it was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron, but to the extent that Levy's political arguments are considerable, he sounds like Aron, not Sartre.
Aron is consequently the best reason for continuing to think of Paris as a capital city of political philosophy. As a Jew, he would not have survived the German Occupation long had he remained in France. Any possible illusion about what the Nazis were up to had been removed for him when he stood beside the historian Golo Mann in the Berlin Operplatz in 1933 and watched the storm troopers burn books. But when the Nazis reached Paris, Aron exemplified the one advantage of being a designated victim. His moral choice was made for him, and he could spend the war in London, with a relatively clear conscience. Sartre and Camus were only two of the many thinkers about politics who, being gentiles, could stay in Paris and think about politics there if they chose. It was a dubious privilege. The Nazis, operating with a subtlety rare for them, managed to corrupt nearly everyone in the Parisian literary world to some degree. The essential trick was to offer the intellectuals the opportunity to continue their careers if they kept their protests suitably muted. The first result was a widespread but tacit collaboration. The less common, overt collaboration could safely be denounced when the Germans packed up and ran. Claiming to be the instruments of _l'Épuration_ (the Purification), self-appointed tribunals—"tribunal" is always a bad word in French history—dealt out the punishment. Such blatant collaborators as Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle had been asking for it, and one way or another they got it. But many of the denouncers had themselves collaborated in a less flagrant way. A pervasive sense of having been implicated, however passively, led to the second result: a long silence that really amounted to a cover-up.
What really happened under the Occupation is a story that, even sixty years later, is still coming out. For decades it didn't come out at all. The first accounts of any scope didn't appear until the 1980s, and the general conclusions have not yet been fully drawn. But one of them should be that the Propaganda Abteilung (Propaganda Division, also often called the Propaganda Staffel) succeeded in its main aim. Apart from the brave few who went underground and fought at the risk of their lives, the French intellectuals gave the Nazis little trouble, and were morally compromised as a consequence. Not even Camus, a writer whose stature depended on his very real capacity for translating his ideals of authenticity into action, was entirely untouched. But at least Camus had the grace to admit that his Resistance activities had not amounted to much, and at least he had the humanity to deplore the excesses of the post-Liberation witch-hunt against the more shameless collaborators. Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own. The sad truth was that he, even more conspicuously than Camus, owed his wartime fame as a writer and thinker to Nazi tolerance, for which a price had to be paid. The price was to lace one's eloquence with a judiciously timed silence. The trick was to pay up and make it look like compulsion. So it was, but only if you considered your career as indispensable—something artists find it all too easy to do. They are even encouraged to, in the name of an ideal.
When you consider the mental calibre of the people involved, Paris under the Occupation thus becomes the twentieth century's premier field of study in which to reach the depressing conclusion that even the most liberal convictions buckle very easily under totalitarian pressure, unless there are extraordinary reserves of character to sustain them. The further consideration—that to deplore the absence of such fortitude might be illiberal in itself—is more depressing still, but should be faced. Apart from permanent outsiders such as homosexuals, petty thieves, and the very poor, only young people on their own had a real opportunity to be brave under the Occupation, and even they had to be saints to take it when death was the likely result. Behind the Nazi show of tact in Paris was the threat of absolute violence. The threat rarely had to be made actual. The threatened were too smart. Their smartness was well-known to the Nazis who ran the show, some of whom were great admirers of French culture. Receptions were held regularly at that most fashionable of restaurants, the Tour d'Argent. French cultural figures who turned up met Nazis who seemed well aware that Cocteau was more refined than anything they had at home. Cocteau, who attended more than once, was slow to realize that once should have been enough.
Wartime Paris was a moral crucible. Aron was out of it, and we don't even have to ask ourselves how he would have behaved had he been in it. (We have to ask ourselves about ourselves, but not about him.) He would have been dead. Untouched and untainted in England, he could prepare his comeback. He came back as a commentator in the newspapers and magazines, deploying his rare gift of making a nuanced, learned and unfailingly critical analysis attractive as journalism. Because of him, the advocates of the seductive fantasy that the imperialism of the West was the most ruthless imperialism affecting Europe did not have it all their own way. But it took a long, hard slog before the illusion began to be dispelled that somehow Sartre was the serious thinker about politics and Aron the dilettante. At the heart of the anomaly was the almost universally shared assumption that those who favoured the declaredly progressive consensus were working for the betterment of mankind, while those who believed that liberal democracy was a better bet were working against it. Helping to make Aron even more unpalatable to the entrenched pseudo-left was his expertise in sociology: he actually knew something, for example, about how industries ran, how houses got built, and how ordinary people earned the money to pay for their groceries. A respect for humble fact is one of the qualities that keep his prose permanently fresh. He could, alas, be very grand. All too often, and especially towards the end, he was a bit too fond of drawing himself up to his full height. But he never lost contact with the earth. He never lost sight of the imperfection that debars mankind from utopia.
Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth.
—RAYMOND ARON, L'OPIUM DES INTELLECTUELS, P. 144
After World War II, Raymond Aron was the French philospher who did most to offset the more famous Jean-Paul Sartre's support for communism. Albert Camus tried to offset it also, but his scholarly qualifications were held to be dubious. Nobody doubted Aron's. From the moment he published _L'Opium des intellectuels_ in 1955, the French left-wing thinkers knew that they had a real fight on their hands. They didn't give up easily. Some of them still haven't. Aron was obliged to go on plugging away at the same theme. He had already said, before the war, that the Communist version of socialism was a secular religion. What remains puzzling is why he said so little about it while the war was on. Self-exiled to London, he wrote a long series of brilliant articles for the Free French periodical _La France Libre_ , which were collected after the victory into three books, nowadays themselves collected into a single volume, _Chroniques de guerre_. In the entire text, Stalin is mentioned exactly twice, and neither time derogatively. Writing in the same city at the same time, George Orwell risked his reputation and income by insisting on a distinction between the Red Army, which was making such a great contribution to defeating Hitler, and the lethal regime behind it, which was bent on the extinction of all human values. Why did Aron not do something similar?
Perhaps the best answer is that he considered himself debarred from attacking an ally. Most of the damning analysis he made of Hitlerite tyranny could have been transferred with equal validity to Stalin, but for Aron to have explicitly done so would have detracted from his first object as a French patriot and as a Jew—the defeat of Nazi Germany. As it happened, Aron underestimated the effects of Vichy's enthusiastic collaboration with the occupying power on the Jewish Question. (In reality, there never was such a question, hence the capital "Q": an early instance of falsification through typography.) Never a true pessimist, although always pessimistic enough to be a realist, Aron was not equipped by temperament to guess that a Final Solution was under way. But he had no illusions about the essential barbarity of Nazi anti-Semitic policies and the general nihilism of the assault on humanism by the psychotic authoritarian right—he hadn't since well before the day he stood with Golo Mann and watched the Nazis burn the books. As a man who loved France, he condemned the Vichy regime first of all for the false patriotism which allowed it to participate in the Nazi attack on the very thing that made French civilization what it was: its humanist heritage. Hence his reluctance to make distinctions between the various columns of the Resistance, one of the most prominent of which, after June 1941 at any rate, was Communist. He believed in de Gaulle, but not enough to disbelieve that the Communist _résistants_ had earned a hearing. Nevertheless, after the Liberation, he could be heard—and can still be heard, in _"L'Avenir des religions séculaires"_ (The Future of the Secular Religions), one of the last chapters of _Chroniques de guerre_ —reminding himself and his readership that, despite the immense prestige won by the Red Army for Stalin's regime and the people of the Soviet Union, a system of belief which confused the desirable and the inevitable was still a dogma.
As the war came to an end, Aron, who was always a liberal more on the left than those on the left were liberal, was convinced that some form of socialism would be bound to prevail in all the European countries. He just didn't want any of those forms to be totalitarian. When it became rapidly more apparent that a different view prevailed in the Kremlin, he prepared himself to write _L'Opium des intellectuels_. Acting more from artistic intuition than solid study, the scholastically unqualified but piercingly sympathetic Camus anticipated Aron's central precepts by four years with the relevant chapters of _L'Homme révolté_ ( _The Rebel_ ), but Aron's is incomparably the more coherent work. Camus had appropriated much of his knowledge of Soviet reality from Arthur Koestler, along with the warm attentions of Koestler's wife. Aron had done his own research, in a colder archive. Camus's book was part of his romance, along with the vilification that it attracted. (The starting gun for the vilification was fired by Sartre, who tried to counter his upstart protégé's arguments by discrediting his qualifications: a reflex among established gurus that we should learn to look out for.) Aron's book was an impersonal treatise much harder to criticize in detail. The English translation, _The Opium of the Intellectuals_ , was meticulously carried out by the doyen of London literary editors, Terence Kilmartin, who did for Aron's prose what he later did for Proust's—he caught its measure, which in Aron's case was always, throughout his career, the measure of sobriety, comprehensive sanity, and a sad but resolute acknowledgement of history's intractable contingency. Kilmartin himself thought that Aron in his old age overdid the last quality. One day in the Black Friars pub near _The Observer's_ old location at the foot of Ludgate Hill, and long before I knew that Kilmartin had been the English translator of _L'Opium des intellectuels_ , I was loudly praising Aron—at that stage I had read about three of his books out of thirty—when Kilmartin warned me that my new hero had become, in his declining years, so cautious about social innovation that he was "a bit, um, _right wing."_ Kilmartin remained "a bit left wing" until his dying day: a proper ideal for a generous man, and one to copy.
In the course of the last forty years, the only part of the world that has enjoyed peace is the continent divided between two zones of political civilization both of them armed with atomic bombs.
—RAYMOND ARON, _L ES DERNIÈRES ANNÉES DU SIÈCLE_ (THE LAST YEARS OF THE CENTURY), P. 68
It was always a bad mistake to suppose that Aron was some kind of Gallic Dr. Strangelove who had learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. The contrary was true: the annihilation of the defenceless was at the centre of his worries. The point to grasp is that he had already seen it happen. Hitler had dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb on at least six million perfectly innocent people—a weapon more than sixty times more powerful than the one that obliterated Hiroshima. Stalin had dropped the equivalent of an atomic bomb a hundred times more powerful on his own citizens. Those bombs had gone off in comparative silence, but Aron had understood the repercussions. For an era in which mass extermination was already not just a possibility but a reality, he presciently drew the conclusion that mutual assured destruction would be the only possible guarantee against disaster. Arguments that it was a guarantee for disaster did not impress him. Hence he was free from the debilitating impulse to warn the world that the arms race was dangerous. Obviously it was: too obviously to need pointing out. While whole generations of intellectuals on the left exhausted their thin talents in an effort to say something that Kate Bush couldn't sing—she, too, daringly believed that a nuclear weapon was an offence against love and peace—Aron occupied himself with the more useful task of examining the peace that had finally come to Europe, guaranteed at last by no further armed conflict being possible, no matter how thoroughly each side might plan for just such an eventuality. In fact the more concretely they planned, the more the possibility retreated into the notional. Political conflict, however, was clear-cut as never before, and here, for once, Marx was proved right. Economics determined the outcome.
The conflict began and ended in Berlin, with not a shot fired except against unarmed people attempting to cross the killing zone between East and West. Nobody was ever shot trying to cross from West to East. When the Wall went up in 1961, its creators called it the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier. There were no longer any fascists who mattered, but the need for protection was real. East Germany, and by extension the Warsaw Pact countries taken as a totality, all had to protect themselves against the glare from the shop windows of West Berlin. Soviet bloc propaganda, faithfully echoed by _gauchiste_ theorists in the West, asserted from the beginning that a free Berlin could not be free at all: its materialist attractiveness was being artificially enhanced by American imperialism as a forward outpost of West Germany, which, in its turn, had been artificially bolstered by the Marshall Plan as a capitalist armed camp. In actuality, the _Bundesrepublik_ would have outperformed the German Democratic Republic whatever the circumstances, merely through its not being burdened with a centralized economy. The propaganda was a fantastic response to a real and potentially lethal threat, already identified by Stalin before 1948, when he made his one and only military move: an armed blockade. Without the resulting Berlin airlift, he would have succeeded in reducing the city by starving and freezing its inhabitants—methods to whose human consequences he had already proved himself indifferent when applying them on a much larger scale against his own people.
Plane-loads of food and coal were the Allied response, which could not have been mounted without the threat of atomic war to back it up. When Stalin lifted the blockade, his battle was lost and the war along with it. From then on, the armed aggression of the East German regime was against its own citizens. In 1953, they had to be put down with tanks. The Wall was put up because too many of them had fled: East Germany was dying from its brain-drain. The Wall ensured only that it would die more slowly, from envy. The confrontation over a divided Berlin, a divided Germany and a divided Europe was one long war, which at any previous point in history would unquestionably have been fought with weapons. It was called the Cold War mainly in derision, by those who had managed to convince themselves that it was all an American idea. But Aron was surely right to view as peace a war in which the winning side made every effort not to fire a shot, and the losing side could have no recourse to its weapons even in despair. There were many thinkers who disagreed with him over the issue, especially among the French left. But he had more trouble with agreement from the right. He succeeded in detaching himself, however, from the addled notion that the long drawn out defeat suffered by the Soviet bloc was a victory for the American Way of Life. He was too clear-sighted for that, and the triumph of his lifetime's effort as a writer on politics was to demonstrate that the believer in liberal democracy, and not the believer in an autocratic utopia, is the one with the hard head. By now everybody realizes that the West's material abundance was decisive. Aron was the first to realize that the fight would have to be without weapons. That was what he really meant by his famous slogan "Peace impossible, war unlikely." He meant that there could be no settled peace without the threat of war, but that the war would probably not happen, and as long as it didn't there was a kind of peace anyway: the only kind available at the time.
An aggressor would not be able to destroy them without killing American personnel, which is to say, without running a grave danger of reprisals.
—RAYMOND ARON, _P AIX ET GUERRE ENTRE LES NATIONS_, QUOTED IN _L ES DERNIÈRES ANNÉES DU SIÈCLE_
Aron's _Realpolitik_ was distinguished by being real, as Realpolitik in the strict sense rarely is. When he reminds us of Machiavelli, he reminds us of Machiavelli's truly hard-headed style, and not of the would-be hard-headedness of his political philosophy—a philosophy that was essentially nihilistic. Machiavelli, perhaps encouraged into admiration by the ruthlessness with which the Medicis would eventually rack him, wrote an invitation to despotism. Aron was writing a prescription for democracy. But the prescription had to include a realistic assessment of the totalitarian challenge (a menace even though the opportunists who made a career from opposing it amounted to a menace in themselves) and in that department realism had to include an acknowledgement that a nuclear confrontation between West and East could not be wished away. In this particular passage, he makes a point which was so antipathetic to the proponents of unilateral disarmament that they were obliged to rewrite history in order to circumvent it.
European countries _wanted_ American atomic bombs based on their soil, not just to fulfil their NATO obligations but because the weapons were accompanied by American personnel. A Soviet strike against the weapons would thus constitute an attack on the United States, which would be unable to remain uninvolved in the conflict. Hence there could be no localized nuclear exchange: only a global one. Unilateralists, unable to accept that it was in the interests of a European country to play host to American nuclear weapons, were obliged to argue that they were an imposition. By extension, this argument fitted a picture in which the U.S.A. was an imperialist presence in Western Europe, like the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. (Even further to the left lay the belief that the U.S.A. was the _only_ imperialist presence in Europe, the Soviet Union acting merely as a protective power against the further encroachment of a capitalist hegemony.) At this distance it is difficult to appreciate how thoroughly Aron's position went against the general trend of liberal sympathies. Stated on its own, this one point was enough to make him sound like Edward Teller, whose political programme—which had only parodic relevance to his practical ability as a scientist—amounted to building bigger and bigger bombs, and digging deeper and deeper holes in which to hide from the consequences. Teller being the principal model for Dr. Strangelove, it became easy to hint that Aron might share the same enthusiasms, even though his own right hand showed no tendency to shoot spontaneously skyward.
But Aron was right, and the effort the USSR made to back the unilateral nuclear disarmament movement in Europe proves it. With the American weapons in place, the USSR was unable to contemplate exerting military pressure in Western Europe in any circumstances. In _Paix et guerre_ Aron made many other points of similarly unpalatable realism, the whole tract adding up to an advance on Clausewitz (one of Aron's passions: he wrote a two-volume commentary), in which Clausewitz's connection between diplomacy and war was extended into a further connection between perpetually imminent total war and the only possible form of peace—an armed truce. That the armed truce included an arms race was incidental, because the high cost was merely material, whereas the price of a shoot-out would have been the loss of everything. Salvation lay in the obviousness of this latter point to all. Aron's conclusion was an epigram: "Peace impossible, war unlikely." But it is the way his whole argument is laid out that needs to be appreciated. He was fully aware of the bitter irony inherent in reaching such a position from humanist principles, but he saw no paradox in the irony: if there was an apparent contradiction, history had enforced it. A real contradiction would have been to disarm in the hope that moral superiority would have prevailed. For Aron, such trust would have flown in the face of his basic geopolitical precept, which he held to be true for all time: that the nation states are in a state of nature with one another. It would also have flouted his reading of contemporary history, in which totalitarian nation states were bound to find it intolerable to cohabit with democracies unless forced to by the inevitable consequences of failing to contain their patience.
Personality affects thought—or at any rate affects the train of thought—and there can be no doubt that Aron's quiet but considerable _amour propre_ got a boost from his being the only one in step. Near the end of his life, when his views became less unfashionable, he was at his least decisive. Jean-François Revel, recalling, in his book of memoirs _Le Voleur dans la maison vide_ (The Thief in the Empty House), his time as editor of _L'Express_ , complains sharply about the senescent vacillations of the paper's most distinguished contributor. Old men with many laurels often use them to lie down in. Aron was at his best when out of the swim, saying hard things—hard things that were made harder to say because they superficially echoed the unthinking right. During the war, for example, he had been no toady for de Gaulle, but when de Gaulle, in 1963, came back to supremacy on the promise to keep Algeria and then promptly gave it away, Aron clearly enjoyed saying that only de Gaulle possessed what the Fourth Republic had lacked, _L'héro sme de L'abandon_—the bravery to renounce ( _Démocratie et totalitarisme_ , p. 11). There was always an element of sombre relish, of hushed gusto, in Aron's readiness to puncture liberal assumptions. But he himself was the very model of the liberal, and those on the left who persisted in believing that liberal democracy was itself ideological were bound to despise him, because he was the one who proved it wasn't. Liberal democracy was, and is, reality. No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness. Only realism can, and Raymond Aron's long shelf of lucid books will always be there to tell us why.
B
Walter Benjamin
Marc Bloch
Jorge Luis Borges
Robert Brasillach
Sir Thomas Browne
WALTER BENJAMIN
Walter Benjamin was born in Wilhelmine Berlin in 1892 and committed suicide on the Spanish border in 1940, almost within sight of safety. In the 1960s, when his work as a critic began to appear in English, he was hailed as an original contributor to the assessment of the position of the arts in modern industrial society, and by now he is taken for granted as one of the early giants of Theory, that capitalized catch-all term which is meant to cover all the various ways of studying the arts so as to make the student feel as smart as the artist. Benjamin is above all taken for granted as a precursor of post-modernism. It remains sadly true, however, that he is more often taken for granted than actually read. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is the Benjamin essay that everybody knows a little bit about. Whether its central thesis is true is seldom questioned, just as the value of his work as a whole is seldom doubted. His untimely death was such a tragedy that nobody wants to think of his life as less than a triumph. But there had already been many thousands of Jewish tragedies before his turn came, and what is remarkable for the historically minded observer is just how slow so brilliant a man was to get the point about what the Nazis had in mind. About the other tragedy, the one in Russia, he never got the point at all. This might seem an unpitying line to take, as well as a presumptuous one. Reinforced by the impressive density of his prose style, Benjamin's intellectual status is monumental, and it is bathed in the awful light of his personal disaster. As a critic devoted to the real, however, Benjamin deserves the courtesy of not being treated as a hero in a melodrama.
Far from inaugurating a purer sphere, the mythic manifestation of immediate violence shows itself fundamentally identical with all legal violence, and turns suspicion concerning the latter into certainty of the perniciousness of its historical function, the destruction of which thus becomes obligatory.
—WALTER BENJAMIN, _S ELECTED WRITINGS_, VOL. 1, 1913–1926, P. 249
BUT LET'S BREAK the flow of eloquent opacity at that point and ask ourselves about its author. The essay is called "A Critique of Violence" and yields a lot more in the same strain. With Benjamin, "strain" was the operative word. Part of his sad fate has been to have his name bandied about the intellectual world without very many of its inhabitants being quite sure why, apart from the vague idea that he was a literary critic who somehow got beyond literary criticism: he got up into the realm of theory, where critics rank as philosophers if they are hard enough to read. Clever always, he was clear seldom: a handy combination of talents for attaining oracular status. More often mentioned than quoted, he has become a byword for multiplex cultural scope. But the unearned omniscience of post-modernism depends on its facility for connecting things without examining them, and the routine invocation of Benjamin as a precursor is symptomatic. In the under-illuminated conference hall where everything is discussed at once, everybody who matters knows his name, even if nobody seems to remember much of what he actually said. One of the few things Benjamin is remembered for actually saying is that his country was not Germany but German, meaning the German language. The idea poignantly harked forward to the unified New Europe which is now, we are assured, in the final stages of getting its act together. Populated by the merrily flush inhabitants of twinned towns, it will be the good New Place with no real borders except where languages meet. Unfortunately for Benjamin, as for nearly all the Jews of the Old Europe, he lived at a time when unity was being striven for by other means, and for other ends. In Hitler's New Europe, where all internal political frontiers had indeed been dissolved but only at the cost of surrounding the whole expanse with barbed wire, Benjamin, a French-speaking cosmopolitan who should have been at home everywhere, was safe nowhere. At the border between France and Spain, within hailing distance of freedom but without a proper visa, he took his own life because he was convinced that for him there was no getting out of Nazi territory. He had devoted his career to pieces of paper with writing on them, but he didn't have the right one.
Had he reached liberty, he might have written a classic essay about passports and permits. To write with scholarship and insight about the small change of culture was his calling card. He could have written an essay about calling cards: granted life, he would probably have got around to it. In the words of Ernst Bloch (from an encomium included in _Über Walter Benjamin_ , a 1968 collection of tributes by various hands), Benjamin was blessed with a _Sinn für Nebenbei_ : a nose for the lurking detail. The idea of studying cultural by-products wasn't new. His beloved Proust (of whom he was the first serious translator into German) had already said that when one reaches a suitable level of receptivity there is as much to be learned from a soap advertisement as from a pensée by Pascal. Mallarmé did not consider himself to be slumming when he got involved with women's fashion magazines. Baudelaire, less afraid of the ephemerally chic than of the stultifyingly elevated, presaged the tradition by which to this day the most high-flown French artists and intellectuals show little reluctance when asked to be guest editor of _Vogue_. Just try to stop them.
What was unique about Benjamin was not his readiness to take a side track, but the lengths he would go to when he took one. He would devote more attention to children's books than he did to books for adults. Even then, if all the side tracks had led downwards he would never have acquired his prestige. But enough of them led upwards to give the totality of his work an impressive air of the intellectually transcendent. Unlike Mr. Casaubon in _Middlemarch_ , whose Key to All Mythologies was as endless as a scheme for joining the stars, Benjamin, we are encouraged to feel, really could see how it all tied up. He had theories about history which still sound good even in the light of the general agreement among practising historians after Arnold Toynbee that any history written in conformity to a theory is likely to be bad. Benjamin argued strenuously that science needs a theory, too: not just theories but _a_ theory, a theoretical background. The empirical evidence already suggested that it was a defining condition of science to need no such thing. (Whichever way Einstein arrived at a theory of relativity, it wasn't by departing from a theory of science.) But Benjamin's urge to validate his interest in concrete detail by elevating it with a suitably abstract lifting apparatus looked like a guarantee of seriousness during the Weimar Republic, when the German tradition of cloud-borne metaphysics was still strong. Posthumously and with renewed vigour, the same urge helped again during the 1960s, when Benjamin, like Gramsci, was rediscovered worldwide as a thinker about culture whose Marxist emphasis could be regarded as unspoiled because he had not stayed alive long enough to see everything go wrong in the Soviet Union. (He had, in fact, but the significance of the 1937–1938 Moscow trials was lost on him, perhaps because by then his own situation was getting desperate.) For the semi-educated Beatles-period junior intellectual intent on absorbing sociology, philosophy and cultural profundity all at once and in a tearing hurry, Benjamin's scrappily available writings constituted an intellectual multivitamin pill, the more guaranteed in its efficacy by being so hard to swallow. The various English translations concentrated the effect by reproducing all the tortuous cerebration of his original texts without any of the occasional poetic flair, thereby forestalling accusations of frivolity. The less comprehensible he was, the more responsible he was held to be. Here was no lightweight.
Benjamin's most famous essay, whose title might best be translated as "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," is atypical for featuring a general point designed to be readily understood. Unfortunately, once understood, it is readily seen to be bogus. Benjamin argued that an art object would lose its "aura" through being reproduced. The logical extension of this line would entail that any painting would retain aura through being a one-off, whereas any photograph would be deprived of aura through its capacity to be copied by the million. I made up my own mind about this seductive notion one afternoon in Los Angeles, during one of those breaks in filming that I had learned, over the years, were better devoted to self-improvement rather than to just lying down and praying for release. At the Getty Museum, which at the time was still in Malibu, I happened to look at the sumptuous but frozen Winterhalter portrait of a Sayn-Wittgenstein princess. The picture was hung so that she was gazing out to sea towards Catalina Island, and she looked as if she could afford to buy it. As an ancestress of one of the Luftwaffe's top-scoring night-fighter pilots, she was bound to attract my interest. She had some history ahead of her as well as, presumably, behind her: she was a bewitching glamour-puss. Or so, at any rate, Winterhalter was trying to assure us. He might have been trying to assure her as well, in which case he was worth the fee. But it was a pretty ordinary portrait, rather along the hagiographic lines of that other faithful servant to the aristocracy, Makart, except with a bit more light thrown on the subject. No doubt her price tag would have been in the millions, but she personally was a dime a dozen. Later on, back at the hotel, I was leafing through John Kobal's excellent coffee-table album _The Art of the Great Hollywood Photographers_. Not for the first time I was transfixed by Whitey Schaefer's spare but incandescent photograph of Rita Hayworth. The Sayn-Wittgenstein princess had looked very nice, but for aura, in any meaningful sense of the word, she came nowhere near the film star. _Which_ painting, and _which_ photograph? And what about all those lovely-looking books Benjamin collected and cherished even when he couldn't read them: what else were they but reproduced works of art, and why else caress them if not for their aura? Whenever Benjamin transcends his sense of the relevant detail, one's own sense of the relevant detail tends to punch holes in his abstractions. Luckily for his reputation, if unluckily for the world's sum total of mental health, his conclusions are seldom so separable from his relentless metaphysical vocabulary. A more typical essay is the one on Karl Kraus, of which Kraus confessed that the only thing he understood was that it was about him.
There is no arguing against all-inclusive obscurity except to say that the whole thing means nothing, which few of us dare to do. Kraus did. Now that Benjamin's writings are at last being published in English in some sort of orderly sequence, there is all too much opportunity to conclude that Kraus might have had Benjamin's number. Kraus had his own limitations, but he had an infallible ear for the kind of rhetoric whose only real subject is its own momentum. Benjamin was a rampant case. Lest we doubt it, we can read on after the sentence already quoted. You will have noted that "the destruction" has "thus" become obligatory. But the "thus" is not enough. There is also "this":
This very task of destruction poses again, ultimately, the question of a pure immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythic violence. Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine. And the latter constitutes its antithesis in all respects. . . .
And that's only a sample. Thus, this very, might, just as—it's the prose equivalent of a velvet fog: breathe it in and you'll choke on cloth. Benjamin was young, but this style of argument was never to be long discarded. In the next volume, or perhaps the one after that, the critic grown older will be heard on more down-to-earth subjects, but invariably the attendant metaphysical speculation will send his treatment of them spiralling towards the ceiling, like the burnt paper wrapping of an amaretto cookie rising on its self-generated column of hot air. (The first time I ever saw that trick worked in an Italian restaurant, I thought immediately of a thin argument gaining altitude.) Apart from his remarks on the reproducible works of art and their lost aura, Benjamin's other widely known brainwave is about how the broad pavements of Paris favour café life. The observation is persuasive, if commonplace even for the time it was made, but the prospective reader should be warned that the disquisition it instigated was endless. Benjamin's aperçus about his ideal European city grew into essays which themselves went on growing, on their slow way to becoming a book which was left unfinished at his death and might never have been finished even if he had lived, since its obvious aim was to Get Everything In. Often supposed, by literati of the panscopic persuasion, to be one of the great lost books of the twentieth century, the completed work might well have turned out to be a teeming marvel. Indeed the fragment we have, published under the enchanting title of _The Arcades Project_ , was greeted by some critics, notably George Steiner, as proof positive that the finished job would have been inexhaustibly miraculous. But for those of us who have been dismayed by the essays, the vanished prospect of Benjamin's magic syntopicon is less likely to bind us with a spell. There is no reason to believe, and every reason to doubt, that the fully realized _omnium gatherum_ would have kept a reasonable proportion between its author's enviable knack for assessing the significance of what everybody else had already seen and his congenital propensity for inflating the results into a speculative rigmarole that nobody else would ever think or could even follow. The sceptical question lingers; how could a brain as sharp as his churn out so much mush?
His life story gives us the answer: he was cushioning reality. It needed cushioning. Reality was anti-Semitism. Born into comfortable surroundings, Benjamin nevertheless concluded at an early age that the Jewish bourgeoisie were kidding themselves about assimilation. The better they did in every field of the arts, science, the professions and commerce, the more they were resented. The more they fitted in the more they stood out. In other words, they were disliked for themselves. Before World War I, Theodor Herzl has drawn the central impulse of Zionism from no other assumption. (Victor Klemperer, in _To the Bitter End_ , the 1942–1945 volume of his monumental diary, noted that a total rejection of assimilation for Jews was the point on which the arch-Nazi Hitler and the arch-Zionist Herzl were of the same mind: _les extrêmes se touchent_.) The idea was already in the air, but Benjamin, perhaps because he was struck with it so young, gave it a portentous twist. He chose to despise, not the goyim for their prejudice, but the Jewish bourgeoisie for their gullibility, and, beyond them, the bourgeoisie _in toto_. Wanting a more enlightened society, he saw its seeds in Marxism. Objectively (as the Marxists went on saying until only recently) he became committed to one of the two implacable forces that would combine their energies to undermine the Weimar Republic, which might conceivably have withstood the pressure from either the Communists or the Nazis, but was squeezed to death when attacked by both.
Well accustomed to travelling within Europe and setting up his desk anywhere, usually within sight of the sea, Benjamin was able to absent himself from Germany after the Nazis got their grip on it. Keeping a suitable distance should have been an aid to perspective, but he was hobbled in his capacity for political analysis by his pidgin Marxist conviction—which he shared with his friend Brecht—that the Nazi regime was somehow a logical consequence of bourgeois capitalism, instead of what it was, a radical force in itself. (In _Die vergebliche Warnung—The Unheeded Warning_ —Manès Sperber said that when the Nazis finally came to power it never occurred to him that he was in danger as a Jew, only as a Communist. The Jews were capitalists, so why would the Nazis attack them?) Sooner or later, according to the Comintern general line, the coming crisis of capitalism would bring the Nazis down. The sooner became later and it never happened. If Benjamin had waited any longer he would have been caught at home, with the concentration camp as the inevitable consequence. When he finally ran, he was only just in time. If he had been better organized he might have made it across the border, but it would be a mistake to blame his unworldliness. Plenty of worldly people died from despair as he did, because the Nazis had taken care to ensure that the world was no longer worth living in. Mentioning Benjamin's suicide in one of her letters to Karl Jaspers ( _Briefwechsel 1926–1969_ , p. 77) Hannah Arendt made a point we should consider: "This atmosphere of _sauve qui peut_ was hideous, and suicide was the only noble gesture." To go out nobly was the only way left to affirm life. It could be said that Arendt, who had got to safety in America, was asking a lot by suggesting that voluntary death was the only nobility left for those who didn't make it, but she was undoubtedly right about the hideous pressure exerted when ordinary civil existence was suddenly transformed into a case of every man for himself. The Devil took the hindmost, and one of them was Benjamin.
There was a subsidiary consequence of Germany's traditional anti-Semitism (the old, pre-Nazi brand that worked by exclusion rather than repression), a consequence which Benjamin might have examined if he had lived to write an autobiography. The autobiography would have had to be unsparing on the issue, because what affected him in a debilitating way was his acquiescence as much as his defiance. Benjamin never got the university post that he might legitimately have expected, but he allowed the rejection to haunt his work instead of giving it strength. Even as late as the Weimar Republic, the German universities retained their tacit quota system by which Jews found it hard to get a place on the faculty. Benjamin wanted a place on the faculty more than anything else in life. Other Jews of comparable critical talent, forced into journalism because the universities had shut them out, did what Benjamin could never bring himself to do. They accepted journalism's requirements of readability, and found ways of giving everything they had to the article rather than the treatise. The books they wrote had a general public in mind. In retrospect, the journalists can be seen to have enriched German-speaking culture by saving it from the stratospheric oxygen-starvation of the deliberately high-flown thesis. Their written and spoken conversations were informal seminars that turned the cafés into universities, even as the universities were hardening further into hieratic structures where nothing mattered except the prestige of position—a characteristic that made them fatally corruptible by political pressure. The journalists were well out of it, and the cleverest of them realized it: they took the opportunity to create a new language for civilization, a language that drew strength from the demotic in order to cherish the eternal.
Benjamin, on the other hand, even when he wrote for a newspaper, had a way of sounding as if he was still angling for a Ph.D. If he had reached safety he might have been obliged to change his ways, almost certainly for the better. To pine for more of what he had done already, you have to miss the glaring point that he had already done far too much of it. Take any essay by Benjamin and then place beside it an essay by, say, Alfred Polgar. In a Benjamin essay, there will be very few actual perceptions gleaming through the cloud of smoke. Some of them will be unique, but they will all be gasping for air. A Polgar essay is made of perceptions and nothing else, and the style is just the most elegant possible way of holding them together. Benjamin truly and touchingly loved Paris, but what did he ever say about it that is not left looking thin beside the wealth of observation that the journalist Janet Flanner could put into a single report, or the historian Richard Cobb into a single paragraph of an essay? Joseph Roth, the Jewish exile from Vienna who drank himself to death in Paris in the last days of its freedom, packed his every piece about the city with enough material to keep Benjamin speculating for a year. Examples could be multiplied, and always to Benjamin's detriment: the lowly journalism of others, then and since, leaves his paroxysms of verbiage sounding inarticulate. None of this is pleasant to say, and is probably not pleasant to hear. There aren't so many truly comprehensive freelance scholars that we can afford to mock one of them just because he was a victim of his own style, and Benjamin was a victim of a lot more than that. Kicking a man when he is down is bad enough, and kicking him when he is unfairly dead looks like blasphemy. Considering the refinement of Benjamin's mind, his fate was a crucifixion. But we are talking about his reputation, the prestige he still has, and, for the humanities, the baleful encouragement he gives to the damaging notion that there is somehow a progressivist, humanitarian licence for talking through a high hat. There is no such licence. The wretched of the earth get no help from witch doctors, and when academic language gets beyond shouting distance of ordinary speech, voodoo is all it is.
MARC BLOCH
Marc Bloch was born in 1886, fought in World War I, established himself as one of France's leading historians between the wars, and took up arms again as a Resistance fighter in World War II. He was caught, tortured and executed in 1944. His last, brief book, written while he was already in some danger ("The circumstances of my present life, the impossibility of reaching any large library, and the loss of my own books have made me dependent on my notes and upon memory"), is easily available in English as _The Historian's Craft_ (1953). His more scholarly books, foundation stones in the _Annales_ school of history, are for specialists, but his incidental commentary, like his life, is for everyone. There is an excellent account of his career by the Univeristy of North Carolina's Carole Fink, _Marc Bloch: A Life in History_ (1989), a model of what an academic study can be, and a testament to the example of an heroic man.
The nature of our intelligence is such that it is stimulated far less by the will to know than by the will to understand, and, from this, it results that the only sciences which it admits to be authentic are those which succeed in establishing explanatory relationships between phenomena. The rest is, as Malebranche puts it, mere "polymathy."
—MARC BLOCH
ALREADY IN HIS FIFTIES, the historian Marc Bloch could have dealt himself out of the French Resistance. But he dealt himself in, and paid the penalty. The quoted sentence is the kind of wide-ranging, narrow-focusing idea from Bloch which makes the reader, even at this distance, grieve for his loss as if bereaved of a loved one. If Bloch had not sacrificed himself, he would have had an incalculable but undoubtedly civilizing effect on the post-war intellectual life of France—a life whose sophistication and global influence were attained at the high price of a surreptitious retreat from humanist values. It could be said that Bloch, as the founding _annaliste_ historian, belonged to the bean-counting school of Braudel, and might merely have added to the future overstock of desiccated accountancy. But his subsidiary prose always promised something better. It promised a broadly human view, and had he lived he surely would have helped to sweeten an intellectual atmosphere turned sour by bad faith and fatigue. The literary critic Jean Prévost, who suffered a similar fate, might have had a similar effect. For both men, part of their lasting impressiveness resides in their absence, the tangible quality of an untimely silence, the depth and length of the If Only. Theirs are the voices that we miss. They were killed because they were Resistance fighters, not because they were scholars. In the light of that fact, their shared martyrdom was an accident, and not the result of a totalitarian conspiracy against humanist culture. But it amounted to the same thing. Both men resisted because for them the love of the European humanist culture that they themselves would come to represent was inseparable from their love of freedom. As true scholars, they refused to be drawn into the tacit, tentacular bargain by which Vichy's cooperation with the invader was seen as a pragmatic stratagem to preserve the eternal France. They could see how that bargain attacked the eternal France in its essence. As true heroes, they were not content to keep their heads down until it all blew over: they guessed, correctly, that too much would be blown away.
So they fought. Prévost was lucky enough to die in battle in 1944. Bloch was captured, and died horribly. In post-war France they were further doomed to a long oblivion, and precisely because of the unequivocal bravery of what they did. If they had done less, and died in some other way except as warriors, their posthumous reputations might have flowered sooner. But the false heroes had too much to lose by the comparison, and those who knew better than to claim heroism for interior dissent were reluctant to be reminded that they had played for safety. We would all like to believe that acquiescence is inevitable in the face of overwhelming retaliatory violence. In Paris the occupying power devoted a lot of effort, skill and personal charm to persuading the French intellectuals that they could retain the luxury of a liberal conscience as long as they did nothing substantial to express it. If they acknowledged the inevitable, they could pursue their careers. The combination of ambition on the one hand, and ordinary human trepidation on the other, was so seductive that it conquered shame. The moral question posed by the judicious inertia of the intellectuals under the Occupation lay dormant for a long time after it was over, but shame was not the reason: the reason was that the shame itself lay dormant. Too much attention paid to men like Bloch and Prévost would have awoken it. Men of letters who had done nothing to resist preferred to admire those among their number who had done little, and safely late, rather than those who had done much, and dangerously early. The latter threatened to spoil the conspiracy by their mere existence. In the physical sense, luckily, Bloch and Prévost _had_ no existence, and were thus deprived of a current voice to help remind the nation for which they had died that their spiritual presence was permanent. All they had was what they had written, and all that their writings could do was wait. The waiting worked, eventually. The sleepers woke, eventually. Their books came back into print, and then there were books about them. In that belated renaissance there is some encouragement, if small comfort. The heartening capacity of the tree of knowledge to replant itself in scorched earth does something to offset the depression induced by the spectacle of accumulated decades of bad conscience. The bad conscience was so bad that it would rather have undone its own culture than face itself. Paris, of all places, became the world's production centre for new ways of proving that the critical intelligence can operate with no fixed connection to reality. Marc Bloch believed exactly the opposite, but he wasn't there to say so: not then, not yet.
Elsewhere in the same chapter, Bloch went on to say that history must offer us a progressive intelligibility. For those with a vested interest in offering us a progressive unintelligibility—Lacan, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida _et hoc genus_ —such a precept could not even be given the status of anathema: it could only be thought na ve. But in the naivety lay the purity and the robustness, and in the sophisticated mockery of it the pervasive malaise. Nevertheless, Bloch's idea that understanding holds the precedence over knowledge needs to be cut up before it can be swallowed without choking. He charts a desirable hierarchy of epistemology, but it would be disastrous if inculcated as a precept. It is commonly and truly said that young people who want to set the world to rights learn later to be grateful that the world is not worse than it is; but if they were convinced of that too early, we would lose their critical effect, and the world would be worse still. Similarly, it is true that most of our knowledge will drop away after we have condensed from it the principles which will connect into a view, but the principles can't exist to be extracted unless the knowledge is acquired in the first instance. Certainly the mind too impressed by knowledge will attain to nothing else. Ezra Pound famously said that culture begins when you forget what book that came from. Unfortunately he himself never forgot any citation that suited his mania, and his work as a totality is hopelessly vitiated by the half-witted diligence of the trainspotter. An edifying comparison can be made with Yeats, whose allegiance to the spiritualist claptrap of the theory of the Mystic Rose was at least as batty as Pound's to the pseudo-economic quackery of the theory of Social Credit: but Yeats could develop beyond his early lyrics because art, for him, was a system of solid knowledge by far transcending his own fads.
For Pound, the lyrics were as far as he went. I loved his early work too much to belittle it now. At my first café table, in the Manning House Women's Union of Sydney University in the late fifties, I read _Polite Essays_ and felt that I was being injected with the ability to swim like Johnny Weissmuller, to dance with Cyd Charisse, to fly a Spitfire. But that first admiration was precisely the measure by which I found the rest of his career to be a tragic farce, and I think any honest critic feels the same. (I think Eliot felt it too, but he stuck by a friend.) Bulging with trifles passionately snapped up but invariably ill-considered, the _Cantos_ are the wares of Autolycus, some of which, no doubt, were curiously interesting, but which meant nothing as a collection. Here and there, and for long stretches not at all, the _Cantos_ have their beautiful moments, but those moments are wilfully beautiful, as if to admit that the dust heap needs decorating. (Even while the later _Cantos_ were still coming out, there was an acute analysis of this discrepancy by Randall Jarrell, whose books of criticism, and especially _Poetry and the Age_ , should be on the reading list of any student anywhere, and not just in his native America.) Pound vaunted his ability to make explanatory relationships, but it was the very thing he could never truly do, even though, like any other paranoid psychotic, he tried to all the time. Nevertheless he had the talent to demonstrate that to go mad for detail might yield something, whereas to go mad for generalization leads nowhere. Pound knew less than nothing about economics, one of his favourite subjects: but he could describe a coin, having looked at it long and hard, although never with comprehension. He thought he could judge an empire by the metallic composition of its small change, just as he thought he could extract the meaning of a Chinese ideograph from the way it looked. In both cases he was too far from the mark for sanity. But if he didn't get the picture, at least he could see it; and young readers will probably go on being excited when they are drawn into his emporium by the magnetic force of his conviction that the Thingness of Things is a destination as well as a departure point.
Pound's was a philosophical urge gone wrong. Thousands of even lesser philosophers are always with us to prove that it can go more wrong still, by trying to form systems out of no knowledge at all. Admirers of Ouspensky, Gurdjieff and Wilhelm Reich were all under the illusion that profundity can be attained by embracing principles with no basis in science. The occult and the mystically profound are perennial short cuts to a supervening vision: a world view without the world. Extreme authoritarianism is only a step away. Himmler was a mighty devotee of cabalistic flapdoodle, and Stalin, had he lived longer, would almost certainly have demonstrated an anti-Semitism rivalling Hitler's in its toxic fervour. The mass murderer is ever fond of theories that explain everything, and all the fonder if they can be acquired without study.
There is no reasoning someone out of a position he has not reasoned himself into. People are drawn into these enthusiasms by no mechanism that has anything much to do with rational thought. In their own minds, however, explanatory relationships between phenomena are exactly what they see. Bloch's precept is fulfilled in every particular. But of course he meant more than what he said. He meant that the knowledge must be real knowledge, which means that understanding must accompany it from the first moment, and can supersede it only on the condition that its chastening memory is never repudiated. Had he lived, he might have expressed himself more cautiously. Hitler had already shown the dangers of leaving knowledge behind too easily, and at least one of Hitler's victims, Egon Friedell, had amply proved that there need be nothing "mere" about a polymath, if the bearer of that title is one who exemplifies how the fields of knowledge are alive within one another, illuminating the world even in its cruelty—the cruelty that caught him defenceless, but surely not by surprise. Bloch, sadly, could not have been surprised either. He knew what he was up against. The drowning pool, the truncheon, the thumbscrew and the blowtorch: for an imagination like his, those things must have been almost as terrible in prospect as they were in actuality. But he risked it anyway. Appalled by the cost in mental treasure, we can even call him irresponsible, the more easily to live with his example.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died in Geneva in 1986, near the end of a century which he had lived almost all the way through and done a great deal to shape. If we now think of Latin American literature as central to the Spanish world, and of the Spanish world as a vitally renewed force in the world entire, it has a lot to do with Borges. As a twentieth-century master artist, he was celebrated even by nineteenth-century standards. Famous on the scale of Tennyson, Kipling and Mark Twain, he was reported like a natural phenomenon, a human volcano. By the end of his life his every spoken word got into print: dialogues with Borges appeared in _The New Yorker_ as fast as they were recorded in Buenos Aires. His dialogues and essays can be recommended as an easy way into Spanish, a language which every student of literature should hold in prospect, to the extent of an elementary reading knowledge at least. (Borges's own, and much vaunted, knowledge of English was really not much better than that.) Once acquired, the Spanish language opens up a huge story, in which it will be found that Borges was not without rivals even in Argentina. His contemporary Ernesto Sabato, for example, wrote even better essays. Nor was the serene national treasure's apparently detached political position regarded as beyond cavil by other Argentinian writers who admired his art but questioned his relaxation into international eminence while his homeland was in the grip of terror. Before getting into all that, however, the beginner with Borges can find a seductive entrance to his enchantment through the short stories collected in _Labyrinths_ (1962), which tranmsit his poetic magic irresistibly even through translation. _Borges on Writing_ (1974) is a painless introduction to the incidental prose. (As early as that year, his writings had been translated into twenty-one languages.) The accessibility of the story-teller is no illusion—as with Kipling, the stories go to the heart of his vision—and his essays and dialogues turn his vast learning into an intellectual adventure guaranteed to thrill the young, as he meant it to do. Before questioning Borges on the political role of his artistic stature, it is wise, as it were, to go crazy about him first. But if he created a fairyland, he did not live in one, and even in the exalted last years of the blind icon there were voices among his countrymen ready to remind him that there had been times when he should have tried harder to use his ears.
The great American writer Herman Melville says somewhere in _The White Whale_ that a man ought to be "a patriot to heaven," and I believe it is a good thing, this ambition to be cosmopolitan, this idea to be citizens not of a small parcel of the world that changes according to the currents of politics, according to the wars, to what occurs, but to feel that the whole world is our country.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES, "HOMENAJE A VICTORIA OCAMPO" (HOMAGE TO VICTORIA OCAMPO), IN _B ORGES EN SUR_ (BORGES IN THE MAGAZINE _S OUTH_), P. 326
BY _THE WHITE WHALE_ , of course, Borges meant _Moby-Dick_. He was often very approximate about the details of his enthusiasm for literature in English. But our attention should be on the argument. It's a pretty phrase, "a patriot to heaven," and nowadays it can doubtless be tracked down "somewhere in" _Moby-Dick_ by means of a search engine, without the necessity to re-read the actual text. In the language of book-bluff, "re-read" is often a claim to have read something that one has merely dipped into or even skipped entirely, but there was a period of my early life which I did actually occupy with getting through _Moby-Dick_. Perhaps spoiled in childhood by the narrative flow of _Captains Courageous_ , I found Melville's ocean clung like tar. I wish I could believe that it was a masterpiece I wasn't ready for. Whoever said "Wagner's music isn't as bad as it sounds" was as wrong as he was funny, but there is surely a case for saying that the story of Captain Ahab's contest with the great white whale is one of those books you can't get started with even after you have finished reading them. It's not so much that I find his language contortedly and wilfully archaic: more that I find it makes a meal of itself, as if foretelling a modern critical age in which it is fated to be more taught than enjoyed. This idea of Borges's, though—that the whole world is, or should be, our country—was encapsulated shinily enough to be picked up like a bead in his untiringly darting magpie beak. So what I underlined was a quotation of a quotation, and I was wondering already if the idea, so attractive on the face of it to a displaced person like myself, was really quite right. Eventually it led me to the considerations that follow.
One of my exemplars, Witold Gombrowicz, would have had good reason to accept the idea: but he didn't, quite. Exiled in Argentina during World War II, he was reluctant to regard himself as the incarnation of Polish literature, but that was because he distrusted the whole idea of literature as a field of ambition, duty, or even of professional activity. After the war his forced exile continued, because he had correctly judged Poland's Communist regime as being only marginally less lethal to creative life than the Nazi slaughterhouse that had preceded it. He was under continual pressure to represent the true, liberal Poland, but he didn't believe in that either. He just didn't like abstractions. When it came down to it, however, he did not regard the land of his birth as an abstraction. He had all the qualifications of a world citizen, and often seemed to preach as one. But when finally cornered on the point he said there _was_ a Poland, and that he, Gombrowicz, was it.
Under extreme conditions of forced exile from political extermination, all the expatriated artists of the twentieth century seem to have reached a similar conclusion. Thomas Mann behaved as if he were the eternal Germany, Stravinsky as if he were the eternal Russia. In London, Freud was still Vienna. Even the most assimilated to their new conditions found that they could not entirely change their minds. In America the possibilities were at their greatest to forget about origins and embrace world citizenship, just as long as American citizenship had been embraced first. Yet it was remarkable how the opportunity, even when it was taken up, always seemed to leave a mental loophole that led home. On the set in Hollywood, Billy Wilder and Marlene Dietrich cracked jokes in German. It was world citizenship, but it was also a way of reminding themselves that the melting pot had not boiled down their souls, which had been formed elsewhere, in a place that was really a place. "There are only two places where we feel at home," Milos Forman once said on television: "Home, and in America." Yet when Vaclav Havel visited the United States, Forman was one of the ringmasters for the new Czech president's welcome, and in Forman's excellent book of memoirs his lost country is perpetually rediscovered. Philosophically, the idea of the world citizen goes back through Erasmus at least as far as Eratosthenes the Stoic, who said he saw all good men as his fellow countrymen; which was only one step short of seeing his country as dispensable. But the modern refugees from totalitarianism, having been compelled to dispense with theirs, found it hard to let go of the memory.
The politically exiled artists thus proved, under laboratory conditions, that the concept of the _Weltbürger_ has its limits. Borges was not in the same position. In 1979, when he wrote his homage to Victoria Ocampo (the founder of the cosmopolitan magazine _Sur_ ) in which this revealing passage appeared, the Argentinian junta was doing its obscene worst. Surrounded by horror, either he hadn't noticed or—a hard imputation, yet harder still to avoid—he knew something about it and thought it could be excused. But even if he was confident that the political Brahmanism he favoured could be pardoned for imposing itself by extreme means, he might well have detected an incipient challenge to his conscience. He had good reason—i.e., a bad reason but an urgent one—to suggest, if only to himself, that what was happening to his country was of secondary importance, because his first loyalty was to the world. But the world, not one's country, is the abstraction: an ideal that means nothing if one's first loyalties to truth, justice and mercy have been given up. The old man was pulling a fast one. I read the book, and made my marginal note, in 1999. But it was the date on the article that tipped me off: 1979. A reprinted article should always carry its original date, but you can see why writers and editors should sometimes find it expedient to leave it out. Otherwise an apparently impeccable sentiment might stand revealed as an opportunistic stratagem, or at the very least as a sign of obtuseness.
Self-exiled to Paris from his repudiated Romania, the fragmentary philosopher E. M. Cioran gushingly admired Borges's world citizenship. On page 1,606 of Cioran's monolithic _Œuvres_ , we learn that the irresistible example of the Argentinian _séducteur_ ("Everything with him is transfigured by the game, by a dance of glittering discoveries and delicious sophisms") helped the Romanian philosopher to formulate the device on his own mental shield: "Not to put down roots, not to belong to any community." But at the time Cioran said this (it was 1976), he was keen to give the impression that his native country had never meant much to him, while not keen at all to reveal that he had played a part in his native country's unfortunate fascist past. (The nice way of putting it is that he had been close to the Iron Guard, and the nice way of putting it when it comes to the Iron Guard is that their anti-Semitism, by Hitlerite standards, was hit-and-miss, although not many people they hit got up.) Cioran had even better reasons than Borges for suggesting that none of the rough stuff had ever had anything to do with him. Borges was never more than equivocally complicit in nationalist mania. Cioran, in that conveniently forgotten youthful period before he prudently took out citizenship in the world, had been in it up to the elbows. It is interesting that he thought a spiritual alliance with Borges might help to wash him clean.
At this point there is a key quotation from Ernesto Sabato that we should consider:
From Borges's fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence. ( _Ensayos_ , p. 304)
In Buenos Aires after World War II, there were two literary voices of incontestable international stature. The main difference between them was that only one of them was known to possess it. The whole world heard about Borges. But to get the point about Sabato, you had to go to Argentina. Both inhabitants of a beautiful but haunted city, both great writers, and both blind in their later lives, Borges and Sabato were linked by destiny but separated in spirit: a separation summed up in this single perception of Sabato's, which was penetratingly true. Borges did fear the bitterness of reality, and he did take refuge in an invented world. When Gombrowicz called Borges's virtuosity "iced fireworks" he was arriving independently at the same judgement. There are no iced fireworks in Sabato, whose fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world, and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination, which would otherwise edit them into something more easily overlooked. (His rationale for this process of saving reality from its own forgetful mechanisms is spread throughout his books of critical prose, but see especially _El escritor y sus fantasmas_.) Sabato's characteristic image is the tunnel. The tunnel is the area of concentration for the dreams. Most of the dreams we recognize all too clearly. He didn't need to search very far in order to find the stimulus for them. All he needed was the recent history of Argentina. In Sabato the reader is faced with that history often, but in Borges hardly ever. In Borges the near past scarcely exists: in that respect his historical sense, like his Buenos Aires, is without contemporaneity. His political landscape is a depopulated marble ghost-town remembered from childhood, spookily hieratic like the cemetery in Recoleta. Before he went blind he would still walk the streets, but usually only at night, to minimize the chance of actually meeting anyone. In his stories, the moments of passion, fear, pity and terror belong to the long-vanished world of the knife fighters. Death squads and torture are not in the inventory. The timescale ends not long after he was born. Why did he hide?
Probably because of artistic predilection, rather than human cowardice. There are always artists who place themselves above the battle, and in retrospect we don't regret their doing so. In World War II, André Gide took no overt position about the Occupation, the biggest moral dilemma that France had faced since the Revolution. Yet we would not want to be without his journals of the period. Safe in Switzerland, Hermann Hesse said next to nothing about the biggest events of any twentieth-century German-speaking writer's life: his dreamy novella _Morgenlandfahrt_ (The Journey East) was the closest he ever came to making a comment on nationalist irrationality, and there was nothing in that skimpy book to which a Hitler Youth idealist could have objected. Borges openly loathed Peron, but fell silent on everything that happened after Peron was ousted—fell silent politically, but artistically came into full flower, an international hit even as his nation entered the tunnel of its long agony.
Though it would be foolish for an outsider to quarrel with his enormous creative achievement—one might as well take a tomahawk to a forest—there is reason to sympathize with those native Argentinians, not all of them Philistines, who can't help feeling that it was an accumulation of trees designed to obscure the wood. So much ancillary prose by and about Borges has been published since his death that it is a professional task to keep up with it all, but a casual student should find time to see _Antiborges_ , a compilation of commentaries edited by Martin Lafforgue. (The contribution from Pedro Organbide, " _Borges y su pensamiento politica_ ," is especially noteworthy.) An instructive picture emerges of a visionary whose vision was impaired in more than the physical sense. Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts. When the junta seized power in March 1976, he took the view that they weren't fascists at all, because the helots weren't in the picture. Most of the intellectuals of the old conservative stamp declined to cooperate with the new regime, and Sabato behaved particularly well. (That a man as out of tune with the regime as Sabato should nevertheless have seen merit in the Malvinas adventure is a token of how indisputable the claim to the islands looked from the Argentinian side.) It need hardly be said that to behave well was not without risk: when everyone was aware of the hideous lengths to which the regime would go against ordinary people whose names meant little, there was never any guarantee that people of prestige would remain exempt. Fear took its toll in a fall of silence.
But there is no evidence that Borges ever felt the need to be afraid. His name and growing international renown were lent to the regime without reserve, either because he approved or—the best that can be said for him—because he was clueless. As the time arrived when not even he could claim blindness to the junta's war against the innocent, lack of information was what he claimed as an excuse for his previous inertia. Signing the round robin of protest that signalled the end of the regime's tacit support from the enlightened bourgeoisie—when _their_ children were taken, they woke up—he said that he had not been able to find out about these things earlier. His impatient statement " _No leo los diarios_ " (I don't read newspapers) became famous among his critics as a shameful echo of all those otherwise intelligent Germans who never heard about the extermination camps until it was all over. It was pointed out with some pertinence that his blindness had never stopped him finding out about all the literature in the world. There was a torture centre within walking distance of his house, and he had always been a great walker. It could be said that by then his walking days were over; but he could still hear, even if he couldn't see. There was a lot of private talk that must have been hard to miss, unless he had wilfully stopped his ears. He might well have done: a cocked ear would have heard the screams.
In 1983, after the junta fell, he was finally forced into an acceptance of plebeian democracy, the very thing he had always most detested. A decade of infernal anguish for his beloved country had at last taught him that state terror is more detestable still. It was a hard lesson for a slow pupil. On an international scale, Borges can perhaps be forgiven for his ringing endorsement of General Pinochet's activities in Chile: after all, Margaret Thatcher seems to have shared his enthusiasm, and John Major's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, now wears a medal hung around his neck by Pinochet without any visible sign of chest hair set on fire by burning shame. But within Argentina, there are some distinguished minds that have had to work hard to see their greatest writer _sub specie aeternitatis_ without wishing his pusillanimity to be enrolled along with his prodigious talent. Pedro Organbide, fully sensitive to the eternal literary stature of Borges, was being restrained when he noted—with a sad finality it is hard to contest—that his tarnished hero's behaviour was a living demonstration of how political elitism depends on ignorance. There are not many great writers who oblige us to accept that inattention might have been essential to their vision. Jane Austen left the Napoleonic wars out of her novels, but we assume that she heard about them, and would have heard about them even if she had been unable to see. Sabato's blindness, unlike Borges's, was confined only to the last part of his life, but it was complete enough. His ears, however, remained in good working order, and when the time came he was able to take on the cruel job of writing about the Disappeared—the innocent people whose vanishing took so long to attract Borges's attention.
ROBERT BRASILLACH
Robert Brasillach was born in 1909 in Perpignan and excecuted as a traitor in 1945. He is sometimes thought of, by wishful thinkers in France, as perhaps the most conspicuous example of the promising young all-rounder whose career would have been different if the Nazis had never come to Paris, although he had already been beguiled by what he thought of as their glamour when he visited Germany. But they arrived, and his nature took its course. As a regular contributor, during the Occupation, to the scurrilous paper _Je Suis Partout_ (I Am Everywhere), he stood out for his virulence even among its staff of dedicated anti-Semites. His Jew-baiting diatribes were made more noxious by his undoubted journalistic talent. Most of the prominent French collaborators with the Nazis got into it because they were disappointed nationalists who thought their country had a better chance of becoming strong again if it stuck with the winning side. Comparatively few of them actually admired the Nazis. Brasillach was one who did. When the winning side became the losing side, he paid the penalty for having guessed wrong. Though there have been attempts, not always unjustifiable, to rehabilitate his reputation as a critic, few tears have ever been shed over his fate. By his rhetoric of blanket denunciation, he had been handing out death penalties for years. Whether the death penalty was warranted in his own case, however, is bound to be questioned by anyone who believes in free speech, however foul it might be.
It is among them that I have found the most passionate defenders and they have shown a generosity which is in the greatest and most beautiful tradition of French literature.
—ROBERT BRASILLACH, _R EMERCIEMENT AUX INTELLECTUELS_, FEBUARY 3, 1945, QUOTED IN PIERRE ASSOULINE'S _L'É PURATION DES INTELLECTUELS_
PREPARING HIMSELF FOR his imminent death, the condemned Robert Brasillach showed courage, but unless remorse had renovated his character it is doubtful if he realized just how generous his defenders had been. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute, he can be heard enrolling himself amongst the greatest and most beautiful tradition of French literature, as if he still believed he had been its servant, instead of its betrayer. Whether he was a traitor to France was, and remains, a fine point of legal interpretation. There were plenty of people, including Marshal Pétain himself, who sincerely believed that to serve Vichy was the only legitimate loyalty, and later on they were able to argue from conviction that they had broken no laws. (During François Mitterrand's presidency it was revealed that his supposed career as a Resistance hero had been preceded by a verifiable career as a Vichy functionary. He contrived to imply, without being toppled from office, that there had been no alternative at the time, although of course he had been _preparing_ himself for Resistance all along.) There were fewer people, although still far too many, who actively cooperated with the Nazis in the belief that the Third Republic had deserved its fate and that the alliance with Germany, even though compelled, would have been worth making voluntarily in the interests of European renewal and a France purged of liberal equivocation. There were very few people who behaved like Nazis themselves, although even in the literary world there were still more than a handful. Brasillach was one of them.
He was given carte blanche by the Nazis to wield his poisoned pen in the pursuit of Jews. On any scale of crime and punishment, a firing squad could scarcely exact payment for the damage he had caused. But he was shot anyway, and got out of his debt early. If the blindfolded angel of Justice could have intervened, she would have sent him to Sigmaringen, the appropriately fantastic cliff-side haven on the Danube where Louis-Ferdinand Céline and all the other unrepentant enthusiasts, taken away to safety by the Nazis, were even then sitting around in plush chairs and boring each other to tears with the tatters of their madcap theories. Their haven was soon overrun but the reprieve had lasted long enough to save most of them from a death sentence. In his disgusting book _Bagatelles pour un massacre_ , Céline had murdered a thousand time more Jews with his foul mouth than Brasillach had ever accounted for by publishing names in the crapulous weekly newspaper _Je Suis Partout_ so that the Gestapo and the Vichy militia could add to their lists over breakfast. Locking Brasillach in the same cell with Céline for the next ten years would have been a far tougher punishment than shooting him. But the vigilantes, as always, were in a hurry, so Brasillach died before he had time to entertain the possibility that his real treason had been to the French humanist tradition he thought himself to be part of.
He could have argued back, and said that Voltaire loathed Jews too. But what would he have said about Proust? What did he think that a pipsqueak like himself amounted to beside a man like that? Proust might have been only half a Jew, but Brasillach was barely a quarter of a literary figure, and in normal times would probably have measured even less: the _Zeitgeist_ lent him a dark lustre. He had some talent as a critic, and could write forceful prose, even against the common run of his own political position, whose banalities did not escape him. As late as his 1937 visit to Germany, though he was impressed by the vault of searchlights (the _Lichtdom_ ) at the Nuremberg rally and bowled over by the sexy energy of the Hitler Youth, he could still describe Hitler as a sad vegetarian functionary. (After the Nazis took over in Paris, Brasillach had to censor some of his own stuff.) But his fateful attendance at the 1941 _Weltliteratur_ pan-European get-together in Weimar put him over the top. It was the combination of poetry and daemonic power that did him in. No tenderness without cruelty! In occupied Paris, Brasillach knew that the Germanophile French writers were being had by the Propaganda Abteilung. But Brasillach wanted to be had. The Jewish Bolshevik peril was still there, and now it was there for the crushing. Here was the organized violence that could do it, and he could be part of it. Anger drove him, as it always drives the resentful. He had the kind of energy that could never widen its view. But it could certainly widen its scope, and the Occupation gave him the opportunities of a big game hunter set loose in a zoo: the targets had nowhere to run. His short career was the logical outcome of the nefarious, microcephalic intellectual trend that had started with the Dreyfus case and the foam-flecked symposium of Action Française: the idea that a cleaned-up, non-cosmopolitan, Jew-free culture could restore the integrity of France as the natural leader of Europe. Whether this glowing future was envisaged with the Germans or without them, it was always without the Jews.
But France was already the natural leader of Europe, and exactly because it had outgrown pseudo-hygienic notions of cultural purity. Paris had played host to Heinrich Heine when there was no home for him in Germany. As Nietzsche himself insisted, Heine was the greatest German poet since Goethe and one of the greatest in any language. Heine's presence in Paris had been a foretaste of the only cultural integrity that would ever matter: the hegemony of the creative mind that enriches nations but makes their boundaries transparent. The French anti-Semitic right was not just a political freak show, it was a cultural anachronism. From the veteran arch-nationalists Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras downwards to such bright young things as Drieu la Rochelle and Brasillach, its fluently virulent mouthpieces raved on about their nation's poisoned blood without ever realizing that they were the poison. Brasillach's goodbye note to a cruel world is just one more piece of evidence that they never got the point. Literature should have taught them better: but the real treason of the clerks has always been to suppose that their studies confer on them a power beyond the merely mortal, instead of revealing to them that merely mortal is all they are. If Brasillach had lived to repent, he might have found that out: although if he had, his conscience would have killed him anyway. He had too much blood on his hands. Thanks to his accusers, his is on ours. Some of them, like his defenders, were men of letters. They should have put it in writing. People who don't think that's enough shouldn't write.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) is one of those minor English prose writers whose reputations are always rediscovered in times of crisis, because they had a gift for rhythm that forecast the language of the future, and it is in times of crisis that the English language is most easily seen to be a treasure house of humanism. During World War II, European exiles in London—the future Nobel laureate Elias Canetti was one of them—learned to value Browne's style as an example of what English could do in a short space. Since written English can so easily run to specious prolixity, we can always use examples from the past to remind us that it doesn't have to be like that. The English language has always made its main initial impact through the turn of a single phrase. Book titles, when they catch our attention, are a constant reminder that this is so. One of the earliest unforgettable book titles was devised by Browne himself: _Urn Burial_. No sooner seen but memorized, even when you don't yet know quite what is meant.
Dreams out of the ivory gate, and visions before midnight.
—SIR THOMAS BROWNE, _O N DREAMS_
WHEN I FIRST read this magnificent line, the second half of it begged to be the title of a book. I copied the line into an early instalment of my journal, so it must have been when I was at Cambridge, where I had a brief period one winter of joining Browne's collected works in Pembroke Library after the early nightfall, as if those moulting leather-bound volumes were a gang of old drinking chums. At the time I had no idea what kind of book mine would be. The phrase was a cap looking for a head to fit. Later on, when I was assembling my first book of television criticism, it took me a while to remember that there was a suitable title all set to go. _Visions Before Midnight_ seemed just right: the television programmes were visions, they happened before midnight, and the falling phrase had something in it of a civilization coming to an end, which was roughly the way the BBC sports commentators made me feel.
Since Thomas Browne thought of it first, I need not fear a show of immodesty in saying that "visions before midnight" is an exquisitely balanced phrase. Browne had an infallible sense of cadence that could operate through a whole sentence, making it a long poetic line. Characteristically the first half of the sentence rolled up the hill and the second half rolled down, so the second half had more momentum. "It cannot be long before we _lie down in darkness_ ," he wrote, "and have our light in ashes." In that sentence the first half itself falls into two halves. (One of those halves was borrowed by William Styron as a title: Lie Down in Darkness.) Another three-part two-parter should be more famous than it is. "Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." Really there should be a colon after "animal," and everything after the colon is a single clause, soaring first and then coming in to land. Browne's section of _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations_ is full of lines like that, but they are best studied in context, in the oldest edition of his works that you can find. The musculature of his style should be appreciated through time, as the beauty of a leopard should be seen through trees. For a writer like him, an anthology is a zoo of the bad old kind, where the animals were stymied behind bars or on concrete islands.
Dreams out of the ivory gate—pause to consider the power of a single comma—and visions before midnight. I never contemplated stealing the first half of this particular sentence and thought that nobody ever would, but years later I found that someone already had. (These were still the days before "to Google" had become the infinitive that could search infinity.) There it was in a second-hand bookshop: _Dreams out of the Ivory Gate_ , by J. B. Priestley. Why he picked the less dramatic half of the sentence is beyond comprehension, but he might have thought it the more poetic. I would call it the more poeticized, and thus the less durable. On its own, "dreams out of the ivory gate" sounds like an average moment from James Elroy Flecker's _Hassan_ or _The Golden Journey to Samarkand_. Not that Flecker is without his covetable jewellery impatiently waiting for the right burglar. "Tonight or any other night / Will come the gardener in white / And gathered flowers are dead, Yasmin." As a title, all _The Gardener in White_ so far lacks is a book to fit. It also has the virtue of being hard to misquote. Both in real life and in the media, I have had interlocutors wanting to talk about some obscure work called _Visions at Midnight_. Since they have probably been misled by nobody less than Shakespeare ("I have heard the chimes at midnight," says Falstaff, as if aware that Orson Welles will come along one day to borrow the last three words), I ought to feel complimented, but actually it drives me to distraction. Similarly, my novel Brilliant Creatures comes back to me as _Beautiful Creatures_. When I lifted that title from a poem by Yeats ("The Wild Swans at Coole") I thought it was fluff-proof. To hear it misquoted is like stealing a piece of Lalique glass for a high-maintenance girlfriend and then watching her drop it.
Book titles are not a true study, but they are a lasting interest. Often they are the first clue to the sensibility of the author who chooses them. In my novel _The Remake_ (much excoriated by critics, and therefore cherished by me) I indulged myself with two separate passages of clever-dick dialogue in which characters vied with each other to name the best book titles ever. Before re-creating the game on paper I had played it many times in real life, and I am still ready to play it with all comers. From any contestant, the author most often drawn upon, as an adept of the seductive title, turns out to be Hemingway. Sylvia Beach, founding proprietress of the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co., used to say that one of the secrets of Hemingway's commercial success was his unerring choice of titles, which resonated across the bookshop to ensnare the customers with their silent music. Some of his best titles, whether for novels or short stories, were made up: "A Way You'll Never Be," "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," _Across the River and into the Trees_. (The last, probably his worst book, inspired a telling critical parody by E. B. White, "Across the Street and into the Grille," and after White came the deluge: every hack had a stab at the same construction—across the this, or these, and into the that, or those.) But a surprising number of Hemingway's best titles were borrowed from established literature, and among them were two of the very best: _The Sun Also Rises_ and _For Whom the Bell Tolls_. Thus to establish a continuity with classic English prosody was not only clever of him, it was appropriate. Eugene O'Neill worked an appearance of the same trick with the title of his play _Mourning Becomes Electra_ : the use of "becomes" hints at a hallowed archaism, and also, when the meaning is grasped, encourages you to emphasize the right word, thereby releasing from a short sentence its endless melody. William Faulkner went all the way by choosing a biblical quotation that had the Old Testament written all over it: _Absalom, Absalom_! But it was just as characteristic of him to call a book Sanctuary, bringing the browser close by opening up the echo chamber of a single word.
A knack for titles is not necessarily the prerogative of genius. Gifted journeymen can do it too. Raymond Chandler's titles were as good as his books: _The Big Sleep, The Little Sister, The Lady in the Lake_. Dashiell Hammett's were better than his books: _The Glass Key, The Thin Man, Red Harvest_. Ira Levin's can be poetic in the best sense: _A Kiss Before Dying_. Newly minted technical terms are an exploitable source for jobbing writers with no particular inspiration but a reasonable ear: _Fail-Safe_. The word "last" carries an automatically romantic charge which has made it too popular with title-seekers to be used now: _The Last Romantics, The Last Tycoon, Last Exit to Brooklyn_. The prolific inventor of the Saint, Leslie Charteris, got in early with the most lasting use of "last": _The Last Hero_. There have even been outright bad writers blessed by the visitation of a poetic title. Ayn Rand had one with _The Fountainhead_ , and another with _Atlas Shrugged_ : a bit of a mouthful, but nobody has ever spat it out without first being fascinated with what it felt like to chew. Yet if those were not two of the worst books ever written—the worst books ever written don't even get published—they were certainly among the worst books ever to be taken seriously.
A foreign title often loses something when brought over into English, but sometimes there is an even match— _Der blaue Engel_ and _The Blue Angel, La Peste_ and _The Plague_ —and occasionally there is a substantial gain. Françoise Sagan got lucky in that respect: _Those Without Shadows_. So did Gabriel García Márquez: not for _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ , a title I find as spongy as the book, but for _The Autumn of the Patriarch_. In the original German, _The Tin Drum_ is _Der Blechtrommel_. Though it is always hard to judge the weight and balance of words in a language that is not one's first, it is just as hard to believe that Günter Grass lost anything there, because the English phrase gives you two clear beats on the drum, while the long German word sounds like someone choking. _If on a Winter's Night a Traveller_ is a faithful rendition of the Italian original, and is therefore ridiculous, because no Italian of any real literary judgement believes that Calvino, when he conceived that title, was doing anything else except putting on the dog, plus a feather boa, a plumed hat and a pair of platform shoes. (This is not to say that long titles don't sometimes succeed: Elizabeth Smart's _By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept_ is still good, although it was never really a good book—it was an indulgence.)
When the language is so far away from English that the translator can afford to rebuild the title from the ground up, the results are more likely to be good, and in the case of Mishima they were marvellous. _The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea_ is one of those ear-catchers that wear better than you think they might, and _The Decay of the Angel_ is one of my favourite titles ever: desolate and lavish at the same time, like Cleopatra's barge at the breaker's yard. (The actual book, of course, has all the taste and judgement of a photo of Mishima in his posing pouch, pectorals oiled and motorcycle aching to be embraced between his bandy thighs.) Tanizaki, a far more important writer than Mishima, should have been as lucky with his titles, but apparently didn't care. The title of his masterpiece _The Makioka Sisters_ is just as lacklustre in the original. If only he could have borrowed something by Mishima: _Spring Snow_ would have been perfect. It would also have been irrelevant, but good titles often are. George Barker called one of his poetry collections _Eros in Dogma_. In the more than forty years since I first bought a copy in Tyrrel's second-hand bookshop in George Street, Sydney, I have found the title of the book as impossible to forget as the poems in it were impossible to remember.
The title that screams quotation is rarely right, although few go as wrong as Anthony Powell's notorious _O, How the Wheel Becomes It_!, which not only makes you not want to read his book, it makes you not want to hear anything else that Shakespeare's Ophelia ever said. (The same man, we should remember, invented a book title to beat the band: _Casanova's Chinese Restaurant_.) All the best quoted titles sound invented, with just a hint that someone else once coined the phrase: _A Long Day's Dying, The Strings Are False, All the Conspirators_. (The word "all" is too cheaply tempting: _All My Sons_ turned out well, like _All the Brothers Were Valiant_ and _All the Rivers Ran East;_ but _All the Sad Young Cannibals_ made all "all" titles suspect.) When writers take their titles from previous literature, the previous literature doesn't have to be all that previous: just as long as it is not contemporary. T. S. Eliot was still very much in business when Evelyn Waugh raided _The Waste Land_ for one of his best titles: _A Handful of Dust_. But _The Waste Land_ had been just long enough established as a canonical text for Waugh to pick a plum. Eliot's own idea of a terrific title was _Ara vos prec_ : a sure-fire hit with any bookshop browser who spoke medieval Provençal.
Poetic titles ought to be easy for poets, but few of them make the effort, or notably succeed when they do. Auden made a point of choosing titles that would radiate art deco glamour even as they lay sideways on the thin spines of his early collections: the flamboyant side of his gift came in handy. _Look, Stranger_! is one of the best book titles in any genre. He took the title from one of his own lines: "Look, stranger, on this island now." His American publisher—at Auden's suggestion, strangely enough—pointlessly dissipated the effect by favouring the excerpt _On This Island_. (Decades later, the essayist Wayland Young, collecting a set of lectures about the state of contemporary Britain, realized that somewhere in the middle of the contretemps there was another good title going begging: _This Island Now_.) Another bank-raid title by Auden came straight out of the American colloquial language, in the same way that the Broadway lyricists picked up temptingly ambiguous phrases from conversations overheard in the street: _Another Time_. It means better luck next time, it means a different era, and it means regret. It also means that any reader who picks up the book can already feel his skin prickling before he opens it. I feel the same about the title of Galway Kinnell's great long poem—his great _short long_ poem, an important consideration— _The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World_. Kinnell's title has the effect of a _trouvaille_ : he probably found it attached to a painting of Spanish troops and priests advancing into a territory they were fated to lay waste. But it was an American find: a big find, the size of a house. Auden's finds were micromanaged, appropriate to his way with a phrase. When young he could invent phrases like "The earth turns over, our side feels the cold" and string them together in a headlong rush, thus producing his trademark early tension, between the locution begging to be pondered and the impetus declining to be stopped. In his later, austere manner, he invented less, but could hear just as well. What he wanted to hear was the plain statement with a wealth of implication behind it—well behind it, so that you had to dig. The idea that his American exile was poetically barren would be sufficiently rebutted by attention to one little poem: "The Fall of Rome." In my own mind, that title is etched as one of his richest, although there is almost nothing actually in it: everything is to come. The whole poem leads you back to it, and almost everything you read about in the daily news or hear about in your daily life will lead you back to the poem. The poem's "unimportant clerk" is you, here, today. Elsewhere in the world, the mutiny of "the musclebound marines" will affect you tomorrow.
As Auden's poetic corpus takes up its place in literary history, it stands ready to be mined for titles by later writers. I myself was one of the first in: the title of my autobiographical volume _Falling Towards England_ came from an Auden poem that features Sir Isaac Newton watching his apple exemplify the law of gravity. (In a letter to me which is now in the State Library of New South Wales, Philip Larkin wondered why none of the reviewers had spotted the theft, and concluded that they were too young to have known the thrill of Auden's first impact.) Risking solipsism—not for the first time in my life—I can extrapolate from my own example to suggest that many writers feel the need to find their titles in the literary past, whether as a claim to seriousness, a desire for legitimacy, or just a childish wish to stick close to mother. There is also the consideration that if you pull off the heist successfully then at least one part of your book will be worth reading. Long ago, in the seedy heyday of Sydney's Downtown Push, I was told the story of an unrecognized but determined Push novelist who had completed a magnum opus bigger than anything by Tolstoy and thought she would have a better chance of getting it published if she could dig a good title out of an established masterpiece of English literature. On being told that Milton had been the author of several works that might conceivably be thought of as filling the bill, she searched his collected poems from end to end—as a slow reader, this took her almost a year—and finally announced that she had found something unbeatable: it encapsulated her theme, had an intriguing rhythm, came from an obscure secondary effort called "Lycidas," and nobody had ever thought of using it before. She would call her book _Look Homeward, Angel_. But there had been nothing wrong about her instinct. She just didn't know that Thomas Wolfe had got there before her, following the same instinct: to look for resonant phrases in the past, when writers like Sir Thomas Browne were minting new coin with everything they wrote.
C
Albert Camus
Dick Cavett
Paul Celan
Chamfort
Coco Chanel
Charles Chaplin
Nirad C. Chaudhuri
G. K. Chesterton
Jean Cocteau
Gianfranco Contini
Benedetto Croce
Tony Curtis
Ernst Robert Curtius
ALBERT CAMUS
Albert Camus (1913–1960) was born in Algeria just before World War I and never forgot his colonial origins, although he rose to stardom in metropolitan France, the homeland of the colonist. "Stardom" is the right word because from his first day as a published writer he was surrounded by the kind of glamorous aura that other writers are likely to resent. In Nazi-occupied Paris he took risks in support of the Resistance but was honest enough to admit later that the risks had not been very great. A fundamental honesty was his hallmark. It led him to question whether the horrors of Nazism in any way legitimized the horrors of communism. His answer to that question was his book _L'Homme révolté_ ( _The Rebel_ ), which appeared in 1951 and set him at odds with Sartre and the whole of the French left, although Camus, with good reason, went on calling himself a man of the left until the end. Raymond Aron found the book weak when not obvious, but that could have been partly because Camus had got into print first with ideas that Aron had held while Camus was still a boy. Those for whom Camus's thesis is still not obvious would do well to read the book: his novels _The Stranger_ and _The Plague_ deserve their reputations but give only part of the picture of a complex mind. The widespread notion that Camus's mind was not really very complex at all is the penalty he paid for being blessed with good looks, the Nobel Prize, too many women and too much fame. He even died famously, in a car crash featuring that most glamorous of all sports saloons, the Facel Vega. The fate of Algeria, his lost homeland, haunted him until his last day. Even at the height of his success, he was a _pied noir_ in exile. To himself, his condition as a displaced person was a constant source of unease. For generations of admiring readers, it must count as the deep secret of his overwhelming charm. Bright young beginners will always be attracted to a man who could say that everybody's life looks to be in pieces when seen from the inside.
Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.
—ALBERT CAMUS, _T HE REBEL_
WHEN I FIRST read _The Rebel_ , this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd's excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler's wife and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit. Camus was a bit of an actor—he thought, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment—and, being a bit of an actor, he was preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he couldn't not apply them.
Though he sometimes fudged the research and often fell victim to the lure of a cadence, Camus was stuck with a congenital inability to be superficial: he could be glib, but would regret it while correcting the proofs. He is not being glib here. Over the course of more than forty years, this line of his must have come to my mind at least a thousand times. (I thought of it again in the first minute of realizing that I would one day write this book.) But the first time I ever read it was the time that really counted, because the idea didn't just strike me as true, it struck me as unbeatably well put. He didn't put it in English, of course, and at that stage I could read scarcely a word of French, so I had no way of checking up. But by a lucky break the line translates easily, and even sounds rather better balanced in English than it does in the original. It would probably sound solid even in Urdu, just as long as the second and third nouns matched for polysyllabic weight. What brings the idea to incandescent life is that the line itself is so attractive an example of the very thing the tyrant's monologue can never do: it's interesting.
The tyrant's monologue doesn't _want_ to be interesting, and that's its point. Camus was among the first—almost as early as Orwell—to realize that the totalitarian overlord's power to bore was a cherished and necessary component of his repressive apparatus. Droning on without contradiction was a proof of omnipotence, Stalin had already proved it with his grinding speeches to the Presidium: speeches which had to be applauded at the end of each bromide, and for which the applause at the end had to be endless. (During the Great Terror in the late 1930s, the first person to stop applauding went in peril of his life: it was either bleeding hands or a bullet in the neck.) But Stalin's speeches were the merest rehearsal for the tedium of his writings. It was particularly brutal of him to call his personally penned missal on the theory and practice of communism _The Short Course_. There was nothing short about it except its length. Physically, his writings were not all that extensive. Spiritually, they extended into the life of his readers and suffocated everything that breathed. Lenin had already set the style, but with Lenin the occasional sign of an active mental capacity crept in to aerate the slogans. Stalin made sure that didn't happen even once, and from his earliest years in power until the Soviet Union finally crumbled, the tone of official prose never varied in its almost inspired dreariness. To take a late example, the official _Short Biography_ of Brezhnev, nominally written as a group effort by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, could have been dictated by Stalin's ghost.
In other Communist countries, the tyrant's monologue was equally a standard, all-pervasive, atmosphere-clogging item. Mao Zedong had a taste for Tang poetry and some qualifications as a poet himself. Western enthusiasts have even seen the virtues of Oriental miniature poetic forms in the component mottoes of his _Little Red Book_. But his speeches were an amalgam of squeal and scream that managed to extirpate from Mandarin its normally inalienable melody. His gift for the dogmatic tirade, lavishly decorated with scatological abuse, was faithfully reproduced by every party mouthpiece who ever addressed a meeting, until, in the Cultural Revolution, the official address was a recognized form of torture throughout the country. In Cuba, Fidel Castro's writings, such as they are, have usually appeared in the form of interviews given to the foreign media. They are not without brio, especially if you are learning Spanish, in which case it actually helps to have the same few themes hit from fifty different directions by the one hammer. The best example of a book-form Fidel interview is _Nada si podra deterner la marcia del historia_. Nothing can hold back the march of history, and he proved it with his mouth. The Swedish journalists who faithfully recorded his torrential flow also caught some of his charm, however, and you can't reach a realistic estimate of Castro unless you take his charm into account. I bought my copy in the book market in Havana, sat reading it in a café while staving off the heat with a _mojito_ , and learned quite a lot of ordinary Spanish by reading from context: the context being, of course, the standard international revolutionary boilerplate, recognizable at a glance in any language with a Roman alphabet.
But Castro's more typical form of communication is the speech, and his speeches have to be experienced to be believed. Most of the jokes made about them are made by people who have never really listened to him: they have just seen footage of him tossing his beard about while jabbing his finger at the air. In real life, if it can be called that, Castro carries the leader's monologue to lengths that should be physically impossible: a dedicated scuba-diver, he can probably do without the oxygen tanks, because he must have the lungs of a sperm whale. Camus, who played soccer, would have admired Castro's sporting proclivities but might have found his oratory suspect. Offshore admirers of Castro's putative intellectual vitality are fond of explaining how the people of Cuba—happy, salsa-dancing folk whose simple minds can be read from long range—find his oratorical powers endlessly entertaining, but the emphasis should be on the endlessly, not the entertaining. A sceptic might note that Castro's supposedly spellbinding effect presupposes the absence of other forms of verbal entertainment, and indeed the absence of a substantial part of the Cuban population. Cubans who head for Miami with nothing but an inflatable inner tube between them and the sharks are unanimous on the point: Castro's speeches would have been enough to drive them out even if the regime's other promises of abundance had been kept.
From North Korea in its nightmare heyday, the writings of Kim Il Sung were exported to the West in container ships, but not even our most fervent advocates of an alternative to capitalism could generate within themselves a demand to match the supply. They should have taken a look: it would have been a useful education, although very painful. Our broadsheet newspapers frequently ran, as a paid advertisement, a full-page prospectus of the collected writings, quoting examples of Kim's thoughts, or Thought. The prospectus was probably enough to make the fans postpone their enjoyment. The luckless inhabitants of North Korea, however, had no choice: they had to stay abreast of a stream of prose that flowed faster than they could read. Not a paragraph of it was of any interest whatsoever, except as an awe-inspiring demonstration of the great leader's prerogative to bore his people rigid, like the Chinese terracotta army he inspected on his tour of Shaanxi province in 1982. He must have thought that he had seen those glazed eyes before.
Examples from the Communist regimes could be multiplied—her rhetoric was the other reason that Camus might not have relished an evening with Mrs. Ceau escu—but the exercise would be without merit. The fascist leaders present a more problematic, and therefore more important, case. Mussolini was held to be an exciting speaker, but on any objective estimate you had to be an enthusiast to think so. Ezra Pound, who was otherwise such a fine judge of poetry that T. S. Eliot sought and accepted his suggestions for trimming _The Waste Land_ , compared the spare shapeliness of a Mussolini speech to a sculpture by Brancu i. It is permissible to suspect, however, that Pound's demented politics (Mussolini's measures against the Jews were never enough to suit Pound, just as Pétain's were never enough to suit Céline) had affected his aesthetic judgement. Even at the time, there were plenty of native Italians capable of realizing that what was coming out of Mussolini's bag was wind, and later on, during the long hangover after the Fascist binge, dispassionate philologists subjected his rhetoric to a rigorous linguistic analysis, laying bare how he had worked his tricks. In the case of Hitler, German-speaking critics had identified his speeches as concerted trickery long before he came to power. (In pre- _Anschluβ_ Vienna, the coffee-house wit Anton Kuh published a persuasive dissection of Hitler's rhetorical hoopla, thus earning himself a high place on the Nazi death list.)
For the performance art of both Hitler and Mussolini—both of whom the young Camus heard regularly on the radio—the most you can say is that it was exciting stuff if you believed it, and abject tub-thumping if you did not. As a writer, Mussolini when young could turn out a reasonably rousing socialist polemic. Hitler as a writer gave us _Mein Kampf_ , which is worse than boring: Rudolf Hess, who transcribed it as it poured from his hero's lips, would have been driven mad if he had not already been that way anyway. Had _Mein Kampf_ been even halfway readable, more people would have actually read it, and the world would have been warned earlier. In their off-duty moments—their down-time, as it was never then called—Mussolini and Hitler were very different creatures. Mussolini, though he brooked no contradiction, could be entertaining because he could be entertained: an admirer of Fats Waller could never be entirely without bonhomie. But Hitler was boredom incarnate. A typical oratorical effort was his broadcast on the eve of the _Anschluβ_ : it lasted a full three hours. And if listening to him was hard work in public, it was living hell in private. As we have it in transcribed form, his table talk makes us long for Goebbels. In the salon of the Berghof, for hours after midnight, Hitler would keep his punch-drunk guests from their beds with an interminable monologue about his early struggles and the shining Nazi future: a _Ring_ cycle minus the music. Secretaries who worshipped him fell asleep trying to write it all down, while amputee officers reporting to him from the eastern front longed to get back to the comparatively spontaneous entertainment provided by the Red Army's massed artillery.
Hitler had the con man's insight into other people's reactions and must have been well aware of what he was doing. He was proving himself. Or rather he was proving his position: proving his power. Tyrants always do, and Camus spotted it. If Mussolini strikes us as a partial exception, it was because he was a partial tyrant. In Fascist Italy, the idea of individuality never quite died among the people. The true political monster insists that, apart from a few hand-picked satraps, there shall be no individuals except himself. Everyone must be reminded, all the time, that solitude is all there is: solitude in the sense of helpless loneliness, awaiting its instructions from the leader's voice. It was probably Camus's own innate loneliness that permitted him the insight. For a would-be athlete with weak lungs, there was no amount of success that could detach him from his primal knowledge of what it feels like to be without power. It was a knowledge that helped to make him a great writer. The Gods poured success on him but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin.
DICK CAVETT
Dick Cavett was born in 1937 in Nebraska. In high school he was a state gymnastics champion and trained himself as a magician. After Yale, he began his television career as a writer for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, and subsequently ruled as the small screen's most sophisticated talk show host from the early 1970s onwards. In America, the talk show format depends on a comic monologue at the top of the show, perhaps a few sketches, and then the star interviews. Cavett's format dissolved the humour into the interviews, and much of his wit was unscripted. The idea that one man could be both playful and serious was never deemed to be quite natural on American television and Cavett was regarded as something of a freak even at the time. Eventually he paid the penalty for being _sui generis_ in a medium that likes its categories to be clearly marked. I should say for the record that his interview with me was one of the least amusing he ever did, and it was my fault. But I learned a lot from him and never forgot him. The book _Cavett_ (1974), which carries on its title page both his own name and that of his friend and amanuensis Christopher Porterfield, is cast mainly in the form of a long interview with the star. One of the best books about show business ever published, there is nothing quite like it, just as there has never been anyone quite like him.
Howya gonna keep ' em down on the farm, after they've seen the farm?
—DICK CAVETT, QUOTING ABE BURROWS
DICK CAVETT may have heard this line from someone else and stored it away for future use, but was certainly capable of thinking it up for himself and delivering it on the spot. In lofty retrospect, the trick of the line seems obvious enough to rank as one of those _trouvailles_ waiting to glorify whoever gets to it first. Abe Burrows merely got lucky. (Abe Burrows also shared the credit for the superb libretto of _Guys and Dolls_ , which was scarcely a matter of mere luck; but that's by the way.) As a true sophisticate with a daunting intellectual range, Cavett was the most distinguished talk show host in America, if sophistication and an intellecutual range were what you wanted. Johnny Carson was an even bigger celebrity, but Carson was a comedian first and foremost. Cavett's mental life was so rich that he could do comedy as a sideline. The only persona that he bothered to, or needed to, develop for working to the camera was of a boy from Nebraska dazzled by the bright lights of New York. To fit that persona, he would freely help himself to ideas from his range of influences stretching back to W. C. Fields and beyond. But he also had the capacity to make up great new stuff at terrific speed. He began as a writer for the established hosts and he could write for anybody, matching not only their themes but their tone of voice. When he finally appeared on screen as himself, he had to match his own tone of voice. He found that harder, but soon got awesomely good at it. By the time he got to me, in 1974, he had already interviewed almost every household name in the country, and was ready for the more difficult challenge of interviewing someone whose name wasn't known at all, and of making something out of that. We were on air, I had hummed and hedged about my reasons for leaving Australia, and he suavely sailed in with his own explanation, which I reproduce above. The throwaway speed of it impressed me: if he had used the line before, he knew just how to make it sound as if he hadn't. A small, handsome man with an incongruously deep voice, Cavett was deadpan in the sense that he had no special face to signify a funny remark. He just said it, the way that the best conversational wits always do. In conversation, "joke" is a deadly word: anyone who relishes improvised humour will duck for cover if he hears a prepared joke coming. Whether in private or in public, Cavett's style posed no such danger. He was by far the wittiest of the American talk show television hosts, most of whom have always been dependent on their writers. There is no shame in that: in Britain and Australia, most of the talk shows go on the air once a week for a limited season. In America it is more like once a day forever. The host's huge salary is his compensation for never being free to spend it. The schedule is crushing, and the top-of-the-show monologue, if the host were to write it on his own, would need a full day's work, with no time left over for all the other preparation he has to do. Before the American host sits down with his first guest, he must first be a stand-up comedian: a joke teller. Cavett, having started as a writer, understood that condition well. But in his career on camera he was always more interested in the stuff that came after the monologue: the conversation with the guest. In this he was different from Carson and anyone else who has followed in Carson's tradition, right up to the present day. Even Jon Stewart, who deserves his billing as a rare bird, is more like Carson than like Cavett.
Carson was most at home doing his annual, high-earning stand-up stint in Las Vegas. Sitting down on his show, he could be spontaneously funny if the guest opened an opportunity—the clumsier the guest, the more opportunities there were—but it was strictly counterpunching. When the guest provided no suitable stimuli, Carson's grovelling feed-man, Ed McMahon, chipped in and Carson counterpunched against him. Carson's successor on _The Tonight Show_ , Jay Leno, does without the stooge but works essentially the same way: the core of his technique is stand-up joke telling, and he keeps in shape by taking cabaret dates all over America. (When he was my guest in London, Leno was in his element, firing off jokes one after the other. When I was his guest in Los Angeles, he did the same thing. I did my best to come back at him, but it wasn't a conversation: more like mouth-to-mouth assassination.) Of the star hosts currently operating, David Letterman comes closest to Cavett's easy-seeming urbanity, but Letterman, for all his quickness of reflex, needs, or anyway takes, a lot of time to tell a story—at the top of the show, he can take ten minutes to get two things said, with much eye-popping and many an audience-milking "Whoo!," "Hey!" and "Uh- _huh_!" Nor does Letterman really enjoy it when the guest threatens to be capable of completing a paragraph unassisted, and an eloquent woman races his motor to a frenzy: instead of interrupting after every sentence, he interrupts _during_ the sentence. The interruptions can be very funny, and they increase our opportunities to admire him: but they reduce our opportunities to admire the guest. Among the current bunch, Conan O'Brien gave you, when he was starting out, the best idea of what Cavett's unemphatic poise used to be like; but O'Brien, as he completes his climb to stardom, gives himself an ever-increasing ration of havin'-fun hollerin'. It's an imperative of the business, and Cavett defied it at his peril. Cavett never mugged, never whooped it up for the audience, rarely told a formally constructed joke, and listened to the guest. To put it briefly, his style did not suit an American mass audience, and in the course of time a position that had never been firm in the first place was fatally eroded.
Perhaps he was too cultivated. His Upper East Side brownstone was full of good books, which the range of reference in his conversation proved that he had read. (At Yale he had been an erratic student, but one of those erratic students who somehow end up reading the whole of Henry James, probably because somebody advised him not to.) Though temperamentally a nervous wreck by nature, he seemed as much at ease among his civilized surroundings as Jay Leno seems at ease among his classic cars and motorcycles. I was in New York to promote my book _Unreliable Memoirs_ , which I suspected at the start would have little chance of securing an American audience. It was just too hard to classify: most of the first wave of American reviewers had convicted it of trying to be truthful and fanciful at the same time. Since I had clearly had no other aim in mind, I read these indictments with sad bewilderment. The most powerful reviewer, in _The New York Review of Books_ , had seized on my incidental remark "Rilke was a prick" in order to instruct me that Rilke was, on the contrary, an important German poet. These portents were not good. But Cavett had been so nice about the book on air that I allowed myself to imagine he had actually read it, so here was one American reader already in the bag. He asked me to lunch at the Algonquin, where he was delightfully fast and funny; and then later in the week he asked me home for drinks, where he was even better, because he was ready to talk his business instead of mine. I learned a lot from him in a tearing hurry. Discussing his disasters on air (self-deprecation was one of his charms) he put on a tape of an old show and fast-forwarded to an illustrative moment. I can't remember who the guests were or what they were doing—it could have been Truman Capote attacking Sonny Liston with a handkerchief—but I can remember exactly the question Cavett asked me. "Why did my voice get louder just then?" When I hazarded that it was because the sound engineer had racked up the level, Cavett rewound a minute of the tape and showed me the moment again. "It didn't get louder," he said. "The director cut to the close shot." Then he played me an example of a line getting lost because his director cut to the wide shot. Suddenly I saw it all: the closeness of the shot varies the volume. I had already done years of television without figuring that one out for myself. That was the night I learned to wait for the red light on my camera before launching a would-be zinger. The red light meant go. In later years, isolated individual tapes (called iso-tapes in the trade) did away with the problem, but at the time it was vital information. Cavett, who did a minimum of four shows a week, knew everything about talking in vision.
It made him famous. He was never as famous as Carson, but he was famous enough not to be able to go out except in disguise. With a fishing hat pulled down over his ears he walked me along to Fifth Avenue so I could hail a cab. In that area the sidewalks had just been relaid with a sprinkling of metal dust in the concrete so that they would sparkle under the streetlights. We were walking on a night sky. Years later I did his show again. He was just as welcoming but he had even less time to spare. His show was fighting for renewal. The network executives thought he was finished and they might have been right. Those hundreds of shows a year had worn him out. The joke-telling machines can take that kind of schedule because nothing troubles them in their interior lives except the problem of finding time to spend the money. Cavett's interior life was more complicated. For too long he had been questioning the value of what he did for a living. I think he really wanted to be a writer, but couldn't face the risk of failing at it. The idea that he was born for television secretly appalled him. One of his many on-air comments about his lack of inches—"Sony are making people"—had a bitter tinge.
But born for television he was. Even if he had never hosted a talk show, his comedy specials would have been enough to establish him as one of the most original small-screen talents since Ernie Kovacs. I particularly treasure the blissful moment when Cavett was being loomed over by a luscious six-foot blonde. Sheltering under her magnificent bosom, Cavett addressed the audience. "Allow me to present," he said, "Admiral Harvey Q. Beeswanger USN, master of disguise." He had the wit's gift of making the language the hero—the gift of playful seriousness. In America, however, play and seriousness make uneasy bedfellows. Even a supposedly urbane magazine or culture supplement will contract a severe case of editorial nerves if a contributor cracks wise on a serious theme, and in the general run of show business the two elements, as time goes on, grow more and more separate instead of closer together.
It might be said that the United States is the first known case of a civilization developing through disintegration. It _might_ be said, but you wouldn't want to say it on an entertainment talk show. A licensed iconoclast like Gore Vidal could perhaps get way with it, but no host would dare try—or even, alas, be capable of thinking such a thing. There are special talk shows for that sort of stuff. Charlie Rose has the seriousness business all sewn up. There will be no Dick Cavett of the future. We should count ourselves lucky that there was one in the past. I count myself blessed that I knew him when he was still a small but seductive part of the American landscape. Eventually the American landscape seemed to change its mind about wanting to include him, but it is possible that he had the idea first. At one point, towards the end, he was scheduled to do a set of programmes in England, for later transmission in America. Booked as a guest and champing at the bit, I was one of the many admirers looking forward to his arrival: but he never showed up. Apparently he boarded the Concorde at Kennedy, had a breakdown before the plane took off, and was taken home. I never found out what happened to him afterwards, and have never tried to find out. He would always have been a melancholic if he had given himself time, and perhaps he finally had time. (At the Algonquin he had given me a copy of his marvellous book, _Cavett_ , and on the contents page he wrote "More in Seurat than in Ingres.") A man looking for oblivion should be allowed to have it. Like Dick Diver at the end of _Tender Is the Night_ , Dick Cavett sank back into America. He had already taught me my biggest lesson about television, far bigger than the one about the light on the camera: doing television can be wonderfully rewarding in every sense, but if there is nothing else in your life, watch out.
PAUL CELAN
Paul Celan was born in 1920 in Romania and committed suicide in Paris in 1970. A thumbnail sketch of his life would include two main facts: he was a slave labourer under the Nazis, and he wrote the single most famous poem about the death camps, " _Todesfuge_ " (Death Fugue). A more detailed account of his life opens up into one paradox after another. Anybody can understand " _Todesfuge_ ," but to become acquainted with the bulk of his other poetry is a much harder task, even though there are admirers who say that the difficulties have been exaggerated, and that he is hard to understand only because he understood so much. But there are times in his work when a purportedly deep penetration of reality looks exactly like taking refuge in obscurity. Though the truth can't always be told by sales figures, it is interesting that his first collection of poems, _Der Sand aus den Urnen_ (The Sand from the Urns), published in 1948, sold twenty copies in three years. If one of the poems in it, " _Todesfuge_ ," hadn't eventually caught on, the world might have heard much less of him: and one of the reasons it caught on was surely that it was, for him, so unusually direct. He himself loathed the idea that his most famous poem had become a media event. He thought that too many Germans were using it to ritualize guilt. On the other hand he had time for Heidegger, who saw no cause for guilt about his own conduct under the Nazis. There is an excellent critical biography by Celan's chief translator John Felstiner, called _Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew_. There is also a question, however, to be asked about that word "survivor." If we can conclude that the only way he had not to be mad was to be dead, can he truly be said to have survived? He certainly survives as a poet, but one does not necessarily belittle him by saying that it all depended on one poem. Mervyn Peake, who was present for the liberation of Belsen, wrote a courtly love poem to one of its dying girls. The discrepancy between subject and vocabulary worked its ironic trick, but finally the properties and cadences of the nineteenth-century romantic heritage obtruded. Celan wrote a twentieth-century poem. He found a way of injecting the inescapable sweetness of the musically constructed poem with the necessary bitterness to fit the time in which it was written, thereby obeying the following instruction to himself.
Number me among the almonds.
—PAUL CELAN, QUOTED IN JOHN FELSTINER'S _P AUL CELAN: POET, SURVIVOR, JEW_, P. 79
AT THE TIME I noted this instruction down, I couldn't resist the unwritten addition: "And call me a nut." But I knew that a mental defence mechanism was at work to fend off the sense of being underrehearsed that one is bound to have when reading about someone upon whom history came down with its full weight, thereby justifying any amount of eccentric behaviour later on. Celan's example will always be daunting to other poets. For one thing, it included suicide, which critics understandably tend to regard as a mark of seriousness. They would have thought him serious anyway, because most of the time his work was almost impossible to make sense of. It courts philistinism to say that Celan's best poem, " _Todesfuge_ ," is also his most accessible, but there is no way around the risk. Celan's usual hermeticism, his obliquity that amounts to an insoluble encryption, was a necessity for the poet, not the poetry: there was never any reason poetry written in the dark light of the Holocaust should be indecipherable, and he wrote at least one poem to prove it. In " _Todesfuge_ " you can tell exactly what is going on. He is titrating the language of the visione amorosa against the imagery of the _giudizio universale_. The poem is an amorous vision of the Last Judgement. To put it more simply, it is a love song from hell. When we pick its entwined melodies apart, which the poem demands that we do, we find that there are two kinds of amorous vision: one the exultant vision of the perpetrator, the other the anguished vision of the slave. Hence the fugue. Scholarship (but only scholarship: not the poem itself) tells us that the fugue started as a tango. In Majdanek the camp's pitiable tango orchestra was forced to play endlessly while the doomed prisoners were selected for the various ways in which they would be worked to death. The German masters were rather partial to the tango, perhaps because it was the smart music of the socially pretentious: Hitler and Goebbels were both entertained by a tango orchestra in 1941. Celan would have heard about the death-camp tango. He would have heard about it, but he would not have actually heard it. We should remember that he was never in Majdanek or in any _Vernichtungslager_ as such, although as a forced labourer in Romania he might as well have been. Majdanek was liberated by the Russians in 1944 and Celan probably heard about its sinister tango immediately afterwards. After he had the idea for the two contesting visions of love, however, it had to be a fugue.
The "Death Fugue" (strictly, the death's-fugue, because _Todes_ is possessive) is, if you like, the last love song. In that sense, Adorno's remark about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz is all too dreadfully true: after such knowledge, there might be forgiveness, but no more innocence. There could be no return to the joyful. But Adorno's remark was also false, in the sense that no such return had ever been possible at any time in the historical world. There had been Holocausts throughout history, which probably featured slaughter as its first multicultural activity. The Holocaust, "our" Holocaust, seemed to be unique for having emerged from culture itself. But that was a misreading: a misreading from professional readers, from whom emerge the misreadings of the most tenacious kind. Culture and the Holocaust were separate things, both of which emerged from history. In the long view—admittedly easier for us who had the privilege of growing to our intellectual maturity after the event—the two things are so separate that they define each other. George Steiner echoed Adorno's opinion, but didn't act on it. Emotionally, Steiner might, had he wished, have embodied the silence into which he suggested (in his early book _Language and Silence_ ) that language ought to beat a retreat. With a highly developed awareness of the richness of European culture, he had a sensitive knowledge of how extensive the damage was. But none of that stopped him becoming a student of Celan; a course which, logically, ought not to have been available to him; if there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, why look for it? Steiner's answer possibly lay in his seeming conviction that Celan's real poetry was in the encryptions, the meta-language that proclaimed, by its obscurity, the impossibility of dealing directly with the event. Leaving aside the consideration that academics might always favour poetic difficulty—it makes them indispensable—Celan's difficulty, and Steiner's endorsement of it, amount to a double endorsement for Adorno.
But " _Todesfuge_ " undoes the whole thesis. The idea that lyric poetry might be rendered nugatory by an enforced awareness of evil will always have its validity as an emotional response. As the world goes, it would be a damned soul who did not feel the idea to be true every few hours: how can we write of love when women are being tortured? But to think it true is to defy reason. Even within the one man, there can be the capacity to see the world at its most destructive and still create. Celan proved it with " _Todesfuge_." Though we are bound to say, and say in a hurry, that a beautiful poem is not the only thing it is, the poem would not be there at all if the tradition of courtly love had not at least been remembered—so the remembering of poetry is still possible, even in the light of the oven. Compounded with the echo of a biblical psalm, a new kind of courtly poem, embracing a more tragic concept of beauty, arises from the memory. Steiner was right about the death of tragedy as a form, but only to the extent that tragedy became formless by getting into everything, in the same way that the ash from the chimneys got into the landscape.
With " _Todesfuge_ " the tragic ash got into the lyric poem. It always had done, by implication—there was never a poem about the idea of love that didn't get its force from the fact of death. (Anthony Burgess, in _Nothing Like the Sun_ —one of the few books about Shakespeare that a young student should read while he is first reading Shakespeare—paints a convincing picture of Shakespeare being inspired to lyric composition while watching an execution at Tyburn.) But no poem ever got quite so much force, from quite so much death, as " _Todesfuge_." There are no points to be scored by calling it a great poem: of course it is. What is harder is to risk opprobrium by saying that Celan might have written more poems of its stature if he had not written so many poems about himself. His hermetic poetry no doubt reflected, and possibly controlled, his mental distress. Judging from his biography, it was a sufficient miracle that he could concentrate at all. But " _Todesfuge_ ," by reflecting the physical destruction of its beautiful girls, got him out of himself. It got him away from the condition that Mario Vargas Llosa usefully calls _ensimismamiento_ (being wrapped up in yourself), and Hannah Arendt defined as the tendency to identify one's own mind with the battlefields of history. Paul Celan had a perfect right to inhabit that condition, but it worked against his best talent, and might even have have helped to convince him, in the long run, that his best talent was not the best part of his mind, thus leaving his conscience free to condemn his own survival. There are no simplistic rules for poets: if there were, any duffer could write poetry. There are, however, rules of thumb, and one of the best is that getting the focus off yourself gives you the best chance of tapping your personal experience. For anyone with a personal experience like Celan's, of course, detachment from the self would be an impertinent recommendation. But it remains fascinating that in this one instance he achieved it, and wrote the poem by which most of us define him: the man who came out of the flames with a love song that redeems mankind in the only way possible, by admitting that there is no redemption.
CHAMFORT
Known, to his contemporaries and to posterity, always and only by his pseudonymous single name, Chamfort was born Sébastien-Roch Nicolas in 1741 and forecast the modern age by the reason for his death. He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine. In the rich tradition of French aphorists, Chamfort was the one who paid with his life for the knack of getting reality into a nutshell. It was because he lived at the wrong time. The Revolution had given birth to ideological malice in a form we can now recognize, but it was not recognizable then. It was still discovering itself. Chamfort, by the time that he ran out of luck, had already defined some of its characteristics, but not even he had guessed that it couldn't take a joke. In the twentieth century both of the main forms of totalitarianism were united in promoting the jokers to the head of the death list.
If it wasn't for me, I would do brilliantly.
—CHAMFORT, QUOTED IN JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL'S _F IN DU SIÈCLE DES OMBRES_ (AT THE END OF THE CENTURY OF SHADOWS)
_S ANS MOI_, _je me porterais à merveille_. Chamfort said this after a bungled attempt to kill himself. His real name was Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, but he lived, and lives on, as Chamfort the wit. He had other ambitions, some of which brought him worldly success. His theatrical works were well enough thought of to gain him admission into high society. Tall, handsome, and a mighty lover of women, he said that he would never get married, "for fear of having a son like me." He was admitted to the Academy in 1781. In today's textbooks, however, Chamfort's sentimental plays are remembered for the thoroughness with which they have been forgotten, and he is classed with Rivarol as one of those pre-revolutionary minor philosophers who haunted the salons, made a night of it, and put too much of their effort into clever talk. But Chamfort's posthumously published _Maximes_ took their place in literature for those connoisseurs of the aphorism who positively liked the idea that there was a wasted lifetime behind the wisdom. Though initially all in favour of the Revolution, Chamfort would probably have had the same chance as Camille Desmoulins of surviving the Terror, and for the same reason: he was a known critic and parodist of the hypocrisy prevalent among humanitarians, and the humanitarians were in charge. Desmoulins was executed because he had made a joke about Saint-Just. (In the tumbril, Desmoulins was heard to say "My joke has killed me," and his last witticism was already spreading by word of mouth even as his clever head fell into the basket.) Unlike Desmoulins, however, Chamfort tried to anticipate the guillotine. In a piquant forecast of Egon Friedell's flight from a window in Vienna 144 years later, Chamfort chose himself as an executioner. He made a frightful mess of it, but luckily died of his wounds, leaving the memory of his deliciously sardonic intelligence free to do its work. Chamfort was the one who supplied the lasting definition of _fraternité_ : "Be my brother or I will kill you." That, in fact, was the joke that killed him: he was arrested soon after making it.
Jean-François Revel is only one of the many subsequent students of politics to admire Chamfort. Mirabeau borrowed from him freely, and Talleyrand more than freely, because Talleyrand didn't even acknowledge the debt. In London, Chateaubriand read Chamfort's complete works. Pushkin, the Goncourt brothers and Schopenhauer all thought Chamfort exemplary. From Ernst Jünger's Caucasus notebooks we can tell that he was reading Chamfort attentively in November 1942, with American bombers already over Germany in broad daylight and the Stalingrad disaster in the final stages of preparation. In de Gaulle's memoirs, Chamfort is quoted to fascinating effect: "Those who were reasonable have survived. Those who were passionate have lived." Evidently Chamfort helped de Gaulle to believe himself a bit of a devil. It is possibly the secret of the attractive wastrel, as a type, that reasonable men see in him the road not taken: his seemingly effortless charm allays momentarily the consideration that for them the road might never have been open. Some of the admiration heaped on the talented goof-off is gratitude to the sacrificial goat. Writers in general are happier if one of their number wastes his gifts, especially if the gifts are conspicuous: the way is left open for his tone to be borrowed, not to say plagiarized. But Chamfort might not have needed his overdeveloped taste for social life in order to marginalize himself. Purporting to find the whole business of securing a reputation sufficiently off-putting to justify a career of cynicism, he seems to have suffered few agonies of shame in writing his romantic entertainments. It was the serious literature that he found, or claimed to find, repellent. "Most books of the present have the air of being made in a day from the books of the past." It will do as well as anybody else's aphorism as a warning against making books out of books, although—as I have tried to argue elsewhere in this book made out of books—there is something to be said for the practice, as long as what is said is something true.
Chamfort had a way of getting something true said memorably without making it look laboriously chiselled. "I am leaving a world," he said, "in which the heart that does not break must turn to bronze." Few wits bow out with a throwaway line, and if they try to, the line is seldom as good as that. Even from such masters of elision as La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, too many French aphorisms come equipped with a marble slab. Chamfort favoured the paper dart. There is an easy, wristy flourish to his phrasing, which an artist-journalist like Revel is qualified to appreciate, because he can do it himself. "Systems of literary criticism," Revel wrote in his little book _Sur Proust_ , "are made to satisfy the devouring lack of interest in literary works that calls itself a thirst for culture." If that sentence turned on "calls itself a thirst for culture" it would just be a Wildean paradox. But _dévorante_ gives it savour, because the consuming energy of the deafness to art that goes into a critical system is always one of its distinguishing features—distinguishing it, that is, from the decently reticent poise of a sensitive response.
Chamfort got the vital extra word from his lyrical talent. With the aphoristic statement as with any other measure of prose, a nose for poetry helps. "For this magician of the epigram," wrote Revel of Chamfort, "the crystal and the music of a phrase are what matter most." A hidden corollary might be that the truth and the justice are what matter least; but there can be no doubt that a suggestive enchantment, always in shorter supply than rational exposition, is more likely to get our attention first, if not to hold it longest. Chamfort reaped all the rewards open to the quick wit, and almost convinces us that it was the only way to live. But if he had really believed that, he would have written down nothing at all. He did do brilliantly in the end, and all because he was himself, and not in spite of it.
COCO CHANEL
Never pretty but always beautiful, Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel (1883–1971) embodied, during the course of her career, two important themes relevant to the story of the humanities in the twentieth century: one of them was the capacity of the popular and applied arts to influence culture at its highest level, and the other was the frailty of creativity under moral pressure. As a designer, her invention of the "little black dress" shifted the centre of attention from _haute couture_ to _prêt-à-porter_ : before her, the height of fashion had been priced out of the reach of any except the wealthy. From the fortune she made from her inventions, she was able to further exercise her infallible taste by patronizing the avant-garde: she wrote cheques for Diaghilev and Stravinsky. During the Occupation, however, her tastes, if not her taste, led her to accept the protection of a German official, with consequences for her reputation that would have been disastrous if her talent had not been regarded, correctly, as a national treasure. She lives on as a brand name: a perpetually bankable guarantee of elegance. The name tells something of the truth, though not all of it.
Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops.
—COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.): A LINE WRITTEN FOR HER BY PIERRE REVERDY, AS QUOTED IN _C HANEL_, BY EDMOND CHARLES ROUX
CHANEL MADE A profitable habit out of keeping a tame poet on hand to coin aphorisms that could be put into circulation attributed to her. As a general rule, the best aphorisms are truisms, but are true about subjects too scandalous to receive regular treatment. The truth of this one was most piquantly confirmed in Chanel's capital city. In Paris under the Occupation, the rationing of luxuries did not stop the women dressing as well as possible. Indeed they tried harder: it was something to take their minds off the grinding boredom, and the competition for the few available men was fierce. Paris was probably the first wartime capital in which the shortage of sheer stockings was compensated for by painting the legs, with a seam pencilled up the back of the leg for verisimilitude. The outbreak of fashion extravagance after the war—the New Look made far more news all over the world than the New Deal ever did—was a generational revenge for shortages of cloth, colour and silk lining.
When I was young enough to be dressing up in my mother's clothes while she was out—I had my transvestite phase at the age of seven, as I remember—the next most fascinating thing after the propelling lipstick was the look of the sequins on her one and only best dress for evening. Their glitter still affects the way I see Sydney Harbour in oblique sunlight. My mother's clothes were her sole connection with a better life, and they were vital. Her clothes and mine: the day when she left the hot iron for too long on the trousers of my first proper blue suit was one of the worst days of our lives. We had enough, but not a lot: not enough for it not to matter. Although Sydney was a long way from the worst of the war's hardships, it did not escape the global law that elevated everything pretty to the status of a rarity. It was only decades later, however, that I fully realized how those few fine things my mother had to dress in had been the true expression of a spritual value. "Philosophy is about people in clothes," said the British philosopher T. E. Hulme, "not about the soul of man." It's about both those things, but he was right to insist that the first mattered.
The next level up from bare necessity is where the life of the soul begins. As the war neared its end, the goods of the American military PX were the world's first international currency. Girls in Germany could be bought for a bar of chocolate. Less directly but just as effectively, cartons of Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes bought the affections of women in Britain and Australia. For our fighting men, the superior uniforms of the American service personnel amounted to one of the most soul-destroying aspects of the war. American enlisted men were better dressed than our officers. It hurt worse than German bombs or Japanese bayonets: with those you could take your chances, but the opulent small change of American culture you simply had to take, and taking it was hard.
Years had to go by before those discrepancies ceased to be painful. People's morality was judged by how long they had held out against the lure of material goods. Chanel's borrowed axiom had a wide and lasting application—a sociological principle raised to the level of science. Unfortunately her own principles were too easily compromised by it. During the Occupation she chose the easy path. She took on a powerful German protector. It paid off in a big way in the early stages: she would not have wanted for butter and sugar. Later on, when the Germans themselves ran out of luxuries, the deal no doubt held less attraction at the material level. Perhaps she deserves some credit for sticking with him. The censorious committees of _l'Épuration_ (the Purification) would not have seen it that way. If she hadn't decamped to Switzerland she would undoubtedly have had her head shaved: a new hairstyle that even she would have been hard-pressed to make fashionable. The film star Arletty spent two years in purdah for collaborating a lot less blatantly. Finally Chanel was allowed back, because she was one of the keepers of the great secret of couture, which the French correctly saw as the first chance of national recovery. A perennial guarantee to the world that Paris held the secret of a stylish life, couture was already helping to regenerate the French economy when the Citroën DS19 was still being designed. No matter how elegant the cars and airliners (and there was never a more classy looking aircraft than the Caravelle), it was the clothes that sold the world on the idea of a uniquely French combination of artistry and design. Nevertheless, Chanel sensibly kept her head down until, in 1954, inspired by the presence in Paris of the beautiful American model Suzy Parker, she went back into the rag trade.
In the West during the twentieth century, the blockade of the German-speaking countries in World War I, the post-war waves of inflation, the Depression throughout the free world, the war in Europe and the Pacific and its long rationed aftermath everywhere except in America—they all contributed to a laboratory for the study of the connection between materialism and the spirit. But it was in the heartland of dialectical materialism that the laboratory provided measures for the whole of existence. In the Soviet Union, nothing mattered more than access to the special stores, which were reserved for the _nomenklatura_ and its chosen favourites. The special stores were where the luxuries were, some of them poignantly elementary: toothpaste that did not corrode teeth, toilet paper that did not cut, scissors that did. The vast majority of the people were condemned to the ordinary shops, where the command economy proved its efficacy by providing a standard of living only one rung up from the Gulag. Except for the brief burst of the New Economic Policy under Lenin, it was like that for seventy long years: the society that had proposed to abolish the gap between rich and poor made it an unbridgeable chasm. In Moscow in 1976 I was with a party of tourists who stayed at the Metropol hotel, famous scene of many a midnight visit in the late 1930s, when foreign Communist dignitaries would go to bed with all their clothes on in case their number came up. One of my fellow tourists, a lecturer in sociology at an English university, told me solemnly at dinner that it was a relief to be in a country where the gap between rich and poor was not blatant. He didn't see our Intourist guide slipping some leftover blinis into her plastic leather-look handbag. In Cuba in 1986 the security man in charge of my party of journalists—we were there to help generate publicity for the Varadero resort project—told me that if I really wished to reward him for his help I could use a few of my dollars to buy him a bottle of good rum from the special store. He was a government agent in a country famous for manufacturing the stuff, and in his whole adult life he had never been able to get a taste of it except at the lowest grade.
Except in periods of deliberately induced famine, nobody starved in the Soviet Union, or died of thirst or went unclothed. But they ate, drank and dressed at a level too low to leave them untouched by a desolate envy of the capitalism they were supposed to despise, and finally it was that corrosive spiritual deprivation that brought socialism down. The deprivation was comparative, not absolute: but the comparison was real. Thoughts of it filled the day, the week, the month, the year and the whole wasted life. In the West, someone obsessed with material things is correctly thought to be a fool. In the East, everyone was obsessed with material things from daylight to dusk. It was the most sordid trick that communism played. Killing people by the millions at least had the merit of a tragic dimension. But making the common people queue endlessly for goods barely worth having was a bad joke. At the Paris _prêt-à-porter_ collections in 1982 I met Viktor Sichov, a photographer who had managed to defect from the Soviet Union and bring his whole archive with him. He thought he had spent his life photographing Soviet women in their moments of joy, passion, suffering and defeat. In Paris he finally realized that the true subject of his photographs had been their clothes. The edge of the crime, where it shaded into ordinary life, was the area in which the sadness became most palpable. In the centre it was too intense to grasp. Soviet consumer goods were the small-arms fire of the government's relentless economic assault on the people. Soviet consumer goods were an insult. They were already rubbish when they were fresh from the factory, and the fate of the people who had slaved, saved and stood in endless lines to buy them was to find that they could not even be cherished, because they were already falling apart. Meanwhile, the tastes of the ruling elite gave the game away. No Soviet diplomat based abroad ever returned to his homeland without a few bottles of Chanel No. 5. So Coco Chanel, who had rolled over for the Nazis, played her part in discomfiting the next dictatorship that came along.
CHARLES CHAPLIN
For most of his life, which stretched from 1889 to 1977, Charles Chaplin was world-famous, and for much of the early part of his career, up until the end of the silent movie era, he was, if measured in terms of recognizability and media coverage, by far the most famous person in the world. Readers of his stilted _My Autobiography_ might assume that it all went to his head. The facts say that it didn't. The object of adulation on a scale that would have embarrassed Louis XIV, Chaplin nevertheless maintained his identification with the common people from whom he emerged. His progressive politics were genuinely felt, and his embarrassment at the hands of Red scare witch-hunters during the McCarthy era—the persecution drove him into exile—was an episode in modern American history of which his adopted country had no cause to be proud. In his later and less successful movies of the sound era, there were signs of disabling conceit in his determination to take every major credit including that of composer, but nobody had a better right to consider himself an artistic genius. He knew, however, that he wasn't a genius about everything else as well. Hitler, who awarded himself credentials for peculiar insight even into science, was thus a perfect subject for Chaplin's comic gift. _The Great Dictator_ (1940) was a study of megalomania by an essentially humble man.
They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no-one understands you.
—CHARLES CHAPLIN TO ALBERT EINSTEIN AT THE 1931 PREMIERE OF _C ITY LIGHTS_
ON THE BIG night, both of the great men looked good in their tuxedos, but the film star was undoubtedly the more adroit at social charm. He said exactly the right thing. He wasn't quite right, however, about the "no-one." Contrary to the lasting myth—generated by a _New York Times_ reporter keen to sex up the story—every physicist in the world understood the theory of special relativity straight away, even if they thought it might be wrong. By now, almost every literate person can recite the equation E = mc2, and even give a rough account of what it means. They might not be able to do the same for the multiple equations of the theory of general relativity, but they have some idea of what the theory deals with. To give a rough account, however, is not the same as giving a precise one, and having some idea is not the same as understanding. It remains true that only the scientifically competent can fully know what is involved. Everybody else has to take it on trust. Chaplin's remark nailed down a discrepancy between two kinds of knowledge: the artistic and the scientific.
The discrepancy had already been there when Goethe rejected Newton's theory about the composition of light because it didn't strike him as artistically satisfactory. The discrepancy was there, but it wasn't obvious. (Certainly it wasn't obvious to Goethe.) By the time Chaplin and Einstein both went to see _City Lights_ , it was obvious to all but the insane. Most of science, for those of us without mathematics, is a closed book. But some of the book's contents can be transmitted in a form we can appreciate, and there is consolation in the fact that the humanities unarguably constitute a culture, whereas whether or not science is a culture is a question that science can't answer. When the British scientist cum novelist C. P. Snow gave his lecture called _The Two Cultures_ in 1959—his main point was that literary people who didn't know something about science couldn't know enough about the modern world—he started a quarrel that he was bound to lose, because the dispute could be conducted only within the framework of written argument. There was no way of conducting it by experiment, or stating it in symbols. It could take place only in language—on the territory, that is, that the humanities have occupied throughout history.
Science lives in a perpetual present, and must always discard its own past as it advances. (If a contemporary thermodynamicist refers to the literature on phlogiston, he will do so as a humanist, not as a scientist. Nor did Edwin Hubble need to know about Ptolemy, although he did.) The humanities do not advance in that sense: they accumulate, and the past is always retained. The two forms of knowledge thus have fundamentally different kinds of history. A scientist can revisit scientific history at his choice. A humanist has no choice: he must revisit the history of the humanities all the time, because it is always alive, and can't be superseded. Two different kinds of history, and two different kinds of time. Humanist time runs both ways: an arrow with a head at each end. If Homer could be beamed up from the past, taught English, and introduced to Braille editions of the novels of Jane Austen, he would be able to tell that they were stories about men, women and conflict, and more like his own stories than not. Much of the background would be strange to him, but not the foreground. A couple of millennia have done not much more to make the present unrecognizable to the past than they have done to make the past unrecognizable to the present. Science, on the other hand, can make its own future unrecognizable in a couple of decades. If the most brilliant mathematicians and computer engineers of 1945 could be brought here now and shown an ordinary laptop, they might conceivably be able to operate it, but they would have no idea of how it worked. Its microprocessors would be insoluble mysteries. The power of science is to transform the world in ways that not even scientists can predict. The power of the humanities—of the one and only culture—is to interpret the world in ways that anybody can appreciate. Einstein knew that science had given Chaplin the means to be famous. Einstein also knew that Chaplin could live without a knowledge of science. But as Einstein told Chaplin on many occasions, he himself, Einstein, could not live without a knowledge of the humanities. Einstein loved music, for example, and was so wedded to the concept of aesthetic satisfaction that he gained added faith in his general relativity equations from finding them beautiful, and frowned on the propositions of quantum mechanics because he found them shapeless. On the latter point he turned out to be wrong, and physicists in the next generation were generally agreed that his aesthetic sense had led him astray. The two different kinds of inspiration almost certainly connect, but only at a level so deep that nobody inspired in either way can ever know exactly how he does it. Whoever was inspired to invent the tuxedo, however, did the world a service: on the big night, the two different geniuses looked like the equals that they were.
NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI
Born in East Bengal in 1897, Nirad C. Chaudhuri lived for a hundred years, which meant that for almost the whole of the twentieth century one of the great masters of English prose was an Indian: and of Indian masters of English prose, Chaudhuri was by a long way the most distinguished. He was granted that title even by other writers of Indian background who might well have claimed something like it for themselves: V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose. They revered him even when they disagreed with him. Chaudhuri himself never set foot outside India until 1955, for a trip to the centre of the old British Empire—rapidly shrinking at the time—that he had always infuriated many of his compatriots by more admiring than not. His short book about that short visit, _A Passage to England_ , gives us the essence of his limpid style and historical range. But readers should not be afraid to tackle at least two of his longer books. _Thy Hand, Great Anarch_!, his account of the crucial years in Indian history between 1921 and 1952, is one of the indispensable historical works of the century, and _The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian_ is rich in self-examination, unfailingly hard-headed in its liberal sweep, and true in every detail except its title. If ever there was a known Indian, it was Chaudhuri. His decision to live out the last act of his life in Britain had profound impliciations for some of his fellow Indian intellectuals. Many of them resented it. But his belief in India's importance to the world remained beyond question.
My notion of what is proper and honest between Englishmen and Indians today is clear-cut and decisive. I feel that the only course of conduct permissible to either side in their political and public relations at the present moment is an honourable taciturnity. The rest must be left to the healing powers of Time.
—NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI, _T HE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN UNKNOWN INDIAN_, P. 502
IN EARLY 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair might have profited if his Foreign Office brief had included this quotation. He might have been a bit less ready to lecture his Indian and Pakistani opposite numbers on the advisability of cooling down. The advice was received with polite disdain: the best that could be hoped for. It was Blair's lucky day. After the Indian Mutiny, cheeky Sepoys were tied across a cannon's mouth preparatory to its being fired. The hankering for a comparable decisiveness must surely linger. Another use for the quotation, and one we can all put into effect, is to remind us that Chaudhuri, while he valued the connection with Britain, had no rosy view of its effects: he was never a lickspittle for the Raj. In _Thy Hand, Great Anarch_! he recounts how Britain manoeuvred to get India's cooperation during World War II without having to promise independence. On the other hand, he came down hard on the counterproductive intransigence of India's political parties, especially of the Congress party. If Congress had cooperated with Britain during the war, he says, it might have prevented partition afterwards. Nehru, not Gandhi, is Chaudhuri's villain. In Chaudhuri's picture, Gandhi retreats into the background while Nehru, between 1939 and 1947, stands forward as "the wordmonger par excellence."
The Indian intelligentsia, says Chaudhuri, wanted Britain weakened but not defeated. Like the Trinidad-born writer C. L. R. James, whose message to the Third World was that it should learn from the First, Chaudhuri offered no automatic comfort to the old Empire's self-renewing supply of angry radicals. Most of Chaudhuri's political talk means discomfort for someone, usually for India's intellectuals. Many big subcontinental names have admired him, but you can't imagine any of them not dropping the book and whistling at some point, especially when he reaches the conclusion (and his writings in _toto_ reach no other) that Britain made India possible. The best reason to whistle, however, is the quality of his prose. Ten pages into _The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian_ , he's already snared you. "The rain came down in what looked like already packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground." If he had lived long enough, W. G. Sebald would probably have got the Nobel Prize for writing like that. Chaudhuri's prize was to live for a hundred years, retain a rock-pool clarity of mind, and spend his extreme old age in England, surrounded by the foreign language he loved best, and of which he was a master.
Chaudhuri and Sebald might seem a strange coupling, but more united them than their choice of England as a place of voluntary exile. Chaudhuri was a character from one of Sebald's books: like Austerlitz in _Austerlitz_ , Chaudhuri could develop a philosophical theme out of a long study of practical detail. Similarly, Sebald was a character out of Thomas Mann. If you ever find yourself wondering where you have heard Sebald's infallibly precise memory speak before, think of the enchanting and omniscient Saul Fitelberg in _Doktor Faustus_. There are tones that connect authors in exile, and that give them a single country to inhabit: the country of the mind. The difference is in the timing. Chaudhuri and Sebald were looking back on shattered civilizations. So was Thomas Mann, but with Fitelberg he could make the character prescient. In _Doktor Faustus_ the end has not yet come. The character can foresee it because the forces that will lead to disintegration are the first he feels. Chaudhuri's prescience was about a future that had not yet happened, and is happening only now. By the mere act of writing such a richly reflective prose, he suggested that a civilization continues through the humane examination of its history, which was its real secret all along.
G. K. CHESTERTON
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) published so many books that his posthumous reputation is almost impossible to sort out. He would have been famous just for his Father Brown stories. He would have been famous just for his novels _The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday_. He would have been famous just as a literary critic: his monographs on Browning and Dickens are still required reading for serious students of those authors. Above all, he would have been famous just for his journalism: the thing he is least well-known for now. The essays he contributed to periodicals were at the heart of his talent for subversive observation. His vice was wilful paradox, but his virtue was for asking the awkward questions about current liberal fashions. The virtue itself had a drawback: as a Catholic convert, he valued theological tradition to the point of embracing some of its blemishes, one of which was an abiding suspicion of the cosmopolitan. Anti-Semitism reared its head, although not as blatantly as in the work of his contemporary Hilaire Belloc. But generally Chesterton's collections of essays and casual pieces are well worth seeking out in second-hand bookshops. There are a thousand brilliant sentences to prove that he was the natural opponent of state power in any form, so there can be no real doubt about the stance he would have taken had he lived longer. He defined true democracy as the sum total of civilized traditions. It was a conservative approach, but it could never have become a fascist one, since the idea of a civilized tradition was exactly what fascism set out to dismantle.
To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics against the fashions.
—G. K. CHESTERTON
WHEN I COPIED this sentence into a workbook about twenty years ago, foolishly I neglected to note the provenance. The sentence does not appear in _The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations_ but that, alas, is no surprise: its entry on Chesterton consists almost entirely of scraps torn from his poetry, whereas all his best remarks were in his prose, which the editors of the Oxford book obviously did not get around to reading. It is hard to blame them for that, because catching up with Chesterton's prose is the work of a lifetime. He wrote a lot faster than most of us can read. Chesterton published many, many books, and at one time I was trying to collect them all. (My shelves containing Chesterton still outdistance my shelves containing Edmund Wilson, but with Wilson I know my way around almost to the inch, whereas there are cubic feet of Chesterton's output where I can't find my way back to something I noticed earlier: a slipshod disorientation, which I could have avoided by taking proper notes.) I saw myself as his champion. Other journalists feared him because he was so productive. Mainstream writers feared him because he wrote too well. He was my favourite kind of writer, scaring everybody because he had talent to burn, and no sense of calculation to make his talent decisive.
His critical writings struck me as particularly valuable among his output: rather more valuable, in fact, than the nominally creative work, in which _The Man Who Was Thursday_ was widely proclaimed to be his masterpiece by people who had no intention of finding out what else he wrote. I thought _The Man Who Was Thursday_ dreadfully windy and most of the poetry less thrilling than its own craft. Is "The White Knight" really that good, even on the level of a recitativo party piece? In Sydney in the late fifties I knew at least one Catholic poet who thought "The White Knight" a deathless text, but he (my friend, not Chesterton) was very Catholic, and no great reciter himself. In my experience, fuelled by many a shouted evening among young men educated by Jesuits, the awkward truth became apparent early: Chesterton the Catholic poet was outstripped even by Belloc, and both were left for dead by Hopkins. But it was just as apparent that some of Chesterton's criticism was excellent. Dickens and Browning are not the only names he can bring alive in a short monograph. As an enthusiast for Chaucer he is only just less inspiring than Aldous Huxley, and he had a gift for the critical essay that could survive even his mania for paradox. Somewhere among the paradoxes there was always a considerable plain statement, and the statement quoted above is a prime example.
On the whole, Chesterton's paradoxes merely asked for trouble. His seemingly plain statements were real trouble. I think I knew that at the time, or I would not have written this one down. If I had taken it straight, I would have regarded it as a truism, and left it unremarked. But there was something unsettling about it. Pretending to just lie there inert, it glowed, fizzed, and shovelled piquant smoke, as a lot of Chesterton does. With a new century crowding in on London's journalistic world, I can recommend Chesterton's teetering example to Grub Street hacks on their last legs, facing oblivion in the current equivalent of the Cheshire Cheese, going home to a mansard room full of unmarked files, yellowing tear-sheets and—impossibly dated now, fading to nothing in ordinary daylight—the carbon copies that were once called blacks. _Nil desperandum_. We just might live. After all, did Chesterton ever look at an article and think: this is the one? No, he never knew.
The second part of the sentence is the more immediately awkward part. The first part apparently takes care of itself. Critics who overdo either the praise or the blame are soon rumbled: sooner still if they overdo both. But the apparently unexceptionable exhortation to support the classics against the fashions conceals a genuine dilemma. All the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and might be disguised as fashions when they do. The neatest deduction that can be made from the advice is about the advisability of finding out what makes something classical, whether it is new or old: and of supporting that, presumably by praise, while blaming anything that pretends to the same condition without the proper qualifications. So the two parts of the motto connect at that point. They connect more closely when we consider that a classic might be tainted by fashionable components, or that a fashion might be enriched by classical ones. Such a possibility is not likely to arise with accepted classics from the past: unless, paradoxically, we find out too much about them. Suppose we knew everything about popular entertainment at the time of Ovid: it might turn out that tall stories about metamorphosis were a craze at fashionable dinner tables, the hot topic at the saturnalia. Or suppose we knew everything about theology at the time of Dante (some scholars almost do): it might turn out that some of Dante's points of doctrine were the merest run-of-the-cloisters debating points. Benedetto Croce, indeed, working like that very basic Australian device the milk separator (it left the cream on top of the milk, like a golden duvet on a heap of sheets), divided the _The Divine Comedy_ rigorously between _poesia_ and _letteratura_ , and by _letteratura_ Croce meant the stuff that belonged to its time—a concept which sounds more like fashion than like anything else. Still, most of us never get to know that much. Knowing about the background is what we either don't get to do or else forget about in short order, and for us, the common readers—who are, in modern times, the uncommon people still interested even though the examinations are no longer compulsory—every ancient classic remains classical right through, even when impenetrable. Homer's most vivid translator in recent times, Christopher Logue, knows that the Homeric poems are classics, even though he can't read them in the original. That's why he feels compelled to bring all his talent to the task of finding an English equivalent for them, with results that might very well prove classic in their turn.
But with contemporary classics we are involved with the same dichotomy from the jump. It is hard to think of a creative mind so pure that it would not be affected by popular notions to some extent. Also it is hard to think of any modern classic in any field that has not been affected by the popular arts. Some modern classics began as popular arts, and in very recent times an assumption has grown up—not easily to be laughed off—that there is no better way for a modern classic to begin. Certainly, in the English-speaking countries, a modern classic song is more likely to come out of a centre for a popular genre—Tin Pan Alley, say, or Broadway, or the Brill Building, or Nashville—than out of the "art song" tradition. In France, the "art song" tradition has some important classical composers at the foundation of it (Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, Duparc, etc.) and carries prestige as a consequence; but one of the reasons the _chanson_ heritage is relatively strong is that the popular genres have always been relatively weak; and anyway, Prevert, Brel, Brassens and a dozen other names are scarcely thought of as members of an academy. In literature, a writer as good as W. G. Sebald is safe from selling millions of books, but he would not be disqualified from seriousness if he sold hundreds of thousands, which he is nowadays quite likely to do, given time. No theorist about literature could any longer get away with the proposition that best-sellerdom is an automatic disqualification from quality. Louis de Berniere's _Captain Corelli's Mandolin_ might not be quite the masterpiece it was thought to be by many of those who chose it for their one hard read of the year, but it is not inconsiderable either: millions of man-hours on the holiday beaches were well enough spent in reading it, although the heart quails at the thought that those same readers later fell for the unalleviated stupidity of _The Da Vinci Code_. In Germany, the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki's uncompromisingly taxing autobiography _Mein Leben_ was at the top of the best-seller list for most of the millennium year. No doubt there was a fashionable element in its reception—some of the people who bought it to decorate the hall table might have been establishing their tolerance, refurbishing credentials vis-à-vis the cloudy past, etc.—but there was no fashionable element to the book itself, a literary work of the first order. Chesterton was actually alive when his principle was used against Puccini, and if Chesterton had been active as a music critic he might well have used it himself. Apart from Shaw, most of the writers on opera at the turn of the century loftily regarded the Italian operatic heritage as a branch of popular music. ("The music's only Verdi but the melody is sweet.") Puccini's overwhelming popular success was interpreted as a fashion by his detractors. Until very recently it still was. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, a prominent Wagnerian among the dons tried to tell me several times that Wagner's stature as a classic confirmed Puccini's as a fashion.
The same don has since turned into one of our best, most receptive and conscientious opera critics, but he didn't do it by following up on Chesterton's principle, which turns out, for its second half, not to be a principle at all. Either in life or in the mind, there can be no such rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige. Prestige alone was never enough to keep an acknowledged classic alive: if it had been, Petrarch's long poems in Latin, which he thought were his real claims to fame, would still be read today. The response to vitality brings us back to the first part, and reveals it, at last, to be an even bigger conundrum than the second. Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift for criticism can't be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment. (Being mad about Mantovani is _not_ a good qualification for the appreciator of Beethoven: Albert Einstein, who in his role as a dinner-party guru enjoyed introducing ignoramuses to classical music, would use Mantovani as bait, but he never thought the bait was a living fish.) On the other hand, those who are too critical are apt to run out of appreciation at the crucial time. Stravinsky, who was never comfortable about attention paid to other composers even if they were long dead, took most of his adult life to get around to the appreciation of Beethoven's late quartets, and gave the impression that his own life had to be almost over before he could hear what Beethoven was trying to do at the end of his. (It was also Stravinsky, however, who finally and incontrovertibly gave Tchaikovsky the praise that was due to him, and thus rescued him from a hundred years of being denigrated as Easy Listening.) All we can be certain of is that such oscillations between praise and blame, whatever their amplitude, show no discontinuity. Praise and blame are aspects of the same thing. The capacity for criticism is the capacity for enjoyment. They don't have to be kept in touch with each other. They are a single propensity that has to keep in touch with itself. Chesterton's plain statement is like one of his paradoxes without the simplicity: but that's a paradox in itself. It's an area that the dear, bibulous, chortling old boy gets you into. He invited being patronized, but it was a stratagem. He was serious, always. He just didn't seem to be.
JEAN COCTEAU
The role of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) in French twentieth-century culture was to be the wonder boy in perpetuity. He should be commended for it: some of his untiring precocity continues to amaze. Diaghilev's famous instruction to him ("Astonish me") was one he fulfilled by astonishing everybody. For Diaghilev, during World War I, Cocteau put together the ballet _Parade_ , with music by Satie, décor by Picasso and choreography by Massine. No single production did more to advance all the arts at once. That they needed advancing was a principle Cocteau never questioned. In that sense, he was dedicated not to the private experience of art, but to its public impact. Unlike other troublemakers such as the Dadaists, however, he was not making up for shortage of talent. Cocteau went on astonishing everybody in a dozen different fields. He was poet, dramatist, graphic artist, novelist and film-maker, practising every art form at a high level. His love for the doomed young novelist Raymond Radiguet resulted in a cycle of tragic poems fit to dispel any illusion that he might have been a dilettante. But he had a dangerous taste for showing off to the exalted, and during the Nazi Occupation of Paris it led him astray. Receptions thrown by the Propaganda Staffel of the occupying power at the Tour d'Argent were too often graced with his exquisite profile. Compounded with an addiction to opium, his compromised reputation led to a spiritual decline after the war. Even then, though, he managed to produce the work by which he is most easily approached now: the film _Orphée_ , which after sixty years still looks original despite all the originality it inspired from everybody else. ("Cinema is the form of modern writing whose ink is light" was a typical epigram.) There were other Cocteau films, most notably _Beauty and the Beast_ , but _Orphée_ gives the best sense of _tout Paris_ making a home movie. If not the first, it was certainly the most sensational updating of a classic myth into modern dress. Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played by Jean Marais, Cocteau's young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus's mistress. French intellectual life was the world's biggest small world, and everyone in it thought of Cocteau as the arbiter of elegance, even when they despised him. Sympathetic biographies by Francis Steegmuller and Frederick Brown have the facts, and the right judgement. Cocteau's all-embracing multiplicity was a kind of unity, even if moral weakness was one of the things that it embraced. The best writer of all on "the banquet years," Roger Shattuck, often brings Cocteau on as light relief, but doesn't underestimate his importance. By and large, the well-funded and often highly qualified American students of French culture after the Belle Époque were ready to forgive all in their aim to understand everything. A humane attitude, as long as it doesn't lead us into the illusion that a man as intelligent as Cocteau didn't know what collaboration meant. He did: he just thought he could find a style for it. After the war, Cocteau's old friend Misia Sert (the tasteful patroness who serves as the nominal subject for one of the best of the many books about _tout Paris_ , Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale's _Misia_ ) threw a string of soirées for which she invited both those who had collaborated and those who hadn't. She invited the two groups on different nights. So Cocteau never had to meet the people who wouldn't stay in the same room with him, because they weren't there.
Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.
—JEAN COCTEAU, _L E POTOMAK_
I UNCONSCIOUSLY PLAGIARIZED this idea on two separate occasions before discovering, when searching through my journals, that it belonged to Cocteau. If I had remembered, I would have flagged the borrowing: it is bad manners to do otherwise, and bad tactics too, because usually you will be found out. My excuse would be that Cocteau, though no end of a dandy and in many respects a posturing water-fly, had the knack of hitting on expressions that were so neat they seemed without a personal stamp, like particularly smooth pebbles on a pebble beach. He once said to an interviewer that you couldn't teach a young artist anything: all you could do was open the door and show him the tightrope. I loved that idea and kept it in my memory. In his film _Orphée_ there are ideas that I loved and kept in a different way: the cryptic phrases used by the angels—the phrases were based on coded BBC radio calls to the French Resistance—became recognition signals for my group of writers at Sydney University in the late fifties. "The bird sings with its wings," we would intone to each other, in smug ecstasies of knowingness. No doubt we were being very precious, but so was Cocteau: _Orphée_ is the apex of preciosity, and therefore, appropriately, the distilled projection of Cocteau himself. In life, far from being Orpheus, Cocteau was an Osric with an infinite range of hats, too many of them by Schiaparelli. In World War I, when he visited the front in a party led by Misia Sert—muse and patroness to all the artists—Cocteau wore a nurse's uniform of his own devising. In World War II he was a cocktail-party collaborator, mainly because he couldn't bear to be out of the swim. At the Propaganda Staffel receptions, with cocktails and finger food, Cocteau was a fixture, if a chameleon crossing a swastika can be called that.
While not exactly despicable—nobody died because of him—his behaviour was not admirable. He can be classed with Sacha Guitry, Arletty and Maurice Chevalier among the top-flight artists who gave themselves a free pass because of their art. Only Chevalier was subsequently crass enough to hint that he had really been an Allied spy risking his life to gather information, but Cocteau came close to the same kind of vulgarity when he evoked the call signs of the Resistance in _Orphée_. All he had the right to evoke was a simpering air-kiss aimed at the Gestapo. There was, however, another, deeper Cocteau: this one, the Cocteau who invented the exhausted chameleon. This was the quickly whittling and fletching phrase-maker who could say and write things that would travel through time like untiring arrows. "Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo." A crack like that doesn't end the discussion, but it certainly starts one.
This, I think, was the Cocteau whom Proust loved: not the stylish poseur but the true stylist, a living concentration of art and intellect, of taste and daring. The moment in _À la recherche du temps perdu_ when St. Loup runs along the top of the banquette in the restaurant is probably based on one of Cocteau's carefully calculated displays of his show-stopping knack for creating memorable scenes by stealing them. And in the long run, St. Loup's unlikely conversion to homosexuality was probably justified in Proust's mind by Cocteau's nature. Probably there were several real-life models for St. Loup, but at the end the model for one of the character's dramatic moments took over the character's inner being, if only because Proust's inner being had the same bent. It would scarcely have happened, however, if Proust had not genuinely admired Cocteau, who was impossible to admire if one did not envy his talent. This remark about the chameleon comes from the aspect of Cocteau's gift that will always remain enviable: the combinative power that underlay his protean knack for special effects. (The book _Le Potomak_ , from which the quotation comes, was named not after the American river but after a creature he made up: a deep-sea fish that rises to the surface and dazzles everyone with its polychromatic, scintillating brilliance. Clearly he was talking about himself.) Endlessly pirouetting to get himself into profile, Cocteau was tiresome in the extreme, but mainly because the froth and fizz of his superficial behaviour made you nostalgic for the underlying man, whom you guessed correctly to be classical in his perceptions despite his self-denigrating mania for originality. It could be said that anyone who admired the looks of Jean Marais, the rebarbative star of both _Orphée_ and _La Belle et le bête_ , had the same classical perceptions as a Las Vegas hotel designer, but the late 1940s were a long time ago, and Marais's bouffant hairstyle was the first ever seen in a serious context. Elvis Presley was not yet there to be copied. Cocteau thought of his own images. He really was as innovative as his admirers said. Their only mistake was to imagine that novelty was an ethos.
GIANFRANCO CONTINI
Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990) was the most formidable Italian philologist of his time. As a scholar of Dante and Petrarch he was crucial to the modern Italian tradition of studying the literary heritage on a rigorous textual basis. But he was also intimately involved with contemporary creativity, as a friend and sounding board to such poets as Eugenio Montale and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (His little collection of articles on Montale, _Una lunga fedeltà_ , A Long Faithfulness, is a classic of the genre.) Vast in his learning and uniquely compressed in his prose style, Contini, even for the Italians, has a reputation as a _scrittore difficile_ (difficult writer), and to translate his major critical articles into English would be a task for heroes. But beginners with Italian will gratefully discover that when giving an interview he could talk with clarity and point on cultural topics, some of them with wide resonance outside his own country. Regarded as a collaborative venture, the literary interview has a long and distinguished tradition in Italy. Contini collaborated with one of his pupils, Ludovica Ripa di Meana, to produce an outstanding example of the form, with a disquisition on education that has general relevance for all countries now suffering from the effects of having reduced the demands on memory.
Unfortunately, the custom of learning by heart has disappeared in the schools, and as a consequence the very use of memory has gone with it. Nobody knows how to read verse. My best students, notably gifted philologists, can't recognize by ear whether a line is hendecasyllabic or not: they have to count on their fingers.
—GIANFRANCO CONTINI, QUOTED IN _D ILIGENZA E VOLUTTÀ_ [DILIGENCE AND ENJOYMENT]: _L UDOVICA RIPA DI MEANA INTERROGA GIANFRANCO CONTINI_, P. 190
CONTINI WAS NEAR the end of his long, fruitful life when he did this book-length interview, which can be recommended for beginners with Italian as a fast track into the national discussion of the humanities. Just as, in the case of Argentina, interviews with Borges and Sabato—and sometimes they had interviews with each other—bring you straight to the top level of the subject, so, in the case of Italy, the dialogue with a protagonist is apt to save you from the perils of over-compression that come with his written prose. This latter advantage is especially important in the case of Contini, whose prose could be so compact that even his best students had trouble picking it apart. In Florence in the mid-sixties, a standard spectacle at the university was a football huddle of his students over their lecture notes after a silently frantic hour of listening to him whisper. Most of the students were female. A few of his best pupils were male but it took an especially daunting breed of woman—we used to call them the _continiane_ —to summon the required pertinacity.
Ludovica Ripa di Meana is a classic _continiana_. When she interviewed her erstwhile teacher in 1989, Contini was in his frail seniority, but his mind was still working at full speed. Her registration of the old man's delivery is a scrupulous job, made easier, perhaps, by the fact that he wasn't speaking formally in the lecture hall, but conducting a seemingly ordinary conversation. There aren't very many ordinary conversations, however, that have so much to say about the humanities as this one; and on this particular point, about memory, he goes right to the heart of the topic. If you think of the humanities as an activity in which the mode of appreciation and the means of transmission are versions of one another, there could hardly be a more pertinent complaint than this: he was looking the death of his beloved subject right in the face.
There is an untranslatable Italian word for the mental bank account you acquire by memorizing poetry: it is a _gazofilacio_. Contini believed that an accumulation of such treasure would eventually prove its worth even if it had to begin with sweated labour. He confessed that not all of the teachers who had made him memorize a regular ration of Tasso's epic poetry had been inspired. Some of them had held him to the allotted task because they lacked imagination, not because they possessed it. But in the long run he was grateful. Most readers of this book will spot the sensitive point about modern pedagogy. Readers my age were made to memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky? Isn't a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy? In a course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn't it true that nothing is gained except the absence of suffering? In his best novel, _White Noise_ , Don DeLillo made a running joke out of a professor of German history who could not read German. But the time has already arrived when such a joke does not register as funny. What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?
The questions are loaded. Few of us enjoy the thought that the younger generation has escaped our miseries, and I suppose it was a misery when one of my first teachers, a stalwart of the then pitiless Australian school system, made me stand up to recite "I come from haunts of coot and hern." Thus I paid the penalty for having memorized the first stanza more quickly than the rest of the class. More than half a century later I still know the line that comes next ("I make a sudden sally") and the one that clinches the stanza ("I bicker down a valley"). The third line has turned into a bit of an um-um canter, like Nigel Molesworth's approximate rendition of "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in Geoffrey Willans's _Down with Skool_!, a classic spoof that depends for its effectiveness on at least an indirect memory, if not a direct one, of the old teaching methods of the British private school. Though Molesworth never got anything right, he knew he was supposed to try. ("Harfleag, harfleag, harfleag onward. All in the Valley of Death rode the er.") But there are still poems, drilled into me in the classroom, that I can recite in chunks. If I get myself started on "I love a sunburnt country," sooner or later I will get to the rugged mountain ranges, the droughts and flooding rains. I will not always get to the name of the poet. In my uncaring recollection, Henry Kendall, Dorothea McKellar and many other Australian poets all shared the one elasticized identity until they were superseded by Shakespeare. But hundreds of their lines got into my head, and with them came the measures of English verse, the most common rhythmic structure being the iambic pentameter. (In Italian, the equivalent is the eleven-syllable line, which is why Contini picks it out.) Even before my first celebrated classroom appearance as a Lady Macbeth shrilly demanding that her milk be taken for gall, I had the shape, weight and length of the iambic pentameter in my mind, as a sort of sonic template. A long time later, in Cambridge, I abruptly realized what a blessing this early inculcation had been. In the practical criticism classes, the American-affiliated students were incomparably better informed than the locals—incomparably more intelligent all round, to put it bluntly—but the one thing the Americans could not do to save their lives was recite the verse in front of them. Whether it was by Donne, Herbert, Fulke Greville, Lovelace, Marvell or Dryden, it came out like a newsflash being read sight unseen by Dan Rather. They had no feeling for a line of iambic pentameter whatever. On their being quizzed about this, it transpired that they had never been required to remember one.
In Italy at any one time there is always someone who can recite the whole of _The Divine Comedy_ by heart. Usually he is of humble clerical occupation: if the man at the post office who goes off to get your parcel fails to come back, that might be what he is doing. Contini wasn't impressed by that kind of feat, the mental equivalent of lifting a grand piano with the teeth. Contini said that where memorizing Dante was concerned, the important thing wasn't to release a torrent at the touch of a button, but to have the poem in your head as an infinite source of ready reference for the events of every day. It was true for him and he valued the same capacity in others. He was a quiet man and it was hard to make him laugh aloud, but his delighted smile was a rich reward for a Dante reference appositely supplied.
One night in Florence in the early eighties, my wife and I accompanied Contini to the opera. He was already pretty frail by then and you got the sense that he was choosing his remaining nights out for their concentration of the qualities: nothing was being left to chance. He had certainly judged well that night. The opera was _Adriana Lecouvreur_ , conducted by Gianandrea Gavazzeni. For Contini as for his friend Eugenio Montale, Gavazzeni was the ideal maestro. After the performance it was raining so heavily that Contini accepted a lift home, with my wife at the wheel of our worn-out Mini. He was in the front passenger seat and I was folded in the back. They talked scholarly stuff. As a _continiana_ of impeccable credentials, my wife was well qualified for the colloquy, but she was no better than anyone else at driving blind. The rain was so heavy that we ended up going the wrong way. I remembered, and recited, a tag from Dante: _Ché la diritta via era smarrita_. Because the right way had been lost. Contini smiled from ear to ear, and when I added my regrets that I hadn't written the line myself, he laughed aloud. My timing hadn't been _that_ good, but the pedagogue had been pleased to the depths of his soul. This was what he had been in business to do all his life: spread the word about culture across cultures. And one of his aesthetic beliefs, acquired as an inheritance from Croce, was that Dante had been in business to do the same. It was the universal conversation, conducted through memory, and it had happened right there beside the Arno, in the dying echo of the music.
Though it can be overdone, there is nothing like a trading of quotations for bringing cultivated people together, or for making you feel uncultivated if you have nothing to trade. Nowadays very few people can quote from the Greek or would think to impress anyone if they could, and even quoting from the Latin—still a universal recognition system in the learned world when I was young—is now discouraged. Quoting from the standard European languages is still permissible at a suitably polyglot dinner table: I was once at a dinner in Hampstead with Josef Brodsky when we both ended up standing on restaurant chairs clobbering each other with alexandrines. If the audience (they had started off as our dinner companions, but had grown resigned to being an audience) had been mainly monoglot, the performance would have been less forgivable. But even if all present understand only English—even if the day comes when the whole world understands only English—memorized poetry would still be the surest way of signalling a love of language.
The proof that the English critic Frank Kermode and the Australian poet Peter Porter inhabit the same mental world—the same civilized tradition and the same literature—is in the treasure chamber of memorized poetry that each carries with him, in the number of valuable items that each _gazofilacio_ holds in common with the other. Either of them could supply the next line to any poem by Auden or Empson or Wallace Stevens that the other quoted. It is on the basis of such universally shared memories that a generation builds its range of allusion. One of the most conspicuous differences between the British and American literary worlds is that the American periodical editors discourage the assumption of a range of allusion shared by the readership, even when they themselves—the editors—do share it. The American editors are not necessarily wrong to have their eye on democracy. There is such a thing as putting the frame of reference at a height where preciousness drives out plain sense. Before World War II, learning poetry by heart was a requirement in American schools. Steadily, between 1945 and 1960, that requirement vanished from the culture, as far as the common run of pupils was concerned. But the uncommon run, those interested in literature, remained; and on the whole it is surely better if writers and editors can trust the reader to be as well informed as they are. In English, a general familiarity with the poetic heritage ought not to be too much to assume. After all, no language in the world is as richly blessed.
It certainly ought not to be too much to assume among poets. But sometimes you wonder. The only thing I have to say against most modern poetry is that so much of it avoids all verse conventions without rising to the level of decent prose. Decent prose has a rhythmic pulse which, if it comes in the first instance as a gift, must be schooled to attain reliability, and there is no way to school it except to take in the rhythmic resources of the language as they have already been discovered by the poets over the course of centuries. By reading and memorizing their predecessors, the poets are set free from the standardized contemporary patterns in which meaning is bonded to syntactic forms. They might not even especially remember what someone once said. What they remember is the pace and lilt of how he said it: what they retain is more likely to be a rhythmic measure than a paraphrasable expression. In this manner, a poet studies his own language as if it were a foreign one. Eliot found out a lot from Donne because Donne was more foreign to him than Shakespeare: the lines and phrases went in directions he did not expect and could not predict. When Eliot said that good poetry in a foreign language could communicate before it was understood, he probably meant, or meant at least partly, that the movement in the lines of the French poets after Victor Hugo was opening up new patterns to him in his own language. (Dr. Leavis, through being reasonable for once, thoroughly misunderstood Eliot's seeming preference for Dante over Shakespeare, and said that Eliot had underestimated what Shakespeare had to offer him. Eliot would have agreed that Shakespeare had a lot to offer, but might have said that only a foreign writer can offer you a lesson in how your own language is put together at a deep level.)
Reading Shelley, you can see that in the last of his few allotted years he had saturated his rhythmic sense with the forms of Dante and Petrarch. He doesn't echo their meanings: he echoes their structures. Similarly, Racine absorbed the structures of Latin poetry; and it is a nice question whether he is closer to Catullus, some of whose lines he mirrors property for property, than to Virgil, whom he does not materially transpose so much as imitate in his pulse and balance. These sonic templates, as they might be called, are transferable through time even when an instigator is unknown to a beneficiary. Dante gets effects from Virgil that Virgil got from Homer, but if we didn't know that Virgil had come in between, we would have to swear that Dante knew the Homeric poems intimately, whereas he couldn't, in fact, read them. It is doubtful whether poets, in order to know each other at this level, need to set out to memorize poems. The memorizing comes automatically with the intensity of engagement. And so, ideally, it ought to do with all of us. We memorize something because we can't help it, and the thing we memorize was written with that result in mind. Poetry is written the way it is in order to be remembered.
It can't always be remembered precisely, which is still the best reason for writing it down. Robert Robinson, one of the last of the over-qualified presenters to grace BBC television in its best years, once contributed to a BBC2 TV programme about Auden (those were the days) with a recital of "The Fall of Rome." Reviewing the programme, I could tell that Robinson had recited the poem from memory. In the most beautiful stanza of one of the most beautiful poems in modern literature, the stanza about the reindeer that, "altogether elsewhere," move across the golden moss, Robinson said "run" instead of "move." The misquotation illustrated our common habit of literalism, which will often, in the memory, substitute a concretely specific word just when the poet wants to be abstractly vague. (Auden himself worked against the tendency when a misprint in proof gave him "the ports," instead of "the poets," having "names for the sea." He found the mistake more interesting, and let it stand.) It seems a fair guess that the capacity to remember always entails a certain amount of adaptation to set mental patterns. Robinson had made his error out of a trick played by familiarity. I twitted him about it in my column, and when we next met he told me that he had at first not believed that he could have made a mistake about something he knew so well, but that he had looked it up and been mortified to find out that he had got it wrong. The excellence of his memory had caught him out.
Leaving aside the occasional freak cursed with total recall, a good memory is in the possession of a personality, not of a machine, and personalities impose their own perceptions, altering their recollection of even the most cherished things in order to fit inner critieria. Italo Calvino traces the process enchantingly in his book _Why Read the Classics?_ Impeccably translated by Martin McLaughlin, _Why Read the Classics?_ is not only the best single book for approaching Calvino, but might well be the best single book for approaching the whole idea of reading for pleasure at a high level. One could praise the book's virtues for pages on end, but perhaps the best way to demonstrate them would be to single out the first of its two essays on Eugenio Montale. In that essay, Calvino shows why, as a student, he found Montale's poetry impossible not to memorize—and also shows why it was hard to memorize accurately. The reader's mind has its expectations, which the poet will play upon in order to defeat. Somewhere in that interplay of expectation and contrary strategy is the reason that scholarship had to evolve the principle of _lectio difficilior_ —the idea that in any crux, the more difficult reading is likelier to be the true one. Calvino's reminiscences about the workings of his own memory—remember that I have remembered—have many implications, but the one we need to make explicit here, for the benefit of our children if not ourselves, is that the future of the humanities as a common possession depends on the restoration of a simple, single ideal: getting poetry by heart. Far from democratizing poetry, there can be no surer way of reducing it to the plaything of an elite than to write it and read it as if it made no claim to be remembered. A man like Gianfranco Contini studied poetry at the very highest level, but could do so because of his ear for its primal movement: for him, the subtle heartbeat in the eleven-syllable line was like the movement of the music I once watched him listening to in the opera house in Florence. He knew what was coming next—he had known that music all his life—but you could tell by the tiny noddings and shiftings of his head and shoulders that he was hearing it afresh. If he had not, it would not have been art, which would have a hard time surprising us if it did not first give us something easy to remember.
The departure point for inspiration is the obstacle.
—GIANFRANCO CONTINI, _V ARIANTI_
This idea, variously expressed, comes up in almost every article Contini wrote about Dante. The emphasis is on a principle: that lyricism, for Dante, was the opposite of an indulgence. Though the principle is especially true of _The Divine Comedy_ , Contini isn't just saying that for Dante the _terza rima_ was a necessary discipline. Contini means that for Dante the whole business of writing poetry was a discipline. In Italian a rhyme scheme, even a constantly demanding one like the terza, is no great challenge, because Italian is so rich in rhymes. An English poet who tries to write even a short stretch of _terza rima_ in his own language will soon find out how poor in rhymes it is: even Louis MacNeice, an awesomely competent verse technician, was driven to the half rhyme in his long _terza rima_ composition _Autumn Sequel_. His results were distressingly approximate. He would have done better to stick with the flexible forms, firmly based on classical measures, that he developed for his earlier work _Autumn Journal_ , but perhaps they were too demanding to be repeated. _Autumn Journal_ , which he wrote in the year following the Munich crisis, is the best thing of its kind in the twentieth century, and one of the reasons for its supremacy is the confidence of its interior movement, which depends entirely on a seemingly free choice of rhythms being held together overall by a classically trained sense of form. No discursive poetry has ever seemed more liberated, or been less loose. The whole poem, in all its richness of incident and observation, fully conforms to Eliot's proviso that no verse is entirely free to someone who wants to do a good job.
In saying that, Eliot could have been answering Robert Frost, who said that poets who wrote free verse without rhyme were playing tennis without a net. Philistines understandably elevated Frost's aphorism to the status of unarguable truth. (An aphorism is never that: unless there was a genuine collision of views, nobody would be moved to a calculated terseness.) Not only by redneck editors but by desperate academics self-assigned to hold the fort against modernism, Frost was thought to have pinpointed the line of division between discipline and anarchy. But the division is purely notional. There have been poets who wrote in strict rhymes and yet were slack in all departments—from the Victorian through into the Georgian era, the dullest poetry was remarkable only for its technical proficiency—and there have been poets who, without rhyming at all, achieve an alert tension in every line and an unfailing sense of coherence in the strophe. As Philip Larkin fondly recorded in his introduction to _The North Ship_ , Vernon Watkins once said that good poetry doesn't just rhyme at the end of the lines, it rhymes all along the line. He thus left the way open for the possibility that lines might not rhyme at their ends at all, yet be so calculated, in all their parts, as to contribute to a form, or at least not detract from it.
Montale spoke several times about the salutary effects of avoiding rhyme—not just the easy rhymes into which Italian always tends to slip, but any kind of end-rhyme at all. In the mainstream of his lyric poetry it is quite hard to find even internal rhymes longer than a syllable: he goes always for the hard sonorities. Mallarmé recommended the same in French: " _Il faut rimer difficilement_." Mallarmé, like Montale later, was out to provide something grittier than the too-smooth heritage of established tricks. Poets today should have the same determination. But it's an emphasis, not a rule: the much despised "moon" and "June" can rhyme successfully as long as, in each case, the line leading up to the last word is sufficiently intense. The most difficult way to rhyme is not to rhyme at all, and yet maintain coherence. The hard part of doing that is to square unrelenting vigilance with the free play of the mind that will let a new idea break through to the surface. (Strict rhymes _force_ new ideas to the surface, as depth charges do to a submarine.) Established rhyme schemes leave more room to relax, which is probably why they are best for comic verse. But Dante didn't choose the _terza rima_ in order to set himself a simple technical requirement so that he could relax when not fulfilling it. He made every passage of verse a technical requirement throughout; made it evident that he was doing so; and made part of his poetry from making it evident. As Contini says ( _Varianti_ , p. 320), a constant of Dante's literary personality is continually to make technical reflections on poetry. The technical reflections amount to an ordering of natural wealth. Contini calls Dante's verbal talent "lexical magnanimity" ( _Varianti_ , p. 322). When I was young, the department in the _Reader's Digest_ called "It Pays to Increase Your Word Power" caught my restless attention. While still in very short pants I learned a lot from that department, and still can't see much wrong with the term "word power"; but "lexical magnanimity" is better because it gets the generosity in.
Generosity, however, can be gush when uncalled for. Even in Dante's time, Italian ran easily to gush. Dante pretty well invented the Italian language we read and hear today. The ideal version of the Italian language, say the Italians, is Florentine Italian spoken by someone from Siena. The Sienese are less likely to murder the "c" sound by aspirating it. But the language they speak with such melody is the one invented by Dante and his friends in or near Florence. Even then, though, it could be a torrent like the Arno in flood, and especially when aspiring to the lyrical. As Contini explains, Dante saw how part of the task would be to keep his _lirismo_ in check rather than to let it rip. Much later on and in another country, we find that Laforgue liked the same thing about Tristan Corbière, who was a wild man, but used common speech—sometimes very common, from the gutter or the brothel—to chasten the worn-out lyrical effects that not even Victor Hugo was able to render obsolete all by himself. Poeticized poetry will always crop up again of its own accord; you can tell it is a weed because it looks too obviously like a flower, and grows again during the night. Ernst Robert Curtius (in his book of collected essays, _Gesammelte Aufsätze_ , p. 312) borrowed Laforgue's idea to praise the prosaic stretches in Eliot's _East Coker_ , the poetry that was not like poetry. In our time, the greatest exponent of deliberately prosaic poetic diction was Philip Larkin. Recently in Melbourne, when I was trying to tempt a young admirer of Larkin's poetry to begin learning enough Italian to make a start with Dante, I told her that the dialogue in the Paola and Francesca scene in Canto V of the _Inferno_ sounds as natural as Larkin's narrative tone in "Dockery and Son," and that when Dante stands back to deliver a clinching moral, the sonorities are just like Larkin's: magisterial because unaffected, the same language intensified without being notably heightened—a dignified squaring of the shoulders rather than a climbing onto stilts. With so finely calibrated a control of tone, Larkin could have written verse forever without rhyming even once. It is very interesting that he usually chose otherwise, and rhymed solidly throughout the poem. The big, matched stanzas of his showpiece poems like those in _The Whitsun Weddings_ are, without striving to prove it, technically challenging beyond anything attempted by the Thomas Hardy he so much loved. Larkin got them, in fact, from Yeats: another self-disciplinarian on the grand scale. In some of Larkin's later poems, he will take the _ottava rima_ stanza and deliberately make the rhymes approximate, but the structure is still strictly present behind the altered façade. Compare Larkin's "Church-Going" with Yeats's "Among School Children" and look for the contrast. There isn't one.
BENEDETTO CROCE
Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was the philosopher of twentieth-century Italy. One says "the" philosopher because nobody else came close, and even those intellectuals who disagreed with him most violently—Giovanni Gentile, who pledged allegiance to Fascism, was one of them—were obliged to take account of what he said. A practising politician as well as a political theorist, Croce was impressed by Mussolini in the beginning but soon saw the threat to liberalism. He went into internal exile and continued with his writing. After the war Croce was offered the presidency of Italy but declined, although in other respects he was crucial to the rebuilding of the country's liberal institutions. Lending him almost irresistible force as a thinker was the riverine flow and clarity of his prose style, fully equal to Shaw at his best, but without the paradoxes. Unfortunately no comparable stylist ever tried to translate him, and although some of his central works were brought over into English, they never had the influence that was their due. (An admirer of R. G. Collingwood would object to these assessments, but few admirers of Collingwood are aware that his indebtedness to Croce attained the level of mimicry, which always belittles the original.) In the 1960s I learned quite a lot of Italian by reading almost everything Croce wrote, and emerged from the experience with a lasting admiration for his range of understanding. When he didn't understand something, however, he brought all his powers of expression to bear on saying the wrong thing: a salutary lesson in the relationship between style and substance.
Attempts to determine the place of art have, until now, looked for that place either at the peak of the theoretical spirit or in the vicinity of philosophy itself. But if, so far, no satisfactory result has been obtained, might it not be because of the obstinacy of looking too high? Why not turn the attempt on its head, and instead of proposing the hypothesis that art is one of the highest grades, if not the highest grade, of the theoretical spirit, propose instead the inverted and opposite hypothesis, that it is one of the lowest, even the lowest of all?
—BENEDETTO CROCE, _P ROBLEMI DI ESTETICA_ (PROBLEMS IN AESTHETICS), P. 13
AS ALWAYS, CROCE defeats ordinary expectation by looking for the creative impulse in the natural instinct rather than in the developed mind. The secret of his fecundity as a thinker was to open up possibilities rather than close them off, and he always did so by demoting the adept. According to him, a heart in the right place, rather than a mind in a high state of training, was the more likely source of truth, and the only source of creativity. Art, far from being the furthermost refinement of intelligence, came before thought, and was as natural as breathing. Croce's guess was that the first human beings sang before they spoke. He was certainly right that they drew before they wrote, and wrote poetry before they wrote prose.
Such propositions from Croce, when taken all at once, can sound like paradox-mongering. But he made them consistent. Over the vast range of his fundamental works—leaving the incidental works aside, which it takes a separate room to do—the key concepts are thoroughly and concretely worked out, abetting each other without friction. The best way of summing up their effect is to say that they show how the instinct to live and grow is channelled through creativity towards mentality. If he had given the mind the precedence over art, he would have been inhibited in his explanatory powers. He did the opposite, and released them. Released, they could give a reasoned account of what he saw in the street: all the busy littleness that was so astonishing in its prodigality and variety of imagination. He always thought that there must be something wrong with an overarching concept if a necessary mental activity withered in its shadow. For a philosophy to be true, he believed, its proponent had to be able to write history. (One of the reasons he thought religions were incomplete philosophies was that no religion can tell the truth about the past.) For an aesthetic to be valid, its proponent had to be able to write criticism. That second idea was especially valuable to his successors. Its effect was to humanize in advance the Italian critical tradition as it extended without a notable break into the modern period. Italy's left-wing theorists, for example, unlike those in other countries, have always felt obliged to show due tact when treating the arts as a political expression, thereby acknowledging Croce's warnings against doing such a thing to any degree at all. (Not even the red radical Gramsci could afford to ignore Croce.)
One of Croce's precepts was paraphrased by Eugenio Montale when he said: "It isn't the man who wants to who continues the tradition, it's the man who can, and sometimes he's the man who knows least about it." It was one of the sentences that made Montale almost as famous a critic as he was a poet, but he would not have been able to write it if he had not read Croce first, and Montale's very next sentence was one that Croce could have written himself. "To this end, programmes and good intentions are of little use." Montale's echo of Croce—or, if you like, Croce's presaging of Montale—is an example of the continuity that makes Italian literary culture so satisfying in its coherence. We should remember, however, that there are Italians who find it too coherent, to the point of being hidebound. They would prefer a story big enough to get lost in, in the way that we get lost in ours. We don't feel obliged to read our philosophers before we read our critics. In Italy there is one philosopher whom everyone has to read before they read anything else, down to and including the instruction manual for a new washing machine.
TONY CURTIS
Like many film stars, Tony Curtis (b. 1925) was already pretending to be someone else before he landed his first Hollywood role. As a Jew raised in the New York Upper East Side district he later called "Nazi land," Bernard Schwartz already knew what World War II was about before he went to it. He emerged from the war with his first professional credentials already established. He had kept his buddies laughing. A further education in drama was made possible by the GI Bill: once again he was the class clown. As an apprentice Hollywood leading man, under his new name Tony Curtis, he caused more laughter for his accent and his hairstyle, but his box office appeal for a young audience was immediate. The rest of the story—mainly about his long and eventually successful quest for credibility—is told in a better than average ghosted autobiography ( _Tony Curtis_ , 1993). Necessarily it leaves out the wider context, which would concern just how the equivalents of Tony Curtis in the European countries failed to make the same impact internationally. American cultural imperialism might look like the answer, but the term explains nothing in itself. American dominance of the world's big screens worked by consent. The effort that went into the product was hard to match. Part of the effort was the quality of the human material that was actually on view. Behind the camera there were refugees from all nations, but most of the faces on screen were Americans. The newer faces, however, knew more about the world than any previous generation. The war changed everything, even the pitch of performance from the established leading men. James Stewart came home from the war a more naturalistic actor than he had been before he left, and the younger men, for whom the war had been not an interlude but an overture, avoided histrionics from the start. Paul Newman and Lee Marvin were conspicuous examples. This naturalism was apparent even in the otherwise frenetic exuberance of Tony Curtis. In his first movies, he looked human even when he hammed it up. He had "only in America" written all over him. But also written all over him was "America is everywhere," and that infinitely exportable quality of confident savvy stayed with him to provide the basis of his charm in the distinguished roles of his later career.
Yonder lies the castle of my father.
—TONY CURTIS (ATTRIB.), _T HE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH_
NO, OF COURSE Tony Curtis didn't write his most famous line. It was written by the otherwise unsung screenplay writer, Oscar Brodney. But Tony Curtis said it, in the accent of the only recently reconstructed Bernie Schwartz, and nobody ever forgot the high-flown speech bubble from a chivalric comic book recited in the cadences of the Bronx. "Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah." Back there at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney I heard him say it, and I didn't laugh. Along with the girls in the audience, I was too struck with his beauty. I had already guessed that only America was big enough to produce Gene Kelly, and here was another living god, not quite as good-looking perhaps, but with an even more acute case of the stylish energy that the Americans had so much of they could hand it out virtually free to the less lucky nations. If I knew that Australia was an almost equally lucky nation—and in some respects even luckier—I forgot it that day. I even liked the way he said the line. I was practising his intonation when I went home to my muddah.
Actually there were already good reasons for admiring Curtis's way with the words. He might not yet have been getting some of the consonants right, but he was always spot on with the emphasis and the impetus. (From his first movies, I assumed that it was an Italian ethnic background he was suppressing. It didn't occur to me that it was a Jewish one, and that Bernie Schwarz had become Tony Curtis for the same reason that Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield. Nothing mattered except the enchanting way that the tormented phonemes seemed to give an extra zing to the American demotic.) In the last year of the war, trapped in the Pacific on a submarine tender, Curtis had entertained his fellow sailors by supplying voices for the movies that they were running with the sound off because they were sick of them. For men whose expectations of life varied between endless boredom and a kamikaze attack, he must have been good to have around, if harder to stave off than a Japanese suicide plane flown by someone with a different idea of glory. Bernie Schwartz was relentless. Like the character in the epigraphs to _The Waste Land_ , he did the police in different voices.
The practice stood him in good stead. With due allowance for the castle of his fuddah, his work in the movies was always marked by his precise way of pointing a line. When he made the whole world laugh in _Some Like It Hot_ , it was surprising to find that some of the critics were surprised. He was also very funny in _Operation Petticoat_. Playing opposite Cary Grant, no mean speaker himself, Curtis held his own in a mentor-prentice interchange that was worked out in dialogue as much as in action. (Later on, in _The Great Race_ , the same director, Blake Edwards, stuck Curtis with a role that had very few good lines, so we have nothing to remember except his white driving suit and the starry glint superimposed on his smile—an early case of a special effect substituting for the effects that really count.) Curtis always excelled as the apprentice: he was in the same relationship with Burt Lancaster in two more films, _Trapeze_ and _The Sweet Smell of Success_. Since Lancaster was a genuine athlete and Curtis knew how to look like one, the first film is ridiculous only when Gina Lollobrigida pretends to fly; and the second film is a masterpiece, with Curtis, in his role as the hustling press pimp Sidney Falco, raising sleaze to the status of poetry. Burt Lancaster once told me in an interview that in his position as co-producer of _The Sweet Smell of Success_ he had come close to firing the director from the movie. The director was Alexander Mackendrick, who worked meticulously with the director of photography James Wong Howe to give the film's visual style a fluency unseen since the heyday of Max Ophuls, who set the standard for filming a whole scene in one elaborate—and therefore expensive—take. But such workmanship took time, and Lancaster, who was counting the financial cost, grew impatient. If he had fired Mackendrick, he would have removed the only force that could rein him in. Lancaster gave a controlled performance because for once someone else was in control. (In _Atlantic City_ it happened again, thanks to Louis Malle.)
But Curtis needed no control. His Sidney Falco is one of the definitive performances of the American cinema: the galvanic answer to the perennial question of what makes Sammy run. There is something marvellous about the way he varies the pace of his dialogue between the cockiness he parades among his fellow grifters and the servility he lavishes on Lancaster's magisterially ruthless J. J. Hunsecker. It takes a lot of self-discipline to develop such possibilities, and they are mainly developed through his way of pointing the line. Doing so, Curtis helped to found a classic school, in which serious delivery avails itself of comic timing. In _Tootsie_ , Dustin Hoffman is meant to be desperate when he delivers the speech about the endive salad: but he doesn't let his desperation get in the way of the words, and sounds all the more panic-stricken for the precision of his delivery. Curtis would have delivered the speech the same way: words first, emotion second. Robert De Niro, coming from the method school, works in the opposite direction. Though he can turn in a precise verbal performance when tightly directed— _Wag the Dog_ is a good example—he can swallow the script when left to himself, especially when he doesn't trust it. The two different emphases are glaringly on view in that wreck of a blockbuster _The Last Tycoon_. Curtis's cameo as the swashbuckling hero of silent movies who has lost his confidence works perfectly in two registers: he falls apart when he is closeted with the studio boss, and he jumps in and out of powerful automobiles when he is on public view. De Niro works in one register, and the puzzled audience spends the whole picture trying to figure out which one it is. The effect is of Tony Curtis giving Robert De Niro an acting lesson. Alas, the ingénue, Ingrid Boulting, who really did need an acting lesson, was never given one. But she might have got one later, when she saw Curtis up there showing what can be done with a few lines.
When it comes to _Some Like It Hot_ , Billy Wilder's justly celebrated hit comedy of 1959, we find out why a screen star like Curtis is worth all that money. First of all, there is what he does on screen. Again, his way with dialogue is the key factor. Hobbling in a pair of 1920s high heels along the station platform, he looks as funny as Jack Lemmon, but so would Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not even Lemmon, however, could deliver the lines like Curtis. By that stage Lemmon was already indulging himself with the stuttering false-start technique that less funny actors have since made the mistake of thinking funny in itself. (In _Ally McBeal_ , Calista Flockhart restarts every sentence half a dozen times before she gets through it: she isn't just padding the part, she is picking up on a mannerism that Lemmon helped to launch.) Curtis delivers his lines with a clean bite that would have made Cary Grant proud of his pupil. When Curtis is actually imitating Grant, in the seduction scene opposite Marilyn Monroe, his story about the two astigmatic lovers whose bodies had to be brought up from the canyon by mule is a copybook example of how to pace and point a comic extravaganza. Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, his screenwriting partner, must have been hugging each other as Curtis brought it off. He would have had to bring it off many times, because Marilyn Monroe is often in the two shot. Her presence reminds us of the second reason Curtis was worth his money. As Wilder told him, with Monroe on the case there would be multiple takes, and he, Curtis, would have to get it right every time, because the take when she finally got it right would be the one they would print. Like Lemmon, Curtis had to keep on delivering the goods over and over in every scene that involved Monroe throughout the movie. Curtis's scenes with her are far more complicated than Lemmon's. In private, Curtis execrated Monroe for her lack of professionalism, but on the set he never wavered. He might easily have been worn down. Marlon Brando, a kind of male Marilyn Monroe when it came to the actual business of learning the lines or getting the shot, always dominated the screen no matter how strong the cast, but he dominated it for a single reason: he needed so many takes that the other actors got tired. He just wore them to a frazzle. Opinions differ about whether he did it deliberately. There is only one opinion about Monroe: she was helpless. But Curtis wasn't, and he is the actor at the centre of one of the funniest pictures ever made.
After that tour de force, some of Curtis's later triumphs should not have come as a revelation, but they always did. When he dominated the screen in _The Boston Strangler_ or stole it in _Insignificance_ , there were always otherwise intelligent critics who congratulated themselves for originality by calling him talented. Nobody would ever have called him anything else had he been less disarming. Like the eloquent man who gets no points for the poetry he writes because he talks well anyway, Curtis was always downrated for his accomplishment because of his screen presence. Throughout his career, he has been one of the most convincing proofs that the secrets of screen stardom must always lie beyond complete analysis. There are actors like Alan Arkin who can do anything except dominate the screen, and there are other actors who dominate the screen yet can do almost nothing. To the extent that screen stardom can be broken down into separate gifts, however, Curtis, apart from a physical beauty that was built to last, had another gift that was rare and precious. He was a writer's actor. When he spoke it, the language came alive. Somewhere under the quiff and eventually the rug, Tony Curtis weighed a line for its rhythm and melody, and said it as if it could be said in one way only, and no uddah.
ERNST ROBERT CURTIUS
Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956) was the most eminent medieval romance philologist of his time. After World War I he tried to build bridges between the German and French humanist worlds, deploring the extent to which they had been separated. In 1932, when it was clear that the Nazis had a chance of power, he published _Deutsche Geist in Gefahr_ (The German Spirit in Danger). When the danger became an actuality, however, he made no further combative moves. Nor did he choose exile. He withdrew into his library, emerging after the war to publish, in 1948, his capital work _European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages_ , which was universally hailed as one of the great scholarly books of the century. He also continued with the series of literary essays through which he is most easily approached by the non-scholarly reader. (They were posthumously translated and collected, as _Essays on European Literature_ , in 1973.) So it looked as if he had done the best he could. But there was a lingering question. With his lifelong emphasis on cultural continuity, what did he really think about the greatest blow that the Nazis had struck against it?
When the German catastrophe came, I decided to serve the idea of a medievalistic Humanism by studying the Latin literature of the Middle Ages. These studies occupied me for fifteen years. The result of them is the present book.
—ERNST ROBERT CURTIUS, IN THE INTRODUCTION TO THE 1952 ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF _E UROPEAN LITERATURE AND THE LATIN MIDDLE AGES_
SEVEN YEARS HAD already gone by since Hitler's fall, and still the most revered scholar in Europe wasn't saying very much about what the catastrophe had actually entailed. (In the original, German edition of the book that had come out in 1948, he had said even less.) The lacuna wouldn't have mattered so much had he been less magisterial. At his best, that was the only word for him. When I was first a student at Sydney University in the late 1950s, my teacher George Russell, himelf a scholar of the Middle Ages, placed his copy of Curtius's masterpiece on a lectern, opened it as if it were a holy text and said: "This is a great book." At the time I had no means of knowing whether he was right. Years later, when I had finally swallowed the hint and began to take on board some of the preliminary knowledge (such as who Dante was) necessary to appreciate what Curtius had written, I found that the book read like a thriller. Curtius had the invaluable knack of not getting bogged down in his own scholarship. His Dante, like the Dante of Gianfranco Contini (Curtius and Contini were friends), lived and breathed. They were agreed that Dante was a great mystifier, but to that fact they both posted the necessary qualification. He was, but not as much as he wasn't.
Dante set problems that only scholars can tackle: a reason for them to love him. But if Dante had not done much, much more than that—if he had not written in a way that invaded the memory and imagination of people with no scholarly qualifications at all—there would be no _Divine Comedy_ for scholars to study. Curtius is a tacit, benign and unusually creative proponent of a line of thought that can be vocal, malignant and sterile: the idea that scholarship and criticism are essential to culture. But they are not: they are essential to civilization, just as culture is. Culture on the one hand, and the study of culture on the other, are inseparable only in the sense that they both belong to something larger. The idea that the professional student of culture is some kind of creative collaborator easily grows into an assumption that the professional understanding of culture is part of culture's driving force. It is, after all, the professional understanding that establishes the culture's tradition. For Curtius, tradition was a key concept. "Culture without tradition," he wrote, "is destiny without history." For him, a threat to tradition was a threat to life. In the Nazi era it was understandable that he should feel that way: understandable and commendable. To help stave off the threat, he wrote _European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages_. He did the work for it while the Nazis ruled, and published it not long after they were gone. Even more than Erich Auerbach's _Mimesis_ , Curtius's _summa_ looks like an act of creative regeneration: a timely and triumphant effort to reintegrate the shattered mental world. At this distance, to equivocate seems churlish. But there are aspects of Curtius's position that require comment, and at least one that ought to be questioned closely.
Not long after peace broke out, Curtius and André Gide met at a café in Cologne, within sight of the ruined cathedral. They could congratulate themselves for having survived, and trade reasons for pessimism. Both had seen the culture of their beloved Europe brought to the same condition as the city around them. The spectacle of disintegration must have been especially discouraging in the case of Curtius. After World War I he had done more than any other German to further the interchange of mental life between France and his own country. The first serious study of Proust to be published in Germany was from his hand. It was contained in a 1925 collection of essays called _Französischer Geist im neuen Europa_ , which is among my treasures: an elegant book bound in crimson polished linen, solidly printed in Bodoni bold, the true typeface of the modern Europe after World War I. He also wrote the best German book about Balzac. Victor Klemperer (now justly famous for his Nazi-era diaries but still a minor figure at the time) was in the same field. A two-volume study of French pre-Revolutionary literature was among Klemperer's early publications. But nobody in the Francophone departments of the German academic world had quite the cachet of Curtius. Always a scholar of the far past, he was keen to apply his curatorial standards to the creative present. (Later on, his admirer Contini was to be the Italian exemplar of the same double competence.) Curtius was also the first German translator of _The Waste Land_. A valued contributor to Eliot's magazine _The Criterion_ , Curtius kept up with Eliot's poetry and knew all of it by heart. He trusted his memory of it at least once too often: in his posthumously published _Gesammelte Aufsätze_ (Collected Essays) we find "April is the cruellest month of the year," a line that Eliot never actually wrote. But the slip proves that Curtius took literature in as a living thing.
In his role as a representative of European cultural unity, as it had once existed under Christendom and might conceivably one day exist again in a new political synthesis, Curtius could hardly have done a better job. History, however, caught him out: not cruelly, as it did the Jews, but ironically, in the way that it so frequently did to those Aryan scholars who thought they could keep a shred of civilization going by sticking to their tasks. On the right wing of French intellectual life, there were quite a few writers and scholars who dreamed that French culture might get together with German culture in a beautiful union, with the new, strong Germany as a political facilitator. (The recurring emphasis on the idea of "strength" should have tipped them off that the unitary concept had less to do with _Kultur_ than with _Macht_ , but wish fulfilment was doing its deadly work: World War I had cost France so much to win that nobody believed there could be a war again.) Though the part of the French right wing that took its tune from Action Française was resolutely German-hating like its founder Charles Maurras himself, there were plenty of others who believed that an integrated Euro culture was at hand. After the Germans occupied Paris, the Propaganda Abteilung encouraged that belief. Some of the second rank of French writers fell for the invitation to tour Germany. (The farcical results were recently well recorded in François Dufay's _Le Voyage d'automne_.) The higher orders were less pliant, but there was a brand of quietism ready to believe that cultivated Frenchmen and cultivated Germans could make a civilized common cause over and above the sordid level of mere politics.
Gide was one of the Frenchmen and Curtius was one of the Germans: the meeting in post-war Cologne was not their first contact, although during the war it had been through an intermediary. We learn from Gide's _Journal 1939–1949_ that on 15 March 1943, he met a " _très aimable jeune officer allemand, étudiant l'histoire de l'art, ami d'Ernst Robert Curtius_." (A very amiable young German officer, a student of the history of art, and friend of Curtius.) "He simply said, at the beginning of our conversation, how uncomfortable he was made to feel by his uniform." " _Il parle chaleureusement aussi de Jünger_." (He also spoke warmly about Jünger.) Like Ernst Jünger, Curtius was one of the eternal Germany's living, breathing examples of a cultural continuity that the current unfortunate episode in history had no doubt compromised but could scarcely obliterate—or so their theory went. The deeper their commitment to the richness of the past, the slower their acceptance of the fact that there was nothing the Nazis could not obliterate. Later on, Curtius soft-pedalled this part of his career, but there is no reason to suppose he had anything much to hide. Curtius was no Heidegger: he never gave the Nazis any vocal support. He and Gide were guilty of nothing except a wishful, wistful thought: that there could be a cultural unity in conditions of political barbarism. Most of our wishful thinking is about what we love. If there were to be condemnation for that, we would all be condemned sooner or later. But if we are to learn anything from catastrophe, it is wise to remember what some of the men who shared our passions once forgot.
Curtius forgot that continuity is not in itself an inspiration for culture, merely a description of it. Similarly, a tradition is an accumulation through time of inspired works, created by people who do not have tradition on their minds. If they have anything on their minds, it is their own uniqueness: the ways in which they do not fit in, not the ways they do. The critic and the scholar, when they are properly qualified, spend at least as much time dismantling their own continuity as reinforcing it. In the twentieth century Natolino Sapegno, the Dante scholar _in excelsis_ —and rivalling even Contini as a scholar of the fourteenth century in general—dismantled the Romantic critical tradition which had given Dante's Paolo and Francesca the saving grace of an eternal love, a free pass valid even in the winds of the _Inferno_. Dante, Sapegno pointed out, wanted the lovers punished: the poet's morality was at the heart of his originality. Scholarly emphasis on cultural continuity—including scholarly emphasis on scholarly continuity—will always attempt to erode the very idea of originality. But originality is more than an idea: it is the closest description of the creative impulse. Curtius would never been the great scholar he was if he had not known that all along. Indeed he would have thought it a truism to say so. But in his work there was also the tacit assumption that, with scholarship's help, art grew out of art.
Art grows from the individual vision. It always has, when political circumstances make individuality possible. The Nazis were dedicated to the self-imposed task of removing individuality from the world. By one of the twentieth century's most vicious paradoxes, Hitler did more than any of his all-conquering predecessors to integrate Europe politically. Luckily he never completed the job, but he got far enough to prove, by negative example, that a civilization is inseparable from a measure of liberalism. In the past, artists have worked for tyrants and done great things, but only because the tyrants, in the exceptional case of the artists, allowed a bubble of freedom. The civilization we know most about, and which we still inhabit, has institutionalized freedom to the point where the connections between art and the study of art are sometimes hard to see. But the central catastrophe of the century gone by served to show us that any such connection between them depends entirely on their both being joined in the first instance to the civilization itself. In the light of that demonstration, Curtius the universal scholar is left looking depressingly restricted, and humanism is left with its besetting weakness on display—the temptation it carries within it to reduce the real world to a fantasy even while presuming to comprehend everything that the world creates.
It is comprehensible and forgivable that Curtius said nothing about Nazi atrocities during the war. Incomprehensible and unforgivable is that he said nothing about them after it. At the height of his prestige, with the whole international scholarly world for a worshipping audience, he never alluded even once to the extermination camps. George Steiner was right to point out that Eliot's post-war _Notes Towards the Definition of Culture_ , by neglecting to mention what had just happened to Europe, disqualified itself from being a definition of culture. The same objection can be made to Curtius's thunderous silence. Writing in his defence, Christine Jacquemard-de Gemeux, in the closing pages of her 1998 monograph on Curtius, touchingly contends that he did not wish to comprehend the tragedy, because to comprehend it would have been to approve it. (" _Il refuse de chercher à comprendre le phenomene parce que le comprendre serait une maniere de l'approuver_.") It is hard to see why. The sad truth is that Curtius lived out his studiously untroubled years still stuck with the decision he had made in 1933, when he condemned Thomas Mann for going into exile. Curtius thought that Mann had been unfaithful to his country. Curtius thought that the true Germany could survive within the Nazi state. Mme. Jacquemard-de Gemeux, generously attempting to make a point he never made for himself, would have us believe that he thought there was such a thing as an interior intellectual life to which Hitler was exterior. In the same way she might have argued that the worm in the apple's core was exterior to the apple. In the café across from Cologne cathedral, Curtius and Gide no doubt found the heaps of rubble a sad comment on their uncivilized times. But the ruins were a sign that the civilization they valued had been fought for, and saved against the odds.
D
Miles Davis
Sergei Diaghilev
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle
MILES DAVIS
Demanding to be heard but not always inclined to make the listening easy, the famous long, slow trumpet solos of Miles Davis (1926–1991) were a follow-on from bebop, the post-war musical development which tried to ensure that jazz would no longer be the spontaneous sound of joy. Whether any art form can really develop is a permanent question, but there is a partial answer in the fact that some of its most adept exponents will often believe it should. A master of his instrument, Davis could play anything he wanted. What he wanted to play was sometimes immediately attractive—often enough to give him some of the all-time most successful jazz albums—but much of it was deliberately parsimonious and oblique, like the soundtrack of a Noh play that had closed out of town. Students of race relations in America are generally agreed that the exponents of post-war jazz were determined, with good reason, to present themselves as challenging artists rather than tame entertainers. Davis had the personality to fit that ambition. Preceding Bob Dylan in his readiness to ignore the audience if he felt like it, he differed in his capacity, when talking offstage, to say something both brief and funny at the same time. He could never be imagined laughing it up like Louis Armstrong. But he still had a cutting wit.
If I don't like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and I drive away.
—MILES DAVIS (ATTRIB.)
I HAVE NO SOURCE for this oft-quoted line except my memory, but it is probably written down somewhere. I first heard it from a jazz musician who held Miles Davis in awe, no doubt for excellent reasons. As a mere listener, I tried hard to feel the same way, but somehow could never quite make it. Always a sucker for the sweet shout of the open horn, I never much liked even the most famous work of Davis, because his trumpet sounded as if it had been shrunk within to the diameter of a drinking straw. Scholarly devotees assured me that his long solos were bringing an art form to its ascetic apex. I thought he was using a pipette as a kazoo. I couldn't see that it made much difference when he chose to sit playing away from the customers, because he had sounded as if he were doing that even when he played towards them.
But if I had ever felt the necessity to say such things in print, I would have tried to remember the Ferrari. His wealth was his whip hand. The concept can be recommended to aspiring artists in all fields; it is the same principle that applies to feminism; if you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line. If you have pleased the public enough to have transferred some of its money into your own bank account, however, you can afford to ignore your detractors. Humphrey Bogart called it his "fuck you" money: with enough in the bank, he wouldn't have to take a bad deal. The point ought to be obvious, although it is not often enough made when the question comes to a sad turn in an artist's career: he might have been forced into it by lack of the wherewithal to give Bogart's instructions to the proponents of a doomed project. What I like about the way Davis put the axiom is the neatness of the illustration. The Ferrari says what matters: he's got one and his critics haven't. A similarly vivid illustration marks the standard anecdote about the Manchester United soccer star George Best. So brilliant that he was marked out of the game by opponents who had been specifically assigned to kick him in the ankles, Best might have taken to drink anyway, but it is more likely that he was simply a born alcoholic. To him the stuff was poison, and that's it. In the sad aftermath of his glory he was a reliable sad-sack act on television talk shows: a wreck who thought he was a rascal. But he had a story up his sleeve that always gave him the victory even if he looked as if he had fallen into the chair he was threatening to fall out of. It is doubtful if he made the story up all by himself: it is too well crafted, and Best's talent, though enormous, was never for words. But one way or another the story got written, and its hero got to recite it. The story is about a room-service waiter in a luxury hotel who pushes a trolley laden with caviar and lobster into Best's VIP suite, only to find Best in bed with Miss World and a bottle of Bollinger. The waiter says: "George, George, where did it all go wrong?"
On closer examination, Miles Davis and George Best were not saying quite the same thing. Davis was talking about the invulnerability conferred by his money. Best, by that stage, had no money. But he had the right to imply that his remembered glory ensured he would still do better than a waiter. A wise artist, however, will be careful to bank his windfalls, because any glory he acquires will soon be compromised if the cash runs out. Money buys control over your career. Without money, your career will control you. But money can't buy you a career in the first place, and inheriting wealth is almost invariably a bad way to start one. Among the screen stars, Jan Sterling and Cliff Robertson were both born rich, but neither would have got anywhere without talent. Jan Sterling, indeed, didn't get as far as she should have, and is nowadays forgotten: later on, Grace Kelly found it easier to be a Lady in Hollywood. The poet James Merrill, who had Merrill Lynch behind him for a rainy day, was free to write exactly as he liked. His poetry might have been less demanding, and more in demand, if he had had to establish himself in an open market. The point can't be pushed too far, of course: Carly Simon, who was brought up as a privileged child in a publishing family of enormous wealth, nevertheless deserved her hit songs, and no doubt took genuine satisfaction out of making money by herself.
But if too much money is made on the job, it can be almost as dangerous as an inheritance. When popular musicians turn to self-indulgence, it is because they can at last afford to do what they would have done anyway. Their early hits, written under the constrictions of compulsory crowd-pleasing, are usually seen in retrospect to be their best work, and often the most adventurous as well. (With the singers, it is always a very bad sign when they start to talk instead of sing. Diana Ross's recorded speeches became the litany of Tamla-Motown in its downhill phase. She was proving that she no longer needed to please the public: a point all too easily made.) Higher up the scale, serious artists are too often exempt from enquiries about the role of money. Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead_ , he was asked what the play was about: "It's about to make me a lot of money." Those of us who attend upon artists with our scholarship, criticism and admiration are apt to forget that the gifted people who give us a glimpse of the sublime are not immune from mundane cares, which, by no paradox except the deviltry of economics, can multiply with success. Mainly because of the glamour involved and the ever present temptations, the arts in all fields seem exactly designed to vaporize even the most exalted practitioner's stipend as fast as he earns it, and the larger the faster. The mere cost of having your money professionally looked after, for example, instantly becomes an overhead. In his _Paris Review_ interview, S. J. Perelman enjoyed showing how hard-headed he was about the writing business. The trick in Hollywood, he said, wasn't to make the loot, but to get it out. He said that the "fairy money" they paid you had a way of evaporating as you headed east.
Books about the finances of the painters are often written, because the money involved is big if the painter becomes fashionable—especially, strangely enough, if the painter belonged to the anti-bourgeois avant-garde before he clicked with the buyers. Painters have to buy materials and pay a large percentage to their galleries, so they are rarely as rich as we tend to think, but when they do break through, they break through on an industrial scale. For writers the financial rewards are comparatively small-time, but a good book dedicated to nothing except the money would be very useful. It might help to explain behaviour that is puzzled over on the metaphysical level when there are concrete explanations that have not been considered. When Nazi Germany cancelled the distribution of Hollywood movies, MGM faced a loss of only a small proportion of its income. Thomas Mann, when he finally realised the necessity of cutting himself off from publication in his homeland, faced the loss of nearly all of his, because although he was internationally famous, his central audience was in Germany. In the Soviet Union, royalties existed only in the form of privileges—an apartment, a dacha, the chance to be published at all—but the privileges were decisive. The threat of their being withdrawn was enough to make almost anyone think twice about speaking against the state. Without this point in mind it is fruitless to go on speculating about why Pasternak, for example, was so slow to dissent in public, and was so equivocating when he did. Lovers of the arts should be slow to despise the cash nexus on the artist's behalf: the niggling difficulties of securing and handling one's personal finances are nothing beside the pressures of state patronage. Going to hell in your own way has everything over being sent there at a bureaucrat's whim.
Was Miles Davis speaking for black America? Yes, of course, although he shrugged off the black man's burden: he wasn't Martin Luther King Jr. But Martin Luther King couldn't have recorded _Kind of Blue_. Davis had his real trouble not with acceptance as such, but with drugs. In the past—the immediate past, let's not forget—black musicians were robbed blind by white businessmen as a matter of course. Davis robbed himself, incidentally showing us the difference between a weakness and a vice. He had a weakness for women, but nobody has ever proved that he played worse for his prodigious sexual appetite. His appetite for drugs was another matter, and it would be a brave defender who claimed that drugs never affected his playing. Charlie Parker was explicit on the subject: "Anyone who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar." Sadder than a falling phrase from "My Old Flame," the line is quoted on page 379 of _Hear Me Talkin' to Ya_. Edited by Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro, it is a book as rich in precepts as in anecdotes, and one which should never be allowed to go out of print. Students in all fields of creative endeavour need a copy of it nearby, to instruct them in the unyielding nature of bedrock. Not long ago I heard a man playing the most beautiful tenor sax. I could tell he had absorbed everything Ben Webster and Lester Young had to teach, but his gift for assembling his phrases into a long legato line was all his own. He was terrific. But he was playing at the bottom of the escalators in Tottenham Court Road tube station. No Ferrari for him.
SERGEI DIAGHILEV
Born in Novgorod and buried in Venice, Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) became famous to the world as the impresario of the Russian opera-and-ballet export drive that turned fashionable Paris upside down before and during World War I. He was already famous in Russia as the brilliant young connoisseur whose lavishly mounted exhibitions rediscovered the country's tradition of religious icons and secular portrait painting, and as the editor of the truly wonderful magazine _Mir Iskusstva_ (The World of Art), in which Benois, Bakst and other Russian names that later became bywords made their first appearances. The gift Diaghilev demonstrated in Paris of attracting all the most celebrated artists of the day (Picasso, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Satie, Poulenc and many more) to join his enterprises had already been demonstrated at home. But at the height of his powers, home was lost to him. After the Revolution he stayed abroad, and the Soviet authorities, once it became obvious that he could not be lured back, condemned him in perpetuity as an especially insidious example of bourgeois decadence. Soviet historians of art wrote him out of their picture of the past for more than sixty years. When, in 1982, a two-volume collection of his pre-revolutionary writings on art was published in Moscow, it was a sign that the confident rigidity of official ideology was starting to bend, because any move towards telling the truth about the past was likely to be a prelude to telling the truth about the present. But it was just a sign. Only in retrospect was the change certain. What the astonished reader could be sure of at the time, however, was that Diaghilev had been a great critic—the discriminating impulse at the heart of his uncanny ablity to bend the talented to his will. They felt that he understood them. He almost always did.
Why should I waste my imagination on myself?
—SERGEI DIAGHILEV (ATTRIB.)
AS A LIFELONG admirer of Diaghilev I am easily impressed by anything he is said to have said, but when I first read this I was so impressed that I neglected to make a note: I knew I would remember it always. I could have sworn that I read it in _Theatre Street_ , Tamara Karsavina's radiant little sheaf of memoirs. (Karsavina, previously the darling of the Maryinsky company in Petersburg, danced the very first _Firebird_ , in Paris in 1910.) Probably the best single book ever written about dancing, it also has general application to the whole world of the arts: if I were making a list of ten books that art-crazy young people should read to civilize their passion, _Theatre Street_ would be on it. But when I searched through the book to find this quotation, there it wasn't. The conversation was there, but only in reported form: no inverted commas. Did I read it in that mighty balletomane Richard Buckle's book about Diaghilev? I couldn't find it there, either: nor in the fascinating interview with Karsavina contained in John Drummond's fine compendium _Speaking of Diaghilev_. Anyway, unsourced though it is, the remark is too resonant to leave out. The location was Diaghilev's small apartment in Petersburg—as the city was then still called, and now, happily, is called again. Karsavina, very young at the time and bowled over by Diaghilev's sophistication, noticed that his tiny bedroom had almost nothing in it except a bed. She said she was surprised, and Diaghilev replied with the rhetorical question quoted above. The remark comes straight from the centre of his personality and helps to define it, as the arthritic Renoir defined his own personality when he said, "Tie the brush into my hands" and the senescent Richard Strauss when he screamed at the orchestra, "Louder! Louder! I can still hear the singers!"
Diaghilev, an artist whose art-form was to combine the art-forms, gave everything to the world and kept little for himself. His hotel bills could be immense and he dressed to kill, but otherwise he did not need artistic surroundings in his personal life. Other impresarios have been less monastic. Lincoln Kirstein, whose taste made possible the whole coruscating pageant of Balanchine's career at the New York City Ballet, kept his Manhattan apartment full of beautiful things. Widening the scope to directly creative artists, we can see the same contrast. At one extreme, some pour all their creativity into their art and don't care how they live. At the other, there are those who have to arrange their personal lives at a certain aesthetic level before they can function. Perhaps the most easily chosen paradigm case of the first kind would be Beethoven, whose working environment was elementary, not to say squalid. (In Erica Jong's debut novel _Fear of Flying_ , which does not deserve the neglect that has followed its best-seller status, there is a convincing passage where the narrator, visiting a mock-up of Beethoven's music room, is "moved by the simplicity of his needs." I quote from memory, but a writer has always done well when you feel the urge to do that.) Keats exemplified the second kind, if only for one memorable moment, when he put on his best clothes before he sat down to write a poem. In order for inspiration to strike, Wagner had to be living in velvet splendour, no matter what it cost him and others. He lived beyond his means on principle, as if imbued with the divine right of kings. It took a king, Ludwig II of Bavaria, to keep him in the style to which he had no intention of becoming unaccustomed. Verdi, on the other hand, paid his way and expected his possessions to do the same: he lived in comfort and the vineyards he could see from his house were all his, but they were a business proposition. Comparable figures in the imperial magnitude of their achievements, the two giants are at odds in this: Verdi could have slept in Diaghilev's spartan bedroom and got up in the morning to compose. Wagner would have thought he was in gaol.
Goethe kept a grand drawing room to impress his guests and a spartan bedroom because he did not need to impress himself: in him, the economy of imaginative effort attained the level of poetry. Yet he might have lived chaotically and written no less well. The connection between highly organized work and an impulse towards a life of order is frequent, but not necessary: a fact amply proved by the slobs. Ford Madox Ford's accumulated literary achievement is a shambles of scrappily realized catchpenny projects dotted with masterpieces, but two of those— _The Good Soldier_ and the first three volumes of _Parade's End_ taken as a totality—are triumphs of precise arrangement. Yet his personal circumstances were so disorganized they looked like a deliberate challenge to Oblomov. Ford would spend all day in a dressing gown stained with bacon fat. That same ingredient of breakfast food was also a theme in the life of Cyril Connolly, an important critical writer whose once high reputation is in a continuous position of never quite being restored, and partly because his epicurean tastes are found repugnant. Connolly's books (mainly collections of essays) were testaments to the cultivated high life, which he tried to live in reality, mortgaging a notional future income to keep himself in champagne, _foie gras_ , upmarket women and first editions. But he could use a cold rasher of cooked bacon as a bookmark, especially if the book belonged to someone else. In all of literary history as we know it, perhaps the most outstanding slob was W. H. Auden. The man whose lyrics were showpieces of carpentry—try to imagine a poem more accurately built than "The Fall of Rome"—kept a kitchen that could have doubled as a research facility for biological warfare. Worse, he treated other people's houses the same way. Mary McCarthy, when a guest, earned a bad reputation by taking a long shower with the curtain outside the bath instead of inside: the host would receive no apology for the subsequent inundation. From Auden, a mere flood would have counted as a thank-you note: he left his benefactors under the impression that they had been visited by the Golden Horde. Auden lived long enough for me to see his tie. I thought it had been presented to him by Jackson Pollock until I realized it was a plain tie plus food. It put the relationship of writer to the written in a new light. How could his poems be so neat and clean, and he so otherwise? Rimbaud, of course, had raised the same question long before. His teenage masterpiece _Bâteau ivre_ , among all the other things it is, is a perfect construction, architecture on paper. But the young man who wrote it was also capable of composing a poem on a café table using, as a substitute for ink, his own excrement, delivered fresh into his hand specifically for the purpose. When any acquaintance made the mistake of offering him hospitality, he trashed the place on principle. Why Verlaine waited so long to shoot him is a great mystery. (In his biography of Rimbaud, Graham Robb—whose books on Balzac and Victor Hugo are likewise models of the form—does his best to give us an answer, but I still don't get it.) Later on in a short life, the prodigy sobered up sufficiently to suggest, by example if not in a written testimonial, that while an adolescent he might have been a crackpot. Certainly it would be nice to believe it. Auden, however, although on a less destructive scale, was a mess for the long haul: a career scumbag.
Exquisite work is no sure sign of a fastidious worker. If you knew them only from what they wrote, you would expect both Proust and Rilke to be dandies. Proust wasn't: his clothes sense was considered weird even before he started to pad his shirts with insulation, and his handwriting was barely legible. Rilke was, except that the word "dandy" is inadequate to the fanaticism of his everyday display of taste. Everything about him, right down to his notepaper, was faultlessly chosen. His handwriting was so beautiful that his merest thank-you note would look like a work of art even to someone who couldn't read. The whole performance of his personal life cost money, some of which he had. When he had to cadge, he was a lot more subtle than Wagner. A supreme master of the bread-and-butter letter, Rilke was continually invited by great ladies to honour their estates by creating his poems in rent-free accommodation. Once again, the way he managed his circuitous trajectory from one finely appointed ambience to the next was a work of art in itself. Taste justified everything. Taste was his world. He behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.
But even Rilke was self-denying in the only area that counts: he served his art and nothing but. He created the conditions for himself in which he would not be distracted. Absurd though it may sound, Wagner was doing the same. The _Ring_ , after all, did get written. The test is not whether the surroundings seem crassly extravagant, but whether what gets created within them seems worth the expenditure. Did Stravinsky keep a needlessly grand household? Not if he needed it: and the precisely discriminating, colour-coded penmanship of his manuscripts was a sure sign that his well-chosen furniture enabled him to concentrate like a monk. (Diaghilev paid him late: behaviour which Stravinsky interpreted, correctly, as bohemian, in the sense that a bohemian's ability not to worry about money always starts with your money rather than his.) The requirement of stately circumstances applied also to Thomas Mann: always grand in his way of life, he followed Keats's principle in every respect, right down to his fingertips. Without a proper manicure, Thomas Mann couldn't write. But he wrote: the second part of _Joseph und seine Brüder_ and the whole of _Doktor Faustus_ cost a small fortune in buffed nails at Brentwood prices, but we got the books. An artist crosses the line only when the way he lives gets in the way of his work. When Scott Fitzgerald spent his way into debt, he sinned against himself and us, because to write beneath himself was the only way out of the trap, so the escape route led to the worst trap of all. _Tender Is the Night_ would have been an even better book if he had known how to give himself time, and admirers who think that _The Last Tycoon_ is much more than a pitiful sketch must have a strange idea of what makes _The Great Gatsby_ a masterpiece. But the self-destructive artists who scare us by the profligacy of their capital outlay can do so only because we know what they are really worth. Orson Welles only appeared to destroy himself: he was still Orson Welles. Plenty of men have been big eaters on borrowed money but we never heard of them. A better comfort, though, is that Diaghilev, when he borrowed money, was rarely thinking about how he could spend it on himself, and almost always about how it would help finance his next miracle of imagination.
PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945) was the tall blond darling of the French right between the wars. Brought up in a bourgeois family with royalist beliefs, he emerged from World War I with with the kind of loathing for capitalism that found the right more congenial than the left. Later on he said that he had been a fascist all along, Although he didn't officially declare his allegiance until 1934, he had decided quite early that there were only two sides, fascism and communism. A much-admired poet when young and an effective prose stylist always, he would have been regarded as an adornment of French culture if not for his politics. As things turned out, only his politics lend him lasting interest. (A direct route to the centre of his agitated political consciousness is _Pierre Drieu la Rochelle: Secret Journal and Other Writings_ , translated and introduced by Alastair Hamilton, a valuable student of the fascist intellectuals right up until the day of their total disappearance at the end of World War II.) Drieu was convinced that French culture had been toppled from its rightful pre-eminence by the corrosive influence of liberals and Jews. Giving a warm welcome to the idea that France might be restored to strength by an alliance with Germany, he saw France as the woman and Germany as the man in a partnership that for him always had sexual overtones. His personal beauty was important to him. He was the kind of man who takes it to heart when he loses his hair. Since he looked more like a blond barbarian Nazi god than most of the Nazis did, his alliance with the invader had the stamp of destiny. More than ready to collaborate with the Nazi Occupation, he accepted the editorship of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ after the parent publishing house, Gallimard, made a deal with the Germans by which it would censor itself in order to stay in business. To do him what little credit he had coming, Drieu became disillusioned with the occupiers, but his annoyance was mainly because they proved themselves less keen about the strength of French culture than he was. The measures against the Jews didn't bother him.
Nevertheless he must have been aware that he had not only chosen the losing side, but behaved badly enough to attract vengeance, because when the Liberation came he attempted suicide instead of standing up to argue for his views. The failure of his quest to eliminate himself raised the question of what to do with so embarrassingly gifted a leftover, but finally he managed to do the right thing, although scarcely for the right reason. "We played and I lost," he said in the farewell address he called Final Reckoning. "Therefore I demand the death penalty." But we don't demand the death penalty because we lose. We demand it because we have done the wrong thing.
And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days.
—DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, QUOTED IN PIERRE ASSOULINE'S _L'É PURATION DES INTELLECTUELS_
ON THE FACE of it, Drieu's valedictory testament was absurd. It was 1944, after the liberation of Paris; he had never made any secret of collaborating with the Nazis; his deeds were done and his time had run out. And his whole personal disaster had been because of his interest in polics. Already resolved to suicide, he was attributing a deficiency to himself in the very area where he had been most obsessed. It is an instructive demonstration of the lengths to which self-deception can go. In the thirties he had been the golden boy and even looked like one. His hulking personal beauty was certainly enough to make some extremely civilized women forget his politics. (Visiting from Argentina, the bluestocking heiress Victoria Ocampo, future editor of the literary magazine _Sur_ , welcomed him into her bed, and decades later she was still forgetting his politics, writing fond articles of reminiscence in which his intellectual proclivities featured as charming quirks at worst.) But his political passions, which included a visionary anti-Semitism, had led him all the way to treason, by a series of steps that had begun with his disgust at the inability of France to unite Europe in a crusade against the liberal democratic heresy. Since he thought Nazi Germany could do a better job, he welcomed the German invasion. It is important to remember, on this point, that he was not coming from the direction of Action Française. Maurras hated the Germans. What united the two different strains of collaboration was that they both hated the Jews.
As editor of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ under the tutelage of a compromised regime, Drieu was effectively a collaborator for as long as he held the chair. But here the difficulties begin. The picture becomes less clear than we might like. Drieu found out, on closer acquaintance, that he didn't think much of the Nazis either: they weren't really serious about the transformation of culture. Feeling that, he was able to nurse within himself the belief that he still had the interests of a greater France at heart. (The fate of the Jews, it need hardly be said, he was able to ignore: i.e., tacitly approve.) Had he chosen to live, he might eventually have been able to put up a case for his past behaviour. As a collaborator on the practical level, he had not done much more to favour the oppressive power than many of the late-flowering literary _résistants_ had done against it. It had been Rebatet and Brasillach, after all, who had helped to direct the hunt against the Jews. Punish those two, by all means. But Drieu had been a cut above all that vulgarity, had he not?
He might even have been able to carry the point about politics: the thoroughness with which he had got them wrong was, after all, a kind of proof that they had never held his interest, which had been expended on his purely intellectual vision of a properly authoritarian Europe. In other words, he might have proved himself incompetent. Some of his contemporaries later ventured the cynical but all too plausible opinion that if he had stayed hidden for a couple of years he might have resurfaced as a minister in the provisional government, where he had friends and admirers. It wasn't just his old Nazi pals who tried to get him to safety. When he revived in hospital after his first suicide attempt through an overdose of Luminal, he found a passport good for Switzerland under his pillow. The documents were almost certainly put there by Lt. Gerhard Heller of the Propaganda Abteilung. Heller was still busy in the corridors of Paris even as the German troops were pulling out and the high-echelon collaborators were settling into their supposedly safe new billets in Sigmaringen. But Heller's efforts were duplicated by Emmanuel d'Astre de la Vigerie, minister of the interior in the provisional government, who also thought that Drieu and Switzerland were a good match. There were plenty of eminent literary figures who considered Drieu as one of them, and thus too important to be sacrificed on the altar of _l'Épuration_. They had a point, about it if not about him. All too quickly it had emerged that the purgative courts would be used as a means of settling old scores. The unspeakable Louis Aragon (a long-time apologist for state terror as long as Stalin was in control of it and not Hitler) shamelessly tried to nail doddery old André Gide. Gide's collaboration had amounted to not much more than a judicious reticence, eked out with the occasional soirée for Ernst Jünger where both men could deplore the barbarism that made it so hard to concentrate on one's art. But Aragon, as a Communist bonze, had never forgiven Gide for his pioneering pamphlet _Retour de l'URSS_ , which had revealed Stalin's regime for what it was.
Luckily Aragon's vindictive spite did not prevail. Nor, thank God, did Picasso's stupidity: to his everlasting shame, the greatest of all modern painters allowed his studio to be used as a meeting point for vigilantes preaching havoc against those who had compromised themselves with the foe—a strictness that came oddly from Picasso, who had eaten in black market restaurants throughout the Occupation and never run a single risk. It was a time for fake virtue: a time in which there was no sure sign of real virtue except diffidence. The fair-minded François Mauriac (some said he had to be fair because his brother had been a _collabo_ ) put in a good word for the unsavoury Henri Béraud, who throughout the Occupation had kept up an unrelenting barrage of vituperation against Communists, the Popular Front, England and, always and above all, Jews. Mauriac was brave enough to defend even the choleric Jew-baiter Robert Brasillach as " _ce brillant esprit_ ," large praise for someone who had asked for his fate in open print by telling the Gestapo which doors to knock on. Brasillach's execution by firing squad was generally regarded at the time as the least he had coming, but Mauriac was prescient in guessing that a saturnalia of rough justice would produce a lasting hangover. Mauriac simply disliked _l'Épuration_ , and in retrospect he seems right. A good moral test for the business is that while Camus saw that there had to be a reckoning but thought it should be done regretfully, Sartre was an untroubled enthusiast. If Drieu had faced trial straight away, a death sentence might well have been on the cards. But it could be that he had already sentenced himself. In March 1945 he finally succeeded in committing suicide. He used gas. Since he almost certainly knew the truth about what had happened to the Jews deported from Drancy, perhaps he thought the means of his own exit appropriate.
E
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
ALFRED EINSTEIN
Not to be confused with his physicist cousin Albert Einstein, the musicologist Alfred Einstein (1880–1952) was born in Munich and went into exile after 1933, first in Italy and then in London. He devoted much of his life to scholarship, of which the principal results were his three-volume history _The Italian Madrigal_ and his reworking of Köchel's Mozart catalogue. He also produced the standard monograph on Mozart—still the best single book to read on the subject—and an authoritative survey of the golden period in Vienna, _Music in the Romantic Era_. Abetting these major works were some superbly compressed essays, the best of which are collected in _Essays on Music_ (1958), the book through which he is most easily approached. At a time when biographies of great composers so often run to many volumes (the trend began well with Ernest Newman's _Wagner_ , but by now it is out of hand) it can be a revelation to discover how much Einstein could say in a single paragraph. He had both wit and a sense of proportion. The second thing is not always accompanied by the first, but the first is impossible without the second.
If we let our imagination roam, it is difficult to conceive what might not have happened in the realm of music if Mozart had lived beyond the age of thirty-five, or Schubert beyond thirty-one.
—ALFRED EINSTEIN, _"O PUS ULTIMUM,"_ IN _E SSAYS ON MUSIC_
LATER IN THE same essay, the musicologist gives a brief list of what Mozart did with the few years of extra life he had that Schubert hadn't: " _Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute_ , the three great Symphonies and the last four quartets." The musicologist thus refocuses an eternally nagging question. The question isn't about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart. Einstein doesn't actually ask the question in that form, but he makes sure that we do. Einstein says that the word _frühvollendet_ (too early completed) is often "strangely and mistakenly" applied to composers who were never completed, because they were interrupted.
For the twentieth—century Jewish scholars of the arts, the idea of a truncated creative life was an ever imminent reality. First in a disintegrating Europe and then later in American exile, Alfred Einstein wrote his books about musicology in the shadow of a looming threat to culture. With persecution always a danger, his view of the past was inevitably tinged with pessimism. One of the elements that make his monograph about Mozart a great book is this projected sense of cultural fragility. He makes Mozart's prodigious outpouring a race against fate. He treats Mozart the gentile as a _Luftmensch_ with a tenuous claim to a place on Earth. He did the same for Schubert, and was surely right. Schubert's career—what in German would be called his _Laufbahn_ , the road he ran—was one of busy contentment. Though the occasional romantic radical of today sometimes paints him as an embattled rebel, Schubert was in fact very much at home in bourgeois Vienna, surrounded by friends, a byword for merriment. But he was also an avatar. If he had climbed out of a flying saucer, he could not have been less of this world.
How do we account for such genius? The first question to deal with is how its prodigality did not interfere in any way with its quality. In a conversation I had with the Australian poet Peter Porter, who has a vast knowledge of classical music, he argued that this is nearly always so with the great composers. Modern literature since Flaubert might lead us to cherish the paradigm of a few perfect products slowly refined over a lifetime, but the main tradition of music from Bach through to Mahler allows of no such ideal. The composers churned the stuff out, and it was all good. There would have been no better Bach cantatas if he had written a hundred fewer of them.
But even among his prolific ancestors and heirs, Schubert was something else. My own way into his sonic universe was through the piano sonatas, played by Artur Schnabel. Theoretically my main interest was in the _Lieder_ , but I found that the words got in the way. The better I got at understanding German the less I liked most of the texts. (With the French _chanson_ tradition at its height there is no such restriction, because Fauré, Hahn, Duparc and the rest took care to set first-rate texts; but with Schubert that was less often so.) Schubert's wordless works presented no such barrier: there was no verbosity to interfere with the eloquence. After a while I could place any phrase from any of the sonatas to the correct sonata, and the time arrived when I could do the same for the symphonies. At Cambridge I knew the future musicologist Robert Orledge. We were in Footlights together—he was musical director for several of the revues I produced on the Edinburgh Fringe—and it would not have surprised me at the time to be told that he would one day be one of our leading musical scholars. (It was a pity he did not compose more: the future student of Duparc could write melodies fully as beautiful as those of his hero.) One evening we had a long discussion about music in which we brandished at each other the names and opus numbers of all our favourite works by the great composers. Orledge admired them all, but Schubert, he said, was beyond admiration. He was surprised that I had not yet heard the Quintet in C Major, and predicted that when I did hear it for the first time it would be one of the great days of my life.
He was right. I heard it played by the Amadeus quartet plus one, in a performance that I later judged to be too lush with the _rubato_ ; but a certain amount of over-interpretation probably helped the initial impact. (Over-interpretation does some of your reacting for you: you hate it later, but it can help you on the way in.) I had thought that nothing could be more wonderful than Beethoven's late quartets, but the _adagio_ of the Schubert Quintet in C Major contained them all with room to spare. Thirty years later, I listen to the Quintet only rarely: it takes me back too far and too deep, and anyway I already know it note by note. But I can already see that I might listen to it many times in my last years, and might even die to it—during the _adagio_ for preference. I was not surprised, merely satisfied, to find Wittgenstein referring to the Quintet in C Major in one of his letters to the British linguist C. K. Ogden. In language unusually fervent for so cool a hand, Wittgenstein hailed its " _fantastic_ kind of greatness." The italics were his, and well judged. No more measured words will do. But here, at the moment of rapture, is the exact time to return to Einstein's formulation. If Schubert had lived even four more years—the difference between his lifetime and Mozart's—he would have written not just a few more works of the same complexity, but dozens, perhaps hundreds. It is like thinking of the Bellini operas we lost because of a simple sickness. (The same sickness took Bizet, but he was three years older: if he had been the same age, it would have cost us _Carmen_.) It is not like thinking of the Aristophanes plays we lost because someone mislaid them, or of the missing books of the _Annals_ of Tacitus that took with them the story of how Sejanus came to ruin: those works were composed, they existed. But Bellini's lost operas, like Masaccio's lost frescoes and Seurat's lost paintings, were lost because they never happened. Their creators were not early completed: they were interrupted.
And the creator who was most catastrophically interrupted was Schubert. It could be said that Masaccio, who died at twenty-six, was an even more grievous loss. Young trainee appreciators of art who stand astonished in front of Masaccio's frescoes in Florence can comfort themselves with the thought that Michelangelo once stood in the same spot and was equally daunted by Masaccio's transformative genius. Masaccio's untimely death switched off a miracle. But there is the consideration that he had probably already worked all the revolutions he could, and what we would have been given had he lived would have been more of the same—bigger and better, perhaps; even monumental on the scale of Michelangelo's ceiling and the Raphael Stanze; but surely within the limits of representational art. He would not have gone all the way to impressionism, cubism and abstraction. But Schubert might have gone anywhere. There is just no telling. Einstein's contribution to criticism was to remind those of us who practise it that we have an inbuilt tendency to freeze the past into position with an injection of the shaping spirit.
Poetic sensitivity, like poetic creativity, is fraught with the sense of an ending. But the tradition we cherish could have been very different: a fact that the twentieth century brought home to us with anachronistic violence. The whole of modern Polish literature, in which Witold Gombrowicz and Czeslaw Milosz are only two of the most luxuriant flowers, might have had an utterly different layout if some Nazi thug, in 1942, had not put a bullet through the head of Bruno Schulz, who, although already fifty, was probably only at the beginning of what he would have written. And as a painter, Schulz was only one of a whole Jewish generation who never got as far as their first exhibition. When we look at the single easel painting by Schulz that survived, we are clearly looking at the start of a magisterial creative outpouring. But the start is all we get to see. Such possibilities were always on Alfred Einstein's mind. As a young scholar, he had the Nazi nightmare still in his future, but he had the eastern pogroms in his memory. It's the Jewish contribution, and a very dubious privilege: to restore to the past the sense of happenstance that its great works contrive to obviate. But of course the great works contain it too, or they could never have been created. Proper criticism brings it out: the play of chance, the capricious fate that energized the inevitability, the number of strokes of luck it takes to make something that will last.
DUKE ELLINGTON
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was born in Washington, D.C., in 1899. His musical training was a compound of piano lessons and an early exposure to the heady cocktail of church music and burlesque theatre. His career as an orchestral leader began when he organized small bands for parties. His first professional band, the Washingtonians, had only half a dozen players when it reached New York in 1923. At the Cotton Club in Harlem, the size of his band increased to ten players or more, on its way to the later standard aggregate of sixteen—the full Ellington orchestra (usually billed as the Famous Orchestra) was usually no bigger than that. But it could create its own world, and the truest statement ever made about Ellington's supremacy was that his orchestra was his instrument. There was not only an Ellington era, there were Ellington eras, of which perhaps the most fruitful was the period of the 1940–1941 band, when every sideman was a star. After making initial contact through his Newport Jazz Festival LP of 1956, my own appreciation of Ellington started with the recorded works of that pre-war (pre-war for America) flowering in the early 1940s, and in the following set of notes I try to reflect how, when I later ranged backwards and forwards in his work, I started always from that sure base. Beginners now, I think, would do best to start there too, so as to be never in doubt that they are dealing with a genius. When he died, he took with him a secret that no other modern composer, whether in jazz or in more formal music, has ever quite recaptured—the secret of combining other people's individual creativity into a larger vision. The best comparison, perhaps, is with Diaghilev. A prophet honoured in his own country—partly because of Richard Nixon, who invited him to the White House and played the piano beside him—Ellington died in 1974.
Jitterbugs are always above you.
—DUKE ELLINGTON, QUOTED IN _H EAR ME TALKIN' TO YA_, EDITED BY NAT HENTOFF AND NAT SHAPIRO
ELLINGTON LOVED THE dancers, and he was appalled by the very thought that jazz might "develop" to the point where they could no longer dance to it. When he said "jitterbugs are always above you" he wasn't really complaining. They might have kept him awake, but he wanted them to be there. He was recalling the sights and sounds of New York life that he got into "Harlem Airshaft," one of his three-minute symphonies from the early 1940s. If he had put the sounds in literally, one of his most richly textured numbers would have been just a piece of literal-minded programme music like Strauss's _Sinfonia Domestica_. But Ellington put them in creatively, as a concrete transference from his power of noticing to his power of imagining. Ellington was always a noticer, and in the early 1940s he had already noticed what was happening to the art-form that he had helped to invent. He put his doubts and fears into a single funny line. "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." Characteristically he set the line to music, and it swung superbly. But under the exultation there is foreboding. Ellington could see the writing on the wall, in musical notation. His seemingly flippant remark goes to the heart of a long crisis in the arts in the twentieth century, and whether or not the crisis was a birth pang is still in dispute.
For Ellington it was a death knell. The art-form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its entertainment value. But for the next generation of musicians the art-form depended on sounding like art, with entertaiment a secondary consideration at best, and at worst a cowardly concession to be avoided. In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious. Where there had been ease and joy, now there was difficulty and desperation. Scholars of jazz who take a developmental view would like to call the hiatus a transition, but the word the bebop literati used at the time was all too accurate: it was a revolution. The _ancien régime_ was kept as a foundation only in the sense that it was pounded into the earth. Thousands of paired examples could be adduced to make the difference audible. A simple case is the contrast between Ben Webster and John Coltrane in their respective heydays. As a sideman for Ellington, Webster played short solos on some of the three-minute-miracle records made by the 1940–1941 band. It was the most star-studded yet best-integrated ensemble Ellington had in his whole career. Every soloist was encouraged to give it everything he had in a brief space, with no room for cliché or even repetition: riffs were discouraged in favour of a legato flow which, though improvised at the time, could have been written down afterwards and shown not a single stutter. Musicians of the calibre of Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart customarily packed more into their allotted few seconds than they later deployed in a whole evening when they were leading their own orchestras. But nobody packed more in than Webster. When I first heard him in action with Ellington I thought he left even Coleman Hawkins sounding tentative. Webster's solo on "Cottontail" was my favourite. After a few hearings I could hum and grunt every note of it, and fifty-five years later that line of notes is still in my brain like the sonic equivalent of a neon sign on a nightclub with a long name, and I can even remember the exact texture of his tone, substantial and burred like Sean Connery snoring. The name Ben Webster got into my head beside the other Webster, the one who was much possessed by death. Ben Webster, I thought, was much possessed by Melody's incestuous love affair with her brother Rhythm. As an adjective, "Websterian" took on a new, modern meaning, with modernism taken in the sense of the age of drama happening again, in a new form and in our time, but with all the primordial vitality of the poetic emerging from the savage. From Ben Webster's recorded works of that period, and especially when he was with Ellington, there was not a bar that I could forget. To remember it was effortless. To be remembered was what it demanded. As Lester Young was for Count Basie, Ben Webster was for Ellington: the sideman in whose tone the orchestra's entire texture was concentrated and projected.
Now put "Cottontail" aside, take a couple of decades to regain your breath, and listen to John Coltrane subjecting some helpless standard to ritual murder. I won't waste time trying to be funny about John Coltrane, because Philip Larkin has already done it, lavishing all his comic invention on the task of conveying his authentic rage. (For those who have never read Larkin's _All What Jazz_ , incidentally, the references to Coltrane are the ideal way in to the burning centre of Larkin's critical vision.) There is nothing to be gained by trying to evoke the full, face-freezing, gut-churning hideosity of all the things Coltrane does that Webster doesn't. But there might be some value in pointing out what Coltrane doesn't do that Webster does. Coltrane's instrument is likewise a tenor sax, but there the resemblance ends. In fact it is only recognizable as a tenor because it can't be a bass or a soprano: it has a tenor's range, but nothing of the voice that Hawkins discovered for it and Webster focused and deepened. There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop, a fact which steadily confirms the listener's impression that there was no reason for it to start. In other words, there is no real momentum, only velocity. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered. It wouldn't have been true, either: nothing is more quickly copied than virtuosity, and Coltrane had a hundred clones. They didn't swing either.
Here made manifest is the difference between the authoritarian and the authoritative. Coltrane made listening compulsory, and you had to judge him serious because he was nothing else. Webster made listening irresistible. But such enchantment was bound to be suspect for a new generation that was determined not to be patronized. The alleged progession from mainstream to modern jazz, with bebop as the intermediary, had a political component as well an aesthetic one, and it was the political component that made it impossible to argue against at the time, and makes it difficult even now. The aesthetic component was standard for all the arts in the twentieth century: one after another they tried to move beyond mere enjoyment as a criterion, a move which put a premium on technique, turned technique into subject matter, and eventually made professional expertise a requirement not just for participation but even for appreciation. (In architecture, the turning point came with Le Corbusier: laymen who questioned his plans for rebuilding Paris by destroying it were told by other architects that they were incompetent to assess his genius.) The political component, however, was unique to jazz. It had to do with black dignity, a cause well worth making sacrifices for. Unfortunately the joy of the music was one of the sacrifices. Dignity saw enjoyment as its enemy.
Swing was the essence of the enjoyment. In the late thirties the word "swing" was appropriated to a category of big band jazz, which later became the music of the American war effort, and thus went on to conquer the world: in Japan, the first bobby-soxers appeared so soon after the surrender that they might as well have been dropped from the B-29s. But swing had always been a staple component of jazz in any category, because jazz began as dance music, and without a detectable beat the dancers would have been stymied. It need hardly be added that without a detectable beat there can be no variations on it: for syncopation to exist, there must first be a regular pulse. No matter how complex, subtle and allusive it became, jazz had always contained that energizing simplicity. Unfortunately bebop had the technical means to eliminate it. The highly sophisticated instrumentalists of the rhythm section were encouraged to display their melodic invention: in the hurtling fast numbers, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played showers of notes that deliberately suffocated any rhythmic pulse, while the rhythm instruments that might have contained the cascades within a palpable tempo were instead intent on claiming equal status by implying the beat instead of stating it. All the implications rarely added up to the explicit. The word "departure" was often heard in approval: everyone in the band departed as far as possible from a predictable measure. (In classic jazz, there had never been anything metronomic about the predictable—syncopation took care of that—but the compulsive innovators thought the essential expendable, as a brain grown too self-conscious might become bored with the regularity of its own heartbeat.) The result of the abandonment of a basic linear propulsion was a breakneck impetus with no real excitement. Only in the slow numbers could the listener tell if the instrumentalists were in command of anything except their technique. The upbeat stuff was a business simultaneously frantic and arid, a desert preening itself as a sandstorm; so it was no wonder that Ellington, a cool customer full of the authentic juice, thought it a fraud.
Listening in much later from a long way across the Pacific, I was very glad to agree with him. I found bebop a fascinating area when I began to explore it, but I was always worried by how seldom I felt compelled to tap my foot. I loved the Thelonious Monk slow numbers and even some of the fast ones, but it was partly because they swung. (In his last phase, which I saw something of, Monk was so stoned that he would occasionally grab for a chord and miss the piano altogether, but in better times his left hand rocked along no matter how oblique his right hand got in its dialogue with the infinite.) The bop that didn't swing drove jazz towards the unflowering graveyard where pretension gets the blessing of academic approbation. It was a destination towards which the exhausted higher arts had spent a hundred years looking for refuge, but what was disconcerting was the way the popular arts headed for the same terminus almost as soon as they were invented. Even without the politically inspired character of bop—let's play something they can't steal—jazz would probably have taken the same course as the movie musical, in which a magically equipped performer like Gene Kelly sadly proved that if he were left to himself he would ditch the self-contained show numbers and turn the whole movie into a bad ballet. The fatal urge to be taken seriously would still have been there even if the musicians had all been white. But the best of them were black, and status was a matter of life and death.
Not even Ellington was immune to its lure. He was a superior being, but it took the Europeans to treat him like one. In Europe he sat down with royalty, as if his nickname were a real title. In America no president before Nixon ever invited him to the White House. In America he had to keep his orchestra on the road, and some of the roads led near enough to the South for Jim Crow to be waiting. Ellington did his best to stay out of all that, but it remained disgracefully true that there was plenty of humiliation available even in the north. It had to be faced: the tour was the key to his economics. He met the payroll as a bandleader, not as a composer. It was understandable that composition should become, in his own mind, his ticket to immortality. As a lover of his creative life I tried hard to agree, but on the evidence of my ears I found the large-scale works smaller in every way than the three-minute miracles. For one thing, the large-scale works didn't swing, except in selected passages that seemed to have been thrown in as sops to impatient dancers who shouldn't really have been in the hall. The set-piece suite of his last years on the world tour, the Sacred Music Concert, was the etiolated culmination of his adventures in large-scale composition—the end point of a long development in an art-form for which his own best work had proved that "development" was an inappropriate word. I attended the Sacred Music Concert in Great St. Mary's at Cambridge while I was an undergraduate. It was a privilege to see the grand old man still in command of his destiny and his charm, but there was too much sacred and not enough music. When the sidemen rose for their solos, showers of notes were no substitute for the carved phrases of their forgotten ancestors. Ellington must have known it: he was conducting a tour of his own tomb. Later on, outside in King's Parade, I saw him ease himself into the limo with his old-time baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, sole survivor from the days of glory, the only Ellingtonian sideman who was ever allowed to ride in the car with the chief, instead of in the bus with everyone else.
From the limo before it pulled away, Ellington smiled and twiddled his fingers at the fans, the bags under his eyes like sets of matched luggage. (I got a wink from him, which I filed away among my best memories.) He had seen mobs in his time who would have wanted his blood if he had shown his face, but there was no wariness in his glance. There was not much energy either. I guessed that it was goodbye, and indeed Ellington retired not long afterwards; but the sad truth was that the creative spirit I had so admired was long gone. It had already started to go at the time when I first heard his music on record, in the late fifties. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, the Ellington band's long disquisition on the theme of "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," with its marathon tenor solo from Paul Gonsalves, had made world headlines on the music pages. A rejuvenation for Ellington's career, the performance was transferred to a long-playing record—it was pretty well the first time that the LP had been exploited to show what a jazz band could do in a space longer than three minutes—and in Sydney we played "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" over and over, making learned comments. Scholars among us knew which Joe Jones it was, plain Joe Jones or Philly Joe Jones, who was slapping the edge of the stage to flog Gonsalves onward for yet another chorus. The debating points were made in mid-dance: nobody listening was stationary, even if he was sitting down. The whole number swung so hard that you had to hit something: sometimes it was your neighbour.
Driven by that sweet stampede of rhythm to a belated acquaintance with what Ellington had done before, I realized only in retrospect that the rot had already set in. The possibility of more room for the band to breathe was tempting him away from the delicious intricacies he had been forced into when time was tight. Though the large-scale suites from the past all turned up on vinyl along with their more recent companions—"Such Sweet Thunder" began its life that way—it was all too evident that three minutes on shellac had been his ideal form from the start: he was a sonneteer, not an epic poet. The standard was set in the Cotton Club days, when cars still had running boards. As the LP Ellington anthologies came out, I built up a library that went all the way back to his recorded beginnings. Bar by bar I drank in the wa-wa sonorities of Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton, for both of whom the effect would have been dissipated if they had gone on longer than a chorus or two. As Ellington's various ensembles succeeded each other, with the personnel always changing but a few always seeming to come back at the right moment, the soloists provided one of the connecting threads. There was a particularly tremendous Ellington band in the mid-thirties, with Rex Stewart playing open horn to complement Cootie Williams and his sour manipulation of the plunger mute: two different kinds of shining trumpet, one a golden bell, the other a wail in the night. The way those two voices would call to each other was quintessential Ellington, for whom the sounds of the city—"Harlem Airshaft," "Take the A Train"—were a collective inspiration for a melodic urban speech that no poet could ever match, not even Hart Crane in _The Bridge_ , or Galway Kinnell in his wonderful mini-epic _The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World_. But Ellington's toughest connecting thread was the compactness of the head arrangements: as precise as if it had been scored yet as loose and easy as jam session, the section work never even riffed without varying and developing the figure. The word "development" fitted for once, and in the only way it should: to mean a deepening, an enrichment. Those inspired soloists, each of them a composer in himself, built the transparent bridges between the dense passages of ensemble voicing, and always with an unfaltering, rhythm-driven melodic surge even when the pace was slow. When he was holding down a chair for Ellington, the most lingering alto sax solo from Johnny Hodges was never boring for a moment. Anyone who thought that Hodges's honey sweet tone could never be boring anyway was at liberty to find out otherwise by listening to the space he gave himself on recordings of the orchestra he made the capital mistake of trying to lead under his own name.
Ellington gave his superbly self-trained horses enough time—just enough time and no more—to perform every trick they knew, but they had to do it inside the corral. The result would have sounded like confinement if the rhythmic pulse, the swing, had not made it sound like freedom. As Nabokov said of Pushkin's tetrametric stanza, it was an acoustical paradise. The 1940–1941 band was Ellington's apotheosis, and as a consequence contained the materials of its own destruction, because all those star soloists wanted bands of their own. Hodges wasn't the only one who found out how hard it was to be the man in charge, and ever and anon the chastened escapees would make their way back to Ellington, but never again were enough of them available at once to recapitulate the hallucinating complexity of those beautiful recordings. I memorized every bar of every track, and without trying. Vintage Ellington was a language: many-voiced, a conversation in itself, but a language none the less, or rather all the more. The most wonderful thing about the Ellington language was that it could be listened to only in the way it was created, through love.
Scholarship and biography, too often twinned in this regard, are always trying to break up Ellington's language by analysing it to pieces. In his later years, Ellington became more and more the subject of learned enquiry, and on the whole it did him little good. (He had long before tried to warn the world against too much analysis: "That kind of talk stinks up the place.") Once it was established that Billy Strayhorn's contribution as an arranger had been underestimated, it was soon discovered that Ellington's contribution had been overestimated. Out on the road, Ellington had freed himself from the dominance of any single woman by sleeping with them two at a time. Now they were old and ready to talk. Thus we heard of the barbarism behind his suave façade. It could now be deduced that, as a cynical stroke of self-exculpation, male chauvinism had expressed itself as sentimentality: "Mood Indigo" was a midnight flit by Don Giovanni. But scholarship and biography could never add enough irrelevant nuance to dilute the truth, which was that the great man had no flaws within himself which he could not transmute into a living song. The flaw that he could not control was in the country he lived in. Even he, a man born to rule, had to fight for prestige, the only armour against perpetual insult. He did it by expanding the lateral scope of his inventiveness beyond its natural compass, in the effort to become yet another American composer, like Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber or Charles Ives. He felt that as a necessity, but the necessity was merely political. Acting from an inner necessity, he was already _the_ American composer, having taken jazz to the point where no further satisfactions could be added in order to make it different. They could only be subtracted. The new boys had to go somewhere. Ellington was too generous not to realize that one of the reasons they went there was because of him, so he was careful never to criticize them too hard. He made a joke of it: it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. But the joke was true, and by extension it is true for all the arts.
F
Federico Fellini
W. C. Fields
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Sigmund Freud
Egon Friedell
François Furet
FEDERICO FELLINI
Federico Fellini (1920–1993) was born in Rimini but dreamed of Rome, where he arrived in time to see the Fascist regime launch itself on the final adventure that ensured its ruin. His gift for drawing caricatures was his ticket to the big smoke. Mussolini banned American comic books in 1938 but for Fellini's generation the damage was already done. Fellini's early work in the comic-strip medium was heavily influenced by American models: he drew bootleg versions of _Flash Gordon_ and _Mandrake_. After the war the American comic strip, no longer officially frowned upon, became more powerful in Italy than ever, to the extent that not even Communist intellectuals, in the 1960s, saw anything incongruous about poring over the monthly comic-strip anthology called _Linus_ , after the _Peanuts_ character. It remains a safe bet, however, that Fellini's ability, in his formative period, to fight off the siren call of the revolutionary left, had something to do with his mental immersion in an imaginary America. All of Fellini's movies, whether sooner or later, culminate in his masterpiece _8½_ , and the hallucinatory imagery of _8½_ begins in the comics: one of the most conspicuous examples of how, in the twentieth century, the popular and high arts established an intimate connection. Other low-life forms that Fellini scraped a living from early on were vaudeville and radio drama. The story of the great director's unsophisticated origins is told well by John Baxter in his _Fellini_ (1993). My own essay "Mondo Fellini," collected in _Even as We Speak_ (2001) and _As of This Writing_ (2003), is an attempt to record the formative impact that a man accustomed to pleasing millions of people at a time could have on a single life.
When I was a little boy I believed I looked a little bit like Harold Lloyd. I put on my father's spectacles and to make the resemblance even closer I took out the lenses.
—FEDERICO FELLINI, _I NTERVISTA_, P. 76
ONE WOULD LIKE to have seen Fellini's Harold Lloyd impersonation. Did he do stunts on the dizzying cornice of a _palazzo_? Most of Harold Lloyd's apparently death-defying stuff was done with camera angles and false perspectives, and at least once he used a double; but it is easy to imagine the young Fellini trying it for real, not yet having figured out that cinema is an illusion. On a similar impulse, at the age of eleven I almost killed myself imitating Batman leaping from the roof of a building site into a sand-pit. If I hadn't landed flat on my back I might have been worse than winded, but at least the world would have been deprived of no more than a writer, a species of which there are always many. A world deprived of Fellini would have had something more rare to mourn: a true director, _il regista_ , the master of the revels. " _È una festa, la mia vita_ ," says Guido in _8½_ : my life is a party. It was true, and he invited everybody.
_Fred and Ginger_ is merely the most obvious case of Fellini's debt to American popular culture. Even when they don't look it, his works are saturated with its influence, right down to their visual style. After Italy pulled out of World War II, Fellini had his beginnings in Italy's teeming subculture of comic strips and _fumetti_ , which were essentially comic strips made up from posed photographs. Before the war that whole subculture had been inspired by America's example, and not even the Fascist regime, when it put an end to the syndication of American comic strips, felt it had the power to cancel Mickey Mouse. Under his Italian name Topolino, Mickey continued his adventures. (After the war, his name was given to Fiat's most popular small car.) Near the end of his career, Fellini cooperated with the brilliantly accomplished pornographic cartoonist Marinara to produce a _bande dessinée_ called _Voyage à Tulum_ , a sort of free-form sequel to _8½_ and _La Città delle Donne_. Marinara's phantasmagoric style took a lot from the American comic-strip tradition that started with Little Nemo and ran right through the parodic _Mad_ magazine period in the 1950s to its self-consuming apotheosis in the extravagant layouts of the head comix in the 1960s. But in _Voyage à Tulum_ , when he celebrated Fellini's big-screen extravaganzas, you can see how well Marinara found a match between the initial purity and the culminating sophistication. He found it by getting back to their common ancestor. Fellini, too, started with the American visionary tradition that grew from the restless mind of _Little Nemo_. The big pictures of Fellini's mature period, from _La Dolce Vita_ through to _E la Nave Va_ , all look like something that Winsor McCay's little boy Nemo dreamed of, and could wake from only by falling out of bed. In his introduction to the published script of _8½_ , Fellini said that the Marcello Mastroianni character, vis-à-vis the same actor's character in _La Dolce Vita_ , had to grow in stature because his enemies were more dangerous. But the enemies were all in his mind: his obsessional neuroses.
When Fellini said that in _8½_ he found a pretext for putting in everything that had been tormenting him for years, he meant everything that had been tormenting him all his life. Critics have searched in vain for literary precursors of Fellini's grandiose Freudian dreams. Proust? Joyce? The answer lies much closer to hand. In _8½_ , Mastroianni is dressed like that because his director is remembering Mandrake the Magician. The American comic strip was the first art-form to exploit the image-generating possibilities of a sleeping mind on its endless journey through the caves and hallways of dreamland. (Tenniel had merely illustrated Lewis Carroll: he didn't take off on his own.) Fascism was a kind of dreamland too, as Fellini emphasized in _Amarcord_. But the dreamland turned to a nightmare while he was growing up. Nazism and Soviet communism combined to drown the ceremony of innocence. Fellini kept his innocence, but it was bound to look like childishness. It was Italy's fate to have its social fabric poisoned first by the Fascists, then by the Nazis and finally by the Communists, whose propaganda campaign against the liberating allies, and especially against the Americans, attained a level of virulence hard to imagine from this distance: reading what the Communist newspapers said about the bombing of Cassino, you would have thought that Guernica had been bombed again, and never have dreamed that the war against Germany was not yet over. Post-war Italian cinema was left-wing because the left was almost all there was: under the pressure of Communist ambitions, the intelligentsia as a whole was polarized between party-line orthodoxy and the independent left, but further to the right there was next to nothing except the wilfully eccentric. Nominally an alumnus of neo-realism, Fellini looked as if he had gone to school in a party frock. Even among those who lauded him for the richness of his imagination, it occurred to nobody that he was the director with the most penetrating social vision. Such an estimation became possible only in retrospect, after it became apparent that no universal plan for society could be compatible with the autonomy of art. The artist who made it most apparent was Fellini himself. The advantage of those lensless spectacles was that he could see an untinted reality. He might have looked like a clown, but from his side of the empty frames he could see the world as it was, and so transform it into fantasies that would last.
W. C. FIELDS
William Claude Dukenfield (1879–1946) was known to the world as W. C. Fields. He began as a carnival juggler. As the magicians Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett discovered in a later era, the accompanying patter was more in demand than the act, although Fields, until the end of his career, was still able to do some of the most difficult conjuring tricks in the book. But there were other conjurers who could do them too. Nobody could equal him for his patter. He was a success in silent movies from his debut in _Pool Sharks_ (1915) until sound movies arrived, but when they did, he was one of the few silent stars who actually gained from the change. It was because he could both write his own material and speak it inimitably: a winning combination. _The Bank Dick_ (1940) is the movie that his admirers know line by line. In real life he was a self-destructive drinker, but he would have been the first to discourage any large theories about his essentially subversive talent having suffered in the context of Hollywood conformity. He had a drinks trolley at the side of his tennis court.
Is Mr. Michael Finn in residence?
—W. C. FIELDS, _T HE BANK DICK_
WOODY ALLEN AND Steve Martin have a common ancestor, and his name is W. C. Fields. A greater prodigy of comedy even than Chaplin, Fields could create dialogue for himself that was as funny as his physical presence. (Chaplin's abiding limitation was that he couldn't: the real reason that he wanted to stay silent forever.) In _The Bank Dick_ , the question about "Mr. Michael Finn" is Fields's way of advising the barman in the Black Pussycat Saloon that a Mickey Finn should be slipped to the visiting bank inspector, Pinkerton Snoopington. The pesky Snoopington having been duly rendered incapable, Fields helps him through the foyer of Lompoc's leading and only hotel, The New Old Lompoc House. (Once having established the name of this hostelry, Fields abbreviates it to "the New Old"—a typically bizarre stroke of verbal economy.) From the right of frame, Fields ushers the barely mobile Snoopington across the foyer and up the stairs on the left, which lead to the room where Snoopington will be safely stashed. The camera doesn't move. Nothing happens. Then Fields, alone, rushes across the frame from left to right. After a pause, he once again slowly propels Snoopington across the frame from right to left, heading for the stairs. We in the audience deduce that Snoopington must have fallen out of the window of his room once Fields had got him up there. Without having seen it happen, the audience is convulsed at the phantom spectacle of the paralytic Snoopington plunging into the street.
The scene is all action with almost no dialogue, but Fields could write wordless physical comedy the way he wrote words: with unequalled compactness and suggestiveness. The direction is already there in the script, and there is every reason to think of Fields as one of the great directors of comic films, even if he seldom took a formal credit. He certainly knew more than the producers: one of them wanted to cut the moment in _The Bank Dick_ when Fields shows his minion Og Ogilvy the warning signal he will use if Snoopington threatens to queer the pitch. If that preparatory moment had been cut, Fields's later use of the signal would have lost half of its effect. (A sure sign of a director who should not be fooling with comedy is when he gets the urge to cut the preparation so as to increase the pace.) Fields knew everything there was to know about comic construction: an important point to remember. Even his appreciators tend to think that because his life was an inspired chaos his work was too. In fact he was disciplined to the roots. The same effort he had put into his vaudeville juggling routines—he would practise until his hands bled, hence the kid gloves—he put into his inventions for the cinema. The most portable of those inventions was his way with the single subversive line. Every Fields fan can recite at least half a dozen of them, and make a fair show of imitating the master's drawling delivery, which could make even an abstract fragment of surrealist delirium as funny as a crutch. ("Rivers of beer flowing over your grandmother's paisley shawl.") It is easy to think that the lines came to him in a dream, but the awkward truth is that they were poetically crafted. When the top hat that fell off Fields's head ended up standing on the edge of its brim on the point of his shoe, it didn't happen by magic, and neither did a line like "What do you mean, speak louder? If I could speak louder, I wouldn't _need_ a telephone." Just think of all the ways that idea could be written down differently, and not be funny. Magicians do not use magic. "Thou know'st we work by wit and not by witchcraft," says Iago, "and wit depends on dilatory time." Iago's business was duplicity, but one of his weapons was straight sense.
Everyone knows that censorship closed off the future for Mae West. Less well-known is that it did the same for Fields. It wasn't alcohol or old age that ensured his decline, but a sudden, fatal limitation on what he was allowed to say. (Nevertheless alcohol helped: one of his best throwaway lines in _My Little Chickadee_ was written from the heart. "During a trip through Afghanistan we lost our corkscrew and were compelled to live on food and water.") _The Bank Dick_ is a great movie, but it might have been greater still if the censors hadn't read the script first; and there would almost certainly have been more Fields movies to equal it. When a poet is denied one word, it casts a pall for him on all the others; and Fields was a poet—a poet of innuendo. In private life, nobody cared if he said "Filthy stuff, water: fish fuck in it." But in the movies he was not allowed to go on getting away with advising little girls against playing "squat-tag in the asparagus patch." Nor could he any longer say to his Little Chickadee, "I have a number of pear-shaped ideas I would like to discuss with you." Restricted by the new regulatory codes, the Hollywood film-makers did not necessarily abandon their intelligence. Some of the screwball comedies, made when studio censorship was in full force, remain among the most intelligent films ever. The terse eloquence of films like _My Man Godfrey_ and _His Girl Friday_ has been matched since the lapse of censorship but not exceeded. There was, however, a certain range of verbal playfulness that went disastrously into abeyance. It became impossible to be suggestive about sex. One could be amusingly evasive about the broad fact of it, but never suggestive about its detail. For Fields, especially in his later years, being suggestive about sex was at the heart of speech, because the discrepancy between his raddled body and his intact lusts was the secret of his screen personality. All his best dialogue came from a mental underworld of sensual indulgence. Hence we have to live with the cruel paradox that sound movies silenced him. What we see of him on screen is just the beginning of what he might have done: a daunting thought if you are one of those people who find his every audible moment even funnier than the way he looked when struggling with a wilful hat, or walking upstairs on the wrong side of a banister. Though he exaggerated his early deprivations when he told tales of his upbringing, Fields was certainly the man out of place: one of those people who are born exiles even if they never leave home. For some reason such misfits seem to favour the notion of verbal economy, as if turning ordinary language into the kind of compressed code that unfolds into a wealth of meaning when you have the key.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) is a cautionary tale, but the tale is about us more than about him. Tormented by a glamorous marriage that went wrong, drinking himself to destruction while doing second-rate work to pay the bills, lost in a Hollywood system guaranteed to frustrate what was left of his ability, he became the focal point of numberless journalistic stories about the waste of a literary talent. He himself gave the starting signal for that approach with the self-flagellating articles later collected by his friend Edmund Wilson in _The Crack-Up_. Faultless in its transparent style and full of true things about the perils of the creative life, it is certainly a book to read and remember, but not until we have read and remembered (indeed memorized) _The Great Gatsby_ and _Tender Is the Night_. Otherwise we might get the absurd idea that one of the most important modern writers spent his career preparing himself for a suitably edifying disintegration. The inevitable effect of a biographer's hindsight is to belittle the subject's foresight. As his two great novels prove, Fitzgerald was well aware that the culture of glamour was a drawback of democracy, a levelling mechanism calculated to give us comfort by turning gifted lives into manageable legends. If he had written nothing else at all after _The Great Gatsby_ , we would still be faced with one of the prophetic books of the twentieth century. Fitzgerald guessed where celebrity, if pursued for itself, was bound to end up: as a dead body in the swimming pool.
A good style simply doesn't form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.
—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD IN A LETTER TO HIS DAUGHTER, QUOTED BY EDMUND WILSON IN _T HE CRACK-UP_, P. 296
MORE THAN FORTY years after I first read them, these two sentences from the ailing writer to his teenage daughter still arouse that thrill of delighted approbation that once took the form of the word "yes!," uttered while one stood up suddenly before walking around the room. Nowadays I stay in my chair, but in the metaphysical sense I am no less moved. Fitzgerald wrote this letter in 1940. Propelled by his alcoholism, he was far gone in his decline by then: so far gone that he could actually believe his stints in Hollywood were getting him out of trouble instead of further in. (We should hasten to note that it wasn't the place's fault: other writers could work the double trick of staying true to their gifts while still doing what the studios wanted, but Fitzgerald was cursed, or blessed, with an incurable lack of savvy about conserving his energies.) He was not so far gone, however, that he didn't feel the need to impress his daughter by presenting himself as a wise man. In the long run, of course, there was a cosmic joke: he was a wise man. Great failure had made him so. It takes a great artist to have a great failure, and F. Scott Fitzgerald was so great an artist that he could turn even his fatal personal inadequacies into material for poetry. The magazine articles collected in _The Crack-Up_ were worth the crack-up: the moment when his mind came closest to disintegrating was the moment when his prose style came closest to a perfect coherence. That was quite a thing for it to do so markedly, because it had always been coherent. Fitzgerald, seemingly from his apprentice years, had wielded a style of inclusive fluency, his because it was nobody else's: the ideal natural, neutral style, so finely judged in its musicality it convinces its readers that their own melodic sense is being answered from phrase to phrase, sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph. Can we really believe that he arrived at his style only after reading many other great stylists, absorbing and synthesizing their various influences, and somehow contriving to eliminate the residues, even of the latest one? The belief comes hard.
Edmund Wilson guarded and nurtured Fitzgerald's reputation: helped, in fact, to bring it back from almost nowhere. The precious miscellany we call _The Crack-Up_ was Wilson's editorial work, and was prefaced by his magnificent valedictory poem to Fitzgerald that begins "Scott, your last fragments I arrange tonight . . .": in my view one of the touchstone modern poems, all the more valuable for being anachronistic. _The Crack-Up_ also contains the selection of letters in which I first read this quotation, at a time when I was still unrecovered from being overwhelmed by _The Great Gatsby_ and _Tender Is the Night_. By those two books one is always impressed, but their first impact turns the world into Fitzgerald's creation: one is unduly receptive to any news about him, and in those days—the late fifties—it was almost exclusively Wilson who was reading the news. Wilson made no strictures about Fitzgerald's talent. But Wilson did make Fitzgerald out to be a bit of a lummox scholastically, not unlike the footballer Bolenciecwcz in Thurber's college memoir: the footballer who, "while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter." In that regard, the picture Wilson painted of Fitzgerald in maturity and later life seemed not very different from the young Princeton student who had played the language by ear and thrown together his first books under the obvious influence of nobody more exalted than Compton Mackenzie. Looking back on it, in fact, Wilson's generous tributes to his academically clueless classmate add up to a bit of a backhander: he praises the marvellous boy, but only on the understanding that a boy is what the marvellous boy remained. According to Wilson, Fitzgerald, although fully gifted, wasn't fully serious. Making the usual contrast between Fitzgerald and Hemingway—it was always usual, although Wilson was among the very first to draw upon it for didactic purposes—Wilson said that Hemingway was the one who could starve for his art. Hemingway, it was implied, had the stuff in him that the high life could not distort. Hollywood might make silly stories out of Hemingway's books; and Hemingway might even write a silly story so that Hollywood would get lucratively interested; but at least Hemingway guarded himself against the temptation or the necessity to work in Hollywood. Hemingway was serious about literature. He knew more about literature. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were both writers, but Hemingway was the reader.
Looking further into Fitzgerald's letters to his daughter, Frances, one is inclined to agree. Fitzgerald asks her whether she has read any good books lately, and supplies, over the course of a series of letters, what amounts to a "such as" list. There are some good names on it, and Fitzgerald has obviously read among them to a considerable critical depth: Henry James, Turgenev, Dreiser, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, D. H. Lawrence, Flaubert and Thomas Mann are all sifted, analysed and compared. But in other respects the list is pretty scrappy. In the context of the chic leftism then prevalent in Hollywood, _The Communist Manifesto_ is a plausible inclusion, but when he recommends _Ten Days That Shook the World_ you start to wonder. If Fitzgerald was belatedly reading up on modern political events in order to repair the lucanae in his own education, there might have been some reason to favour such a book in order that his daughter might be better informed from the beginning; but as a measure for style, _Ten Days That Shook the World_ is devoid of beneficial properties. There were American journalists and non-fiction writers of the period who could be studied for their prose: Wilson, Mencken, even George Jean Nathan when his frenzy to decorate did not weigh down his architecture. There were cultural reporters who have since dated hopelessly because what they reported has been absorbed, while the way they reported it was never interesting enough in itself to ensure their survival: you could put Gilbert Seldes in that camp, and the wonderfully curious James Gibbons Huneker. (Paul Rosenfeld, much favoured by Edmund Wilson, should, in my opinion, be left to rest: though he wrote quirkily and well about modern music, he essentially believed that jazz would never amount to anything while it remained in the hands of black people.) But John Reed, even at the time, fell into the category of those who could barely write at all. In _Ten Days That Shook the World_ he had the biggest story on earth to tell, and no gift to tell it with. He ended up buried in the Kremlin wall, but the reader feels the same weight. To Fitzgerald, this discrepancy between task and talent must have been apparent at a glance. It follows, damagingly, that Fitzgerald felt he _ought_ to rank Reed's celebrated kludge as a good book, presumably because of the line it spouted. One is forced to conclude that Fitzgerald not only declined to take his own literary judgement as an absolute, he thought there was another absolute that he ought to conform to, if only he could figure out what it was.
What Fitzgerald says is true, but its truth is more in our possession than his. In the circumstances from which he speaks, self-deception is not far away, nor is the bombast that goes with it. Fitzgerald was such a drinker that when he was drinking nothing but beer he thought he was on the wagon. (American beer at the time was low on alcohol but he ordered it by the crate.) Similarly he might have convinced himself that he had always been a dedicated student of his art, just because he remembered how, during all those parties, he had made plans to start some systematic reading the next morning, and had made the same plans again during the hangover. Hemingway had better claims to the title of serious reader, even though he flourished his credentials with a bluster that emphasized just how modest in the matter Fitzgerald was. In _Green Hills of Africa_ there is some ludicrous posturing around the campfire as Papa announces his intention of going toe to toe with Tolstoy. The embarrassment factor is off the scale, but the implied claim to a fellow craftsman's intimacy with Tolstoy is nothing but the truth. Hemingway knew Tolstoy almost by heart, and there were less obvious tastes in which he showed the same loving diligence—which, it should be remembered, can't be had without humility. When Hemingway praised Ronald Firbank, it was no mere flirtation. Critics as disparate in their origins and interests as Edmund Wilson and Evelyn Waugh both spotted that Hemingway's tricks of arranging dialogue had been quietly lifted from Firbank. Hemingway the bull-necked ruffian and Firbank the pale exquisite sensitively hiding behind the sofa: they were such different writers that a connection seemed unlikely. But it was more than a connection. In the direction from Firbank to Hemingway it looked like the kind of influence that Fitzgerald was talking about in his letter—an absorption. The subtext of Fitzgerald's homily is that you must be influenced by a lot of exemplars to be influenced properly. If you are influenced by only one, there will be traces, and the essence of an absorption is that you don't see the traces. One continues to suspect of Fitzgerald, however, that the reason he showed no traces is that he was never really influenced: he was more or less born writing in his characteristic manner and is recommending school to his daughter because he played hookey himself, and is all the more ashamed because he got away with it.
Fitzgerald's self-schooling in prose style consisted mainly of eliminating arabesques. Montesquieu, in his formative years, did the same: he was temperamentally susceptible to the superficial charm of those virtuoso performers whose spectacular effects he was designed by his artistic nature to supersede with a dignified exposition limpid even when condensed. A case could be made that such powerful writers don't need to be influenced by any model: they need merely to encounter examples of the unadorned expression to which they should aspire, the capacity for which they already possess within themselves. If Fitzgerald can be said to have absorbed and amalgamated all the excellent stylists in English, then it was probably because he was already like that, deep down. His fellow-feeling for Keats (the title of _Tender Is the Night_ is only one of the signs) reminds us of a question: where did Keats get it from? Keats's touch and tone (we notice _his_ excesses because they are his, not because they are borrowed) had always been fully formed: though he read prodigiously throughout his short life, he seemed mainly in search of reassurance that he was not as unique as he felt. Fitzgerald was like that, except that he was seldom alone long enough to find out that he was lonely. Quite early on, he ceased to sound like anybody else. The young Hemingway sounded like Gertrude Stein, and later on he sounded more and more like Hemingway, in a dreadfully hypertrophied example of the self-imitation we call mannerism.
Fitzgerald was never mannered except in his attitudes, and not even they became predictable until, with his final curtain already falling, the set of sketches we call _The Last Tycoon_ assembled them in the one place. For all we know, the principal influence other writers had on Fitzgerald lay in the effort he took to avoid echoing their rhythm and tone. If genius is inherently absorptive, that might always be the principal influence: whereas weak writers sound instantly and comically like the writers they admire, strong writers take care not to, as part of their strength. In _The Great Gatsby_ , Fitzgerald's well-manicured dreamland on Long Island has something in it of a Booth Tarkington small-town idyll. Jay Gatsby carries distant echoes of Penrod Schofield. The echoes would be louder if Fitzgerald had not known how to suppress his memories of Tarkington's slick-magazine romanticism, and the memories might have been harder to suppress if they had not been so powerful and thus easy to identify. For any writer, the writers he reads when young open up possibilities of subject matter, drama and psychology. It is quite possible that some of the writers who open up the most to him in these areas will not be artists at all; but if they are, they will inevitably also open up possibilities of diction, rhythm and narrative tactics. The strong talent will be less likely to echo these than will the weak talent. Now justly forgotten, the busy 1950s journeyman Robert Ruark, in books like _Horn of the Hunter_ , wrote in abject homage to Hemingway. He wanted to live like Hemingway, shooting every animal in Africa. Fatally for his achievement as well as for the animals, he also wanted to write like Hemingway, copying all his cadences. He would never have tried to copy Fitzgerald. But copying Hemingway seemed easy to do—for at least a generation, every mediocre American writer lapsed automatically into Hemingwayesque incantation—and Ruark did it with a thoroughness that established him unchallengeably in the position of Hemingway's second most helpless unintentional parodist. The first, alas, was Hemingway himself. Sounding more like his own imitators as his works became more empty, he provided an annihilating illustration of why style and substance are separable concepts after all.
It can be argued—indeed, it is hard to argue otherwise—that ever since Shakespeare, every writer in English literature has had to devote a huge effort to not aping him. The chief reason there can't be another Shakespeare is that he never had to waste time doing the same. Shakespeare created a permanent imbalance in every traditional field of subject matter and expression, so that it will never be possible to escape his influence, especially not by ignoring it. (The fallacy in the idea that purity of expression can arise from untainted ignorance lies right there.) The process of submission and avoidance is so deep-seated and long lived that it is hard to examine. But developments in technology and social organization continually make it possible for someone to make a green-field discovery. A new range can be opened up, and ways of exploring it can be developed, but the fresh seam can be mined only as far as the individual artistic personality allows—and that individual artistic personality is the thing to keep in mind when talking of style, tone, diction and influence. Hemingway, in his short stories, could equal Tolstoy's writing about warfare in the Caucasian forests and at the bastions of Sebastopol. For modern times, Tolstoy opened up a field—the field of civilized men taken back to natural savagery by warfare. In late 1942, Ernst Jünger in his Caucasus notebooks consciously echoed Tolstoy's effects and cited his name to prove it. Hemingway didn't need to mention the name: the forests and the closely wooded creeks of his early stories ring with Tolstoy's rifle shots and the snort of his horses. Hemingway took on board every technique that Tostoy ever devised. But in all of Hemingway there is nothing like the relationship of Anna Karenina and Vronsky. In _The Sun Also Rises_ , Hemingway could imagine himself as an emasculated man; but he could never imagine himself as a weak one, and the idea of a strong man weakened by an emotional dependency was not within his imaginative compass. (It might well have been within his life, but that would have been the very reason that, for him, it was not something he cared to imagine.) For Fitzgerald, on the other hand, Anna and Vronsky were well within range. In _Tender Is the Night_ , the mere existence of Nicole does to Dick Diver what the mere existence of Anna does to Vronsky. Fitzgerald nowhere sounds like Tolstoy, but his themes, and especially his love themes, are everywhere comparable. Their minds are alike, and one might as well say their talents are alike: because in art the mind is the talent, although just how the artistic talent-mind is constituted might be destined to remain a mystery, in the sense of being inherently impossible to analyse to any depth beyond the outermost surface, which is the art itself. With Fitzgerald, however, the place to start analysing it is not in _The Crack-Up_ , which, although certainly a work of art, shows only the perfection his prose could attain when his larger creative powers were disintegrating. The place to start is one or the other of the two major novels, where those powers are integrated.
When the talent-mind of the artist exists and has the conditions to express itself, it seems to develop with great speed and daunting ease. On this subject, scholarship can be misleading, and the formal history of the plastic arts can be especially misleading. For long periods and over wide areas, primitivism reigns, but that might only mean that the wrong people are painting the pictures, carving the logs and throwing the pots. The idea is hard to kill that the natural condition of graphic art is to be not very impressive: after all, the idea fits what we ourselves can do, who can barely draw a man standing sideways. But those cave paintings in France, if they didn't come out of nowhere, certainly came out of a very short tradition. In the eye of history, perfection was reached in a trice. The animals on the walls make ruins of all developmental theories. No higher development is possible: there is nowhere to go except abstraction. There are good reasons for thinking this to be the natural condition not just of graphic art but of all the arts, even music: that something which needs to be expressed will quite rapidly gather towards it all the technical means it requires. It might be said that it takes a while to marshal a symphonic tradition to the point where Beethoven can write the _Eroica_. And so it does, because there are practical considerations: for one thing, all the instruments have to be invented, and very few instruments were invented just to be in an orchestra—most of them were invented for separate purposes. But Bach needed few predecessors in order to write _The Well-Tempered Clavichord_ , and he didn't even need a very highly developed clavichord: it just had to be well tempered.
None of this line of thought is meant to simplify the question of the individual talent and its composition. On the contrary: one is trying to complicate it, by rendering it even less explicable than it was. Explicability is inimical to it. Talent can be dissected, but not alive. The elegant yet conversational cadence of Fitzgerald's prose is unmistakable precisely _because_ it can't be analysed.The creative talent is probably the most complex phenomenon a non-scientist will ever have to deal with, and to deal with it the non-scientist needs first of all to realize that there is only one thing he can borrow from the scientist, but borrow it he must—the scientist's unsleeping attention to the question of what constitutes evidence. Just because someone says that he has been influenced by someone else, for example, doesn't mean that he has, and just because someone doesn't say that he has doesn't mean that he hasn't. In philosophy, an area where gifted people try hard to tell the truth, few practitioners have ever been able to provide plausible reports of their own interior workings. In the creative arts, where fantasy is at a premium, introspection is even less likely to be reliable. Advice, rules of thumb and cautionary tales from established artists are always worth hearing—Goethe certainly thought that such talmudic material was worth providing—but there is no guarantee that those artists ever followed the same path themselves. What they are giving you might be the sum of their experience, but could just as well be a schematized form of what they had by nature. They might be trying to teach you what they had no need to learn.
There is no small print, unfortunately, to warn us it might be impossible to teach. We guess, and probably guess correctly, that if an artist acquires technical ability beyond the requirements of what lies within him to be expressed, the result can only be mannerism. The same guess should lead us to the possibility that the technical expertise artists really do need they will be driven to acquire by the demands of talent. If there is a class, whether for music or for painting, the best students in it know what they want; and it is doubtful whether a class for creative writing can teach anything at all except remedial reading. We shout "yes" to Fitzgerald's advice because what he recommends is what we were doing anyway: reading dozens of the best writers we could find, including him. As things turned out, Fitzgerald's daughter did become a writer: but never one like him, because what he had could not be transmitted.
The same was true for Rilke and his letters to a young poet. _Briefe an einen jungen Dichter_ is a toy-town book for the magic doll's house of the mind, but before we choke up with twee gratitude for its impeccably balanced cracker-mottoes we should remember that the young poet to whom they were addressed turned into a boring old businessman whose only masterpiece was his impeccably balanced account book. Rilke and Fitzgerald were two different versions of the same neurotic wreck, and both would have given a lot, in their darker hours, to be blessed with the ordinary ambitions of the youngsters they advised. But the avuncular advice, as always, ran exclusively in the wrong direction, from those in need of consolation to those who could not benefit. An effective letter from Fitzgerald's daughter to her desperate father would have had too much to cover: it would have had to tell him to get out of Hollywood, to go back in time, to stop imagining that he could hold his drink, to visit the fashionable world for material but never think that he could live in it, and above all to marry someone else—someone he could not damage, and who would therefore not damage him.
He wouldn't have listened anyway. When a man on a cross is told to save himself, he can do so only at the price of seeming to admit that it was all for nothing—he knows better than that. Concerning Fitzgerald, there is a principle that can't be taught in a creative writing class and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it's worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as _The Great Gatsby_ and _Tender Is the Night_ , but we wouldn't have those if he hadn't been like that. Fitzgerald's prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when, by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was adopted by twentieth-century modernists as a precursor, especially if the modernists wrote in English. Among his fellow French writers, Flaubert's first fame was for his bad grammar. But his untiring quest for factual accuracy and the right word (the untranslated French expression _le mot juste_ got into English mainly because of his influence) eventually, and justifiably, formed the basis of an international reputation, mainly because _Madame Bovary_ can be seen to be charged with meaning in every sentence even when translated into Japanese. The reputation was buttressed by the lengths he would go to in order to keep his art uncorrupted by the allegedly sentimental expectations of the bourgeoisie. Flaubert himself looked on the bourgeoisie as the sworn foe of art, even though he and most of his readers were of bourgeois origin. In the following century his hatred of cliché was eagerly taken up by right-wing critics—principally Ezra Pound—disdainful of democracy's supposedly weakening influence on language, and his view of the bourgeoisie as the class enemy of art was equally eagerly taken up by left-wing critics with an anti-capitalist programme. The most conspicuous among the latter was Jean-Paul Sartre, who devoted much of the later part of his career to a mountainous critical biography of Flaubert which should certainly be sampled by any student of ideology on the rampage, but not before that same student has read _Madame Bovary_ and at least one of Sartre's own novels, which prove, although not quite as thoroughly as Flaubert's do, that a living work of fiction is a vision of what the world is, and not just of what the author thinks society should be.
No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn't exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone.
—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN AN 1861 LETTER TO MME. ROGER DU GENETTES (TRANSLATED INTO SPANISH BY MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO IN _E NSAYOS_, VOL. 2, P. 1022)
THIS PASSAGE IN one of Flaubert's letters has fascinated two great essayists, Miguel de Unamuno and Gore Vidal. For Unamuno, the apostate Catholic in a permanent spiritual crisis about his repudiated faith, it was one of the great texts of his life. In interviews, Vidal has said several times that Flaubert's godless hiatus was the historical period in which a sane man would have been glad to live. Obviously the idea appealed to Unamuno in the same way. It never appealed much to me, which is probably why I didn't underline it in Francis Steegmuller's magnificently edited translation of Flaubert's letters. (A well-edited translation of such an archive is often more useful than the original, because the editor is more likely to supply copious annotation: witness our privileged access, in English, to Mozart's letters and Cosima Wagner's diaries.) But because it appealed to Unamuno, suddenly it appeared striking, so I underlined it there. Unamuno preceded Vidal in his distrust of the religious impulse, and Flaubert preceded both of them. Those of us who came easily to our paganism will find it hard not to think all three of them correct.
But really the idea that mankind would do better if atheism were universal is only an idea. Some of us would now like to think that Islam will destroy itself, and possibly us along with it, unless it develops a secular culture strong enough to offset the comforting strictness of fundamentalism: but we had better be right. There is also the question of whether Flaubert was factually correct. The two questions are linked. In his preferred interregnum between polytheism and monotheism, it is more likely that people believed everything than that they believed nothing. Flaubert has pinpointed a brief age in which superstition, far from being absent, was almost certainly paramount. In those circumstances, the last thing you could say, whether in French, English or Spanish, is that man was alone. Even theoretically, man had no refuge from the judgement of his fellow men. You can't be less alone than that. A society in which all the pressures are social is the one dreamed of by totalitarians. In _Julius Caesar_ , one of them pricked Cicero's name on a list. Shakespeare, with typical sensitivity to an historic turning point, recorded the sub-zero temperature of the unique moment, although he did not show us how Marc Antony made the proscription: he only showed us how Cassius heard about it, rather put out that Brutus already knew. If Shakespeare took such a roundabout course to make the point, it could have been because of his irrepressible awareness that he was living at a totalitiarian period in history, all the more insidious for being apparently exuberant. In the time of Good Queen Bess, it meant death to be Catholic.
Eventually, in the West, we emerged from the age in which people paid with their lives for a religious allegiance. We emerged into another age in which they were murdered by the million for other reasons, but not for that one. Though the religious might hate to hear it said, the West graduated from its nightmare only because religion ceased to matter in any way except privately. At the time of writing, we are in the uncomfortable position of hoping that the same thing can come true for Islam, and do so in a briefer time than the span of centuries it took to come true for us. While we are waiting, it might be of some help, although of little comfort, to realize that an Islamic fundamentalist doesn't have to share the psychotic certitudes of Torquemada in order to be dangerous: it is enough for him to share the civilized attitudes of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted every invading priest tortured as soon as caught, and gruesomely executed soon after that. It's the general view prevailing within a religious culture—the general view usually described as being "moderate"—that matters most. When she was growing up in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was taught that Salman Rushdie deserved death because he had blasphemed against the holy book. She was taught it, and she believed it, as did everyone she knew. It was the moderate view. Now, as a member of parliament in Holland, and after her Dutch friend Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street by an Islamic extremist, she believes differently. But how extreme was the extremist? Until the whole of the Islamic world repudiates him, we will be forced to believe that its moderate views are dangerous in themselves, if only for what they condone. We will be forced to believe that there is something crazy about all those people actually _believing_ all that stuff; and wish that their belief could become more unbelieving, like ours; and not a few centuries from now, but right now. Such a quick transformation doesn't seem very likely. Perhaps it would be better to wish that their religion could be reinforced, in that area where, so we are told, Islam means peace and tolerance. Certainly there were times in history when Islam meant that, much more than Christianity did. But our understandable hope that every Muslim male of fighting age, if exposed to a sufficiency of Western culture, might transform himself into Flaubert sounds very like wishful thinking; and it is quite likely that Flaubert was thinking wishfully in the first place, when he posited a wonderful ancient time in which nobody had any Gods to worship. He searched the far past, and lo! He found a new dawn.
SIGMUND FREUD
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was first a neurologist, then a psychopathologist, in which second role, and based in Vienna, he developed the technique of conversational "free association" that we now recognize as the distinctive feature of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling in whatever form we might happen to encounter them. Since at one time or another most of us will spend hours telling our troubles to somebody we hardly know, this is a very widespread influence for a single thinker to have had. On an academic level, Freud's theories about human personality will always be argued over, as they were when they were being developed. The quarrels of his disciples with him and among themselves are interesting studies in how animus and outright hatred can arise from purely mental differences. The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can't be coherent without being intolerant. What there can be no argument about is Freud's stature as an imaginative writer. Quite a lot of it comes over into English— _The Psychopathlogy of Everyday Life_ (1904) is a good place to start—but in the original German his body of prose is poetically charged almost without equal. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they banned psychoanalysis straight away. After they took over Austria in 1938, Freud was lucky to escape. In London he lived for a further year before succumbing to cancer. His house in Hampstead retains his wonderful collections of books and sculpture. The Freud name, through his descendants, is still prominent in British cultural life.
_Finis Austriae_.
—SIGMUND FREUD, AN ENTRY IN HIS DIARY, PROBABLY MADE ON SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 1938
ALL THE ENTRIES in Freud's diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long. On the day he began to keep the diary in 1929, he signalled his intention on the first page with the underlined heading " _Kürzeste Chronik_ " (Shortest Chronicle). The entries are explicated ably in a Hogarth Press coffee table book, _The Diary of Sigmund Freud_ 1929–1939, edited by Michael Molnar: a punctilious effort which can be recommended, not least for its lavish iconography. As picture books go, it's a page-turner. But a longer and more sensitive explication of this particular entry would have been useful. Austria's chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had resigned, Hitler was already in Linz, and the _Anschluβ_ was inevitable. Its advent could be measured in hours. This was indeed the end of Austria. But why did the great seer say so in Latin?
One reason might have been that _The Times_ of London had already said it in Latin. True to the paper's appeasing form in that period, the Times leader writers had behaved despicably right up to the crucial moment, but when the catastrophe finally looked inevitable even to them, they summoned the courage to admit that the end might indeed be near. (Up until then, they had run endless assurances about Hitler's benevolence.) Because _The Times_ was read religiously in Vienna, and especially by the Jewish intellectuals, the imported Latin tag had been circulating for a week. But there was no reason for Freud to pick up on it. He probably did so to give the moment an automatic historical perspective, and thus claim for himself, through speech, an oracular viewpoint. Shakespeare did the same for Julius Caesar: _Et tu, Brute_? At the moment when all is lost, Caesar reverts out of his everyday language (which in the play, of course, is English) to the formal language of his schooldays, which for Shakespeare would have been Latin. Shakespeare, a psychologist far more intuitive that Freud himself, knew that people revert under pressure. (Even trained singers, when things are going wrong, will suddenly retreat into the shallow breathing that was once all they knew, and any professional in whatever field could tell a similar story.) In the case of Caesar, Shakespeare was probably helped to the idea by Suetonius. In Suetonius's account of Caesar's life, Caesar, when he receives the last blow, reverts out of Latin into Greek: _kai su, teknon_. The effect is not just of a retreat to youth but of a distancing, as if history has inevitably led to this, and the moment must be given its dignity as a point in the flow of time.
The irony in Freud's case is that his tendency to an historical perspective on modern European politics was portentous for himself and potentially lethal to his family. The Nazis emerge slowly in the last years of his diary: too slowly, as it turned out. From the historical viewpoint, the diary is not a proportionate account, because the history that really mattered is barely mentioned. No doubt in his everyday conversation he said much more, but in the diary he said so little that the paucity can be assessed as a kind of inverted _Sprachfehler_ —one of those linguistic slips in which he saw so much when they were made by other people. In the years of Austria's final and fateful destiny, he had been working on two culminating trains of thought. One train of thought is captured in _Die Zukunft einer Illusion_ (The Future of an Illusion), his most intense evocation of the destructive impulses in mankind. In that book, he defined civilization as the overcoming of nature, with the implication—and the implication was fully worked out—that mankind's natural state was destructive. It was a powerful argument brilliantly articulated, and remains to this day one of the most magnificent condensations of a world view into a prose style. But there was a penalty to be paid, and he paid it. The growing threat to civilized Austria seemed nothing special. He even seems to have seen nothing special about the Nazis themselves. Did he think civilization would contain this destructive force in the same way as, recently at any rate, it had contained all the others? Or was he fatalistically resigned to the catastrophe?
If he was fatalistically resigned, his other important train of recent thought might have played a part. It was in these years that he brought to a climax his theories about the libido and its typology: erotic, narcissistic and obsessional. Everyone, he thought, shares all three departments, with an emphasis on at least one of them at the expense of the other two, and possibly on two at the expense of the third. The narcissistic-obsessional was the most creative combination. Those blessed with it, or cursed, could do great work. But beneath it all, as Philip Larkin was later to put it, desire of oblivion runs. Thanatos, the death wish, was much on Freud's mind. It is possible to say—although it might be wiser to say something else—that he looked forward to personal extinction. He was suffering badly from his cancer by then, and might well have longed for a crisis that would release him. He could not seriously contemplate oblivion as a thing of his own will, because his mother was not yet dead. (He called that "the barrier.") But he might have contemplated it for his country, which, if it went down to destruction, would take him with it.
What makes that line of argument seem unwise is the terrible array of facts that would have to be counted as its cost if it were true. When the reign of terror finally arrived, Freud, with help from abroad, was able to get away to England. But four of his sisters were trapped. All of them were in their eighties, but none was allowed to die of old age. (Marie and Pauline went to Treblinka, Rosa to Auschwitz and Adolfine to Theresienstadt.) In Freud's beloved Vienna, Jewish contemporaries who almost equalled him in eminence suffered the tortures of the damned. Thanatos was no gentleman, and he came not to rescue minds from their torments, but to torment bodies until minds collapsed. Thanatos was a raving maniac, not a mental principle. How was it that Freud, of all people, could not foresee this? Hannah Arendt and E. H. Gombrich, among others, have reminded us that in the German-speaking countries the assimilated Jews thought of themselves as nationals first and foremost: that there was never really any such category as the Jews until Hitler invented it. But Hitler had already invented it. From Germany, the news had been coming in for five years at least. Everyone in Vienna who knew anything about politics was well aware of what might be in store. But to Freud, it might all have been happening to the Hittites and the Assyrians. His historical perspective was everything but actual.
He was a bit like that. There was always a naivety underlying what he knew. An unquenchable naivety is part of an artist's power, and that Freud was an artist should never be in doubt: he was one of the great prose writers in German, which would be worth learning to read for him alone. But his naivety had a way of coming to the surface even in his most subtly elaborate formulations. He thought there was something psychologically wrong with his rich female Viennese patients who did not want to sleep with their husbands. Schnitzler's writings would have taught him better if he had known how to read them. Schnitzler's writings should also have told him about the potential danger to the Jews. But Freud, the master psychologist, was not equipped to receive the message. Freud took holidays at Berchtesgaden without being much troubled by the demeanour of some of its newer visitors. Stefan Zweig, who had a house in Salzburg from which the activities in Berchtesgaden could be observed, was less confident. With the top Nazis in plain sight, Zweig guessed what was coming all too well, but if he ever told Freud, Freud didn't take it in. Freud's sensitivity to his fellow masters of prose was at the level of the ego. When Thomas Mann published a testimonial piece about Freud's scientific achievment, Freud was miffed to note that it was really a tribute to his literary style, with the stuff about science tacked on at the top and tail. He was sensitive enough on that level. But he was cut off from the cultural information that the writers were providing as the situation in Europe steadily deteriorated. He would have been more likely to view them as neurotic. His attention was focused on personalities and their individual neuroses, not on politics and its collective disease. The real psychodrama was too big for him to see.
He could have escaped so much sooner, and from exile he could have saved all his relatives in good time. There would have been no financial problems: from the beginning of the post-war inflation, he had always based his finances on the hard currency brought in by foreign patients. Moving to where the patients were would have boosted his income. Leaving early would have been a better way for him to love Vienna. Alas, he seems to have believed that the Nazi irrationality was just one more instance of the destructive impulse like any other, and could be contained in balance with the impulses to order, continuity and creativity. (At a meeting in his Hampstead house, I once heard a letter of his quoted in which he said, months after he had reached safety, that the Catholic Church would probably be able to sort the whole matter out.) He never grasped that Nazi destructiveness was a complete mind in itself. Surely he was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality. From the realm of the human spirit he had banished God and the Devil, and replaced them with a family of contending deities bearing proud Greek names. They were household gods: aided by judicious therapy, they would one way or another always reach an accommodation, in a world where people like his old sisters, even if they were not happy, would die in bed. But the Devil came back. The Devil had never been away.
EGON FRIEDELL
Egon Friedell (1878–1938), a student of natural sciences who graduated to the twin status of cabaret star and polymath, was a figure unparalleled even in Vienna, where there were several learned cabaret artists and even a few funny polymaths, but nobody else who could be both those things on such an heroic scale. To think of an equivalent in an English-speaking context is impossible: you would have to imagine a combination of George Saintsbury, Aldous Huxley, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Clark and Isaiah Berlin. Translated into English in 1930, the three-volume set of his _Cultural History of the Modern Age_ was such a publishing disaster that it simply vanished. Today it can be obtained only from a dealer in rare books. In the original German, however, _Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit_ turns up second-hand all over the world, because it was a talisman for the emigration: the refugees took it with them even though, in its usual format of three volumes on thick paper, it weighed more than a brick. Of the several copies I own, the most beautifully printed, which I bought in Buenos Aires in 2000, was put out as a single volume on thin paper by Phaidon Press in London in 1947, for export back to the newly democractic Germany and Austria. (Phaidon also ensured that the book's unfinished companion piece _Kulturgeschichte des Altertums—The Cultural History of the Ancient World_ —was published with fitting splendour.) The scholars and book lovers of the emigration gave Friedell's capital work a context, which could be picked up on by the German publishers after the war. I own three copies of the handsome, single-volume post-war edition put out by Beck. My intention was to use one of them as a workbench, and put into its endpapers the notes that have gone into this book. But I ended up defacing my beautiful Phaidon edition, perhaps guessing in advance that my graffiti would be labours of love. It's that kind of book: it makes you feel civilized. The best explanation for Friedell's continued presence in the German-speaking countries, and his absence everywhere else, is that they needed him. His writings give the comforting illusion that the historical accumulation of knowledge makes some kind of steadily increasing, and therefore irreversible, sense. He himself might have thought differently by the time of the _Anschluβ_ , when he anticipated his inevitable arrest by jumping out of his window, calling a warning as he descended: a cry whose lingering echo contains an era, with all its promise of a just world, and the despair of that world cruelly lost.
Of all the good wishes I received for my fiftieth birthday, it was yours that delighted me most.
—EGON FRIEDELL, QUOTED BY FRIEDRICH TORBERG IN _D IE TANTE JOLESCH_, P. 195
EGON FRIEDELL'S POLITE message doesn't sound witty at all until you are supplied with the information that it was sent as a printed card. The recipients must have loved it. You can imagine them considering themselves members of an exclusive club for the rest of their lives. A lot of Viennese wit was like that: shared jokes that travelled in a collective memory, and often didn't get into print until a long time later. Friedrich Torberg's retro-guide _Die Tante Jolesch_ (Aunt Jolesch) is full of such moments, all recorded after the war, when the _Anschluβ_ , the deportations, the mass murder and the rigours of exile had trimmed the cast of characters to a random few. (One of them, the publisher Lord Weidenfeld, put me on to _Die Tante Jolesch_ : like Alfred Brendel, he never sent me away from a conversation without a reading list.) The minor Hungarian literatus Friedrich Karinthy has vanished into obscurity but his eternal question remains unanswered: "What can you make out of a day that starts with getting out of bed?" Ferenc Molnár, the internationally successful playwright, had an acute business sense to go with his enviably marketable talent, but he was much put upon by women. When he and his ex-wife, the actress Sari Fedak, were both in American exile, she traded on his name by billing herself as Sari Fedak-Molnár. He published a brief but effective newspaper advertisement declaring that the woman calling herself Sari Fedak-Molnár was not his mother.
Molnár's quietly delivered bombshells always dug in deep before they went off. One famous compulsive fabulist, the Jeffrey Archer of his time, never recovered what was left of his credibility after Molnár said: "He's such a liar that not even the opposite is true." As happens in any literary circle, some of the Viennese writers were better in conversation than they were on paper. The journalist Anton Kuh (who later died of a broken heart in New York, unable to survive out of his café context) wrote pointed articles and sketches that are well worth reading today, but his talk, by all accounts, was on another level: too good to miss and therefore, alas, too fast to catch. One of his few lines to survive is a definitive physical description of Stefan George: "He looks like an old woman who looks like an old man." Most writers would be pleased with themselves if they could get even one crack like that into an article. Kuh talked like that all the time. A lot of them did. The main reason more of the stuff wasn't written down was because everyone was Johnson and nobody was Boswell. It was the stuff of common interchange. The sense of something precious came after the collapse.
Although most of the Jewish figures in Vienna's intellectual life were secular and assimilated, the rabbinical tradition was strong. The wisecracks were concentrated wisdom, and the verbal thumbnail sketches that were treasured, polished, elaborated and passed on had a moral background. The unrolling scroll of illuminated talk was a continuously enriched compendium of edifying stories: an unwritten literary text, a spoken Talmud. Wit and point were taken for granted. When everyone was a famous talker, there were no great individual reputations that could be marketed to a wider public. The contrast with pre-war New York could not be more complete. The Algonquin Round Table wits prepared their epigrams with the intention of being quoted in newspapers and magazines. The results, even at best, sound strained: they hark back to Oscar and Bosie at the Café Royal rather than to Friedell, Karl Kraus, Peter Altenberg and Alfred Polgar at the Café Central, or Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Franz Werfel and Joseph Roth at the Café Herrenhof. The tradition began in the 1890s at the Café Griensteidl, where Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal were both regulars. But really it can't be confined to the cafés: in the whole culture right through until the Nazis turned out the lights, talk was a way of being, and it was universally understood that the best talkers had the right to talk it all away. When the distinguished and wildly eccentric legal advocate Hugo Sperber played cards, people would take turns to stand behind him so they could overhear his running commentary: the queue would stretch down the aisle between the tables all the way to the door of the café. Talk was one thing and literature was something else. Even the feuilleton, a demanding genre that reached a high state of development in Vienna, was commonly thought to be more talk than literature. Alfred Polgar, the supreme master of the form, was praised to his face by Molnár as the world champion of the one-metre sprint.
For more than forty years in Vienna, talk was a way of life, and then it ended. In 1938, just before the Nazis took over, there were about 180,000 Jews in the city—down from about 201,000 in 1923. (As George Clare tells us in his exquisite memoir _Last Waltz in Vienna_ , it was already a dying community, but nobody wanted to admit it.) After 1945 only 10,000 came back, and most of the rest, of course, had not chosen to be absent: they were absent because they had been slaughtered. But even in the great period not all the participants were Jews, and post-war, it has been argued, the tradition might well have revived, even if in restricted form. Torberg contends that there was more than one reason it didn't. In the old days, people concerned with literature and journalism had time for a café existence even when they were busy. Peter Altenberg was only one of the many literati who did everything but sleep in the café, although he might have been unique in having it as his only address: P. Altenberg, Café Central, Wien 1. Novelists and critics wrote in the café, impresarios made their plans there, publishers read manuscripts and corrected proofs. Today, people use machinery to write, and need a telephone right in front of them, instead of in a little booth downstairs next to the lavatory. They write at the studio or in the office. They might meet for lunch at the café, but a lunch hour isn't long enough to get the unimportant things said. The talk that counts is the talk that doesn't matter, and to get that you need time to spare.
So argues Torberg, and there is reason in what he says: but there is also an unintended pathos, like a nervous whistle in the dark. In Vienna, the Jewish café habitués had no other real home. They were assimilated, but mainly in a technical sense: except for the café, where they could pay for a place by the hour, there was nowhere they belonged that was not overseen by a watchful landlord— _the Blokleiter_ of the future. They could feel comfortable only in public. They could feel _private_ only in public. Torberg tells a poignant story of seeing, in the Café Herrenhof in 1960, Leo Perutz and Otto Soyka still pursuing their no-speak policy from the years before the _Anschluβ_. Soyka had returned to live in Vienna but Perutz was merely visiting, from his new home in Haifa. The only reason the Herrenhof was still open was that its proprietor, Albert Kainz, thought there should be a meeting point for anyone who came back from the past. These two had, but they refused to meet. Their time-honoured vendetta—some ancient business of an unexpiated insult—continued long after its context had disappeared. In the café thronged with the voices of contentious ghosts, no literary Jews remained alive except them. Their quarrel was all they had left, and no doubt they preserved it as a way of pretending that this much, at least, had not altered.
Horrific evidence suggests that the Austrian Nazis, when their armbands were still in their pockets, put the café talk high on their long list of Jewish intellectual pursuits to be trampled out of existence when the great day came. The future firebrands and executioners had been listening in for years, probably inflamed as much by sincere disapproval as by thick-witted jealousy. After a single orgiastic day of violence in March 1938 there was no-one left who had anything to say worth hearing. Hugo Sperber, already worn out from too many years of living on thin pickings, was thrown to the ground and kicked until he fell silent for good. Fritz Grunbaum, one of the stars of the _Simplicissimus_ cabaret, was arrested within hours of the takeover, shipped to Dachau, and beaten to death. Whether in Austria or Germany, it had never been the fault of the Jews that they were so slow to realize the catch in the assimilationist ideal: the more indispensable to culture they became, the more they were resented. Hitler needed no telling that there were a lot of brilliant Jews from whom German-speaking culture had gained lustre. That was what he was afraid of: of a bacillus being called clever, and of the phosphorescence of decay being hailed as an illumination. For him, as for every racial hygienist, the whole thing was a medical problem, and the last thing he was likely to contemplate was that the medical problem might lie within himself. He didn't know he was sick. He thought he was well. Convinced racists think they are healthy: their conscience can't be appealed to, they have no better self that might repudiate the lesser one, and they bend all the powers of human reason to the unreasonable, without reservation. For the Jewish intelligentsia, cultivated to the fingertips, it was very hard to grasp the intensity of the irrationality they were dealing with—the irrationality that was counting the hours until it could deal with them. Even in Auschwitz, some of the enslaved musicians must have thought that Schubert's writing for strings would melt Dr. Mengele's heart, as it had always melted theirs. And it did melt his heart. It just didn't change his mind. Similarly, there were probably crypto-Nazi kibitzers who laughed at the running commentary of Hugo Sperber as he played cards. But that was exactly why they wanted him dead. They wanted _their_ jokes to be the funny ones, and they got their wish.
It should be said that Friedell's great book, for much of its enormous length, does not use wit for its texture. But it always has wit for a basis. The Viennese tradition of the enlightening wisecrack is there underneath, supporting a prose narrative that never loses its geniality even when talking about the Black Death. Friedell didn't always feel compelled to be funny. But he was never unfunny, in the sense of straining to amuse, and missing the mark. For him the whole target was a bullseye, and he could let fly at his leisure. He saw the same quality in Shaw, whom he admired, perhaps to excess. When Friedell dedicated the English translation of _The Cultural History of the Modern Age_ to Shaw, the dedicatee was already a known admirer of the dictators. Friedell would never have been capable of such a misplaced enthusiasm. He would have been a valuable voice in the English-speaking world if he had ever been taken up, but his name was never well-known in Britain or the United States except to the German-speaking refugees. Today it is so thoroughly forgotten that he is not even listed in the excellent _Chambers Biographical Dictionary_ , which finds room for Finnish playwrights of the second order, and is usually good about those who once were prominent but are so no longer. Friedell, however, was never there to be forgotten. But if we know nothing about him, he, true to form, knew a lot about us. He was a student of British cultural history and wrote one of the best appreciations of Lord Macaulay. Typically playing himself in with a witticism—Friedell the cabaret artist always knew how to buttonhole the audience—he said that Macaulay was so highly regarded in Britain that his book of collected essays was included in any list of classics. In the English-speaking countries, Friedell pointed out, a list of classics was regarded as a guide to books that should be read, and not, as in the German-speaking countries, to books that should be avoided. It's easy to imagine that idea starting its life at a café table. Harder to imagine is how the giant could walk away from his laughing friends, climb the stairs to his apartment, and settle down for another day's lonely work on his strange and wonderful attempt to get the whole of creation into a nutshell.
Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.
—EGON FRIEDELL, _K ULTURGESCHICHTE DER NEUZEIT_, VOL. 3, P. 225
In his great book, Egon Friedell regales us with thousands of lines like this. If they were fully separable from their context, they would be aphorisms: we could pick them out like jewels from a crown. But they are more like threads and knots in a tapestry, and can't be pulled loose without violating the texture. Suitably aware, however, that we are doing his masterwork an injury, we can memorize some of his best moments and reproduce them in conversation, although morality demands that we should acknowledge the borrowing. After all, he did. This line is one of the many he lifted from someone else. Friedell gives the provenance: one Gustav von Bunge said it in his Lehrbuch (Textbook) _der Physiologie_ , and it wasn't his line either. He was quoting a professor of physics who said it in a lecture. Thus, all the way back to anonymity, we can follow the trajectory of a shining notion. The tapestry analogy breaks down. Friedell's mighty gathering place of a text is a game park, a menagerie, an aviary and an aquarium. Sentences live in it as our dreams are populated with fragments of experience, often including experience we have not yet had, and may never have. It follows that the importance of always identifying a source lies not only in common justice, but in truth to life. Whether we like it or not, individuality is the product of a collective existence. Few writers have ever had a more identifiable tone of voice than Egon Friedell. But the tone was a synthesis of all the voices he had ever heard, and so is ours. If we had never heard anyone else, we would not sound more like ourselves; we would sound like Kaspar Hauser the savage infant, on the day he was rescued from solitude. In the matter of style, freedom lies in all the ways we have been a prisoner of someone else's example. He might only have been a school bus conductor with a gift for sardonic verbal abuse. She might only have been the woman who stamped your card at the lending library. But they gave you the gift that comes next after the gift of speech: the gift to give it shape.
Obviously, in wit, there are degrees of humour, from intense to non-existent. What is funny is a matter of dispute, but I have always found the anonymous humour of Hollywood immensely funny. Nobody knows who first said: "She'd be a nymphomaniac if only they could slow her down." But whoever thought of that line knew a lot about humour: probably he worked in it professionally, in some branch of the film business, although I doubt if he was a writer. (If he had been, he would have a found a way of letting us know who he was.) One day, perhaps on the spur of the moment, he—or, come to think of it, more likely she—came out with a witty line that was also creasingly funny. Slightly lower down the scale of tickled ribs, there are witty lines that make you smile with appreciation—the smile that acknowledges how you almost laughed.
On that level one can place many of Oscar Wilde's best epigrams: the ones that are condensed without being leaden, and fashioned without being laboured. "Meredith is a sort of prose Browning, and so is Browning." But much of the most valuable wit forms at a level where laughter is neither induced nor sought, and even a smile is not required: the level where a sense of rightness combines with a sense of neatness, and a nod of the head is enough to acknowledge the blend. It's possible to say that on this level all wits sound the same. They are not monotonous—quite the reverse—but they do share a tone: the enviable tone of something put with sufficient cogency to make the listener feel that if he can't remember exactly how the thing was said, he won't remember exactly what the thing was. It is as if there were one precisely codified set of manners operating, which all its adepts know equally.
As a result, it's easy to mistake them for one another. As an illustration, I once quoted several aphorisms by Hugh Kingsmill, capped them with a single aphorism by Santayana, and defied the reader to spot the difference. In my memory, the one by Santayana is "A fanatic redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." But I would not be surprised to be told that it is by Kingsmill. It is not so much that the memory plays tricks: rather that, in this area of distilled truth, there is not all that much difference between personalities. "We are asleep," says Baptiste to Garance in _Les Enfants du Paradis_ , "but sometimes we wake up just long enough to realize we are dreaming." "If all the people who lived together were in love," says Wittgenstein, "the earth would shine like the sun." It is easy to imagine the attributions reversed; and indeed, without your permission, I just reversed them; it was in Jacques Prevert's screenplay that the shining earth appeared, and the moonlit line about the dreaming sleepers came from the thin-lipped mouth of the sad philosopher.
Vauvenargues the unlucky aristocrat is a larger spirit than La Bruyère the rising bourgeois, and both would have been more fun to meet for a drink than La Rochefoucauld, whose contempt for mankind would have been unlikely not to have included us. They were three very different minds, but you would need to know an awful lot about the treasury of the French aphorism never to misattribute a coup by one of them to either of the others. The same applies even on the dizzy level where wit becomes funny: in the brief span that the Italians usefully call a _battuta_ there is not much room for an individual personality to show up, so all the wits sound like the one sparkling soul, and on our deathbeds—if we do much laughing there—it will probably be a matter of hearing the jokes that go past our ears rather than of seeing the people who cracked them go past our eyes. When forgetfulness confers anonymity, it could well be that justice will be restored. I doubt if Liberace was the first to say "I cried all the way to the bank." It sounds like Old Hollywood, and could very well be Old Vienna. Dorothy Parker might not have been the actual inventor of the joke about the woman who injured herself sliding down a barrister. Except for Flann O'Brien, there was never a new pun, although always an alert plagiarist. Dorothy Parker could think the stuff up, but you can tell that it took effort: in her theatre reviews, she could barely manage one real zinger each time, even when it was expected of her. A wit under pressure to produce is very apt to borrow on the sly.
Friedell could go on and on being wise because he didn't feel compelled to be funny. He thought it sufficient to be interesting: a desirable condition for a writer to be in. Comedians do not enjoy the same luxury, although they always aspire to it: given the chance, they will construct a framework in which character makes the points, so that they can relax. The necessity to go on throwing a double six is nerve-racking and eventually not even amusing. A commentator probably does better to accept that too many wisecracks are a mistake. Even Mark Twain soured some of his early travel writing in Europe by dragging in a vaudeville routine when he should have been focusing his observations, which were always the most interesting features of his pieces, and often the funniest.
Friedell was one of those enchanted spirits who are observant over the whole range of human experience from everyday behaviour up to the most exalted level of creativity: indeed he scarcely recognized the hierarchy, and took it all as an isotropic universe of delicious excitement. Finding everything significant, he was in a good position to appreciate the perennial charm of the charlatan, whose expertise is to convince the hayseeds that they share the same propensity for universal insight. It is not enough for the mountebank to unleash a theory that explains everything: to be successful, he must convince his gormless onlookers that the same theory has always been in their possession, but now stands suddenly revealed. They reward him for what he has discovered in them, and buy his snake oil as a vote of thanks.
Memories from childhood tell me that it can be deeply disturbing to be addressed by an adult in the grip of such all-encompassing certitude. It sounded like madness even before I could tell sense from nonsense, and ever since, through a life now blessedly stretching to some length, I have been periodically rocked to meet otherwise normal-sounding people who are suddenly taken over by the same rhythmic rant. Those in the grip of an all-encompassing Answer soon make it clear that the desire to be so enlightened has more to do with personality than intelligence. Few men were more intelligent than Arthur Koestler, for example. He was one of the first prominent international commentators to develop a case of clear-sightedness about what was going on in the Soviet Union. During the Spanish Civil War, savage maltreatment by the NKVD helped to open his eyes. He stopped believing in communism as an Answer. But he started believing in everything else: one fad after another until the end of his life. He thought the world was going to be put to rights by science fiction, by J. B. Rhine's researches into the paranormal, by a Lysenko-like offshoot of Lamarckian evolution. Finally he asked his ageing but loyal audience of intellectual supermarket browsers to fall to their knees in wonder when they heard a word on the radio at the same time as they were reading it in a book—to be impressed, that is, by mere coincidence. Throughout this stentorian career of waxing and waning enthusiastic, Koestler always maintained his solid capacity for realistic observation and cosmopolitan savvy. He was hard to fool, except when the boondoggle was big enough, and sounded like science. If you want to read an essay whose humour attains the level of a cosmic joke, read P. B. Medawar's demolition of Koestler's theories about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Medawar put his fastidious finger exactly on the throbbing point of the fervent amateur's psychological problem: Koestler was science-struck. Untrained in science himself, he had a taste for it—the fatal proclivity for magnetism.
As Robert Musil said in praise of Alfred Polgar, our only _idée fixe_ should be the determination to avoid one. But the bonnet-filling bee is a tireless migrant, and can even show up in fields nominally concerned with the rational employment of the brain. Apart from the sharpness of the disappointment, there should be no surprise in the fact that the philosopher's stone has always made its most prominent appearance in philosophy itself, where its looming outline is the surest mark of incompetence. But monomania would be easier to deal with if the sufferer were of one mind: we could just avoid him. Unfortunately it is quite possible for the subtle visionary and the shouting dunce to inhabit the same skull, so that Wagner the anti-Semite will always be there to help convince aspiring race scientists that they know something about politics, and perhaps even something about music. Newton's celestial mechanics constitute a mental achievement sublime beyond estimation. But those same exalted capacities of ratiocination spent years plugging away at a system of chronology whose fraudulence was self-evident to any shopkeeper. From the evidence supplied by history's teeming reservoir of minds simultaneously clear and crazed, the logical inference can only be that we probably all suffer—somewhere on the pathway winding through our heads there is a philosopher's stone waiting to trip us up. But as long as we don't hit anyone else with it, we are probably doing well. One of the loveliest women I ever knew was a believer in colonic irrigation as an aid to beauty. She was mad enough to think that it had worked for her. But she wasn't mad enough to suggest that it might have worked for me. On that showing, I would have pronounced her sane, but I wouldn't have wanted to stand surety for how she might have behaved if the Moonies had got hold of her. Fifty years before, it might have been Reich's orgone box, and fifty years before that it might have been the theories of Madame Blavatsky. When the beautiful Magda Rietschel met her future second husband, she had just finished being passionate about Buddhism. Before that, it had been Zionism. In order to marry Josef Goebbels, she became equally passionate about National Socialism. Her latest and last enthusiasm made even less sense than the others, but there can be no doubt it convinced her: she not only killed herself for it, she made certain that her children died too. And so on, all the way back through history, in which the beautiful women, because they get written about, are forever cropping up in the grip of the latest explanatory fad, whose essential property is to console them for having been picked out from other mortals, and thus made to feel so mortal. Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren't in search of the truth, they're in search of themselves.
Mankind in the Christian era possesses one huge advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience.
—EGON FRIEDELL, _K ULTURGESCHICHTE DER NEUZEIT_, VOL. 1, P. 132
Friedell wrote this not long before the Nazis arrived in Vienna. Had he survived the onset of the new barbarians, Friedell might have modified an unwarrantably uplifting sentiment. He must have been revising it in his mind long before he went out of the window, because it had already turned out that he had chosen too confident a grammatical form for the verb. Mankind in the Christian era _ought_ to possess a bad conscience. By the time of his wisely chosen suicide, the evidence had already been coming in from Germany for the previous five years that Christianity was in for a comprehensive rewrite, the main aim being to jettison its moral encumbrances, of which the bad conscience was the most burdensome.
Even if the Nazis had stayed where they belonged, at the ragged edge of politics instead of in the centre, the same sort of evidence would still have been coming in from Russia for a full twenty years. A conscience of any kind, good or bad, was never listed as an item of a Bolshevik's mental equipment. Loyalties beyond the state's declared aims were thought to be inimical, and an a _priori_ set of values carried within the mind could have no higher status than that of a psychological problem. Since Christianity was the main source of the problem, the elimination of Christianity was a state aim from the word go. The state could have lived with the icons and the incense. The icon, in fact, was about to come into its age of gold, even if the gold was the light gilded alloy of the badges that bore the images of Lenin and Stalin, and which always startled you by weighing no more that snowflakes when you picked them up.
But the Soviet state could never live with spiritual values. Strangely enough, the Nazi state could, as long as the spiritual values were aimed in the right direction, along the path of Parsifal, or of Siegfried on his journey down the Rhine. Compared with the Soviet state, which was a monolith, the Nazi state was a bucket of eels, with conflicting values of individual conscience having validity independently of the programmes of state power. Even near the top, departments were in contention. There were even different departments to interpret orthodoxy, so that Alfred Rosenberg, the cultural "expert" on policies towards foreign populations in the East, would have ideas on race that other top Nazis thought stupid. To get a ruling was hard: Hitler would have preferred it if all his subordinates were in conflict with each other, always. Only the paper-pusher Martin Bormann ever succeeded in imposing hegemony, and he could do so only as an exercise in pure bureaucracy, after Nazi power to influence events had ceased to be a reality. The Nazi state got its act together when it could no longer act. There was always room in the upper reaches of the Nazis' earthbound Valhalla for dreamers to imagine they were following the true path—for an appeal to spiritual values of chivalric dedication. Himmler brought it down to pentagrams and runes, but even among the SS there were would-be Teutonic Knights in the picture. It was possible to dream of being Parsifal—Parsifal standing upright in the turret of a Tiger tank. Siegfried could carry a flame-thrower charged with Wotan's magic fire. The mark of sentimentality it is to be all choked up with feeling about nothing, and the mark of black-and-silver ceremonial was to upgrade sentimentality to the religious plane by working towards a future in which nostalgia for the supposed purities of the heroic past would become real. The time and treasure that the Nazis put into mumbo-jumbo was one of the marks of their regime. Other racist regimes have been more pragmatic. In post-war South Africa under apartheid, when it became expedient to make the Japanese racially acceptable, they were simply declared racially acceptable. Under the Nazis, when it became expedient that the Japanese should be reclassified as Aryans, Himmler poured a lot of the Reich's money and effort into proving the point scholastically. Cynicism could have worked the trick in an instant, but sincerity demanded evidence. Nothing except the fervour of religious belief can explain such a rush of blood to the head.
After the defeat, the Nazis vanished completely. Officers of the occupying powers forgivably got the idea that the party membership had consisted of nothing but opportunists. Some of the opportunists were among the hierarchs. Goebbels stood out for his willigness to accompany Hitler to oblivion. Himmler and Goering were both ready to forget the whole thing. But we should not overlook the dreamers: there were many men who looked back on their duties not just as a dedication of moral effort, but as a sacred rite. Those quondam mass executioners who talked about "the task" were the Nazis we should not write off. Many of them, after the war, grew comfortable enough to wear fleece-lined car coats, drive a big Mercedes, and die in bed, and some could not resist telling the television reporters how sad it was to see a new generation of young people who believed in nothing and had no respect for values, because they had never done anything hard and clean. There is no reason to believe that those terrible old men were faking their disgust. They remembered their lives as a crusade.
The religious trappings of the Nazi movement were kitsch, like all its art: but as with the art, they left a long echo in the mind for as long as the mind had nothing else in it. It was by no great act of cynical calculation that Nazi liturgical material could be pitched unerringly at the kind of people who were genuinely moved by tripe. It was concocted by the same sort of people. Bad taste gives aesthetic expression to the aspirations of upstarts, and part of the appeal of Nazism was in the way it turned social mobility into a path of adventure rewarded with decorations at every step. The kind of women who could pin a diamond studded swastika to a bias-cut jersey silk evening dress were thrilled by the kind of men who had learned just enough about Wagner's Siegmund to fancy the idea of impregnating Sieglinde. When the years of power were over, there was plenty to be nostalgic about. The memorabilia market was soon in the position of having to manufacture souvenirs: there are probably more SS ceremonial daggers in existence now than there were in 1945. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, nobody ever felt the same way about the paste cookies cranked out by the state medal factories. A Soviet officer at general staff rank was covered with medals like a pangolin with scales, to no lasting effect except on the spectator's funny bone. The Soviets knew nothing about rarity value, whereas the Nazis made sure that the ascending grades of a high decoration all occupied the same focal space—the Knight's Cross was worn at the neck, and so was the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, and the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. The "Diamonds" was referred to in the singular and almost invariably conferred by Hitler personally. The aim was to stress quality over quantity, and once again the trick worked particularly well on people who had not been brought up to know the difference. After the Berlin Wall came down I bought a KGB cap (it was from a clerical branch of the KGB: no rough stuff, and therefore not very glamorous) at a stall near the Brandenburg Gate for a few dollars. An equivalent SS cap would have cost a hundred times as much, and I would have had to buy it in Islington. In Germany, the stuff is so precious it either circulates in secret or is crated for export to America's alarming abundance of people who find the Nazis glamorous. The big question, in Germany, has always been whether the hard-eyed sentimentality would live on into the next generation. The question was hard to answer because the older generation was so slow to go away. Nobody lives longer than those old men who got tough from killing children. They can ski until they're ninety. They don't even lose their hair.
It can be said that the Nazi brew of Nordic saga, Wagnerian fable and elfin tomfoolery had little to do with the Christian concept of conscience. There is truth to that, although we ought not to leave out the consideration that for many centuries a Christian conscience was no obstacle to the most hideously comprehensive persecution of unbelievers. Nevertheless the liberal conscience, the conscience we really value, would never have arrived in the world unless the Christian conscience had preceded it; so Christianity can be conceded the primacy.
When Friedell talked about a bad conscience, he meant the mind that was capable of seeing that might and right were not the same thing. The Nazis were dedicated heart and soul to observing no such discrepancy. Their superstitions served merely to make them feel better about it. If the Communists had managed to come good on their declared aim of abolishing all superstitions, they would have been even more frightening than the Nazis. It is a weird kind of consolation, but at least it is something, to have evidence that they couldn't keep up the secular momentum beyond the death of Lenin. Already during Lenin's life, his writings and sayings had been awarded religious value, like the poetry of Virgil, which for a large part of the Christian era was consulted as an oracle. Even as late as the seventeenth century, and in a country as civilized as England, people were still poking a finger at random into the _Aeneid_ to be given a portent of an upcoming battle. Lenin was awarded that treatment while he lived, having given the lead by the way he treated the writings of Marx. After Lenin's death, the embalming fluid was an interior anointment presaging the divinity to come. Stalin's act as the Son of God depended on Lenin's continuing as God, so the corpse remained safe. The superstitions attached to Stalin need not be rehearsed. Though they generated boredom on an intercontinental scale, they remain interesting to the extent that he agreed with them: the great realist really seems to have believed, for example, that he knew something by instinct about economics, biology and military strategy. Stalin's capacity to join in the superstitions centred on his person is the gateway to the larger subject of how an utterly cock-eyed metaphysics guaranteed that the Soviet experiment could not possibly succeed even though the men who led it were ready to murder the innocent en masse.
It was hell; nor were they out of it; and the fuel that fed the flames was superstition of the most unsophisticated kind. The superstition which held that bread and wine turned into the body and blood of Christ always had a poetic justification even when men were burning each other in disagreement about whether it really happened, and on a practical level it scarcely matters whether it is true or not, because only the spiritual life is, or should be, affected. But the superstition that Soviet agriculture would do better if it were collectivized by force was one that killed people by the millions, and none were more certain to be victims than those who looked as if they might know the truth. There is a great danger, here, in ascribing the whole disaster to Stalin's personal mania. Young people today who find it thrilling to flirt with the notion that they might be Trotskyites should know that Trotsky's voice was the very loudest in calling for a more thorough "militarization" of the struggle against the reactionaries on the land: by which he meant that the peasants weren't being massacred in sufficient numbers. It can be concluded, however, that agriculture was an area in which Stalin was particularly loopy. Almost certainly it was the importance of biological research to agriculture that made Stalin see the attractions of putting the ineffable T. D. Lysenko in charge of biology.
Lysenko preached the kind of biological theories that Stalin could understand: i.e., they were poppycock. Stalin gave Lysenko the power of life and death over a whole field of science. The result was the collapse of Soviet biology and the permanent ruin of Soviet agriculture, which never again produced enough grain to feed the nation. (The difference was made up by importing part of the American surplus at a knock-down price, a _sub rosa_ agreement which continued throughout the Cold War.) But lest it be thought that Lysenko was the invention of Stalin and Stalin alone, it should be noted that it took the intervention of Andrei Sakharov, then still at the height of his prestige as the golden boy of Soviet physics, to persuade Khrushchev against favouring Lysenko's comeback. The dreadful truth was that the superstitions had reached so deep into the fabric of the Soviet polity that nothing except a complete collapse could get them out. The notion that a government can plan a whole economy, for example, was already known to be a superstition at the time of Marx. By the time of Lenin, there were no serious economic theorists in the world who thought that a command economy could exist without a large area of private enterprise. Stalin spent his whole career in power proving that a state could plan every detail of an economy only at the cost of terrorizing a large part of the population which might have hoped to benefit from it.
By the time of Brezhnev, the Soviet Union had effectively given up. The Twenty-fifth Party Congress in 1976 decreed that the quality of consumer goods would be raised. I was there at the time and saw the decree hoisted into position on every second building, in red letters anything up to six feet high. The Soviet Union certainly knew how to make signs. But nobody knew how to raise the quality of consumer goods. Brezhnev's own consumer goods were all bought abroad, like his cars. Brezhnev bought his shoes in Rome because no shoe factory in the Soviet Union could produce a pair of shoes that didn't leak—a state of affairs which Stalin's era had long ago proved as _especially_ likely to come about if you threaten to shoot the official in charge. By Gorbachev's time, the party hierarchs were no longer making a secret of having their tailoring done abroad. (When filming in Rome, I had a jacket made by the celebrated tailor Littrico, and found out that I had the same measurements as Gorbachev: they were on file in Littrico's office.) Even while it was still a qualification for membership of the Politburo that the old dreams should be paid earnest lip service as if they still had some life in them, Andropov, head of the KGB, was preparing his organization for the novel concept of _not_ ruling by terror. Sakharov had tried and failed to tell the Party that unless the Soviet Union embraced the concept of freedom of information there would be no way to continue. U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz tried to tell Gorbachev the same, with pie charts. But Andropov didn't need telling. The intelligence community in the Soviet Union were the people who knew from experience that information and superstition were different things. The story of how the Soviet Union backed out of its historical cul-de-sac is adequately told in Scott Shane's _Dismantling Utopia_ , but it would be a blessing if John le Carré could occupy himself with the biggest single mystery ever to come out of Moscow Central—how the men charged with State Security managed to conspire against the state without becoming victims of each other merely for suggesting it. In his last years, I. F. Stone, an erstwhile sympathizer turned unyielding scourge, developed an elaborate theory to prove that the Soviet apparatus of control could never voluntarily dismantle itself. Before the eminent sociologist Aleksandr Zinoviev was expelled from Russia, he had already developed a similar theory, taking it so far as to suggest that even dissident writings like his own had come into existence only to support the structure by acting as a safety valve. There would be no retreat. It couldn't happen.
It couldn't happen, but it happened. The story is hard to summarize and of course it isn't over yet, any more than history is over. Since the Soviet Union's nuclear weapons are even more dangerous now than when the state was making sure they were chipped free of rust, it is quite possible that the end of history is in the offing, but not in the way that Francis Fukuyama was talking about. It was yet another superstition to believe that the collapse of one of history's most complete totalitarian dystopias would be succeeded automatically by a functioning democracy, as day follows night. In politics, it is more likely that a deep enough night will be followed by a lot more night, and then by nothing at all. But to be too confident about that happening in this case would be yet another superstition, and would lead us away from the fascinating question of where men like Andropov got their bad consciences from. They grew up in an atmosphere of unrelieved moral squalor. Through bad faith, they flourished; and good faith would have held them back. The system had been designed so that they always stood to benefit personally from the decay around them. If the whole thing had gone to the dogs, they would have been all right. Yet they chose to dismantle the system that had given them their careers. Most men bend with the breeze: which is to say, they go with the prevailing power. But a few do not. With or without Christ's help, they grow a bad conscience. Thank God for that.
FRANÇOIS FURET
François Furet (1927–1997) was one of the most valuable liberal voices in France, where they were in short supply. As a general rule, the liberalism of ex-Communists always needs to be searched with a careful eye for any signs of the original extremism's having been transferred to a new domicile, but Furet passes that test well. One of the first attempts to treat the effect of Communist ideology on a global basis, his book _Le Passé d'une illusion: Essai sur l'idée communiste au vingtième siècle_ (1995) is a touchstone, and partly because he himself had once been caught up in the illusion. Apart from his powers of realistic observation, one of the forces that shook him loose from his first allegiance was the conclusion he drew from his studies of the French Revolution that its dogmatism was not just incidentally lethal, but necessarily so. New students can get the essence of his two-volume _La Révolution française_ (1965, written with Denis Richet) in the sheaf of articles he wrote subsequently in defence of his view, published posthumously as _La Révolution en débat_ (1999). His views needed defending because almost everyone on the established left attacked them. For gauchiste thinkers, Furet's position on the Revolution required that he be discredited, but it was hard to do: he wrote too well. The most accessible evidence of his journalistic brilliance is the lifetime collection of articles put together after his death by Mona Ozouf: _Un Itinéraire intellectuel_ (1999). Admirers of Jean-François Revel will find that Furet, as both thinker and writer, was in the same league, with something of the same sardonic tone. But they will usually remember that Revel, before he championed liberation, had no illiberal position to repudiate. Furet had; and whether his personal history gave him the advantage of experience is an abiding question, for him as for other lapsed believers.
In this clinically pure fascism, reduced to its own cultural elements, the central point is racism, and the idea of race, impossible to think about clearly, is made up from an anti-image, that of the Jew. . . . Constituted at this level of psychological depth, the fascist ideology is completely impermeable to historical experience.
—FRANÇOIS FURET, _U N ITINÉRAIRE INTELLECTUEL_, P. 258
THE AUTHOR OF the best book in French about the history of Communism was part of the history. François Furet had been a Party member himself. Jean-François Revel has many times warned us about the tendency of belatedly reformed _gauchiste_ intellectuals to high-hat those who never fell for the drug in the first place. Furet, however, was too fine an analyst to flaunt his superior experience. He could, had he wished, have flaunted his superior insight. In recent times France has been blessed by the presence of a gifted plain-language philosopher, Alain Finkielkraut, who writes almost full-time on the problem posed by the anti-Semitic heritage of modern France. But part of France's recent run of good luck—it needed some, in view of what the past was like—is that a philosopher like Finkielkraut has been accompanied, abetted and often preceded by older journalists, commentators and historians who were forced to some of his conclusions by the weight of events. Furet never sat down to argue in a systematic way about nationalism and racism, but he had a knack for turning in the remark that opened the subject up. Talking about the noxious collaborator Lucien Rebatet, who managed to blame the Jews for their own deportation, Furet said that the right-wing ideologue has nationalism in order to legitimize racism. It is always useful to be reminded that if an ideology contains a prejudice, the prejudice is likely to have been there first, like the splinter in the fester, if not the speck of grit in the pearl.
Furet would have attracted far less opprobrium if he had stuck to criticizing the right. But his criticism of the left was too uncomfortable to bear. His most irritating device, from the viewpoint of progressive orthodoxy, was to pick out the big lies of the past that were still resonating in the present. Talking about the Stalinist terror in the late 1930s, Furet noted how Stalin made use of Hitler. Because Hitler was anti-Communist, Stalin was able to say that anybody else who was anti-Communist must be a fascist. He could intimidate his liberal adversaries " _en répandant le soupçon que l'antisoviétisme est L'antichambre du fascisme_ " (by spreading the suspicion that anti-Sovietism was the antechamber to fascism) ( _Le Passé d'une illusion_ , p. 266). Such a point from Furet put his _gauchiste_ contemporaries on the spot, because they were still using the same tactic, calling anyone who opposed left-wing orthodoxy an enemy of "democracy," a word they employed only as a decoy. They inherited the usage from Stalin. The Soviet Constitution of 1936 proclaimed the Soviet Union as the only true democracy. The proclamation was a musical prelude to the grinding of machinery, as the Great Terror was put into gear.
For Stalin, liberal democracy was always the chief enemy, with Nazism coming a distant second. Stalin never cared what crimes Hitler committed, as long as they were committed against the democracies. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was designed to keep the Soviet Union safe while Hitler wiped out the democracies in the west. Furet is particularly good (i.e., subversive) about the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945. The Soviets said nothing about what they had found there, and when they were finally obliged by British pressure to make an announcement in August, the Jews didn't get a mention. Stalin didn't think they mattered. It was a perfect example of how the two totalitarianisms were aspects of each other. Furet's most important book, the book about the passing of an illusion that still hasn't passed, is crammed from beginning to end with such unsettling perceptions. But making it even richer is his answer to your question of why anyone was ever fooled. He was. How? Not just because he was young and clueless, but because he cared so much about humanity that he couldn't believe that the destruction of innocent millions could be without a constructive result. Having grown older and learned better, he put his finger on the reason otherwise decent and compassionate thinkers could stick with a discredited ideology so long: their reluctance to accept that so much suffering could be wasted.
G
Charles de Gaulle
Edward Gibbon
Terry Gilliam
Josef Goebbels
Witold Gombrowicz
CHARLES DE GAULLE
As the single most dominant figure in twentieth-century France, Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) has inspired a whole library of commentary, much of it written by him. After absorbing William L. Shirer's classic _The Collapse of the Third Republic_ , the student of modern French politics, in order to follow everything that happened afterwards, could safely settle down to read nothing but books by, about, for and against _de Gaulle_. The argument about whether the so-called Man of Destiny was a despot or a guardian angel will never be over. But there can be no argument about his status in French literature. He was a prose stylist in the grand manner, with a force of argument that was held in respect even by his most bitter opponents. His four volumes of autobiography are all available in English. A beginner with French, however, could do worse than become acquainted with them, although he might get the impression that French is a language for and about demigods. All four volumes can be kept easily on the bathroom shelf in the neat little Pocket Presse boxed set from Plon. Jean Lacoutre's three-volume biography De Gaulle is likewise available in a boxed set. It makes a good story: misunderstood youthful genius, the proof of battle, the rebuffed redeemer, years in the wilderness, eventual triumph. The three volumes of the general's wartime speeches, _Discours de guerre_ , are likewise a compulsive study, although they should be sipped at rather than wolfed down: the reader doesn't want to end up talking in that style. Reading in that style is already grand enough. It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so. We can spend only so much time with the sculpted busts of Louis XIV and Napoleon before our own heads start to swell. In almost all his aspects, de Gaulle had a marmoreal momumentality. But he did have one vulnerable point, and it helped to keep him in touch with the ordinary human world.
A spirit has been set free. But the disappearance of our poor suffering infant, of our little daughter without hope, has done us an immense pain.
—CHARLES DE GAULLE, WRITING TO HIS DAUGHTER ELISABETH ABOUT THE DEATH OF HER SISTER ANNE; QUOTED BY JEAN LACOUTRE IN _D E GAULLE_, VOL. 2: LE POLITIQUE, P. 326
AFTER A LIFE OF misery, Anne de Gaulle, who had a severe case of Down's syndrome, died choking in her father's arms. She was twenty years old. At her funeral, de Gaulle is reputed to have said, "Now she is like the others." The awful beauty of that remark lies in how it hints at what he had so often felt. Wanting her to be like the normal children, the ones who couldn't help noticing that she was different, must have been the dearest wish of his private life. Knowing that the wish could never come true must have been his most intimate acquaintance with defeat. For us, who overhear the last gasp of a long agony, there is the additional poignancy of recognizing that the Man of Destiny lived every day with a heavenly dispensation he could not control. But to be faced from day to day with a quirk of fate not amenable to human will is sometimes the point of sanity for a man who lives by imposing his personality—the point of salvation, the redeeming weakness. Hitler's will power was sociopathic: his instinct, when faced with frailty, was to kill it. Stalin's will of iron came from a heart of ice: his response, when asked to consider what his son might be suffering in German hands, was to blame his son. Roosevelt and Churchill were both paragons of will power but they had great, living countries behind them. De Gaulle's country was dead. He had to resurrect it, providing an example of political confidence unmatched in the democratic politics of the twentieth century. (Undemocratic politics, alas, was staffed by a full range of would-be national leaders who had the same virtue of never giving up until their dreams came true; but when the dreams did, the virtue tended to be offset by what happened next.)
Establishing himself in London after the French defeat in 1940, de Gaulle had few resources beyond his prestige—he always said that prestige counted for more than anything—and his gift of persuasion. He drove Churchill to distraction and Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with him, but the antagonism he aroused in foreign leaders served his purpose as long as it helped to rally his countrymen. Once he had secured their allegiance, he extended his intransigence even to them. Intellectuals of the French left wing who had seen the Communist element in the Resistance as the precursor of a post-war socialist France were doomed to disappointment. So were the Algerian _pieds-noirs_ who expected, when he came back to power in 1958, that France would retain its sunlit colony. Having ruthlessly and correctly decided that Algeria had been kept only through weakness and that giving it away would be an act of strength, he gave it away. When the Secret Army tried to assassinate him, he never doubted that they were traitors to their country. _Je fais don de ma personne à la France_. Who did he think he was? This is my body, which is broken for you!
The presidential system he bequeathed to his successors had the flaw of placing more power in the hands of friends and favourites than of elected officials. The flaw showed up early, and the constitutional set-up of the Fifth Republic already looked like a well-tailored tyranny even during the reign of its founder. De Gaulle decided off his own bat to pull out of NATO in 1966: he told only three ministers, and consulted not even them. The French have a word for it: _égocratie_. Such an identification of man and nation would have been monstrous if it had been made only by the man, but the nation, on the whole, thought the same, including a large part of its liberal element, which had not been the case in the love affair between Hitler and Germany. When the French nation ceased to make the identification, the Man of Destiny fell from power. In 1968 he used television as a megaphone instead of an ear trumpet. It was a miscalculation, but it lay within his nature, and whether his ascendancy had ever amounted to more than a protracted constitutional crisis remains a moot point. What can't be disputed is his grandeur. Had he been a true megalomaniac, he would have been less impressive. Napoleon, owing allegiance to nothing beyond his own vision, was petty in the end, and the fate of France bothered him little. De Gaulle behaved as if the fate of France was his sole concern, but the secret of his incomparable capacity to act in that belief probably lay in a central humility. This might have been imposed by his awkward height, progenitor of the shyness that made him seem aloof. (Even in the communal bathhouse of his World War I prison camp, nobody ever saw his private parts—he must have been as dextrous with a skimpy towel as Sally Rand was with her fans.) A more likely answer, however, is that the touchstone of his humanity was his poor daughter. Nothing is more likely to civilize a powerful man than the presence in his house of an injured loved one his power can't help. Every night he comes home to a reminder that God is not mocked: a cure for invincibility.
EDWARD GIBBON
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) wrote a book that inadvertently raises the question of whether English prose style can be, or even should be, an end in itself. _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ encapsulates—in a very large capsule—his idea that history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind." The reader can decide whether it is or it isn't, and might very well decide that it is both. But about the style of the book, the question is not so clear-cut. Praised already at the time as one of the unchallengeable artistic creations of the eighteenth century, Gibbon's prose style was still held up as example in the nineteenth century even when Lord Macaulay became popular for writing history in a far more conversational manner. In the twentieth century, there were still historians who praised Gibbon's style as their true model. But in fact they all tried to write like Macaulay, and by now nobody could expect to echo the balanced Gibbonian period without being laughed at. Since much of the most substantial expository prose of modern times can be found in the writings of historians, it is perhaps worth looking in detail at the characteristic innovations within Gibbon's prose, and at least entertaining the possibility that the reason most of them did not catch on was that they did not deserve to. At a time when one of the dangers facing liberal democracy is a loss of confidence, there is an easy reflex by which it is assumed that the powers of expression of the English language are in decline. A possible, and desirable, contrary opinion would be that the worst writers do indeed write worse than ever, but that the best writers write better. If they do, one of the reasons they do is that they have learned from ancestors who had an ear for ordinary speech. But to call that a desirable object, we have to do something about Gibbon, whose desires were quite otherwise.
To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly.
—EDWARD GIBBON, _T HE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE_, P. 73
ONCE READ, IMPOSSIBLE to forget; and I have used this line ever since, but always in the sad knowledge that Gibbon provided very few like it. I expected him to. I came to him late, and spoiled: spoiled by Thucydides and Tacitus, by Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Pieter Geyl and Lewis Namier, by Mommsen and Gregorovius, by Napier's _History of the War in the Peninsula_ and Prescott's _Conquest of Peru_ , by Stephen Runciman's set of books about the Crusades and finally by—one of the great long historical reads in the world—Shelby Foote on the American Civil War. I expected Gibbon to provide me with a heap of those readily detachable judgements that all the serious historians seem able to generate at will as a qualification for their trade.
No such luck, alas; and after twenty years I am still getting to the end of Gibbon's long book—longer than its admirers admit, I think, because not as good as they claim. No doubt the quoted sentence translates itself from the eighteenth-century page to the twentieth-century mind with such ease because the modern condition is in it. Gibbon was talking about an empire that filled the known world, so that when a tyrant was in charge there was nowhere for the victim to run: and that was the kind of empire that Stalin, Hitler and Mao all brought into existence. Mao's version, indeed, though admittedly in attenuated form, is still here to distort the lives of more than a thousand million human beings. But the modern condition is in any pregnant sentence from any time: current possibilities are what a classic sentence is pregnant with. In Tacitus and Montesquieu there are few paragraphs without a sentence that seems written with us in mind, and few chapters without a paragraph. Sometimes there is a whole chapter: even in Tacitus, let alone Montesquieu, there are times when time collapses and the past seems very near. You would swear, when some vengeful emperor's proscription is raging in the _Annals_ of Tacitus, that you were reading the secret diary of the daughter of a Prussian landed family after the botched attempt against Hitler's life on July 20, 1944—the atmosphere of prying doom is so similar. One way or another, the modern age is always there in the best moments of the old historians: we can tell by the way the construction of the prose suddenly ceases to sound anachronistic, or even constructed.
Gibbon, unfortunately, seldom ceases to sound any other way. From him, this quoted sentence is rare first of all for its relatively natural cadence. Yes, it is consciously balanced around its caesura and makes us feel that it is: but no, it is not typical of him, because his usual classicism was neo-classical by way of the Baroque, and what he wrote rarely lets you forget that it has been written. Had he been an architect, his buildings would never have ceased to remind you that they had been built. He is one of the four master dwarves of the Rococo, but unlike the other three—Pope, Lichtenberg and Cuvilliés, the court architect of the Wittelsbachs—he can't make you forget his injuries, which dulled, instead of sharpening, his sense of proportion. Would his capital work have ever acquired its huge reputation if it had not been a harbinger of imperialist dominance, a proof that Britain could own, not just all the new worlds, but the ancient world as well? Now that the wave of history has retreated, the book is left looking like a beached whale. A more compact version could have been the written equivalent of Sir John Soane's Museum. Instead, Gibbon produced a hulking forecast of St. Pancras Station. But a shorter book, to seem so, would have needed less elaborate sentences: at their original length, even a single page of them is a long haul.
There are parts of Gibbon's autobiography to prove that a simple declarative sentence was not beyond him. In _The Decline and Fall of theRoman Empire_, for some reason, it was. Having chosen a tall theme, the small man got up on stilts, and stayed elevated for twenty years. Not the least of his heroism was that he could make a single page seem like an eternity. His secret was—we had better say is—to make you read so many of his sentences twice even while you think you are reading them only once. His aim might have been compression and economy, but the compression was a contortion and the economy was false. In a single sentence, two separated adjectival constructions often served the one noun, or two separated verbs the one object, or two separated adverbs the one verb, and so on through the whole range of parts of speech: it was a kind of compulsive chess move in which a knight was always positioned to govern two pieces, except that the two pieces governed it. Whether this conspicuous stroke of ingenuity ever really saved time is debatable, but when properly done it added the value of density, or at any rate seemed to. Take this observation about the two sons of Severus and Julia, the "vain youths" Caracalla and Geta: "Their aversion, confirmed by years, and fomented by the arts of their interested favourites, broke out in childish, and gradually in more serious, competitions . . ." (volume 1 of the Modern Library edition, p. 111). There is more to the sentence, but all we need note here is that "childish" and "more serious" both qualify "competitions"; and that there is no great hardship in following the train of thought, because we don't imagine that a noun to fit the adjective "childish" will fail to arrive eventually. Gibbon worked this forking manoeuvre over and over, but it was a dangerous habit, especially if the first adjectival construction could be mistaken for a noun. After Caracalla's oppressive tax had made a mess of Rome's finances, the "prudent liberality" with which Alexander restored them attracted Gibbon's admiration. But Alexander was still left with the problem of how to meet the expectations of the troops, and Gibbon with the problem of how to mirror Alexander's perplexity. Gibbon would no doubt have packed my previous sentence into a smaller space, but he might well have made it as awkward in its compactness as this one of his: "In the execution of his design the emperor affected to display his love, and to conceal his fear, of the army" (vol. 1, p. 133).
By now the danger needs no explaining, because you have just tripped over it. Until you read further, there is nothing to say that the first comma might not as well be a full stop; and the same applies to the second comma; so you must get all the way to the end before you read back again and make the proper sense of what you previously mistook. When you have been long enough with Gibbon you learn not to mistake it, and always wait for a re-reading before settling on what must be meant; but it is a tiresome necessity, and makes for the kind of stylistic difficulty which leads its admirers to admire themselves, for submitting to the punishment. There was never much to the assumption that a sentence is only ever read diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the eye doesn't work like that and neither does prose. But there is still something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should be intelligible by the time he does, and that if he is forced to begin again he has been hoodwinked into helping the writer do the writing. Readers of Gibbon don't just help: they join a chain gang, and the chain gang is in a salt mine, and the salt mine is reached after a long trip by galley, during which they are never excused the feel of the oar or the snap of the lash.
Gibbon was quite capable of working his favourite bipartite effect of pretended compression twice in a paragraph and sometimes three times. In one of his best early chapters of summary, chapter XVI (a.d. 180–318), he has a paragraph that begins very promisingly. "History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution" (vol. 1, p. 453). This is almost good enough to remind you that Montesquieu was alive at the same time, although by now the reader has recognized Gibbon's favourite stylistic device to be a nervous tic, and the tic has transferred itself from the writer's quill to the reader's face, so that he flinches while wondering if the word "future" should not have a comma after it too, in case "past," like "future," is not a noun but an adjective sharing the task of qualifying the noun "ages." I suppose that if Gibbon had meant that, he would not have put a "the" in front of "past," but it gets hard to give him the benefit of the doubt after you have realized that he was in the grip of mania. The proof is only a little way away in the same paragraph, where three sentences in a row are all lamed by the same hobble.
But the princes and magistrates of ancient Rome were strangers to those principles which inspired and authorised the inflexible obstinacy of the Christians in the cause of truth, nor could they themselves discover in their own breasts any motives which would have prompted them to refuse a legal, and as it were a natural, submission to the sacred institutions of their country. The same reason which contributes to alleviate the guilt, must have tended to abate the rigour, of their persecutions. As they were actuated, not by the furious zeal of the bigots, but by the temperate policy of legislators, contempt must often have relaxed, and humanity must frequently have suspended, the execution of those laws which they enacted against the humble and obscure followers of Christ.
When I first read this the name of our redeemer had already sprung to my lips before I saw it in print. In a way I am still reading it: years have gone by but the anguish in the brain has not abated. Gibbon has that deadly combination of talent and determination which can put jagged awkwardness into your head as if it were a melody, and keep it there as if it were a splinter of shrapnel.
Talented he was; a genuinely superior individual; but he wanted his readers to be optimates like him. He was continually testing them. Especially he tested their powers of memory. Quite often he expected them to remember the layout in detail of one sentence while they were reading the second. Take this for a first sentence. "Like the modesty affected by Augustus, the state maintained by Diocletian was a theatrical representation: but it must be confessed that, of the two comedies, the former was of a much more liberal and manly character than the latter" (vol. 1, p. 332). Got that? You will need to have done, because the next sentence depends on it. "It was the aim of the one to disguise, and the object of the other to display, the unbounded power which the emperors possessed over the Roman world." Just to make it feel like Groundhog Day, the second sentence has the familiar two-part forking routine as well; but in the long run the reader—who will either develop a more muscular attention span or, more likely, postpone into old age his commitment to what the counsellors call closure—is obliged to accept the memory test as an equally inescapable, if not equally frequent, event.
How did you do? You had to look back? But of course you did. Everyone has to, all the time, and it makes reading Gibbon a long business, which some of us never seem to quite finish. An expert will judge from my citations that I have got not much beyond a third of the way through. Actually, over the years, I have several times gone further: but I could do it only by ceasing to make notes, and for one of the few times in my reading life I have skipped and tasted, in the manner that the egregious twentieth-century British politician R. H. S. Crossman unwarrantably dignified with the name of "gutting." As well as the Modern Library edition, which is ugly but strong and therefore good for travel, I also own Bury's handsome but fragile seven-volume edition of 1902, and at home, in fits of fire-lit studiousness during a cold winter, I have sometimes dipped into the later volumes, hoping to find some uncluttered going, but always in vain. The one passage everyone quotes is indeed a standout, and that's just the trouble. "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation." Roguish Gibbonians assure us that the younger of the two Gordians has thus been impaled unforgettably on the skewer of satire. By Gibbon's usual standard it certainly counts as a moment of light relief, and indeed it isn't a bad gag even with its donnish dressing: you could just about say that the elevated diction multiplied the mirth. But even here, you need Quiz Kid retentiveness if you aren't to be driven back to the beginning of the sentence to sort out which was the former and which the latter. _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ is a Grand National with a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well as forwards; and you have to carry your horse. At one stage I skipped all the way to the end, and found the pages about Cola di Rienzo blessedly free of most of Gibbon's most irritating tricks. But not even Wagner can be fully boring about Rienzo, and in Gibbon the road to the final excitement is very long.
Is it worth the struggle? Yes, certainly. I still don't think Gibbon is the Virgil with whom to take your first journey into ancient history. If it takes multiple volumes to make the effort feel valuable, about Greece you can do well with Grote, and about Rome you can do very well with Mommsen. And there are single-volume histories that have served schools well for decades, through telling the story first, before getting down to the implications. In Gibbon the narrative would be hard to retain even if he wrote as fluently as Macaulay, and nowhere, not even in his autobiography, does Gibbon even look like doing that. (When you hear Macaulay's style belittled, guard your head: there is an owl in the room, and it is not Minerva's.) What Gibbon does give you is not ages past in summary, but his own age in one of its several cordials. He gives you contrivance. In him we can study the arrangement of prose pushed to its limit—not to the limit of prose, but to the limit of arrangement, where a trellis weighs like a bronze door. Though the intention might be the opposite, there is a risk of turning the permanent into the evanescent.
Gibbon had a knack for the permanent. It showed up when he was simple. The epithet "vain youths" is a token of what he could do: it was understatement, precisely calculated to sound that way, as a sign that the facts were too extreme to be evoked. After Probus imposed peace on the vanquished nations of Germany he used German troops to reinforce the legions throughout the empire, "judiciously observing that the aid which the republic derived from the barbarians should be felt but not seen" (vol. 1, p. 288). That is good, plain narrative, and this is better: "The feeble elegance of Italy and the internal provinces could no longer support the weight of arms." The two-word coupling "feeble elegance" is excellent: a thought compacted but not crippled, it encapsulates the theme for the chapter and indeed for the whole work, which is the story of an empire dying from the poisonous fermentation of the fruits of its initial success. That there is something feeble about Gibbon's own elegance is an idea his admirers would resist. I think there is: but I am in no doubt about the elegance, or at any rate about the initial fruits that lay behind it, before the mania of his stylistic ambitions began to waste them. A proof of the gift he began with is that he could often revert to it, so long as the occasion was sufficiently unimportant. His footnotes, for example, are almost always better than the main text. "With regard to the times when these Roman games were celebrated, Scaliger, Salmasius, and Cuper have given themselves a great deal of trouble to perplex a very clear subject" (vol. 1, p. 300). What a pity that the same was true of Gibbon. Not that he always had to take trouble: sometimes he could create confusion through ordinary carelessness. His otherwise exemplary tirade about the decline of Roman jurisprudence and the rising tide of lawyers (vol. 1, p. 536) is ruined by a sentence in which there is no sorting out the personal pronouns except by guesswork. "Careless of fame and of justice, they are described for the most part as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series of years, they were at length dismissed, when their patience and fortune were almost exhausted." Who, after the semicolon, is dismissed, and whose patience and fortune are exhausted? We will have to read it again.
We will always have to read it again, but sometimes the requirement is a blessing. "The same timid policy, of dividing whatever is united, of reducing whatever is eminent, of dreading every active power, and of expecting that the most feeble will prove the most obedient, seems to pervade the institutions of several princes, and particularly those of Constantine" (vol. 1, p. 540). If only he had written like that all the time. He scarcely ever did: a fact made more galling when we find out that he could. We want more than enjoyment from our historians; but it is hard to make do with less, and to find them tedious is no sure sign that they are thorough. There are eminent readers who say they wallow in Gibbon. They are hard to believe. When that old showman Harold Macmillan retired into his valetudinarian role as Lord Stockton he noised it quietly abroad that he was occupying his slippered hours with reading Gibbon "again." He got away with saying that. When Lady Thatcher let slip that her idea of cloistered intellectual satisfaction was a second reading of _The Day of the Jackal_ she attracted scornful laughter. John Major knew just how high to pitch his claims: in retirement he allowed it to be known that he was closeted with Trollope, whom he had always always loved, but could now read properly. Stockton sounds to me like the odd man out: i.e., the one who was dressing the set. It is fitting that a retired Tory prime minister should punish himself with hard reading, as a belated participation in the sufferings of the poor. But if we ever hear that the old man was propelled into slumber by every second Gibbonian period, I will be no more surprised than Gibbon was in that famous moment when a blind man felt his face and thought it was a baby's bottom. Gibbon was resigned to the absurdity of his appearance. His true absurdity, however, is that he tried to make up for it with the dignity of his style, and his style was never enough at its ease to be truly dignified. It could have been: but in the great work on which he staked his reputation it died from the strain of hauling on its own bootstraps.
TERRY GILLIAM
Born in Minnesota in 1940, Terry Gilliam, after pioneering his personal graphic style as a resident artist for Harvey Kurtzman's _Help_ magazine, reached international fame by way of Britain, where his visual inventiveness, based mainly on the silent wit of animated collage, was an important part of the _Monty Python_ television series. In his subsequent career as a film director he earned an unjustified reputation for extravagance when his _Adventures of Baron Munchausen_ left its budget behind and sailed off into the unknown. On the level of cold fact—always hard to regain once a myth has taken hold—he has proved, with several Hollywood projects including the extraordinary _Twelve Monkeys_ , that he knows exactly how to bring in a movie on time and on budget. These undeniable achievements availed him little, however, when his film of _Don Quixote_ had to be abandoned. A measure of his idiosyncratic creative energy is that even a documentary about that film's abandonment— _Lost in La Mancha_ —is required viewing. Really he doesn't fit the Hollywood frame at all, and needs his own country of which to be a representative writer-director, like Pedro Almodόvar or Lars von Trier. If he had been born in Montenegro instead of Minneapolis, today there would be an annual Gilliam Festival on the shore of Lake Scutari, although his tendency to giggle at a solemn moment might still queer his pitch. Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with Brazil (1985), one of the key political films of the late twentieth century. There is an excellent interview book, _Gilliam on Gilliam_. It takes some effort to see past his laughing façade to the troubled man within. His best work depends on an audience that can do so, which will always be in short supply.
No no no no no no no no. . . .
—TERRY GILLIAM, _B RAZIL_
THE TEXT MEANS exactly what it says, but it needs a lot of decoding. A meek, distinctly non-glamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what the victim is saying in the torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate of his bland niceness. This is the _ne plus ultra_ of torture as an everyday activity. Still revealing its subtleties after a third viewing or a fourth, _Brazil_ is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized image which belongs to Gilliam alone. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film's many disturbing themes. The suggestion seems to be that a torturer, except for what he does, need be no more sinister than your doctor. That's the picture we take away. But how true is the picture?
In modern history, which is most of the history that has ever been properly written down at the time, there is plenty of evidence that the torturers are people who actually enjoy hurting people. What was true in medieval Munich was true again in the cellars of the Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, and what was true under Ivan the Terrible was true again in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. The frightening thing is that any regime dedicated to ruling by terror so easily finds a sufficient supply of lethal myrmidons, and even Americans, on those occasions when they bizarrely conclude that the third degree might expedite their policies instead of hindering them, never suffer from a shortage of volunteers: at Abu Ghraib, the dingbats were lining up to display their previously neglected talents. On the whole, the man in charge is not a sadist himself, presumably because it would be a diversion of his organizational effectiveness if he were. Beria obviously enjoyed conducting the occasional interrogation personally, but Himmler would have fainted dead away, as he did on his sole visit to a massacre. Ceau escu gave his dreadful son a torture chamber for his birthday. No doubt daddy knew what went on in it: but again, regular attendance at the frightfulness he encouraged is not known to have been among his pleasures. The same was true for General Pinochet. His critics, still trying to convince us that he was a homicidal mediocrity despite all the evidence that he was nothing else, write about him as if the dogs that were trained to rape women were trained by him. He probably never saw it happen. He didn't need to. All he had to know was that the state commanded unspeakable powers of savagery.
In his huge and definitive political biography of Juan Peron, the esteemed Argentinian historian Felix Luna gives us a once-and-for-all illustration of how the author of a state that rules by terror can detach himself from the brute facts. First, Luna chillingly describes the actuality that festered at the base of the Peronist dictatorship. (The description starts on page 253, but a preliminary stiff drink is recommended.) Luna takes the view, which to us might seem quixotic, that the torturers were just doing their job. He calls them _tecnicos_ , and certainly they were technicians of the _picana_ , the electric torture which was invented in Argentina, and was therefore one of Peron's gifts to the world, along with a good role for a soprano in _Evita_. Luna describes the subtleties of the technique, which on the torturers' part did indeed require a certain lack of passion if the victim was to survive for long. If Luna gets you wondering how he knew so much about it, your questions are answered a few pages later, where he records a conversation he had with Peron in 1969. "But in your time," said Luna, "people were tortured." Peron said: "Who was tortured?" Luna said: "Plenty of people. Me, for example." Peron said: "When?" We are at liberty, I think, to marvel at the detachment of an historian who could confine to a few pages out of a thousand a personal experience that might have left him incapable of being detached about anything ever again.
Luna had been a victim of torture sanctioned by the state: a legitimization that adds outrage to injury. Weber actually defined the state as the entity holding a monopoly of legalized violence. But the terror state goes beyond that. The terror state aims to command a monopoly of legalized horror. As long as its hierarchs can safely assume to be in charge of that horror, they don't have to see it to enjoy its fruits. Saddam Hussein was regarded as a madman even among other tyrants for his habit of specifying the details of punishment. Hitler seldom did. He just let the sadists get on with it, and he might even have been proud of being so powerful that he didn't need to know the minutiae of what was going on in the Gestapo cellars in the major cities, and in the political block at Dachau. It is doubtful if, in his mind, he ever reached the point where he enjoyed the idea of inflicting pain for its own sake. Mad enough to think himself sane, he was under the impression that the sufferings he sanctioned had their justification as condign punishment. In 1937, when a child molester was convicted in the courts and given a long sentence, Hitler personally intervened to ensure that the prisoner would be tortured first, but that was a rare instance. It is known that he watched films of the July conspirators strangling in their wire nooses, but he seems to have taken his satisfaction from the spectacle of a just punishment being inflicted, rather than from the hideous pictures of a slow agony. To do his colleagues what little credit they have coming, Hitler watched the films pretty much on his own. It was Goebbels's idea to have the conspirators hanged, but for once he didn't turn up for a screening.
With due allowance for Luna's emphasis on their clinical indifference, the maniacs who do the work seem mainly to come from the unfortunately plentiful supply of those who do enjoy inflicting pain for its own sake. "In what pubs are they welcome?" Auden asked rhetorically. "What girls marry them?" It is a nice question how large the supply would be if circumstances did not create it. Alas, the circumstances seem often to be there. Many of the Nazi torturers enjoyed their omnipotence on the strict understanding that without their place in the regime they would have been nothing: hence the tendency to go on tormenting their prisoners even after Himmler called a halt. They faced going back to where they started, which was nowhere.
Similarly, in the Soviet Union, the security "organs," under whatever set of initials they flaunted at the time, were always, at the brute force level, staffed by otherwise unemployable dimwits. The opportunity to inflict torment gives absolute power to the otherwise powerless, and must be a heady compensation for those with a history of being the family dolt. The Japanese army of the twentieth century was based on the Prussian model of strict discipline. Combined with the traditional violent streak of the samurai culture, in which an accredited warrior could decapitate any peasant who failed to bow at the correct angle, the bushido version of Prussian browbeating produced a fatal cocktail. Among the enlisted men, every rank could hit the rank below in the face until finally the wave of intimidation got as far as the lowest rank, whose members had nobody to hit except prisoners and civilians. The unsurprising result was a daily nightmare for POWs and for those Asian people that the Japanese imperial forces had supposedly come to liberate from European colonialism. The details are still hard to credit, and people of a squeamish temperament would prefer to believe that reports were exaggerated. Such a belief continues to be encouraged by the Japanese educational system. Japan's post-war ministry of education was eager to soft-pedal the bad memories, mainly because it was a bolt hole for high-level perpetrators who had escaped being prosecuted. As a sinecure for the judiciously silent, the education ministry made sure that the next generation learned nothing from the school textbooks about what the army had done to disgrace itself. German school textbooks were already talking about the Nazi disaster by the mid-1950s. In the late 1980s, when I was spending a lot of time in Japan, the one and only author of a school history text who had attempted to mention the 1937 Nanking incident (in which something like a quarter of a million innocent people perished, many of them in hideous circumstances) was in peril of his life, and his book had still not left the warehouse. The situation is better today—mainly because NHK, the Japanese public-service television network, was brave enough to grasp the nettle—but the Japanese right wing still regards any mention of those old embarrassments as a provocation.
In the Italian transit camp of Fossoli during the Republic of Salo (the last stage of Mussolini's Fascist regime, with the fanatics well in charge), there was a female officer who indulged herself in the Dantesque experiment of packing a cell with victims and keeping them without nourishment of any kind until they ate each other. Many of her victims were women. She seems to have had a social problem: she was cutting prettier, wealthier women down to size. In Latin America, the torturers were all men, but even the qualified medical practitioners among them seem to have been motivated by a similar urge to assure their victims that the boot was now on the other foot. On the disheartening subject of how sadism and sexuality might be connected, Argentina has the dubious privilege of having produced a key document. In a short story called " _Simetrias_ "—a creative work which unfortunately has ample documentation in fact—Luisa Valenzuela tells us how some of the male torturers would take out their victims for an evening in a café or a nightclub. The wounds caused by the electrodes would be covered with makeup. (The story appears in _Cuentos de historia argentina_ , a collection published in Buenos Aires in 1998.) In Brazil after that country's nightmare was over—it took place roughly at the same time as Argentina's—a book came out called _Cale a boca, jornalista_! (Shut Your Mouth, Journalist!) (São Paulo, 1987). The book enshrines the testimony of journalists who had the sad privilege of seeing the big story from close range: too close. Survivors recall being woken up in the middle of the night by the cold barrel of a .45 automatic applied to the nose, as a preliminary to a long encounter with the electrodes. There were journalists who never came back to say anything. Unsurprisingly, silence soon reigned.
In the years since the silence broke, documentation has piled up. Too many of the most terrifying pages reveal that the torments were an end in themselves. Torture, especially when the victim was a woman, went on far beyond any use it might have had as a means of extracting information, and even beyond what was needed to create a universal atmosphere of abject terror. Films like _Kiss of the Spider Woman_ and _Death and the Maiden_ have done their best to face what happened in Latin America, but finally, if we can bear to look at what is happening on screen, we have been spared the worst. The general picture in Latin America squared up badly with the picture of torture evoked in an impeccably realistic film like Gillo Pontecorvo's _The Battle of Algiers_ , in which the decent young paratroopers did not really want to be doing that kind of thing. (Alain Resnais's _Muriel_ , without showing the horrors, made the same point by implication.) In Latin America the torturers did want to be doing that kind of thing. Which brings us back to Brazil, and hence to _Brazil_. Were they ever the same place?
In the film called _Brazil_ , Michael Palin is the torturer as the civil servant who might conceivably have been doing something else, such as selling life insurance. In the country called Brazil, the same role was usually played by a psychopath. (The key document proving this is Brasil: _Nunca mais_ —Brazil: Never Again—published in São Paulo in 1985. By the time I bought my copy in 1988, it had gone through twenty printings.) We know from the fascinating long interview published as _Gilliam on Gilliam_ that the Palin character in the movie was slow to take shape. The first three drafts of the script were written by Tom Stoppard. Finally Stoppard and Gilliam parted company because of disagreements over some of the characters. One of the characters in question was the torturer. The way Stoppard wrote the part, Michael Palin would have had the opportunity to play against type: he would have embodied evil. Palin is a very accomplished actor and could undoubtedly have done it. But Gilliam insisted on Palin's full, natural, non-acting measure of bland benevolence: the same set of teeth, but they would be bared only to charitable effect. On the set, Gilliam gave Palin mechanical things to do while acting—eat, for example—so that Palin would be distracted from developing any nuances on top of his natural projection as Mr. Nice Guy. It is a moot point which of them was right, Stoppard or Gilliam. In the long run, the Banality of Evil interpretation of human frightfulness is not quite as useful as it looks. It helps us appreciate the desirability of not placing ourselves in a position where the rule of justice depends on natural human goodness, which might prove to be in short supply. But it tends to shield us from the intractable facts about human propensities.
White settlers of America were horrified to discover that the Apaches would torture their prisoners slowly to death on the assumption that the captor would gain spiritual stature as the captive lost it. The student would prefer not to think that a primitive people was thus showing us what was once universally true, and came from instinct. It would help if mankind were the only animal that tortured its prey: we could persuade ourselves that only a social history could produce such an aberration. Unfortunately, cats torment mice until the mouse turns cold, and killer whales play half an hour of water polo with a baby seal before they finally put it out of its misery by eating it. We can do better than the cats and the killer whales, but it might be a help to admit that the same propensity is widespread, and could even be there within ourselves. In that respect, the film _Three Kings_ was a rare feat for the American cinema. Educated in a hard school of bombed refugee camps, the Arab torturer was trying to show his clueless American victim what it felt like to be helpless. It is possible that all torturers are attempting to teach their own version of the same lesson. But in that case we are bound to consider the further possibility that anyone might be a torturer. The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces. Certainly this was true of Pol Pot's Cambodia.
If, as seems likely, Pol Pot would never have come to power had not the U.S. Air Force first devastated Cambodia, then Henry Kissinger has a lot more than the disaster in Chile on his conscience. He has the disaster of the Khmer Rouge torture camps. Of 17,000 people who were interrogated in the S-21 camp in Phnom Penh, 16,994 died in agony. The half dozen people who survived were questioned again, by journalists, but they had been too badly injured to say much. The writing on the wall probably says all that we need to hear. "While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all," said Security Regulation No. 6. The other regulations were no less terrifying, but there is something unique about Regulation 6, as if Swift and Kafka had both had their brains picked by a lethal child. There was a variation on the same instruction: "During the bastinado or the electrification you must not cry loudly." But "not cry loudly" leaves room to cry softly, whereas "not cry at all" has the perfect lack of logic which reminds us, as we will always need reminding, that the Khmer Rouge torturers were not an example of a system of thought decayed into a perversion: they were pre-thought, and thus had a kind of childish purity.
Another Khmer Rouge regulation is almost charming: "Don't try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me." The charm is in the waste of effort: the prisoner can give only one answer, so why didn't the interrogator just write it down and sign it with a mark, especially since the prisoner's eventual signature wouldn't make much sense anyway? Unfortunately for our hopes of innate human goodness, all the evidence suggests that the torturers were keen to get on with the job even if it was meaningless. All the evidence was still there afterwards, including photographs taken at every stage of the torment. Whether the Khmer Rouge torturers were psychopaths is a question for psychiatrists. The question for general students of human affairs is about the reputation of the Khmer Rouge in the West. Their own mad frenzy did not last long, but while it lasted there were sophisticated Western apologists who made some marvellous pretexts this and that. It was notable, however, that in this one case the apologetics had no staying power. One of the first Western publications to blow the whistle was _The New York Review of Books_ , which could normally be depended on to suspend judgement as long as possible in such cases. Access made the difference. If we had known as little about what went on in the Killing Fields as we knew about, say, North Korea, the example of Pol Pot's Cambodia ("Hands off democratic Kampuchea!") might have rallied the West's faithful dupes a lot longer. But the story got out straight away, mainly because a pack of adolescents were in charge. Adults are cannier.
Back in the late 1950s, on the sleeve of the _Beyond the Fringe_ record album, Jonathan Miller made a dark joke about his worst fear: being tortured for information he did not possess. The assumption behind the joke was that if he had something to reveal, the agony would stop. He was looking back to a world of polite British fiction, not to a world of brute European fact. In the Nazi and Soviet cellars and camps, people were regularly tortured for information they did not possess: i.e., they were tortured just for the hell of it. Kafka guessed it would happen, as he guessed everything that would happen. In his _Strafkolonie_ , the tormented prisoner has to work out for himself what crime he has committed, and is finally told that it is being written on his body by the instrument of torture into which he has been inescapably locked. Kafka was there first, but he wasn't alone for long, and now we must all live in a modern world where the words "No no no no no no no no" can be recorded with perfect fidelity for their sound, yet go unheeded for what they mean.
JOSEF GOEBBELS
Josef Goebbels (1897–1945) began as a professional student (he was enrolled at eight different universities) and would-be literary figure. He ended as a corpse in the Reich Chancellery, having achieved, in the interim, the distinction of being minister of public enlightenment and propaganda in the Nazi government, and a ranking second only to Goering's among those closest to Hitler. During the war, after Goering's prestige waned, Goebbels moved up to the vacant second spot, and was effectively in charge of the country in the final period when its most terrible crimes were being carried out: the idea that Himmler acted without Goebbels's knowledge does not bear examination. A crippled schizophrenic, Goebbels was easy to make fun of at the time by those safely out of his reach. Now that we all are, we should perhaps try to remember that as a young man he was interested in the arts, loved the movies, saw the power of advertising, studied the techniques of publicity, and favoured the idea of politics as a spectacular drama. A lot of what we think normal now, he thought of first: so we need to be very sure that we have a different slant on it. Even his anti-Semitism began as an intellectual pose: he took it up while he was on a scholarship.
Since Stalingrad, even the smallest military success has been denied us. On the other hand, our political chances have hugely increased, as you know.
—JOSEF GOEBBELS, QUOTED IN HIS OFFICE ON JANUARY 25, 1944, BY WILFRED VON OVEN IN _M IT GOEBBELS BIS ZUM ENDE_, VOL. 1, P. 178
AMONG THE NAZIS who got away to Argentina after the war was the future author of what would be the world's funniest book, if it did not take your breath away so thoroughly that laughter is impossible. After a notable beginning as a war correspondent reporting Nazi victories in Poland, the West, the Balkans and in Russia, Wilfred von Oven spent the late part of the war as press secretary, personal assistant and tireless sounding board for Goebbels. At the Propaganda Ministry in Berlin, Goebbels would think aloud by the hour while von Oven wrote it all down. Von Oven was on the spot when Goebbels microfilmed his personal diaries and made them safe for posterity.
But the papers in von Oven's own keeping were even more precious. In Argentina von Oven typed up his reminiscences as if they constituted a world historical document, which indeed they did, and still do. They were published in two volumes by Dürer-Verlag in Buenos Aires in 1949. My set dates from 1950, when the work achieved a second printing. (They had an awful lot of coffee in Brazil, and they had an awful lot of Nazis in Argentina.) I bought the set second-hand in that same city fifty years later. The twin volumes were in good shape: bound in yellow cardboard with orange cloth spines, they had never sprung their hinges, and the paper, though of low quality, had not yet begun to crumble. I took my find to my favourite café in San Telmo, sat down to read, and almost instantly realized that I was in the presence of an unrivalled comic masterpiece. In Mel Brooks's _The Producers_ , the berserk playwright in the helmet admires Hitler as one psycho admires another. But von Oven is funnier than that. He thinks Goebbels is the soul of reason, a great intellectual, a philosophical and creative genius whose visions are frustrated only by unfortunate circumstances. Making it even funnier is that van Oven himself shows few signs of being exceptionally stupid. Like his boss, he was able and industrious. He didn't miss a trick. All he missed was the point.
If we ever doubted that Goebbels did the same, the evidence is here. Goering knew that the game was up when the first P-51 Mustang long-range escort fighter appeared over Berlin. Even Himmler started looking for a way out. But Goebbels kept the faith. Though finally it got to the point where not even he could keep his faith in victory, he still kept his faith in Hitler. Even as it became clear that the insurmountable obstacle to any political solution was the existence of Hitler himself, it never occurred to Goebbels that his loyalty to Hitler could be abandoned. After the attempted coup of July 20, 1944, it was suggested to Goebbels that the cause might still be saved if Hitler could be sidelined in favour of a Goebbels-Himmler duumvirate. Though Goebbels held Himmler in high respect ("immaculate," "a paragon of character"—vol. 2, p. 301) he could see no choice: he was for Hitler, even if it meant that Germany and Hitler would go down together. As the end neared, the only reproach Goebbels made against Hitler was that the Führer had not been sufficiently true to himself, having allowed himself to be surrounded by a gang of opportunists, time-servers and mediocrities. There was certainly some truth in that. Goebbels had good reason to think of himself as the genuine Nazi article. The comedy lies in his unintentional revelation of what being a genuine Nazi entailed. One thing it entailed was a huge, incapacitating overestimation of the world's tolerance for Nazi policies of territorial aggression and mass murder. Goebbels was right to believe that Stalin threatened civilization in the West with a similar disaster. But he was wrong to believe that the Western allies, when they realized this, would see Nazi Germany as a bastion against the threat. He couldn't let it occur to him that the unlikely global alliance against Nazi Germany was held together by the existence of Nazi Germany itself, and would be maintained until Nazi Germany was gone. For him it was a thought too simple to be grasped. He was too clever for that.
Goebbels's cleverness was diabolical. Faithfully transcribing the master propagandist's torrential paroxysms of inspiration, von Oven was right to be awed. The man who invented Horst Wessel (a Nazi thug beaten to death by Communists, Horst Wessel was turned by the creative staff in Goebbels's office into the hero of a song) never ran out of ideas. But the diabolical cleverness all served a self-deception. In September 1944 we find the Minister (von Oven always calls Goebbels the Minister or the Doctor) favouring his assistant with a long tirade about how the situation could be saved if only he, instead of Ribbentrop, were in charge of foreign policy. "I would work in both directions," Goebbels explains. "The English way of thinking is congenial to me. I could bring into play my good and friendly connections with many important Englishmen. But I would also start talking to the Bolsheviks. It is not for nothing that I count as the representative of our party's left wing. What possibilities! What visions!" _Der Minister seufzt und lehnt sich in seinen Sessel zurück_ (vol. 2, p. 145). The Minister sighed and leaned back in his chair.
Once again, what makes it funny is that there was something to it: just not enough. Before the war, Goebbels had indeed charmed the pants off many of the visiting Englishmen: he had long heart-to-hearts with the Duke of Windsor, Sir John Simon and Lord Halifax. Even Beaverbrook, later tiresomely active on Churchill's behalf, had seemed to understand Germany's sacred mission against Bolshevism. But Goebbels could never grasp that everything was transformed from the moment Churchill took office. The accommodating opinions of all these influential people either had ceased to matter or had changed, so that now, while they might all have been variously influential, they were united in having no power to favour Germany even if they had wanted to. Predictably, Goebbels's interpretation of this otherwise unaccountable turn-up for the books was that a small, Jewish-inspired clique had taken over.
On the question of the Jews, von Oven does his best to employ the soft pedal on the Minister's behalf. Even in post-war Argentina, where Nazi refugees could voice their old opinions virtually unchecked, it was thought prudent to go easy on the mania. But a true mania has a way of seeping through any amount of reasoned argument, and so it proves here. Though von Oven's post-war preface to the complete work assures us that he had never known anything about gas chambers or exterminations, in the body of the transcript the guileless amanuensis can't hide even his own real opinions, so his master's are bound to come out eventually. On October 3, 1943, von Oven delivers himself of the prediction that some of the Nazi hierarchs will soon start looking for alibis: "they will manufacture a connection with some resistance group, or they will pretend that they helped some Jew ( _etwa einen Juden_ ) escape from Germany." Now why should some Jew have wanted to do that? In volume 2 von Oven lets the Minister, in his role as Doctor of all the arts, rave on for three solid pages about the slyness with which the Jews pulled off the confidence trick called Modern Art, but von Oven is still careful to confine the discussion to aesthetic matters. On a later page, however, both he and the Minister stand revealed as fully aware of what has been going on. Goebbels "wonders" if Himmler, fine fellow though he is, might not have let the concentration camps (in German, _Konzentrationslager_ , or KZ) get a little bit out of hand. Previously, says the Minister, one was able to assume that the conditions in the KZs, "though they might have been hard, were correct and humane. Hard work, strict discipline, but everything that a man should have: adequate food, medical care, even some entertainment." The Minister goes on to lament, however, that under wartime conditions the KZs might have become a touch less entertaining than they used to be. "Just imagine how it would look if the camps in their present condition are discovered by the enemy!" In that case, predicts the Minister, even the German people will say no more about the blessings that Germany has enjoyed since 1933: blessings which have ensured that even during the war there has been "no unrest, no strikes, no uprisings, no rowdies, no Jews. . . ." At which point, there is no more game to give away.
There is a kind of poetry to it: the poetry of evil, a destructive lunacy so fluent that it soars to the level of the creative, as if Mephistopheles, as well as appearing in _Faust_ , had actually written it. Compared with Goebbels, Hitler himself was earthbound. With the aid of Albert Speer, Hitler conjured gargantuan visionary cities to be made real in brick and marble, but he would never have thought of a concentration camp that provided entertainment along with the adequate food. Goebbels really was some kind of artist, which is why he should interest us: even more than Speer, Goebbels was the Nazi who talked the talk of an intellectual. As for the way he walked the walk, in von Oven's masterpiece the Minister's bad foot goes largely unremarked. As we can tell from Goebbels's diaries, it never went unremarked in the mind of the man on whom a cruel trick of birth had inflicted it. Byron's bad foot, we are told, did not make him limp: but he might have felt as if it did. Goebbels's bad foot never let him feel any other way. Only one thing could make him forget it. His measure of a suitably passionate mistress was how she could liberate him from that dreadful awareness. "I forgot my foot." Goebbels, though always a family man, awarded himself an artist's privileges with women, and his position of power ensured that he did not have to restrict himself to the demimonde—where, indeed, he got so involved with an actress that Hitler had to call a halt to the affair.
Things could be more discreetly managed among the upper orders, with the usual proviso that too much discretion tended to stifle the action. During an official visit to Nuremberg, the Minister drove out to the countryside to take lunch with the Gräfin Faber-Castell, an accomplished, gracious twenty-six-year-old beauty who clad herself in a dirndl for the occasion. After the war the Faber-Castell firm was still making most of the pencils produced in Germany; in Australia as a schoolboy I had a whole box of them in various grades, and very fine pencils they were. (In Solzhenitsyn's long narrative poem _Prussian Nights_ , the invading Russian soldiers marvel at the perfection of the Faber-Castell pencils: the very kind of reaction to Western goods that Stalin was afraid of, and obviated retroactively by purging his victorious army, nicely calculating how long a stretch in the Gulag it would take to forget a centrally heated house or a flush toilet that worked.) As pioneering participants in the post-war _Wirtschaftswunder_ (economic miracle), the Faber-Castell dynasty saw no reason to change the firm's name, and indeed they hadn't done anything. They had just made pencils; and made Goebbels welcome. After lunch, there was a cultural interlude. When the Gräfin played and sang _Lieder_ , her illustrious visitor joined her at the piano for a four-handed, two-voiced recital. If not a passionate physical relationship, it was certainly a passionate spiritual one. She was his upper-class muse and point of solace: the same supporting role that was played for Goethe by Anna Amalia Herzogin von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, a parallel that Goebbels would have been well equipped to draw. The Gräfin Faber-Castell's exalted name crops up repeatedly as the end approaches. It was already approaching on the day of that cosy little combined lunch and _Lieder_ concert. It was June 6, 1944.
After D-day Goebbels gave up smoking, probably because he was on a psychological high. He really did think, or said he thought, that the chances of working a political master stroke were going up as the military situation deteriorated. By July 1, however, he was smoking again. We have to admit the possibility that his mind was working at two levels. He was the pre-eminent Nazi advocate of Total War (he was surely right that if he had been allowed to institute it earlier, Germany would have done better) but he was also a realist; although we should always remember that he was a realist in a surreal world, the madhouse he had helped to create. There was a significant development on June 11, 1944: von Oven's help was required in a comprehensive reordering of the Doctor's personal library. All the standard party literature was thrown out and the remaining books were arranged purely according to literary standards ( _nach literarisches Masstaben_ ). There is something touching about that. Goebbels wasn't getting out of the Nazi party. He thought that the Nazi party would be eternal, even if it were reduced to two members, him and Hitler. But he seems to have decided that all this ideological junk had nothing to do with the real thing. He might have also been trying to get back to his essential, untainted self, all unaware—or perhaps only almost unaware—that the taint was his essential self. Nevertheless there had been a day when, as a young student, he had it all before him. It was a day when he had respected his Jewish professors, saw a literary future for himself, and had not taken the Nazis seriously. A day before he met Hitler. Perhaps now, with the roof falling in, he hankered for the lost past, at a level he could not examine. But the reordering of his books did the examining for him. A man's relationship with his books tells you a lot about him, and in the case of a man like Goebbels we should pay close attention, because a crucial early choice he made was one that continually faces any of us who read at all. He chose a life of action, and his life would have been different if he had not. It could be said that the lives of millions of innocent people would have been different too, but there we should be equally alert to the danger of optimism. The only thing different might have been that he would have had a job like von Oven's. He might have been merely reporting on the insanity instead of helping to create it, but the insanity would still have been there. Hitler wouldn't have needed to find someone else. Someone else would have found him. When absolute power is on offer, talent fights to get in.
The Nazis had no tragedies: they caused tragedies for other people. In tragedy there must be a fall from high degree, or at least from the level of common humanity: and the Nazis had nothing to fall from. The tower they built was subterranean. But we can sympathize with their children. Near the end of the second volume Frau Goebbels speaks; and when she speaks, laughter dies. It is the April 22, 1945, and the Russians are already in the U-bahn tunnels under Berlin. She tells von Oven that she and her husband have already said goodbye to life. They had lived for Nazi Germany and would die with it. "But what I can't wish away is the destiny of the children. Certainly my reason tells me that I can't leave them to a future in which they, as our children, will be defenceless before the Jewish revenge. But when I see them play around our feet, I just can't reconcile myself to the idea of killing them."
When the time came, she managed it. It probably never dawned on her that her innocent children were following at least one and a half million other innocent children into the same poisoned oblivion, and for the same reason—no reason. (Once again, incidentally, von Oven forgets to explain why the Jews should have wanted revenge. Had something bad happened?) In all the literature about the Nazis, there is nothing quite like _Mit Goebbels bis zum Ende_ to tell you that the whole vast historical disaster was a figment of the imagination. If only we could return the dead to life and the tortured to health, we would be able to see it as a comic extravaganza. Goebbels was the limping, shrieking embodiment of the whole thing. He was not a fool. In many respects he was very clever. He even had creative powers. But his creative powers were all at the service of Hitler's destructive powers. So everything the most eloquent of the Nazis said was a joke. If the joke had all happened within his study—if the Doctor had remained what he was, a dreaming student walled in by books—the laughter would never end, and we might even sympathize. The way things turned out, the most we can do is try to understand. As for Wilfred von Oven, his long post-war career provided evidence that a Nazi past could count as a sort of qualification if you could hang in long enough. In Argentina he was prominent in the circle around Hitler's favourite Stuka pilot Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the bunch who always knew where Eichmann was. Having never been deprived of his German citizenship, von Oven went back to Europe as often as he liked, and as late as 1998 he was loudly active in Belgium with an outfit dedicated to winning back separate nationhood for the Walloons. For his fellow agitators, his curriculum vitae, going all the way back to service with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, was a powerful indicator that he knew what he was talking about. And on top of all that, he had known Goebbels personally!
WITOLD GOMBROWICZ
In Poland between the wars, Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969) became a successful writer of a recognizable type, principally because of his surrealist novel _Ferdyduke_ (1938). After he went into exile in Argentina, however, he gradually transmuted into a type of writer that we are only now starting to recognize: the writer who doesn't write in established forms, but just writes, and who, not belonging anywhere, makes everywhere belong to him. When Poland ceased to suffer under the Nazis, Gombrowicz declined the opportunity to go home and see it suffer under the Communists. In the many volumes of his _Journal, Varia_ , correspondence and memoirs (all available in French, but only some, alas, in English) he worked out a position by which he himself was Poland, and the detailed description of his flight from artistic form was the only art-form to which he felt responsible. On this latter point he differed from his fellow Polish-speaking exile Czeslaw Milosz, who practised all the literary art-forms as if they were one. In his long final phase, Gombrowicz practised none of them, and wrote about how he didn't. But the way he wrote, in a prose teeming with observed detail and subversive perceptions, was a continual fascination, and went on being so after his death: volumes of his casual-seeming writings continued to appear, and his widow, Rita, became the curator of his reputation as it rose inexorably to fame. At his death he was called "the most unknown of all celebrated writers." Two decades later, in the year that the Berlin Wall came down, the first uncensored edition of his complete writings finally appeared in Poland. His country had come home to its most obdurate world citizen.
I find that any self-respecting artist must be, and in more than one sense of the term, an émigré.
—WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, _V ARIA_, VOL. 1, P. 203
"EVERYONE," SAID DR. JOHNSON, "has a lurking wish to appear considerable in his native place." If he had been blessed with clairvoyance, he might have added: "Everyone except Witold Gombrowicz." Having spent most of his writing life in exile, Gombrowicz was under some compulsion to judge the experience vital to his cast of mind: but he seems not to have been faking. He might possibly have gone back to Communist Poland if its literary authorities had not been so stupid as to attack him before he got there instead of afterwards. In his _Journal Paris-Berlin_ we find him merely nervous about going back. He is not yet refusing to. But things worked out as they always did, with one of Poland's most talented writers confirmed in his course of having as little as possible to do with Poland and its immediate concerns. It seems fair to say that he liked it better that way. He wasn't just making the best of a bad job. Over the course of a writing life spent far from home, he took the opportunity to examine just how closely a national writer must be connected to his nation. In _Journal_ I he asked: is the life of an exile _really_ more fragmentary? In _Journal_ II he said that the more you are yourself, the more you will express your nationality—with the implication that it was easier to express it if you were free of nationalist pressures. In Nazi Germany, he had noticed, the citizens had become _less_ typically German, less authentic. (It should be said that in the writings of Gombrowicz the frequently employed word "authentic" has an authenticity that it never has in the context of Sartre's existentialism, where it essentially means having the chutzpah to do what it takes so that you may suit yourself—not quite the same thing as being true to yourself.) In _Journal_ II Gombrowicz said: "I want to be only Gombrowicz": i.e., a country all by himself. He could see the attendant danger: " _mon moi gonfle_ "—my self inflates. "Because the trivial concerns oneself, one fails to see it might be boring." But in the end, he said in _Testament_ , to lose one's country is a release. In Empson's famous poem, the companion piece to the line "It seemed the best thing to be up and go" is "The heart of standing is you cannot fly." If Gombrowicz had not been able to fly, he would probably have ended up dead. But it is not impossible, just difficult, to imagine him choosing a quiet life from the start, and writing his diary in secret. It is impossible, however, to imagine him not leaving home if given the choice. The idea he spent his life refining—that art was its own kingdom—was an idea that he was born with.
Nobody got closer than Gombrowicz to making the idea of the "world citizen" seem exalted, the ideal condition that we should all seek, the only way that a mind can come home. But it is important to remember that he had only _lost_ his country: he never forgot it. Poland is one of his constant themes—more so than Argentina, his land of exile—and he continually defines himself in relation to it. "I want to be only Gombrowicz" is transmuted into various versions of "I am Poland": pretty much the way de Gaulle felt about France, Stravinsky about Russia or Thomas Mann about Germany. The surest guarantee of Gombrowicz's deep feelings about his country is that he went on writing in its language. Under their various titles, the journals, which amount to his masterpiece, were written in Polish, not Spanish. We owe it to the French publishing house Christian Bourgois Editeur that the Polish was translated into French. Year after year in the late eighties and early nineties—the years when the East was coming back from the dead—I would stop in at the Polish bookshop on Boulevard St. Germain to see if there was a new volume of Gombrowicz. There almost always was. It was a pity that the same did not happen in London or New York. The complete Gombrowicz journals are still not available in English. Thus we pay the penalty for the too-long lingering policy of publishing in an expensive hardback edition first. The French, publishing directly in paperback, found an out-of-the-way writer like Gombrowicz a less suicidal commercial proposition. After all, they had at least one customer they could be sure of. Gombrowicz would have liked the idea of an Australian resident in London looking forward to a trip to Paris so that he could buy the latest book of a Pole resident in Buenos Aires, take it to a café, gather together his rudimentary French, and start construing the text line by line, with much note-taking in the endpapers after copious use of the dictionary. The spectacle would probably not have inspired Gombrowicz to large approving statements along the lines of Vargas Llosa's _cosmopolitanismo vital_. But Gombrowicz might have been pleased by the evidence that the individual personality is at the centre of the art, and gets through.
It is isn't easy to make someone who hasn't experienced it understand what it feels like, this martyrdom of being judged, devalued, disqualified, and misrepresented by journalists writing in haste who are bored by reading and who, for that matter, hardly ever read anything anyway.
—WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, _V ARIA_, VOL. 1, P. 105
He was making the classic complaint of those who would rather be famous than not, but find fame an instrument too blunt to leave their refined views uninjured. As a man without a country, Gombrowicz was good copy for international style-section journalists, and he admitted the advantages of the accruing prestige even as he deplored the psychological effects of being hailed by the uncomprehending. He brought the theme to a nodal point in _Journal_ II, with a disquisition on " _le sex-appeal des messieurs d'un certain âge_." Perhaps indulging in wishful thinking—although in his own case the wishful thought seems to have often come true—he said that a man no longer young, but with a certain lustre for his achievements, will soon find the second factor outweighing the first in the matter of attracting youthful admirers. One might as well lie back and enjoy it. The thing to do, he added, is to enjoy it without believing it. Gombrowicz thought that Thomas Mann did believe it, and that the result was "a complacent dignity . . . parading in its cardinal purple." Calling Mann an old cocotte, Gombrowicz couldn't let his victim go, and those pages of the second _Journal_ in which he toys with Mann's reputation can be recommended as a paradigm example of one great literary exile getting on another's case.
Gombrowicz probably had the right of the argument: even if glory is justified by talent, nobody can remain fully genuine " _dans cette dimension supérieure_." (Gombrowicz cheekily suggested that Mann would have made an extra contribution to literature if he had recorded how his growing grandeur had made him more bogus.) But it was Mann who went on adding to his roster of novels. Though Gombrowicz never quite gave up on himself as a novelist, he did give up on putting his main imaginative effort into fiction. Instead he persuaded himself—with what success it is up to us to judge—that his factual work was imaginative. The question remains (and is bound to remain, because he wanted it to remain) of whether the journals, taken all together, are a true literary work. I think they are, but they are a true literary work of the second order—the second order of ancillary writings which, as he said when singing a bitter hymn to his lost country in _Souvenirs de Pologne_ , is a measure of a nation's culture. On that last point he was surely right. A nation can boast masterpieces while having no culture. The Soviet Union, had it wished, could have claimed that it had produced Shostakovitch, but it could never have produced the equivalent of _Singin' in the Rain_ , even if it had wished to. Gombrowicz had spotted a new, ideologically determined and therefore wholly modern kind of aridity, in which first-class art was up for display but had no general effect in everyday life.
Gombrowicz would never have become himself if he had not escaped from the requirements of a literary career: if he had not dismantled his own reputation as fast as it threatened to form. (His chief rule for getting this done was never to make an expected move.) The escape is part of his fame. What he did not do is part of what made him Gombrowicz—a name that means an attitude. Without the attitude, there would never have been the name. He woke up to this specific form of celebrity quite slowly, and was probably far embarked on his journals before he ever realized that they were destined to be his capital work. After her chandelier-shaking first night in Paris before World War I, Karsavina, the very first Firebird, sat up until all hours darning her stockings as usual, until a friend told her that she would have to stop doing it. "And he brought me the papers, and for the first time I learned that I was Karsavina" (John Drummond, _Speaking of Diaghilev_ ). From all those boring journalists who tracked him down and trailed him around, the diarist in exile learned that he was Gombrowicz. He had staked his life on the idea, but kept repeating it as if he didn't yet believe it. After the dullards agreed, he was able to believe it. Goethe said that Ovid remained classical even in exile: he found his unhappiness not in himself, but in his distance from the capital of the world. Gombrowicz avoided even the unhappiness, by deciding that _der Haupstadt der Welt_ went with him wherever he went. Or anyway he appeared to avoid it: some of his art might lie in the pretence.
Bizarrely, I am convinced that a writer incapable of talking about himself is not a complete writer.
—WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, _J OURNAL_ VOL. 1, P. 69
But not even Gombrowicz talked about his complete self. As Ernesto Sabato complained when Gombrowicz was safely dead, the endlessly self-revealing exile never talked about his homosexuality. Sabato was an unquestioned feature of Argentina's literary landscape and Gombrowicz was always and only the questionable visitor, but the two men admired each other. From Gombrowicz's _Testament_ we learn that he was struck by Sabato's _Sobre heroes y tumbas_ ( _On Heroes and Tombs_ ), It was, however, by no means a perfect match. In his reputation-making pre-war surrealist novel _Ferdyduke_ , the young Gombrowicz had proclaimed that the artist's aim was never to grow up. " _Notre élément, c'est l'éternelle immaturité_." Our element is eternal immaturity. Gombrowicz stuck to that idea all his life: he came closest to outing himself when he proclaimed, in terms that would have seemed familiar to Thomas Mann, that age could be refreshed only by involvement with youth. No idea could have been further from Sabato's mind. Sabato, unlike Gombrowicz, had not given up on the surrealist novel. Sabato thought the dreamwork could be a work of maturity, not just an effusion of youth. Sabato did not play it young, nor did he ever hide. Gombrowicz, though his stance was to talk about himself without self-censorship, probably thought that it couldn't be done unless something was held back. Favouring the Latin tag _lavartis prodeo_ —I advance in a mask—he drew attention to Goethe's proper location, which was behind Faust. (In his Testament Gombrowicz said, " _Je m'avance masqué_ "—a straight translation from the Latin.) We are left with the daunting prospect that there is another, real Gombrowicz who is not in the voluminous journals—or we would be left with it, if we thought that the secret man was the real one. The chances are low, however, that we are dealing with the Constantine Cavafy of Buenos Aires. Gombrowicz seems to have simply done what he said: drawn refreshment by surrounding himself with youth. In the sumptuously illustrated memorial volumes edited by his widow, Rita ( _Gombrowicz en Argentine_ 1939–1963 and _Gombrowicz en Europe 1963–1969_ ), the photographs are selected to show Gombrowicz well supported by a cast of stunning young women. At ease on an estancia in Argentina during some comfortable weekend, he can be seen bathing in the worship of three beautiful blonde Grace Kelly lookalikes all hanging on his every thickly accented word. It was the main story. It just wasn't the whole story.
Any pipsqueak can roar like a lion on paper, because grand words cost little, whereas delicacy—the delicacy of Chopin for example, persevering to the extreme, tense, elaborate—requires effort and character.
—WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, _S OUVENIRS DE POLOGNE_, P. 141
When Rubinstein was in America making his great Chopin recordings after World War II, Gombrowicz was in Argentina writing the first of his _Journals_. It was Poland's fate that its artists had no home, especially if they were still in Poland. Their best way of keeping their country alive was leave it. In that sense, Gombrowicz was just another Polish artist of his time. He shared the dubious benefits of a thorough education in powerlessness. First the Pitsudski right-wing regime, then the Nazis, then the Communists: it was a long course of instruction in what happens to civilization when it is deprived of a political dimension. It becomes a dream based on its surviving personalities, who are forced to live in a world of their own. The constant temptation for the powerless is to daydream of super-strength. Gombrowicz's originality was to realize so clearly that his powerlessness would be his subject. Elsewhere in the same book, he retroactively defines his aim as "to transform weakness into force, the defeats into values. If I was not sufficiently authentic, not linked enough to reality, it was precisely that which could become my rich and authentic drama." The same explicit statement of his mission was made again in _Varia_ II: "in the end, the weakness becomes the strength." The sign of deadly seriousness in the quoted passage is the mention of Gombrowicz's revered Chopin. In the previous century, Chopin had been a pioneer of what was to become every talented Polish exile's historical position: he was under continuous pressure to represent his country. Chopin had represented it by living for his art in Paris, where he could play in private. In Poland he could play only in public. Gombrowicz served the eternal Poland by being Polish in Buenos Aires, and didn't even serve his art in the accepted sense; he abandoned even that, and made a point of refusing to create. Writing his decision down, however, he seems to have realized, by the way he felt compelled to return to the subject and draw out its nuances, that his refusal to create was a new kind of creation. And so it proved. The twentieth century was rich in journal writing, but not even Gide or Julien Green brought the formless form quite to the pitch of informal intensity achieved by Gombrowicz, who would have his name on his discovery if his name had been less . . . well, less Polish.
H
William Hazlitt
Hegel
Heinrich Heine
Adolf Hitler
Ricarda Huch
WILLIAM HAZLITT
William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was the writer who put the English essay into the mainstream of English literature, and did so as much by his commentary on public affairs as by his attention to poetry, drama and literary history. He thus supplied the English-speaking countries (including America, where Henry Adams wrote very much like Hazlitt) with a new tradition of higher journalism that could be exploited to the full in the twentieth century, during which the dignity and worth of the essay form were taken for granted. (Other countries were less lucky: in Spain, for example, when Ortega said that the essay written for a newspaper or a periodical could be a vital form, he was thought provocative, because the heritage wasn't there to back him up.) Hazlitt's comprehensive grasp of contingent reality had a lot to do with his capacity for self-examination: his emotional life, for example, was a succession of disasters about which he had the courage to come clean, at least in part. "Well, I've had a happy life," was a large-hearted thing for him to say when he died poor. Although he could be acerbic when on the attack, he was rarely vicious, and generosity will be the main impression he gives to the beginner, who would be advised to start with his later collections of pieces, because Hazlitt got better as he got older, his powers of reflection having more of his own experience on which to reflect. The volumes _Winterslow_ and _Sketches and Essays_ , both published posthumously, contain some of his best things, and nobody who reads them will succumb again to the seductive notion that a wide-ranging concern with all forms of creativity is a specifically modern, or post-modern, propensity.
Burke's style was forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent.
—WILLIAM HAZLITT
WHAT AN ELECTRIFYING thing to say. I not only thought so when I first read it, but the actual word "electricity" came into my mind, no doubt because the word "lightning" was already there on the page. It didn't bother me that I couldn't think of many crested serpents. A cobra, perhaps, with those bits at the side of its head quivering; or perhaps he meant the arched neck crested like a wave as the serpent gets set to strike. Possibly there was a crested serpent somewhere in Shakespeare, and Hazlitt was making a subtle reference; or Shakespeare might have had a crested _servant_ , and Hazlitt was remembering a sequence of sounds rather than a specific meaning. ("Be thou my crested servant, bear my shield / As token of two prides, both mine and thine" as the Duke of Alpacino does not say in _The Good Woman of Sienna_.) What mattered was the balance between the two pictures. The first picture was of things happening very quickly at random, and the second was of a pause, a poise. These pictures were matched by the two contrary movements of the sentence, prancing up to the comma, and then turning deliberate after it. Hazlitt had paid Burke's style the double compliment of contesting it with a well-crafted sample of his own.
There can be no doubt that Burke (1729–1797) deserved it. As the greatest combined statesman, parliamentarian, philosopher and prose stylist of the century before Hazlitt's, he was a fitting object for admiration even by a man of Hazlitt's talents. We would scarcely need to say so if it was not for the suspicion that Hazlitt can sometimes arouse when singing in praise. Hazlitt made his living as a freelance journalist, and there has always been a tendency, for a man in that occupation, for the pen to run off on its own. Nobody tried harder than Hazlitt to keep the pen in check. His standards for his own originality were high. In his lecture on Shakespeare and Milton, he says, about _Paradise Lost_ , one of his best ever things: "Wherever the figure of Satan is introduced, whether he walks or flies, 'rising aloft incumbent on the dusky air,'it is illustrated with the most striking and appropriate images: so that we see it always before us, gigantic, irregular, portentous, uneasy, and disturbed—but dazzling in its faded splendour, the clouded ruins of a god." The trouble with that is that it is too good. It is detectably better than anything he has been able to quote. Plenty of quotation from Milton decorates the lecture. Quoted lines helped to fill the hour, but decency demands we should presume that Hazlitt liked them. He found it hard, however, to point out any phrase from Milton that looms and resonates like the clouded ruins of a god. It looks exactly as if he coined the phrase to get himself interested.
With his writing about Burke, the same suspicion does not intrude. He has no secret reservations: he admires with a whole heart. We can tell that because he writes at his whole ease. Writers are at their best when they can do that—when they can do it at all. On the whole, writers find other writers hard to be enthusiastic about, even when the other writers are safely dead. It takes security in one's own talent on top of generosity of soul. Philip Roth and Milan Kundera are both wonderfully admiring of Kafka: real generosity in both cases, because each entered Kafka's territory, and must have felt him to be a competitor. It is easier to admire someone who is nothing like you, as Hemingway admired Ronald Firbank. Martin Amis's praise of Saul Bellow is especially valuable because the younger writer is continually faced, when reading the older one, with things he himself would like to have said. In admiring Burke, Hazlitt showed magnanimity as well as taste, because Burke had the stature as a public figure that Hazlitt, in his own eyes, lacked. In our eyes, of course, his lack of pomposity is part of his dignity. But he was not to know that he would come so well out of his age—an age in which he was not even a poet, when almost everybody else was. As for the general principle contained in this encomium to Burke, it can hardly be followed as a recommendation, because it is too general. Laforgue wrote rather the same way about de Musset. These are recommendations to the reader's attention, not incitements to action. The chief merit of the praise is that it does not fall short of its object. But it doesn't really tell you anything specific. In the visually lavish but linguistically impoverished film _Titanic_ , Leonardo DiCaprio is not really much less informative when he draws Kate Winslet's attention to Monet's "use of colour." Everyone with a considerable prose style varies the pace, picks up on the unexpected, rises to the occasion. That is what a style does. Burke's style just did a lot of it. More important—as Hazlitt doesn't forget to point out—Burke's style didn't do those things for their own sake. In other words, he was not just a stylist. But there again, nobody with a considerable style is.
None of this means that style and content are ever wholly separable. But neither are they so closely integrated that they can never be discussed separately. In the twentieth century, the United States became the laboratory for Frankenstein experiments in expository prose. In Britain after Bernard Shaw—or during Bernard Shaw, when you consider how long his fluent blarney set the pace—there was only so much sky left overhead for the forked lightning to be playful in: even T. S. Eliot, who abominated Shaw's every opinion, acknowledged him as a master of prose style. (The only contemporary who ever did a convincing job of analysing the cliché content in Shaw's prose was Flann O'Brien, and O'Brien had caught his giant compatriot in windy old age.) In America it was open house. Consider the jump from that lone bounty-hunter of a cultural journalist James Gibbons Huneker to the vaudeville double-act billed as H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. Huneker knew all there was to know about modern art, Europe and modern art in Europe: three linked subjects that he diligently made one. But his prose had no more interior life than John Reed's. In _Ten Days That Shook the World_ Reed made the Russian Revolution sound dull, but Huneker could make the whole modern upsurge in the arts sound dull—an even harder task.
With Mencken and Nathan, co-editors of _The American Mercury_ and twin commentators on everything that roared in the Roaring Twenties, you are abruptly in a different world, where each man tries to embody his intellectual excitement in his style: to make his journalism, in fact, part of the creative outburst. Nathan overdid it to the extent that nobody now reads him, but Mencken at his best—in his reportage, in his memoirs and in his loving scholarship about the American language—worked the enviable trick of being always identifiable without wearing out his welcome. If admirers of his _Prejudices_ had known what some of his prejudices were really like—his anti-Semitism would have earned a tick of approval from Alfred Rosenberg—they would have stopped reading soon enough, but a guardian angel riding in his forehead made sure that the stuff from his brain's bilges didn't get through from his secret diaries to the public page. Unlike the true nutty pamphleteer, Mencken could be selective about the application of his unbounded energy. Thus equipped, he set the standard for the individual voice in upmarket American journalism. Most remarkably, and right to the end, he managed to preserve, despite the tendency of American periodicals to over-edit, his unique individual rhythm.
Rhythm is never effortless. To achieve it, you must start rewriting in your head and then continue rewriting on the page. The hallmark of a seductive style is to extend natural speech rhythm over the distance of a complex sentence. In speech, Gore Vidal has always been a famous wit; and probably a well-rehearsed one, like Disraeli or Oscar Wilde. The rehearsed epigram is a piece of writing in itself. Kingsley Amis loathed the prepared epigram, but his own aphoristic remarks in conversation, though they sounded spontaneous, frequently bore the telltale signs of having been made ready: they were well made like an army bed, the polished kit precisely arranged on a blanket stretched tight, with hospital corners. Vidal chose the right place, where he could be properly overheard, to launch his salute for the nuptial arrangements of two Broadway artistes: "The rocks in his head fit the holes in hers." But he didn't choose just the delivery point, he chose the syntactical balance. Developed over a lifetime, this mastery of construction finally yielded a prose style that could express the most complicated argument as if it were being spoken. Many of his juniors, of whom I am only one, learned a lot from his example—and at a time in our own careers when we thought that we had already learned everything. But one of the things I learned incidentally was that Vidal's transparent style could transmit a false argument as persuasively as it could express a true one. Vidal was at the height of his written eloquence when he began to advance his thesis that the United States provoked Imperial Japan into a war in the Pacific. The kind of proof he offered was on a par with Hitler's proof that Poland had provoked Germany into a war in 1939, but the way he offered it was dazzling. Vidal's bizarre _démarche_ has quite serious implications for the world outlook of my own country's intelligentsia—who should, in my view, be on their guard against any attempt to give aid and comfort to Japan's recidivist right wing—but what matters here is that there could be no more cavernous discrepancy between the thing said and the way of saying it. The two things really are disjunct, and can be made to seem otherwise only by craft. Hazlitt, when he praised Burke's style, was appreciating an artefact, and probably knew that he was. The penalities for not knowing are very large. When we start believing that a statement must be true simply because it is arrestingly put, we are in the first stages of being spellbound, and the later stages are a kind of slavery.
What is the use of being moral in a night-cellar, or wise in Bedlam?
—WILLIAM HAZLITT, "ON THE DISADVANTAGES OF INTELLECTUAL SUPERIORITY," IN _T ABLE TALK_, P. 280
This reproduces the cadences of Sir Thomas Browne's "splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." The comma is the giveaway; it is placed at the same point of balance, as a fulcrum; and then the beam tips, as if your glance had weight. Echoes of a predecessor's rhythm, pace and melody are rarely accidental. Hazlitt had read Browne's sentence and remembered it. The words might not match, but everything else does. These underlying templates are the true transmission tunnels of influence from writer to writer through the ages, and the hardest thing for scholarship to get at. In painting, the echoes of shape are easier to detect. Kenneth Clark writes convincingly about Rembrandt's absorption of every striking outline in the Renaissance: Rembrandt took in the shapes, rather than the iconography. It is the means, rather than the meaning, that travels through time.
HEGEL
The philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a departure point even for those later philosophers who disagreed with his version of idealism. Croce, for example, was as much in debt to Hegel as he was to Vico. But most of the miasma that retroactively surrounds Hegel's name was generated by those who agreed, or thought they did. The Communist theory of dialectical materialism was a toytown model of Hegel's dialectic, as set out in the two volumes of his _Wissenschaft der Logik_ ( _The Science of Logic_ ) between 1812 and 1816. Similarly, his later theories about the state as a perfectible creative expression appealed to those who saw Germany in a leading role, and the long residue of that idea was available to those pre-Nazi nationalist thinkers who helped pave the way for the Nazis, who scarcely thought at all. (Unfortunately their sleep-walk towards destiny fulfilled Hegel's prediction of what the right people might one day do: he just hadn't guessed that the wrong people would do it.) Helping to confuse the issue about Hegel was a prose style that became steadily more impenetrable as his thought developed, thereby encouraging, among his numerous epigones, the damaging notion that obscure is the way philosophy should sound. It should be remembered that Hegel, early on, after his academic career was interrupted by Napoleon's victory at Jena in 1806, did time as a newspaper editor and a headmaster. He was not without experience of practical affairs, and his art criticism shows that he could stick close to an issue. But he had an undoubted natural tendency to ascend to higher realms, building towering systems of thought that were attacked in the twentieth century (notably by Moore and Russell) as castles in the air. Those who believe, however, that all German philosophy is necessarily as abstruse as Hegel's should read one of his predecessors, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, whose resurgent reputation after World War II might have had something to do with a widely felt desire to re-attach German philosophy to the concrete reality from which Hegel's influence had worked to separate it.
The owl of Minerva begins its flight only in the gathering darkness.
—HEGEL, QUOTED BY EGON FRIEDELL, _K ULTURGESCHICHTE DER NEUZEIT_, VOL. 3, P. 79
HEGEL'S PROSE COULD be very beautiful, like this. After his death, his prose became famous for being unyieldingly opaque; and indeed much of his later prose was; but the best reason for believing that the tangles he got into were legitimate is that he could have an idea as delicately suggestive as this and write it down without breaking it. The theme is that the _Zeitgeist_ can be understood only when its time is over. There is a piquant appeal in that for us; and part of the appeal might arise from a syllogism with an undistributed middle term; we would like to take, as proof that a bad time is over, the fact that we have begun to understand it. I, for one, would dearly like to believe that this book is a flight by Minerva's owl; in the sense that I would like to believe a terrible era has so finally and unarguably come to an end that even I have begun to understand it. I would like to believe that, but I can only hope it's true; and since September 11, 2001, even the hope has come to seem silly. The period when "the end of history" sounded like an attractive idea can now be recalled as being very brief: a hump in the hallway, a thirty-second seduction by language. In the dark light of recent events, Hegel's owl of Minerva might be heading anywhere. Following the sound of its flapping wings, we can perhaps say a few things about where beautiful language can lead, when it unexpectedly shows up somewhere in the course of a reasoned argument.
The poetic line plucked from a philosopher might provide us with only the illusion of understanding what he has to say, but the range of implication feels real for a good reason—it might not be under our control, but it is not under his either. By saying something so resonant, he made a lucky strike, and part of the luck is that it can reach us by an indirect route. The rich saying gets passed on. It was at the end of Edgar Wind's classic set of 1963 Reith Lectures, _Art and Anarchy_ , that I first read about Kant's dove—the dove which, on being told about air resistance, thought it could fly faster by abolishing the air. If I had had to wait to hear about the dove from Kant himself, I might have grown old and grey. As things were, I was handed in good time an analogy that has served me well for the ambitious artist who hopes to express himself more easily by ignoring technique. I even have a picture of him: a gormless bird disappointed by its own slowness as it flaps in the opposite direction to Minerva's owl.
Walter Benjamin, by way of Hannah Arendt, supplied another flying paradigm for a mental skyscape growing crowded like one of those airborne avenues in _Blade Runner_. In her collection of essays _Men in Dark Times_ Arendt cites Benjamin's angel of history, which flies backwards with its hands raised to its face, appalled by the spectacle of the ruins piling up constantly before its eyes. Benjamin, it might be objected, was not a philosopher. Well, he was when he wrote that: or else he was the kind of poet who, writing only in prose, has moments of explanatory intensity for which the word "poetry" is hard to withhold, unless we call them philosophy instead. As for the systematic philosopher, he might try, as a matter of professional etiquette, to avoid speaking in quiddities, but is most likely to be cogent when he finds that imputation hard to dodge. If he has poetic moments, they will not necessarily be throwaway: often they will happen at the focus of the argument, as a natural consequence of trying to get a lot said at once. The same happened even for Croce, who preferred to lay out an argument throughout a whole book at an even pace, with an unvarying transparency. He preferred a texture as serenely even as a snowy plateau in the Antarctic. But just as the snowy plateau in the Antarctic is studded with meteorites like chocolate chips in vanilla ice cream, so Croce's long, smooth stretches are riddled by sentences heavier than the surrounding texture. Reading Croce day after day in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence the year after the 1966 flood, I picked out and stored hundreds of sentences as attention-getting as Hegel's twilight owl. If I had to choose a favourite, it would be because it chose me: for reasons I can't be sure of, although I am sure they go deep, it's the one about the history of the flowers. Croce was saying that all living things have a history: having a history and living are the same process. Even the flowers, he said, have a history, although only they know it.
I can remember sitting back and shaking my head, to clear it from too much clarity. _Although only they know_ it was the speeding point of light that rang the bell. The wave-particle of prose that rings the bell does what poetry does. Poetry just does more of it, and one of the ways we measure greatness in poetry is by how it organizes, to an even higher degree, everything that great prose does in the same space, gracing it with the additional splendour of a festival. Shakespeare, nearly three hundred years before Croce was born, did that for the flowers.
_How with such rage shall beauty hold a plea_
_Whose action is no stronger than a flower?_
I saw it said in some newspaper profile that this is Seamus Heaney's favourite moment in Shakespeare. A favourite moment in Shakespeare is a concept that could make sense only to a cultural journalist with a deadline. One can imagine the journalist's question, and the poet's politely suppressed groan of despair. Yet if one were forced to choose on pain of death, this moment would not be a bad choice. We might think it could not be added to, but Croce added to it, because one of the things meant by what he said is: _and no weaker_. These connections between phrases, sentences and lines across time might seem tenuous, but I know nothing more surely than that the collective mentality of humanism is made up of them. They give the mentality of humanism its coherence and independence: two of the characteristics which the totalitarian mechanism always makes it an early business to destroy. Sooner or later, and usually sooner, the jealous mind of the tyrant decides that pleading beauty must be brought under strict control, even when it presents itself in the unspectacular form of a philosopher's passing remark. In normal times, the aim of scholarship is to bring out the meaning of a seemingly passing remark in its full richness. In dark times, the aim is to confine meaning to a sanctioned path, or eliminate it altogether. In 1939, the German state came to knock on the study door of Hegel. He wasn't in, but the Nazis knew how to make even a dead man change his story. There was an irony in that, because Hegel thought civilization had reached its purpose and apogee in the ordered Prussian state. But the Nazi state, though it had received some of its impetus from his ideal of order, was something else. In 1939 Alfred Kroner Verlag in Stuttgart put out a handy one-volume selection from Hegel on the subjects of _Volk, Staat_ and _Geschichte_ (the people, the state and history). Poetic suggestiveness was rigidly eschewed: this little book meant business. (The Kroner pocket books always did: they were the hard-bound German equivalent of the English Pelican series in later years.) The editor of the Hegel volume was one Friedrich Bülow. My copy, which I bought in Munich in 1992, was first owned by Dr. H. Linhardt of Münster. He bought it in Rothenburg on May 19, 1940—a time of Hitlerite triumph. (Rotterdam was blitzed five days before, and the King of the Belgians capitulated nine days later.) There is a bravura passage in paragraph 373 which we hope was not music to Dr. Linhardt's ears. It certainly would have been to Hitler's, at any time before those final hours when he decided that the German people had been unworthy of their destiny. Hegel speaks of the _Volk_ destined to rule an epoch. This Volk carries the development-stage of the world-spirit ( _Entwicklungsstufe des Weltgeistes_ ), against which other peoples have no rights: in world history they no longer count.
As far as I know, Dr. Linhardt's activities during the war made little mark on world history. One hopes they were benign. We know what happened to Hitler: in Hegelian terms, he died cursing the German Volk for their shortage of development-stage. But the name to notice is that of Friedrich Bülow. His name was still there on the title page of Kroner's 1955 reissue of Hegel's _Volk. Staat. Geschichte_. Though the reissue was in the same reliable Kroner format, there was a notable change to the exterior. The word _Volk_ had disappeared from the spine, which now read _Recht. Staat. Geschichte_. The people had been quietly replaced by the law. But on the inside of the book, the ecstatic passages about the people chosen by history to carry the development-stuff of the world-spirit remained intact. There was no footnote to warn of the presence of toxic waste, and perhaps there should not have been. Though I think the West German government was right to ban _Mein Kampf_ even at the certain cost of its becoming a bootleg hit with neo-Nazis, on the whole the revived democracy's educational authorities were wise not to attempt a new tampering with established texts. The Nazis had done that, usually by banning them if not burning them: and it hadn't worked. Some of Hegel's thinking had lethal tendencies, but the times had to become lethal before the tendencies became obvious; until then, those bits looked merely silly. In 1940 Dr. Linhardt made marginal notes against any of the editor's comments that he found too liberal ( _grund falsch_!) but that was because the Nazis had so distorted _Staat and Recht_ that they had convinced a nonentity like Dr. Linhardt he was enrolled with Hegel as a member of the world-historical _Volk_. Hegel's celebration of unopposed and inexorable power had become temporarily relevant, but it was never right. On that subject he had set Minerva's owl flying too early. In the long run, had he lived, his poetic perceptiveness would have shown him what had gone wrong with his political theories. Great writers supply us with the strengths to measure their weaknesses; but the latter are always there, to generate the air through which the dove flies, dreaming of freedom.
HEINRICH HEINE
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), one of the greatest writers in German, spent only the first third of his mature creative life being a great writer in Germany. Already famous for both his poetry and his prose, he went into exile in Paris in 1831, never to return. In 1825 he had volunteered for the Christian baptism that a Jew then needed if he were to gain German citizenship; and he had incurred the derision of some of his fellow Jews as a consequence; but it was his revolutionary political opinions that made emigration advisable. In Paris he continued with the travel journalism that he had already pioneered as a serious form, and added a body of miscellaneous writings recommending a closer identification of French and German intellectual achievement. On whatever subject, he wrote a clear prose whose wide-ranging play of thought has never gone flat: on every page will be found something relevant now. As a cosmopolitan democrat he eventually incurred the disapproval of the more incendiary revolutionaries, and might easily have died in a duel. Instead, he was condemned to the long agony of spinal paralysis, which kept him in bed for the last seven years of his life, during which he wrote and published books and collections that can be seen in retrospect to express the romantic age at its height. His status as a displaced person, and a prophetic statement—that those who burn books will one day burn people—combined to place him, politically, a hundred years before his time. Nietzsche thought him second only to Goethe among the German poets. Beginners who start with his poem about the slave ship (" _Die Sklavenschiff_ ") will get the immediate and correct impression of a brave liberal intelligence combined with a vaulting lyric gift. Both characteristics transferred readily to his prose, making it one of the first and finest models for what we now see as desirable in literary journalism.
I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems.
—HEINRICH HEINE, _R EISE VON MÜNCHEN NACH GENUA_, CHAPTER 1, P. 193
THE JOKE STILL rings true. Hearing a man recite his poems unbidden remains even worse than hearing him recount his sufferings. So Heine's sarcastic crescendo is as funny as ever after more than 150 years. But the statement as a whole has been overtaken by time. The possibility of choosing not to be rude has long vanished. It was already vanishing when Yeats said, "Always I encourage, always." A few years later, and Yeats's prominence on the radio would have ensured that the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts he was already receiving would have increased to teetering hills that he could no longer consider being polite about. The mass media, even when a literary figure did his best to avoid their embrace, eventually made it certain that there could be no natural, human connection between the illuminated exemplar and the solicitous disciple. There is no real relationship, for example, between ordinary letters and fan letters. In the pre-celebrity-culture world, an important writer received a lot of letters, but they all, in some way, had to do with his work, even when the correspondent's own work was the subject under discussion. Later on, in the celebrity age we now all inhabit, the fan letter is connected only with the addressee's fame: it has nothing to do with his achievement. If it has, it is not really a fan letter: it is an ordinary letter buried in the pile of fan letters. Circumstances dictate that it will be buried deep.
A woman much more original than she is often given credit for, Greta Garbo was one of the first international celebrities to spot what was going on. Joan Crawford answered every fan letter she was ever sent: she was under the illusion that they were ordinary letters, and that there were just a lot of them. Garbo never answered a single fan letter in her whole Hollywood career. She ordered them destroyed before they reached her. The few that did reach her she threw into the fire. She was acting on the defensible assumption that they had already done their work simply through having been sent. She also showed acute insight in divining that there was no appropriate response. The sort of person who might send a fan letter would take any form of personal reply as the beginning of a relationship. It was not given to one person to maintain even a small proportion of those possible relationships in a single lifetime. Dismissing the prospect was thus the only way of dealing with it. As the most famous woman in the world, only Garbo could know that the sole means of behaving politely was to subtract herself from the whole monstrously amplified anomaly.
It will be argued that Heinrich Heine was not Greta Garbo. But he practically was. Heine was famous on the scale of Byron and Victor Hugo. If there could be a twentieth-century equivalent to his kind of literary prominence—you have to imagine a Philip Larkin as famous as Jeffrey Archer—he would be snowed under with correspondence that had no clear instigation except his fame. As things were, the flow of attention was on a scale that, though great, allowed him to think he still had a choice. Even in retrospect, however, it is remarkable that he chose not to be rude. His nature must have been uncommonly sweet. It might also have been perilously gullible. The sheer volume of correspondence with which any literary figure, no matter how obscure, is nowadays inundated has the dubious advantage of uncovering a full taxonomy of the literary aspirant. The correspondence from the obvious maniacs bears a disturbing resemblance to the correspondence from the apparently sane. The disturbing element springs from the dreadful suspicion that the normal-sounding ones might not be quite all there either. Leaving aside the typical appurtenances of the nut letter—the many closely written or typed pages, the numerous cut-out inserts, the documentary evidence to illustrate some rankling item of litigation—the things that the psycho supplicants want are wanted also by the sane. They want you to read a manuscript. Often the manuscript is huge, but they want you to read it. Some of them, verging on the nutty, want you to help write the next draft. A few, nutty but perhaps not irreversibly so, will generously suggest that after you have arranged for its publication, the title page might carry your name. A very few, nutty on a career basis, will insist that it carry both your names, and there will be the occasional one—the supreme nut, the dingbat in _excelsis_ —who thinks _your_ next book should carry _his_ name. Backing up all these suggestions, in all their varieties, will be the general argument that the publishing industry, as at present constituted, is not favourable to the individual talent. The publishers have formed a conspiracy against any fresh voice.
To the occasional sane-sounding letter informed by the same assumption, it is possible, if one has the time, to reply with the truth. The truth ought to be so obvious that it needs no pointing out to anyone not mentally unbalanced, but there is always the chance that your correspondent has lost his judgement temporarily just from the fact of knowing you, and knowing you to be a writer—as you yourself might temporarily lose your judgement just from knowing somebody and knowing him to be a doctor. If you have ever found yourself describing your symptoms to a new acquaintance who had until then been under the impression that he was meeting you in social circumstances for a few drinks, you will see how it happens that people who have been in your life for years—good, solid friends, sometimes—can be struck simultaneously with the unfortunate urge to write (the sudden disease that Dr. Johnson, following Juvenal, called _scribendi cacoethes_ ) and the capacity to forget common manners. Anyway, whatever the reasons, and without warning, someone you thought you knew well is telling you that he requires your assistance in getting his manuscript past the usual barriers thrown up by publishers to ward off original talent. It is made clear that a recommendation, to your agent if not to your publisher, is the very least favour expected. What do you say?
You say the truth: there are no such barriers. Publishers are in business to publish a marketable manuscript, and go to some expense employing professional readers in order to ensure that such manuscripts may be found, among the mountain ranges of unmarketable ones. (A single glance at the clogged throughput of this traffic in any publisher's office would be enough to convince the independent onlooker that the old saw about the average novel is nothing but the truth: the average novel does not get published.) Recommendations never work: publishers are too well aware that whoever does the recommending might be under pressure, and anyway an author's personal marketability is no proof of his capacity to detect it in others. You might be sincerely passionate on behalf of a friend, but sincerity will not do: a good publisher will sometimes be prepared to lose money on a writer he believes in, but not on one that _you_ believe in. Just making these simple points will take you at least a page of prose, which will make you impatient of lost time, so try to remember that it's your friend, and not you, who has tested the friendship. Blame him, not yourself. Getting harder not to be rude, isn't it? Things will be easier all round if he has included his manuscript, because the awesome bulk of its presence will help you reclassify him in the screwball category where he belongs.
For a close friend, a phone call is probably the best way out of it. Don't hesitate to sound as if you are too short of time to write. You are: you are a writer, and so time spent writing without financial reward is time worse than wasted—unless you are writing for pleasure, which in this case you most certainly aren't. For everyone else, a form letter is probably the best course. It should say that you get hundreds of such requests. You won't be exaggerating by much: over a lifetime, even the most determinedly hermetic poet will receive a few score unpublished novels and autobiographies, which can find their way to an igloo, a shack in the desert, a hut on the beach. Make the point that publishers do not listen to recommendations, they employ readers: and add the point that agents almost invariably do not. This will defuse in advance the standard hint that if your correspondent could be recommended to your agent it would smooth his path. If the unjustly neglected manuscript has not turned up with the first letter, it will almost certainly turn up with the next, so to ward off that dreaded eventuality your first letter should make the crucial point that you are under legal advice not to read unsolicited manuscripts. If this is not strictly true, it ought to be; because if you sought legal advice, that is the advice you would get. Anyone self-obsessed enough to hand you his manuscript is more than self-obsessed enough to sue you if he thinks a future work by you is based on his idea. In Hollywood, which has a full century of experience as the laboratory for every legal aspect of handling literary property, no written material, in any form or at any length, is ever dealt with for five minutes unless the legal rights attached to it are beyond dispute. There is nothing perverse about such caution. It is the logical consequence of everyone—including your admirably sane friend—honestly believing that the idea he just wrote down is unique.
Heine, with his fatal pride in his own politeness, sounds as if he might have trouble with modern autograph hounds. In his day their activities were restricted by limitations on transport, and on the technology to follow through after an initial refusal. Today, an autograph nut can travel hundreds of miles in a short time to catch you at your latest location before you can move on, and has several routes through which to forward his requests. He doesn't even have to confront you in order to pester you to distraction. A modern Heine should be smart enough to keep his own address out of _Who's Who_. He should also keep his agent's address out of it. (Anyone who needs his agent's name in _Who's Who_ is lucky to be in _Who's Who_ in the first place.) But his publisher, unless instructed not to, will forward requests from autograph freaks, and is even morally obliged to if they are marked "Personal: Please Forward." Straightforward requests for an autograph to add to the correspondent's world-beating collection can be binned with a clear conscience if a self-addressed stamped envelope is not included. If there is an SASE, there is probably also a heart-rending account of how little time the correspondent has left to live, owing to a progressive disease inexorably depriving him of the strength to do anything except (he forgets to say the next bit) send mad requests for autographs to every minor celebrity on Earth. After struggling with his conscience and losing, Heine will probably send off his name. After struggling with mine and winning, I usually bin the letter and keep the stamp, but that's probably why I haven't written anything as tenderly humane as " _Das Sklavenschiff_ " lately. All letters from dealers, SASEs included, should be burned immediately, as if infected. As a clue, people asking you to sign first-day covers are always dealers. Never believe they are philatelists. And anyway, how sane is a philatelist?
Met in person, autograph hounds are a big problem with no easy solution until your fame fades, whereupon their absence might make its disappearance less painful. Even when his worldwide instant recognition factor was at last blurring at the edges, Cary Grant, if asked for an autograph, invariably said "Go get Elvis Presley's." He was being courageous even in those days, and today it would be folly to turn down any such request so abruptly, because there is now no way of knowing how many of the people you rebuff are homicidal maniacs—all you can be certain of is that there are far more of them about. It is sometimes wise to cut things short when assailed by an aggressively rude man, but never when he has a child with him. Though he may demand that you sign everything including the child, a man shamed in front of his offspring won't forget it, and you should try to follow the rule of never making an enemy except deliberately. Of the regulars who hang around the stage door, the door of the Ivy and any other door that a celebrity might come out of, the genuinely banged-up man in the wheelchair should have your signature, for what it is worth. (If it is Madonna's it will be worth a substantial amount: but yours he might conceivably want for itself.) The others are merely head cases and if you waste time standing in the rain to write in their books, so are you.
When asked to sign his own books, Heine will be on safer ground. If someone bearing a well-thumbed copy of an author's book conveys the impression that the addition of a signature to its flyleaf or title page will raise it to the status of the Rosetta Stone or the shield of Achilles, the author will find it hard to disagree. But Heine will need to keep his wits about him. At book signings, and especially after readings, there will be people in the queue carrying every book he ever wrote. Most of them will be genuine admirers, but some of them will be dealers, and it is often hard to tell the difference. Either way, they should be sent to the end of the queue, so that people who have actually purchased your book are not kept waiting. When the person with the teetering armful finally gets his turn, the question arising is no longer about whether to sign, but about how. For safety, the author should put the current date after his name. Harold Pinter once asked a man who proffered a first edition of one of his early plays for signing: "I suppose if I didn't date this," (pause) "it would look as if I'd signed it _at the time_ ," (pause) "and that would make it more valuable," (pause) "wouldn't it?" The man could not disagree, and Pinter wrote the current date. Heine might not mind helping a dealer make money, but most authors do: they remember too vividly how little they earned from an entire print-run to enjoy seeing some stranger cash in from a single copy of it.
Some authors are armoured against signing anything at all except the initial presentation copies, and when a successful author finds out how valuable that makes _them_ , he might cease doing even that much, and just include a card. (The best method anyway, because it means that the recipient, if he wants to, can sell the book without embarrassing you both.) Another famous playwright of my acquaintance was once given free board and lodging by the illustrious director Mike Nichols in Los Angeles, and wanted to pay back his host by presenting him with a full set of Anthony Powell's _A Dance to the Music of Time_ novels, which Nichols much admired, and presumably would have admired even more if he had been regaled with a set of first editions all signed by the author. At great expense and trouble, the famous playwright got a set of firsts together, but Powell would not sign them. He was well aware of who was asking and of whom the gift was for, but his pen stayed in his pocket. That was his principle and he stuck to it, even though a set of first editions of _A Dance to the Music of Time_ which had provably passed through the hands of the famous playwright, of Mike Nichols and of Powell himself would have been an association copy fit for a museum. It could have been, however, that Powell was afraid of exactly that: becoming a museum piece. There is something unsettling about being sought out for one's name; as mummies in the mummy cloth are wound, one feels wrapped up in documentation; breathing comes hard. I quite understand why some writers try to get out of public life altogether. Perhaps Heine today would take J. D. Salinger's route to privacy, although Heine's blessed sense of the absurd—still scintillating after all this time—might tell him in advance that solitude is no guarantee of being left alone.
But really there are no rules except rules of thumb, and for a quiet life it is probably better just to sign everything put in front of you, even bare skin, and try to think of something useful while you are wasting the energy. After all, back there at the start you wanted to be well-known. Even Heine did. He just didn't want to pay the price of being a good poet: hearing bad poetry. But if he had built up an infallible early-warning system to ensure that no ninny could ever reach him he would have been less human than he was, and therefore less of a poet. So it all worked out in the end. It usually does. Unless you actually get killed, you have handled fame as well as can be done. At the Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide I once saw George Harrison staving off the autograph hounds with the brilliantly enigmatic explanation "It's Thursday." I thought it a marvellous technique: funny enough to satisfy the normal, and plausible enough to soothe the sort of psycho who had already accounted for John Lennon. George Harrison did as good a job as an unmanageably famous man can do to stay sane. But the man who broke into his house and stabbed him to the point of death had never stayed sane at all.
If Heine were here with us, he would have something new to write about, and it would be edifying to hear his conclusions. My own guess is that he would find, now as then, no alternative to being polite, while being obliged to admit that some of the unbearable villains nowadays come armed with more frightening weapons than the well-rehearsed grievance and the tritely rhymed poem that doesn't scan. The admission would soon lead him to the real subject: what happens to the women. Heine had a tender heart, and for any man with one of those the real and abiding questions about modern fame concern the completeness with which it takes famous women back to the primeval forest. There are some famous men who pick up a female stalker: but there are no famous women who do _not_ pick up at least one male stalker, and very famous women pick them up by the platoon. The only reason you hear so little about the restraining orders the women have to take out is that they are doing their desperate best not to attract any more copycats. Stalking is mainly a male preserve because, for men, love is an aesthetic event in the first instance. Though the stalker's mentality is a long way from the mentality of a lyric poet, it is not impossibly far. Stalkers are murderers—they all are, without exception—whose killer instincts are triggered by beauty. Garbo guessed that fact by another instinct, the one for survival: through those finely flared nostrils, she had correctly sensed that a man ready to rob a woman of her peace would just as easily take her life if given the chance. Heine's politeness depended on the idea that it is right to be nice to strangers. It is a civilized idea, but it is not always correct, because life is not always civilized. Once upon a time, it never was, and being rude to strangers was the only way to stay safe. The truly awful thing about the celebrity culture is how far it takes us back.
ADOLF HITLER
Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) should need no introduction. Statistics suggest, however, that a large proportion of young people now emerging from the educational systems of the Western democracies either don't know who he was or have only a shaky idea of what he did. One of the drawbacks of liberal democracy is thus revealed: included among its freedoms is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence. Granted the uncontested opportunity to do so, Hitler would have devoted himself to eliminating every trace of free expression that came within his reach. The awkward question remains of whether, on his part, this propensity precluded any real interest in the humanities. The awkward answer must be that it didn't. Though it is tempting to think of him as illiterate, he could quote Schopenhauer from memory. Hitler's love of music was passionate, to the point where some believed that his admiration for Wagner was a sufficient reason in itself for dismissing that composer from musical history. Hitler the would-be painter never lost his interest in the plastic arts. His projected art gallery in his home town of Linz was one of his most dearly cherished dreams for Nazi Europe after the inevitable victory, and just because he thought Menzel the best of the German painters is no good reason for thinking Menzel inferior. Above all, Hitler was moved by architecture, which brings us to the central point; because he wasn't just moved by it, he was mad about it. He had no sense of proportion in any of his ostensibly civilized enthusiasms. His interests lacked the human element, so they could never have amounted to a true humanism. But though his connection with the civilized traditions was parodic at best and neurotic always, there was still a connection: in that respect, he stands above Stalin and Mao, and should therefore, by the scholar, be handled with even greater caution, because far more poisonous. Many of his more cultivated victims used their learned resources to deny that Hitler had a mental existence. Some of the last aphorisms written by the great Robert Musil were devoted to summarizing the pathogenic nature of Hitler. Beautifully crafted statements, they had no effect on Hitler whatsoever. The finest minds in Europe devoted their best efforts to proving that their mortal enemy had no mind at all. But nothing they said was of any avail. Hitler could be defeated only by armed might: i.e., on his own terms. Whole libraries written to his detriment didn't add up to the effect of a single Russian artillery shell. This ugly fact should be kept in view when we catch ourselves nursing the comforting illusion that there is a natural order to which politics would revert if all contests of belief could be eliminated. There is such a natural order, but it is not benevolent.
Books about Hitler are without number, but after more than sixty years the first one to read is still Alan Bullock's _Hitler: A Study in Tyranny_. Familiarity with the events that it recounts should be regarded as an essential prerequisite to the study not just of modern politics, but of the whole history of the arts since its hideously gifted subject first demonstrated that a sufficient concentration of violence could neutralize any amount of culture no matter how widely diffused. It is not possible to be serious about the humanities unless it is admitted that the pacifism widely favoured among educated people before World War II very nearly handed a single man, himself something other than a simple Philistine, the means to bring civilization to an end. The lessons of history don't suit our wishes: if they did, they would not be lessons, and history would be a fairy story.
You have everything that I lack. You are forging the spiritual tools for the renewal of Germany. I am nothing but a drum and a master of ceremonies. Let's cooperate!
—ADOLF HITLER AT THE JUNI-KLUB, SPRING 1922, AS QUOTED IN JEAN PIERRE FAYE'S _L ANGAGES TOTALITAIRES_, P. 30
RESPECTABLY SITUATED in Berlin's Motzstrasse, to the south of the Tiergarten, the Juni-Klub, or June Club (the name breathed defiance at the Treaty of Versailles), was a twenties talking shop for right-wing intellectuals concerned with revolutionary conservatism. The consciously oxymoronic idea of revolutionary conservatism had almost as many forms as it had advocates, who found it easy to mistake their dialectical hubbub for the clanging forge of a new order. Of the one hundred and fifty members, thirty were present on the afternoon Hitler dropped in. They thought he had come to hear what they had to say, and they found out that he had no intention of listening to any voice but his own. Their scholarly qualifications counted for nothing. Best qualified of all was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Before World War I, Moeller had been a translator of Baudelaire, Barbey d'Aurevilly, Defoe, De Quincey and the complete poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He had written essays on Nietzsche, Stefan George, Hofmannsthal, Büchner, Strindberg and Wedekind. With Dmitriy Merezhkovsky and others he had edited the first complete German-language edition of Dostoevsky, published in Munich in 1905. He knew Paris well, and spent time also in London, Sicily, Venice, the Baltic countries, Finland, Russia, Denmark and Sweden. For cultivation he was up there with Ernst Jünger, one of Germany's most gifted modern prose writers and likewise a revolutionary conservative. As a kind of back-to-the-future movement, revolutionary conservatism depended for its force on advocates who embodied established values. Moeller embodied learning the way Jünger embodied storm-of-steel militarism. Both had their rationale for a conservative revolution worked out in detail, with all the nuances duly noted. Possibly because of this meeting at the Juni-Klub, Moeller was the first to grasp that Hitler didn't care about any of it.
Moeller's revolutionary conservatism was meant to safeguard the nation's Wesens-Urgestein (the original essential stone) from the corrosive encrustation of _Blutmischung_ (mixed blood). Nominally, the tainted blood he was most concerned about was the Latin blood of the German south. (In France at the same time, the future arch-collaborator Drieu la Rochelle had the identical bee in his bonnet about blood from the south: he thought even the south of France was dangerous.) Some of Moeller's colleagues thought that Hitler might have picked up the dreaded southern infection from spending too long in Bavaria. But it hardly needs saying that Jewish blood was the real bother. If anyone is still looking for the linking factor between the resolutely thuggish Nazi movement and all those long-forgotten, highfalutin nationalist groupuscules that superficially seem so much more refined, anti-Semitism is it. To Ernst von Salomon, one of the assassins who found so many excellent reasons, that same year of 1922, for murdering Weimar Germany's most creative politician, Walther Rathenau, Jünger actually said it: "Why didn't you have the courage to say that Rathenau was killed because he was a Jew?"
What we should say to Jünger's ghost is still in question. When, during World War II, he finally allowed himself to find out exactly what the Nazis were doing to the Jews in the east, he was suitably devastated. But during the twenties it never seemed to concern him much that all the various nationalist groups—even the national Bolshevist group fronted by Ernst Niekisch—always seemed to have this one characterisitic, anti-Semitism, in common. Not, of course, that it would have come to anything much if Jünger and the rest of the intellectuals had been left to themselves. It wasn't mass murder that they had in mind: just the purification and protection of the folk heritage, brought to the point of irreversible decay by the curse of liberalism. Like Niekisch, who was coming from the other direction but with the same prejudice, Moeller thought that the nineteenth-century theorist of Prussian conservatism Julius Stahl was not convervative enough. Stahl was baptized a Lutheran, but he was Jewish. So the objection was racial, although Moeller would have resisted being defined as a mere racist. He had bigger ideas than that. The biggest of them was that liberalism was the real enemy. To the Juni-Klub's collective testament, an album by many hands called _Die neue Front_ , he contributed a fragment of his forthcoming book. The fragment was called "Through Liberalism Peoples Go to Ruin." The book, published in 1923, carried a title which would gain in resonance beyond his death: _The Third Reich_.
I have a copy of _Das dritte Reich_ in front of me as I write. An ugly little volume bound in paper, it was put out in 1931 by the Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, a Nazi publishing outfit based in Hamburg. This particular example was purchased in Jena in 1934 by someone signing himself Wm. Montgomery Watt. Presumably he was a Scot, because I found the book in a dust pile in the back of an Edinburgh second-hand bookshop. Whether in approval or disapproval it is hard to tell, but Wm. Montgomery Watt was a great underliner. You soon spot that he underlined the same point over and over. It was the point Moeller couldn't help making: he got around to it whatever the nominal subject. The point was that Germany had never lost the war, except politically. Militarily it had triumphed, and all that was now needed was a revolution in order to put reality back in touch with the facts. It just never occurred to Moeller that to say Germany had never lost the war except politically was like saying that a cat run over by a car had never died except physically. It never occurred to hundreds of thousands of present and future Nazis either, but Moeller was supposed to be an intellectual. So was Jünger, whose book _Der Arbeiter_ was also published by the Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, with a resonant line of publicity material: "Jünger sees that bourgeois individualism, the cult of personality, the conceit of the ego all belong to the nineteenth century, and are now visibly melting before our eyes through the transformation of separate people into a collectivity." (Memo to a young student of cultural flux: when you buy old books, keep the wrappers if you can. Nothing gives you the temperature of the time like the puffs and quotations.) All these finely articulated arguments were going strictly nowhere, because nobody in the Nazi hierarchy ever found much time to read them, and certainly Hitler never read a single line. What continues to matter, however, is not where the arguments were going, but where they came from. They came from the same source that gave the chance of action to the thugs who used them as a warrant: the chaos, the dislocation and the demoralization of a civil order. To that extent, and to that extent only, superior minds like Moeller and Jünger were right. They were like Groucho Marx turning up his nose at any club that might admit him as a member: a society that led them to write such stuff had no future.
At the end of the meeting in the Juni-Klub, before Hitler set off on foot through the Tiergarten to doss with an old comrade, Moeller politely offered him a free subscription to the club's monthly magazine _Gewissen_ (Conscience), but was later heard to say that Hitler had understood nothing. If, as seems likely, Hitler had given nobody time to speak except himself, it is hard to see how there could have been anything to understand. Finally, however, Moeller understood Hitler in the only way that counted. The following year, the Munich putsch was a fiasco, but it caused enough uproar to show Moeller the difference between well-polished words in small-circulation magazines and raw charisma in the streets. Suddenly Moeller remembered Hitler's little farewell speech. Shouting feebly from the sidelines, Moeller made the classic obeisance of the man of letters to the man of action. "Beat the drum, drum of nature!"
With a brief pause for unsuccessful psychiatric treatment, Moeller committed suicide in 1925, so he never had to see what became of his subtle theories. What became of them was nothing. They had never mattered. What mattered was the stuff he took for granted: anti-Semitism, and his certainty that the Weimar Republic had only one destiny—to be destroyed. It was the second of those two things that turned out to be crucial, and the steady subversion from men like him that helped to make it happen. After Moeller's death, the Juni-Klub was succeeded by the Herrenklub, the gentlemanly conservative ambience of which provided a support group for von Papen, who in turn thought that he had found a suitable ruffian to clear the way for a return to the traditional ascendancy. Hitler, the suitable ruffian, could never have done it on his own. He could never have done it with all his party. He needed a climate of belief—the belief that Weimar was a problem requiring a solution. Having solved it, he was free to answer his version of the Jewish Question—the question that the intellectuals had fooled with on paper. Only the madmen among them had ever thought it needed to be answered with fire. But the sane ones had helped open the door for the avenger that the madmen had dreamed of. Moeller was lucky he didn't live to see the results.
When intellectuals conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favour of a refined dream, it might seem unfair to condemn them for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller, though outstandingly qualified, was only one among many. But there were too many: that was the point. Too many well-read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature. Among the revolutionary conservative intellectuals, Jünger is the real tragic figure. Unlike Moeller, Jünger was condemned to live. He saw the light, but too late. In his notebooks he gradually de-emphasized his call for a conservative revolution led by men who had been "transformed in their being" by the experience of World War I. In 1943, in Paris, he was told the news about the extermination camps, and finally reached the conclusion that he had been staving off since the collapse of the Weimar Republic he had helped to undermine: one of the men whose being had been transformed by their experience of the Great War was Adolf Hitler. The quality Jünger valued most had turned out to be the only one he shared with the man he most despised.
RICARDA HUCH
Ricarda Huch (1864–1947), the first lady of German humanism in modern times, can be thought of as a bridging figure between Germaine de Staël and Germaine Greer. Poet, novelist and above all historian of culture, she started out as the very model of the stylish female troublemaker, the upmarket bluestocking as inveterate social bugbear. Breaker of many male hearts, including those of her husbands, she began her career of role reversal as one of the first female graduates from Zurich University, where she studied history, philosophy and philology. (The universities of her native Germany still did not admit women.) Her books on romanticism retain their position as key works. Her historical novel _Der dreissigjahriger Krieg_ (The Thirty Years War) richly demonstrates her uncommon gift for talking about the powerless as if they had the importance of the powerful. She got into history herself in 1933, when she publicly rejected the blandishments of the Nazis, who were keen to co-opt her prestige. After quitting her position as the first woman ever elected to the Prussian Acadamy of the Arts, she went into internal exile in Jena. A lifelong rebel against the class structure of capitalist society, after the war she stayed in the East, spending her last years as a figurehead: in the year of her death she was honorary president of the First German Writers Congress in Berlin. If she had lived to see the regime ossify, she would probably have written yet another book that her would-be masters would not have liked. But she was an old lady, and her studies of history had given her everything but clairvoyance.
To save Germany was not granted to them; only to die for it; luck was not with them, it was with Hitler. But they did not die in vain. Just as we need air if we are to breathe, and light if we are to see, so we need noble people if we are to live.
—RICARDA HUCH, _F ÜR DIE MARTYRER DER FREIHEIT_, MARCH/APRIL 1946, CITED IN _B RIEFE AN DIE FREUNDE_, P. 449
BEFORE WE SPEAK about the old lady who wrote this, we should recall the doomed bravery of the young men she was writing about. For those involved in the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler's life, martyrdom was always a possibility, and in retrospect, naturally enough, it looks like a certainty. A successful coup d'état would have required far too much to go right. Even if the conspirators had succeeded in killing Hitler, their own lives would have been forfeit: Himmler had the exits covered. With martyrdom secured, canonization duly followed, especially on the conservative right. Many of the plotters had been aristocrats and it was felt—felt because wished—that they had expressed a long-standing repugnance among people of good family towards the vulgar upstart Hitler.
Actually it had never been as simple as that. When some of the condemned young officers had been even younger, Hitler had looked to them like a saviour, a new Bismarck. Nor was it only the Wehrmacht that benefited from well-connected enthusiasm. Aristocratic recruits to the SS were plentiful: promotion was rapid, and there were opportunities to ride horses. (Funding an SS equestrian team was one of Himmler's master strokes.) Most of the young officers who developed doubts about Hitler had close friends who never developed any doubts at all. Critics on the left who would like to deny saintliness to the high-born conspirators will always have a lot to go on. But the papal voice, the voice that matters most, spoke early. The voice belonged to the distinguished scholar Ricarda Huch, the bearer of a resounding title given to her by no less an authority than Thomas Mann. He called her the First Lady of Germany.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Ricarda Huch, by then heaped with laurels but still glamorously prominent as an enfant terrible, was the kind of illustrious Aryan name they wanted to keep enrolled in their academic institutions to help offset the gaps left by the expelled Jews. Already of a certain age but with plenty of a glittering career left in her, she nevertheless, and without hesitating for a moment, found the courage to tell the Nazis where they could put it. The composer Max von Schelling, president of the Prussian Academy of the Arts, received a letter from her in which she insisted that the "Germanness" the Nazis kept talking about was not her Germanness: _nicht mein Deutschtum_. Her point made, she retired into private life. It was a mark, of course, of Nazi Germany's relative porosity vis-à-vis the Soviet Union that it offered bolt holes in which it was possible to lie still and say nothing, as if silence were not treason. Had the regime lasted longer than its brief twelve years, Himmler's steadily growing SS imperium and Bormann's always more enveloping bureaucracy would have probably closed off the last chances of tacit dissent: as under Stalin, vociferous affirmation would have been the only survivable posture. But under the Third Reich a woman of Ricarda's age and authority could get away with holding her rulers in contempt, as long as she wasn't vocal about it. The housebound matriarch survived the war and resumed her career afterwards, living long enough to find her early works forgotten. With the relentless, and largely justified, left-wing critique of the old institutions increasingly establishing an unchallenged ascendancy, a scholarly achievement like hers was thought too bourgeois to be valuable. The First Lady of Germany was quietly lowered into the tomb of her own respectability. The Germans have a word for it: _Todgeschweigen_. Killed by not being mentioned.
But there was a paradox in the deathly hush, because the First Lady, when young, had been the First Vixen. Born too grand to be impressed by high society, Ricarda became an establishment figure only by default and by the lapse of years: as a girl she was a rebel, not to say a bit of a raver. Intellectually, she had begun as an admirer of Mussolini, not for his Fascist hegemony but for his rowdy anarchist origins. She had admired Bakunin for the same reason. Emotionally, she was a feminist role-reverser _avant la lettre_. In Wilhelmine Germany, at a time of stifling conformity when the marriageability of young women was the quality that mattered most, she managed, by sheer force of character, to dish out to men the kind of treatment she would ordinarily have been expected to take. If women got in her way, they too were given short shrift. She stole her sister's husband without compunction and usually made a point of getting engaged to her suitors before giving them the elbow, just to ensure that they would have the humiliation to remember. She was a social revolutionary in the deepest sense: no party, not even the Sparticists, had a programme to match her behaviour. She was on her own. For her spiritual equivalent in modern times, you would have to imagine a combination of Germaine Greer, Billie Jean King and the London bluestocking Barbara Skelton, the fiery amalgam eventually cooling into the general shape of Muriel Spark, with overtones of Camille Paglia after the second cocktail.
It is doubtful, however, if the wild girl's pilgrim soul was ever tamed, even by time. One modern parallel that won't work is to attribute to her a Jane Fonda—like anabasis from one mould of progressive conformity to the next. Ricarda was never a conventional spirit looking for the display case of a radical context: she was always a genuine solo act. Her opinions were entirely hers and often uncomfortable to even the most wide-ranging liberal hierophant, as if she had been some kind of clerical surrealist out to shock with decontextualized opinions instead of sliced eyeballs and soft watches. In June 1943 she recorded in writing her profound enjoyment of her first air raid. It was the same month that Hamburg was incinerated. Thoughts of doom and retribution would have been more suitable, but Ricarda could not repress her delight that the full-colour spectacular had come to a cinema near her. "Finally Jena has had a sensation." In Berlin after the war she wandered the world of ruins—the _Trümmerwelt_ —where it would have been permissible for the author of one of the most important books on the Thirty Years War to weep heavy tears for the downfall of a civilization. She loved it. Her aesthetic enthusiasm for the gutted buildings and heaped rubble was boundless. She was in her eighties at the time.
And that was the time when she wrote her encomium to the suicidal young nobles of July. It would do us good to remember that the old lady had lived a long life as they had not, and that she had lived it with originality as they might never have done. They were exactly the kind of stiff-necked, tight-trousered cadets to whom she had once so enjoyed giving the runaround. If she could salute them, so should we. She was, after all, absolutely right on every point in the paragraph. The boys never had a chance. Even if the apprentices had managed to kill their sorcerer, they could not have saved _Grossdeutschland_ , which was going down to unconditional surrender no matter who led it. But even if they had known in advance that a coup would not work, they would still have been right to try. Henning von Tresckow, who knew more about the Killing Hitler business than anybody, guessed that the July 1944 plot was doomed but said it should go ahead anyway. He could only have meant that he saw it as a ceremony: a moment of honour that would be remembered when there was nothing else to remember except shame.
Ricarda was well aware that there were other and less charismatic people in the conspiracy apart from the glamorously uniformed _Hochadel_ scions whose consciences had developed few notable doubts until military defeat became a certainty. There were obscure commoners who had seen through Hitler from the beginning. What she meant by nobility was the sacrificial spirit that joined, in this one instance, the beautiful young men from the _Almanach de Gotha_ and the plodding minor bureaucrats from the local council. She could take such a large view of nobility because she was noble herself. One of the marks of the natural aristocrat is that the brain, the centre of rationality, does not become detached from the viscera, the seat of moral judgement. As a student of German history—and a reader of her book on romanticism will wonder if there was ever a better student—she was well placed to assess the condition her country was in during the Weimar Republic, and to understand the appeal that a strongman might have to those conservative forces who feared a Bolshevik insurrection beyond anything else. But she had only to see the Nazis in action to know exactly what they were, and when they invited her to join them she had only one answer to give. Millions of dead bodies later, those who equivocated were slow to mention her name. Their reluctance was understandable, and remains easy to share. Conscious that we, too, might have found no uncompromising path through a moral maze, we would all like to believe that there was no easy answer. And indeed there wasn't. But there was a clear one. It was to tell the Nazis to go chase themselves.
All it took was courage. But courage is hard to come by: as Ricarda's rococo c.v. suggests, to have buckets of guts you need to be a little bit mad. Hence the discomfort which haunts any of us who write about the subject: the malaise comes from our self-doubt, and the self-doubt is the surest sign that the murderers in black uniforms are still with us. It is almost as disturbing that a woman like Ricarda Huch is still with us, but if we seek reassurance about human dignity instead of mere acceptance of human weakness, we must face up to her, and try to remember why Judas found it so hard to look into the face of Christ—not because of the divine serenity that was there, but because of the self-seeking calculation that was not.
J
Ernst Jünger
ERNST JÜNGER
Ernst Jünger was born in Heidelberg in 1895 and reached maturity just in time to volunteer for service in World War I, during which his bravery won him the Pour le Mérite, Germany's highest military decoration. After the war, his book _In Stahlgewittern_ ( _Storm of Steel_ ) launched him on a literary career that amounts to as big a problem for the student of twentieth-century humanism as Bertolt Brecht's. In Jünger's case, however, the problem came from the other direction. Jünger emerged from the trenches as a believer in national strength, which he thought threatened by liberal democracy. Though he never gave his full allegiance to the Nazis, he was glad to accept military rank in the Wehrmacht, and wrote approvingly about the invasion of France, in which he accompanied one of the forward units. After the plot against Hitler's life in July 1944 he fell under suspicion, but his prestige and his Pour le Mérite made him untouchable. Never an active conspirator, he thought he was fulfilling his duty to civilized values merely by despising Hitler. The thought of killing him did not occur. In his post-war years, Jünger wrote contemptuously against the apparatchiks of the East German regime, who found it easy to condemn him for his right-wing track record, describing him in their official literary lexicon as "an especially dangerous exponent of West German militaristic and neofascist literature." Having missed his first chance to identify a totalitarian enemy in good time, he didn't miss the second. Demonstrating powers of compression and evocation that could pack a treatise into a paragraph, his two collections of linked short essays, _Auf den Marmorklippen_ ( _On the Marble Cliffs_ ) and _Das abenteuerliches Herz_ (The Adventurous Heart), are the easiest introduction to his literary talent and political vision. The talent is unquestionable. The vision is quite otherwise. But when he finally realized what Hitler had done in pursuit of the same ideal of strength that he had himself cherished, even he was obliged to consider that his espousal of Darwin (the struggle for existence) and Nietzsche (the will to power) might have depended on some sort of liberal context for its rational expression. He died in 1998, his name much honoured, with good reason, and much in dispute, for a better one.
Things like that belong to the style of the times.
—ERNST JÜNGER, _K AUKASISCHE AUFZEICHNUNGEN_ (CAUCASIAN NOTES)
WHEN IT COMES to a great offence, a phrase like "the style of the times" can be self-serving, because it removes the obligation to place blame. Even before Hitler launched Germany on a catastrophic war, Jünger should have been able to assess the toxicity of the Nazis by the intellectual quality of some of the people who were trying to get beyond their reach. In retrospect, his phrase "the style of the times" enrols itself among many euphemisms that served to sanitize the effects of the Nazi impact even on the learned professions. Jünger, as an Aryan, was safe from that impact. He should have cared more about what happened to those less privileged. A learned man himself, Jünger knew all their names: even the names of the minor figures, the spear carriers and walk-ons. In the late 1930s, in a race for a foreign chair of philology, the obscure Victor Klemperer was beaten to a safe seat in Ankara by the illustrious Erich Auerbach. If Klemperer had secured the prize instead, and got away to safety, it is unlikely that he would have written anything with the bold scope of Auerbach's _Mimesis_. We should not romanticize Klemperer because of what he went through: millions did. But we are compelled to admire him for what he made of it. Compared to Auerbach, Klemperer was a plodder. Fated to stay where he was, however, he was granted the dubious reward of experiencing from close up what the Nazis did to the German language: an instructive, if disheartening, philological field. Some of Klemperer's conclusions are loosely distributed through his indispensable two-volume diary, published in English as _I Shall Bear Witness_ and _To the Bitter End_. But most are tightly contained in a separate book assembled after the war out of the notes he somehow managed to make and keep during it: _LTI_. (The initials stand for _Lingua tertii imperii_ —Language of the Third Empire—a bitter scholarly pun.) As a Jew in the Third Empire, Klemperer was allowed no new books or newspapers. He wasn't even allowed to listen to the radio. But he picked up the new usages at second hand. Reading his analysis, we can only conclude that the Nazis wrecked the language they had usurped. They wrecked it with euphemism: they spoke and wrote the officialese of slaughter.
But we should not delude ourselves that an Aryan non-Nazi, no matter how exalted his intellect, could exercise the privilege of remaining uninfected. Ernst Jünger is a case in point: perhaps _the_ case in point, because he was incomparably the most gifted writer to remain on the scene. In his wartime diaries, the strange usage isolated in my opening quotation keeps on cropping up. It centres on a single word. The word is _Zeitstil_ : "the style of the times." In early December 1942 we find Jünger visiting the Russian front. He hears about dreadful things happening to Russian prisoners. First of all he convinces himself that the prisoners are partisans, and can thus expect no quarter. When this thesis starts to look shaky, he convinces himself of something else: that both sides are behaving dreadfully, and it all belongs to "the style of the times." Later on in the same month, he hears from a general (the generals were always at home to Jünger, whose prestige was immense) that the Jews are being slaughtered. Jünger's reaction is: "The old chivalry is dead: wars from now on will be waged by technologists." Once again, it is the style of the times. And so it was, but not in the way he meant it.
Jünger had lent his literary gift to the idea of German militaristic renewal. Until the news about the extermination camps was finally and unmistakably read to him by a German general in 1943, no amount of horrifying truth could induce him fully to admit that he had made a mistake. His way out of such an admission was to blame the style of the times: i.e., to console himself with the belief that everyone was at it, led back to barbarism by the modern spirit of technology. The style of the times was a powerfully useful idea. It didn't even need to be put into words. It could be put into silence. In his elegant, learned and finally disgraceful _Notes Towards the Definition of Culture_ , published in 1948, T. S. Eliot simply declined to admit that the Holocaust might be a pertinent topic in a discussion of what had happened to Europe. Closer to the scene but equally untouched, Eliot's admirer and colleague Ernst Robert Curtius achieved a similar feat of inattention. If pressed on the point, both savants would have blamed the new technological order: the style of the times. But there was no such thing as the style of the times, except in the sense that they themselves personified: a style of not concerning themselves with the catastrophic results of a political emphasis they had been given ample opportunity to recognize as the first and most deadly enemy of the humanist culture they claimed to represent. The humble Victor Klemperer, if they had been forcibly reminded of his name, would have been dismissed as small beer by both of them. Ernst Jünger would have behaved better. To give him the respect he has coming, he finally realized that the massacre of the Jews could not be wished away. But he never quite gave up on the airy notion that the style of the times was to blame for things like that.
K
Franz Kafka
John Keats
Leszek Kolakowski
Alexandra Kollontai
Heda Margolius Kovaly
Karl Kraus
FRANZ KAFKA
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 and died in Berlin in 1924. In his brief four decades alive he created a body of work that has influenced almost everything written since: not even James Joyce had such an impact. Kafka was trained as a lawyer and was first employed in Prague's Workers' Accident Insurance Institution. This experience probably laid the foundations for his evocation of bureaucracy and the plight of the individual caught up in the remorseless logic of an irrational system. (J. P. Stern's short book about Kafka is predicated on the view that Kafka's supposedly fantastic vision was largely an account of reality; and it is a measure of the unsettling power generated by Kafka's magic spell that Stern's view is commonly regarded as wilfully paradoxical.) As a Jew, Kafka also had first-hand knowledge from birth of how it felt to be faced with exclusions and unpassable tests with ever-changing rules. But his vision of state terror lay deep in a psychology personal to him. Since the Nazi era need never have happened, to say that he prophesied it is actually a belittlement of his creative achievement, and only one step up from saying that he caused the whole thing. But nobody could now read _The Trial_ without thinking of the Soviet show trials, or the short works _Metamorphosis_ and _In the Penal Colony_ without thinking of death camps. The novels for which he is now most famous— _The Trial, The Castle and Amerika_ —were all published posthumously, against Kafka's wishes that they should be destroyed. (Often derided as a giftless and interfering parasite on Kafka, his friend Max Brod was in fact responsible for ignoring Kafka's instructions, preserving his books, and thus giving us the genius that we know today.) Kafka's very order for the immolation of his work could have been issued by the keepers of _The Castle_ , a book which has been usefully defined as a _Pilgrim's Progress_ whose pilgrim does not progress. Beginners reading in English can place sufficient trust in the translations by Edwin and Willa Muir to be sure that they will get something vital from reading _Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and The Castle_. But just how Kafka should ideally be translated remains a question, best tackled by Milan Kundera in the relevant sections of his _Testaments Betrayed_. Philip Roth is another important novelist who writes illuminatingly about Kafka. Writings on the subject by scholars and critics are without number, but perhaps the best single short essay is by George Steiner, collected in Louis Kronenberg's indispensable _Brief Lives: A Biographical Companion to the Arts_. The best way to approach Kafka, however, is probably just to plunge into _The Castle_ and get lost. Getting lost and staying lost is the whole idea of the book, and a matchless symbol for how, according to Kafka, we really feel underneath, when we momentarily convince ourselves that we know what's going on, while still suspecting that the momentary conviction might be part of the deception.
How short life must be, if something so fragile can last a lifetime.
—KAFKA
KAFKA WAS TALKING about a young woman's body. Along with the anguish, there is an unmanning tenderness in the statement, and the tenderness should be remembered when we consider what a tangle the whole business of sex was for Kafka, who never quite got away from the idea that the consummation of sexual desire, if it should ever happen, would be _Schmutz_ —something dirty. We need to remind ourselves that a man can be in that condition and still find inspiration in desire. If that had not been so for Kafka, he would never have said this. Anything Kafka said gained so much weight in the light of events that it is hard to extract it from history. Here is one thing he said, however, that has its true setting in eternity. History tells us that many of the pretty female bodies on which he helplessly doted were consumed by fire before their time. Eternity tells us that he would have been right anyway, even if the disaster had never happened. The heavenly expression before us will last only as long as a life.
"Just so long," as Louis MacNeice put it, "but long enough." Desire can be repressed to the point of extinction, but it is still the wellspring. As we saw when discussing Peter Altenberg, there is nothing "only" about it. Nietzsche said that sexuality saturates the consciousness all the way to the top. In European literature, ever since the poetry of courtly love first codified the _visione amorosa_ , the identification of desire and revelation has been common currency. We can think of Wagner's emphasis on redemption as an attempt to separate the flower from its roots, but he could have had no such aim if he had not felt the connection as a fact. If the fact is a myth, it is a myth that all cultivated mankind shares, so it is a fact anyway. When we stumble across another literature in which the fact is lacking, we tend to find that literature perverted rather than primitive. Our assumption is that the whole idea was there from the beginning, one of the first things in the mind, perhaps even before religion: primordial. We might even think that civilization began at that point, when the individual was first seen to embody the universal. It brought endless trouble: when Menelaus and Paris both burned for Helen, Troy burned with them, and Pascal was making a powerful point when he suggested that history might have turned out differently if Cleopatra's nose had been a different length. Men have always been fools for beauty. But without being bowled over in the first place, they would never have begun to be wise. Sex, the most powerful instinct, generates the most closely focused attention: so that we see, in the desired other, the proof that creation is a miracle. Men who see the proof ten times at every pedestrian crossing are no doubt foolish, but men who see it only in their own shaving mirrors are generally agreed to be suffering from a case of arrested development.
For the narrator of _The Castle_ , the girl Frieda is his only connection with a sane order of events as he reluctantly but steadily realizes, in the opening section of the book, that the castle has a mind of its own, and the mind will marshal infinite resources to shut him out. In Frieda's arms he can momentarily believe that she, at least, is not doing what the castle wants. The lovers soon find that they can't go to sleep together without expecting to find spectators gathered around them when they wake up. Even during their first sexual encounter there are probably other people in the room: it is hard to tell, but one of the novel's mechanisms is not to permit us to rule out such a possibility. Much later, in _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ , Orwell reprised the same relationship of physical love to hopeless odds. Orwell wanted the tenderness reduced to raw sex: Winston Smith presses Julia to admit that the act itself is enough, as if Orwell was looking for a touchstone, an irreducible impulse that the totalitarian state cannot eliminate even by control. But for Kafka, the touchstone is the tenderness. Presciently, Kafka's nightmare state is even more controlled than Orwell's. "You ask if there are control officials?" asks the _Vorsteher_ (superintendent) rhetorically. "There are _only_ control officials." But Kafka creates Frieda as a whole personality, not just a symbol. As a personality, she wilts under the pressure of what she and K. are up against: her beauty fades. Under the influence of the _Wirtin_ (innkeeper's wife), Frieda reinterprets K.'s involvement with her as a stratagem for getting nearer to the castle. K. rebuts her, but he can't refute her. How can he be sure? All he can be sure of is that he is robbing her of her vitality. Merely from the psychology of Frieda's accusations—which any man who has stood accused by a woman will recognize—it would be one of the great scenes in Kafka, and thus in all modern literature. But to see how magnificent it is, we should look through it, into Kafka's heart. K. hates having reduced her to this, and it is because he loves her. Rather than see her destroyed, he is even ready to contemplate that she might regain her position with Klamm—the inexorable and suitably mysterious figure of authority—thus to restore her credit with the castle. K. knows that he spells danger for Frieda, and he wants her safe.
Allegorical interpretations of Kafka's major novels are no doubt valid—with the usual proviso that if they are all valid they might all be irrelevant—but for once the biographical element begs to be brought in. In real life, Kafka sent his imagination to rest in the minds of women. If he had not done so, his fiction would have been less different: more like ordinary fiction, and less like fact—the facts that were yet to happen. There are good reasons for believing that he could prophesy the nature of the totalitarian state because as a Jew he had already lived with its mechanisms of exclusion, the first parts of the totalitarian state to develop: he knew them so intimately, and thought them to be so pervasive, that he came to agree with them, providing one of our most tragic examples of self-directed _Judenhass_. But much of the prophetic element in Kafka comes from his extreme sensitivity to evanescence, and that sensitivity was centred squarely on what time could do to a woman's life. Milena Jesenská, the woman worthy of his intellect, was wooed from the distance at which she was kept. Felice Bauer (on whom the Frieda of the book was probably based) never had a chance: even if a marriage had followed upon the repeated engagements, nothing would have happened. Kafka thought sex was a disease. But he also thought that it was a gift, or he would not have asked himself, only a short time before his death: "What have you done with the gift of sex?" ( _Was hast du mit dem Geschenk des Geschlechtes getan?_ You can hear the integrative rhythmic force of his prose even at the moment of resignation.) We hope that Dora Dymant, with whom he shared a brief spell of happiness in Berlin, would have said that he had done at least something with it. And he would never have written to Milena with his desperate complaint about the certainty of their never living together _Körper an Körper_ (body to body) if he had not wanted that above all things, even in his consuming fear of the wish coming true.
JOHN KEATS
John Keats (1795–1821) exemplifies the difference between the past and yesterday. Wordsworth and Coleridge are in the past. Even Browning, who came later and who in so many ways was a prototype of what we call the modern, is still in the past. But Keats, like Byron, is just yesterday. Every modern poet is obliged to have a view on Keats, as if he were part of the living competition. Sometimes an adverse view is even more packed with cherished information than an approving one. (Collected in his deliberately provocative book _What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions_ , Kingsley Amis's essay on Keats is a fine example of the critical attack that brings out every virtue.) A searching critique of Keats could be built up just from what he wrote about himself, especially in his _Letters_ , collected into a book which outstrips even Rilke's _Letters to a Young Poet_ as a document that goes to the centre of the poetic life. Keats's observation on the unnecessarily high quality of Shakespeare's "bye-writing" is an example of how the young writer could bring to the examination of language the same analytical intensity with which he examined the world. It was a quality he shared with Pushkin: their lives overlapped, but they didn't know about each other. They might, however, have shared the one mind when it came to precocity of technique, the technique beyond technique, the technique that includes every modulation of the natural speaking voice; and with both it is necessary to remember that they died at the beginning of their careers, not at the end. The forbearance that we bring to Shelley; the astonishment that we bring to Büchner and Radiguet; the sense of being robbed by fate that we bring to Masaccio and Bizet; we must bring all these things to Keats, or miss the full point about the arbitrary fate that leaves us thinking of him as a promise only partially fulfilled. We should also remember that Keats, like Chekhov and Schnitzler later on, was trained in medicine at a time when medicine could not yet cure tuberculosis: he lived and died, that is, in a time when it was normal for talent to be killed at random. In the modern age we don't regard that as normal, even when it is common. Hence our outrage when it happens, and the permanent indignation with which we find it so much harder to come to terms than our ancestors did with mere regret.
Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.
—KEATS TO HIS BROTHER, JANUARY 23, 1818
COMING FROM KEATS, the remark was either generous or nervous. On any objective estimate, he was a prodigy: and a prodigy not just on the level of raw verbal talent, but in the breadth and reasonableness of his mind. (There is a striking contrast here with Shelley, who was rarely reasonable even when brilliant.) Given all the qualities at a young age, it would have been large of Keats to envy the plodders who acquire them, if at all, only over time. Or it would have been large of him had he known how blessed he was. But perhaps he thought he wasn't, in which case he was being jumpy. We tend to think he was jumpy, because we tend to believe Byron had something when he mocked Keats for letting bad reviews get to him: the mind, that very fiery particle . . . snuffed out by an article. (Because the rhyme clicked, the barb stuck: a couplet, like a caricature, can set the terms of discussion far into the future.)
But nobody who lacked a solid inner artistic confidence could have written the Odes. When I was first in London, a fair copy in Keats's best hand of the "Ode to a Nightingale" was on display in a glass cabinet in his house. His best hand was a thing of sculptural beauty, like Petrarch's, Rilke's or Rimbaud's. Though the ink looked barely dry, the ode might as well have been chiselled into a slab of marble. Lack of confidence was not his problem. He would just have liked to live, thrive and grow wise. There is no good reason to believe that he would not have gone on developing: there are reasons, but they are all bad. Kingsley Amis left that consideration of Keats's possible future development aside, as if it didn't matter. Not normally prey to obtuseness, Amis should have taken warning from a previous example. F. R. Leavis had done the same for Shelley, with plainly ludicrous results, because the unastonishing conclusion of Leavis's essay was that Shelley was not as good as Shakespeare. A Swiftian method of textual comparison was used to establish this. Leavis's owlish judgement obviously meant nothing without a consideration of whether Shelley, had he lived, might not conceivably have got a bit better. Amis at least conceded that Keats's initial charm was Shakespearean in its buttonholing melodic effect. Amis, indeed, said that no English reader could know much about poetry who did not think at some time in his life that Keats, because of the initial impact of his verbal music, was the greatest poet in English after Shakespeare. But Amis definitely meant that it had to be an early time in the reader's life: that an enthusiasm for Keats was a callow enthusiasm, because the poetry was callow poetry. Even if Amis was right on the point, it is hard to see why Keats's poetry, had he lived, should not have grown more mature. Keats might have had everything, but he still needed time. He knew that within himself. Only twenty-six years old, he died knowing it, and should surely be granted the validity of his own insight. Today's young tourists of a literary bent, when they pass, on the Spanish Steps in Rome, the window of his last resting place, are being granted an insight into the fearful realities of a world without antibiotics.
Degas said he was more interested in talent at forty than in talent at twenty. We think the remark good because of our general conviction that anyone who credits himself with a vocation should prove it by staying the course. Keats's remark fits into that view, so it, too, wins our approval. But in fairness we should not forget the artists who reached such an intensity and complication of achievement at an early age that we can think of them as fulfilled even if they died young. Masaccio and Seurat are the two clearest cases in painting. In literature the French seem to specialize in the phenomenon of the nonpareil prodigy: during the Revolution they had André Chénier, whose neo-classical measures were certainly the complete product even if he himself was not, and in modern times they had both Radiguet and Alain-Fournier. The German language boasts the most amazing literary prodigy of all: Büchner, whose _Dantons Tod_ sums up the lifetime's political experience of a man sixty years older than its author—Burckhardt might have written its last act. In music, Mozart and Chopin were old stagers compared with Schubert and Bellini, dead at thirty-one and thirty-three, respectively. Speculation about what Schubert and Bellini might have done had they lived can continue for ever, but despite Alfred Einstein's warning that we ought not to think of the brilliant young dead musicians as in any way complete, we do in fact think of them as complete artistic personalities: we don't think, "Well, that was a beautiful piece from the man who one day would have been Schubert" or "What a pity that " _Prendi l'annell'ti dono_ 'betrays none of the restrained coherence that a fully developed Bellini might have given it." We think of them, that is, in the same way as we think of Rimbaud, who lived out his life; but who, as an artist, really was _frühvollendet_ , to use Einstein's word—completed early. The question is whether Keats would have been the same: a prodigy who, had he lived, would have gone no further. Surely our only reason for entertaining that notion is that he was so very, very good, and we find it uncomfortable to contemplate how rich his career might have been had he been allowed to live it through. It might have realigned the whole history of English literature by giving it a second apex: a turn-up for the books.
There is also the consideration that when we go back even so short a distance as to the early nineteenth century—only a few generations—we have already moved out of our time, the time of arbitrary premature death from politics, and entered something even more frightening by our standards, the time of arbitrary premature death from disease. The American philosopher Charles Pierce, in the title of his best-known book, had a phrase that captured the resulting dilemma: _Values in a Universe of Chance_. Looking back to the long pre-modern human era when life was valued at a pin's fee, we should be careful, as critics of the arts, not to take with us our sense of a reasonable expectation of health and longevity. We need to cultivate a feeling for the suddenness and randomness of God's wrath, because it is almost certainly true that the urge of genius towards artistic coherence was in reaction to exactly that. With Keats, though the age of preventive medicine was arriving—as a physician, he would have been part of it—we are still in that old continuity. When we see, as his powers of evocation make us bound to see, the mental picture of his nymph's filmy clothes sliding down her body on the Eve of St. Agnes, we are seeing the living body with such intensity because of the intensity with which he saw dead bodies in the dissecting room. The dark knowledge behind his light moments was once the constant background radiation behind all creative life. As Louis MacNeice said of the ancient world, "It was all so unimaginably different, and all so long ago." But we have to imagine it, or else lose our grip on the past. What we need is a trick of the mind, unobtainable with any known drug, by which we can imagine how it must have felt when the only possible way to view reality without the benefit of religious faith was to despair. Imagining that, we will find it easier to realize why Lucretius committed suicide, although even harder to believe that he should have composed the presciently realistic _De rerum natura_ before he subtracted himself from the game of chance whose full arbitrariness he had so bravely faced. Many poets before Keats had caught his tone of realism, but he sustained it, and one of the most remarkable of his many precocities is that he intensified it, all the way to the end. The end came too soon and much of his realism was veiled in romance, but underneath the romance he saw things as they were, and wrote them down as if to record the texture of life were his deepest compulsion. He probably felt the same way about dying, but he could no longer lift his pen.
LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI
Leszek Kolakowski was born in Radom, Poland, in 1927. As an unduly inquisitive professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw he was first of all ejected from the Communist Party in 1966 and finally expelled from academic life in 1968. In exile he was variously a visiting professor at the universities of Montreal, Yale and California (Berkeley), and, in the long term, a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. His three-volume treatise _Main Currents of Marxism_ is one of the most important, and luckily also one of the most readable, twentieth-century books on the theory of politics. (Students who find Karl Popper's _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ a hard and repetitious slog will have no such difficulties with Kolakowski.) The three volumes of _Main Currents_ progress chronologically from Marx's own lifetime to those crucial years after Stalin's death when the dream, somehow deprived of energy by the subtraction of its nightmare element, was already showing signs of coming to an end, in Europe at least. In its third volume, entitled _The Breakdown_ , theory is backed up with the harsh realities of practice, because Kolakowski is talking about the period he himself lived through, and was lucky to survive. In this repect, Kolakowski's observational scope will remind the reader of the Russsian professor of sociology Aleksandr Zinoviev, another academic who was obliged to carry with him into exile a bitter first-hand knowledge of his subject. Kolakowski's analysis of Marxist logic is as penetrating as Raymond Aron's in _The Opium of the Intellectuals_ but it attains a wider resonance by extending itself to the individual personalities of those thinkers who espoused the cause and were distorted by it. Prominent among these was Georg Lukács: the potential student could start with the pages on Lukács and arrive straight away at the fulcrum of Kolakowski's view. Like many a political analyst who was born to serve a socialist hegemony but lived to question it, Kolakowski developed and harboured an increasingly rich nostalgic regard for the lost civil order. His slim but rich _Le Village introuvable_ (1986) puts a Burkean emphasis on the indispensibility of an inherited social fabric and insists that the so-called global village will always remain a pipe dream: a cautionary message that applies to our cybernetic future just as much as to his collectivist past. The beginning reader should not be too quick to assume, however, that an argument billed as an anti-Marxist polemic must automatically favour social conservatism: some of Kolakowski's principles are radical enough, the most subversive of them being that the individual intellect, whatever its learned scope and range of interpretation, has no inbuilt safeguards against a hardening into sclerotic orthodoxy. He thus gives any university student not just a licence, but an imperative, to stay on the alert against authority.
Lukács is perhaps the most striking example in the twentieth century of what may be called the betrayal of reason by those whose profession is to use and defend it.
—LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI, _M AIN CURRENTS OF MARXISM_, VOL. 3, P. 307
IF KARL POPPER had not traced the irreparable faults in the circuitry of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski would have done it. In his _Main Currents of Marxism_ , the third volume (the one to read first) sums up what happened to Marxism in the twentieth century, and proves it to be a case of Marxism happening to defenceless people. Georg Lukács was Hungary's gift to the international delusion (slow to die even though Stalin didn't like it either) that serious literary studies might serve progressive ideological ends. In the Communist world there were hundreds of thousands of intellectuals who were doomed to the status of victim, but Lukács rated even above the Soviet cultural commisar Lunacharsky (who, in the 1920s, was first of all given the job of encouraging the avant-garde artists and then, later on, the job of bringing them to heel) in the sad category of intellectuals doomed to the status of perpetrator. What made Lukács doubly pathetic was that he could never quite stop trying to talk himself into it even after he had done it: a trick of the mind which Kolakowski analyses with a fine touch. Kolakowski makes such an example of Lukács because Lukács was a true intellectual: an intellectual of real culture in a context of dogmatists without any. Bukharin counted as a thinker among the old Bolsheviks because he could make a general statement about the connection of music to economics: nobody would be able to play the piano, he pointed out, if there were no pianos. Compared with that sort of thing, Lukács was a humanist. But he was a Jesuit humanist, which was what Thomas Mann made him in _The Magic Mountain_ , where the character called Naphta reflects Lukács's insatiable need for a totalitarian system in which he could immerse himself by developing a theoretical justification for its hegemony. (Briefly serving as minister of culture in the Imre Nagy government of 1956, Lukács was duly deported to Romania by the Russians and had a ringside seat while almost all his colleagues were murdered. His conclusion was that Stalinism was a mere aberration in the triumphant story of socialism.) Kolakowski can assess the range of Lukács's culture, and therefore measure the depth to which he sank.
Kolakowski's combination of critical rigour and humane sympathy is yet another reminder of what we owe Poland. If history could begin again, Poland's contribution and sacrifice would both be too much to ask of any nation of so small a size. (For Poland to escape its fate, geography would have to begin again: between Germany and Russia was simply the wrong place for a smallish country to be.) Poland gave us too many examples of what the twentieth century could do when all its destructive forces were unleashed at once. Some of the losses were our gains. Poland gave us a set of glittering literary exiles: Witold Gombrowicz, Czeslaw Milosz and my personal favourite among all the world's literary critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki. But, in his best-selling autobiography _Mein Leben_ , Reich-Ranicki reminds us about the Polish literati whom we never got to hear of even vaguely. One of them was Julian Tuwim, a poet of "incomparable many-sidedness" who, while he escaped being murdered, did not escape oblivion—the world still hasn't heard of him. Unnamed young Polish mathematicians gave us the first clues to the Enigma machine, and thus to the Ultra secret that saved Europe from Nazi domination. Other losses were dead losses: the world gained nothing except cautionary tales. Poland gave us Bruno Schulz, perhaps the single most unbearable modern example of talent laid waste in midlife. It gave us the Katyn massacre: a whole generation of gifted young men wiped out at once, and buried without even the opportunity of rest, because one of the only two forces physically capable of such a deed spent decades befouling the air by trying to pin it on the other. (The Russians did it; the Nazis accused them of it; and for decades the Russians were exonerated because it was the Nazis who did the accusing.) But as Michael Burleigh reminds us in his essential book _The Third Reich_ , we should not always be looking at the talented.
In Poland the whole of ordinary life was distorted: everything that had given rise to a civilization and helped to sustain it was rooted out. After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there was a general expectation in the West that there would be a sudden cultural efflorescence in the East. It was thought that Poland would produce a dozen young versions of the film director Andrezj Wajda, for example. Only gradually was it realized that things don't work that way. A figure like Wajda was never a precursor of a free-market future: he lived in an air pocket of the liberal past which had somehow managed to hold itself together in the surrounding miasma. The films that made him famous were made in the rare periods when the grip of the regime relaxed. (By the time that I first watched _Ashes and Diamonds_ in the late 1950s, the comparatively tolerant conditions that had allowed Wajda to make the film were already hardening again into orthodoxy.) The merit of Kolakowski is that he tells us where the miasma came from. Karl Popper, Raymond Aron and the other sociological analysts show how Marxism affected everything at the practical level. Kolakowski does an even better job than Isaiah Berlin of showing how it affected everything at the mental level. Except to the extent that a clear explanation always offers a kind of encouragement, volume 3 of _Main Currents of Marxism_ makes depressing reading: but it can be recommended for all those of us who grew up in sheltered circumstances. It was an encouraging sign, towards the end of the twentieth century, that Kolakowski's conclusions got into the general conversation about politics—and especially about constitutional politics, in which the effect of his sceptical view of holistic intellectual innovation was to encourage a salutary dab on the brake pedal.
"We rebelled by criminal methods against the joyfulness of the new life."
—LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI QUOTING BUKHARIN AT HIS TRIAL, IN _M AIN CURRENTS OF MARXISM_, VOL. 3, P. 82
Kolakowski is surely right to pick this confession by the Old Bolshevik Bukharin as the definitive moment of the 1938 Moscow show trials. Onlookers who fell for Bukharin's big moment would fall for anything. There were sharp onlookers who did, however. Dorothy Parker, the once and future drama critic and lifelong analyst of bogus language, thought that the trials were authentic. More interestingly, there were sceptics who still fell some of the way. Arthur Koestler, whose _Darkness at Noon_ was really based on the Bukharin case, thought that Bukharin could have told such a lie only out of the belief that it might benefit the cause. Koestler's novel, nominally dedicated to discrediting the Soviet Union, thus held out a crumb of comfort to its admirers in the West: there must have been a cause to believe in. The crumb of comfort helped to sustain sympathizers for another eighteen years, until Khrushchev, at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, revealed that no such sophisticated interpretation of Bukharin's performance had ever been necessary. The Old Bolsheviks' ludicrous confessions had been beaten into them. (Bukharin, apparently, did not need to be tortured: a threat to the lives of his wife and little son was enough to do the trick.) After Khrushchev blew the gaff, the international left intelligentsia had no choice but to give up on the idea that the terror in the late 1930s had been at some level a necessary stage in the building of socialism. But there was still, and still is, a reluctance to believe that the Soviet Union had been like that from the beginning. Bukharin had always been well aware of the horrors that underlay the joyfulness of the new life. During one or another of the Party purges, Brecht delivered himself of the opinion that the more innocent the Party members were, the more they deserved to suffer. The charitable, and probably correct, interpretation of his remark is that he meant there was no such thing as an innocent Party member: if they had faithfully done their duty, they were necessarily guilty. (An uncharitable interpretation must follow the charitable one: if Brecht realized that the Party conspired against the people, why did he support it?) Though Bukharin's lifeless prose style pioneered the _langue de bois_ that Stalin would later bring to an eerie perfection, he was certainly a shining light of humanism compared with the rest of the top echelon of the Old Bolsheviks. Surviving members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia thought he might intervene for them or their relatives if only he could be reached. But he helped to build the nightmare, whose countless innocent victims have a far better right than he does to be spoken of in tragic terms.
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI
Alexandra Mikhaylovna Kollontai (1872–1952) was born and raised in comfortable circumstances in old St. Petersburg; rebelled against her privileges on behalf of women and the poor; and was exiled to Germany in 1908. During World War I she travelled in the U.S.A., preaching socialism rather in the manner that an American feminist like Naomi Klein would nowadays preach against globalization when travelling in Europe. Upon the outbreak of revolution in Russia in 1917, Kollontai returned home, where she served the Soviet government first as a commissar for public welfare, then in a succession of foreign ministerial and ambassadorial posts. She was the regime's recognized expert on women's rights: special rights, that is, in a state where there were no general ones. She was thus the twentieth century's clearest early case of the fundamental incompatibility between feminism and ideology. Feminism is a claim for impartial justice, and all ideologies deny that such a term has meaning. Kollontai managed to live with the contradiction, but only because she was unusually adroit when it came to aligning herself with the prevailing power. Her dogged service to a regime that condemned large numbers of innocent women to grim death has rarely resulted in her being criticized by left-wing feminists in the West. The pattern, alas, continues today, especially when it comes to the spurious alliance between feminism and multiculturalism, an ideology which necessarily contains within itself a claimed right to confine women to their traditional subservience. Against the mountain of historical evidence that left-wing ideology has been no friend of feminism, there is some comfort to be drawn from the fact that fascism was even less friendly: Hitlerite Germany, in particular, did little to release women from their traditional typecasting. But it remains sad that women who seek a release for their sisters from the crushing definition of a biological role have always found so many bad friends among those theoretically wedded to the betterment of the working class. Readers of Spanish might care to look at a file of Cuba's _Bohemia_ magazine for 1959, the year of Castro's revolution. The yellowing pages are full of stories about the heroic women who fought and suffered beside all those famous beards for the liberation of their island from tyranny and backwardness. How many of those women ever became part of the government? At least Kollontai got a job, and perhaps she and the Soviet Union she so loyally served both merit a small salute for that.
The masses do not believe in the Opposition. They greet its every statement with laughter. Does the Opposition think that the masses have such a short memory? If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line, who else besides these prominent members of the Opposition were responsible for them?
—ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, "THE OPPOSITION AND THE PARTY RANK AND FILE," IN _S ELECTED WRITINGS_, P. 313
A FAMOUS FIGURE AMONG the Old Bolsheviks, Alexandra Kollontai was a sad case, and sadder still because it is so hard to weep for her. Her career is a harsh reminder that feminism is, or should be, a demand for justice, not an ideology. It should not consider itself an ideology and it should be very slow to ally itself with any other ideology, no matter how progressive that other ideology might claim to be. Kollontai was an acute and lastingly valuable analyst of the restrictions and frustrations imposed on women by the conventional morality of bourgeois society. Fifty years later, Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer did not say much that Kollontai had not said first, even if they said it better—as they were bound to do, because they were proposing feasible modifications to a society already developed, whereas she was trying to make herself heard over the roar of chaos. Armed with her hard-won awareness of how injustice for women had been institutionalized in the bourgeois civil order, she thought that the Russian Revolution, the universal solvent of all institutions, would give feminism its chance. She spent the next thirty-five years finding out just how wrong she was. From the viewpoint of the slain, the best that can be said for her is that she backed the regime for a good reason. Unfortunately she backed the regime no matter how murderous it became. This outburst from 1927 is really a declaration of faith in Stalin, making an appearance under his other name, "the masses." "The Opposition" were those brave few among the Old Bolsheviks who still dared to question him, starting with Trotsky. As always, it is advisable to note that Trotsky, the butcher of the sailors at Kronstadt, was no humanitarian. Only a few years further up the line, he actually thought that Stalin's treatment of the peasants sinned through leniency. But it was obvious at the time that any conflict among the leaders had nothing to do with principle: it was a power struggle, with absolute power as the prize. Kollontai was weighing in unequivocally on the side of an infallible party with an unchallengeable leader.
A textual scholar might say that she was taking a conscious risk when she wrote: "If there are shortcomings in the Party and its political line . . ." It is quite easy to imagine a Lubyanka interrogator asking her: "Oh yes, and what shortcomings are those?" But the interrogation never came. Kollontai managed to stay alive, partly by spending as much time as possible on diplomatic duties in Norway, Sweden and Finland. (Talleyrand said, "He who is absent is wrong." In the Soviet Union, however, being absent was often the key to survival.) She died in 1952, shortly before her eightieth birthday, with two Orders of the Red Banner to her credit, if credit that was. The terrible truth was that the only real equality made available to women in the Soviet Union of her time was the equal opportunity to be a slave labourer. Her dreamed-of principle was "winged Eros," love set free. The Soviet actuality of love set free was a one-size-fits-all contraceptive diaphragm, with the overspill taken care of by serial abortions. In her early writings—just as charmless as the later ones but a touch more personal—she was already exploiting the standard _langue de bois_ technique of speaking as if she herself were the incarnation of the proletariat. She probably hoped that if she sounded like the Party line, the Party line might be persuaded to incorporate her views. A sample:
The proletariat is not filled with horror and moral indignation at the many forms and facets of "winged Eros" in the way that the hypocritical bourgeoisie is. . . . The complexity of love is not in conflict with the interest of the proletariat.
In the event, she found winged Eros a hard taskmaster. In a touching forecast of the policy declared by Germaine Greer forty years later, Kollontai favoured the notion that a non-academic but suitably vigorous proletarian might be a fitting partner for a female high-brow. But either the muscular young lovers she chose for herself did not understand that in offering them freedom she required their respect, or else she found parting from them hurt more than it was supposed to. It would be cruel not to sympathize, and patronizing too: even while she was earning her decorations she was in fear for her life, and during the Yezhov terror in the late 1930s she thought every trip back to Moscow might be her last.
Our real sympathy, however, we should reserve for those who were not spared. An impressive proportion of them were women, even within the Party itself, where they were seldom given high office, but certainly had unhampered access to the status of victim. If Kollontai had been sent to the Gulag and somehow survived it, she might conceivably have written a book along the lines of Evgenia Ginzburg's _Into the Whirlwind_ , although it is hard to believe that any amount of deprivation and disillusionment would have given her Ginzburg's gift for narrative. Kollontai wrote boilerplate even on the few occasions when she felt free to speak. Besides, she already had the disillusion: she didn't have to be locked up to have that. A single week in the company of the regime's high-ranking thugs and boors would have been enough to tell her that there was no hope. We should not go so far as to greet her every statement with laughter, but we should try to rein in our pity. Pity belongs to the countless thousands of her sisters who were sent to the unisex hell that lay beyond Vorkuta, where they aged thirty years in the first three months unless they were granted the release of a quicker death. Did she know about all that? Of course she did. Women always know.
HEDA MARGOLIUS KOVALY
Heda Margolius Kovaly (b. ca. 1920) could have been sent into history specifically to remind us, after we have read about an initially worthy but fatally compliant apparatchik like Alexandra Kollantai, that there really can be such a creature as an incorruptible human being, and that it quite often takes a woman to be one. The broad details of Kovaly's life are outlined in the short essay below. Harder to evoke is the personality that sets its healing fire to every page of her terrible story. Reading _Prague Farewell_ is like reading about Sophie Scholl, the most purely sacrificial protagonist of the White Rose resistance group in Munich in 1942; like reading Nadezhda Mandelstam's _Hope Against Hope_ in its saddest chapters of resignation; like reading one of the interviews that the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali gave just after her friend Theo van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by a fanatic who took exception to her views about the subjection of women under Islam. Examples could be multiplied. Unfortunately, for some reason, they have hardly ever been codified: either the modern encyclopedia of feminist heroism has not yet been assembled, or else it has never been made popular. Almost certainly the reason is that ideology gets in the way. An uncomfortable number of the heroines achieved their true bravery by questioning the political cause they first espoused, and a chronicler who still espouses it is not likely to tell their story well, or at all. The real opportunity—to evoke a set of humanist values that lie beyond the grasp of any single political programme, and thus form a political and ethical ideal in themselves—remains untouched. Yet it would be a poor man who could finish reading Kovaly's book without asking himself how an experience like hers could ever have been thought to be subsidiary. Why, he must surely ask himself, isn't this the central story? If the world can't be ruled by the values that come naturally to a woman like her, how can it be worth living in?
A few miles out of Prague, the limousine began to slide on the icy road. The agents got out and scattered the ashes under its wheels.
—HEDA MARGOLIUS KOVALY, _P RAGUE FAREWELL_, P. 180
GIVEN THIRTY SECONDS to recommend a single book that might start a serious young student on the hard road to understanding the political tragedies of the twentieth century, I would choose this one. The life of Heda Margolius Kovaly is not to be envied. If we had to live a life like hers in order to come out of it with her spirit and dignity, we would be better off not living at all. But her life did have one feature that we can call a blessing. It dramatized, for our edification, the two great contending totalitarian forces, because they both chose her for a victim. As a Jewish teenager in Czechoslovakia she was fated to be swept up by the Nazis, and subsequently went right through the mill, starting with the Lodz ghetto and going all the way to Auschwitz, where she wound up in a block for young girls. Mercifully, in evoking her girls' dormitory, she restricts herself to one scene. The girls had to kneel all night on the parade ground waiting to see one of their number punished the next morning for having tried to escape. Any of the kneeling girls who fell over was taken away to be gassed, so they had to hold each other up. In the morning, the recaptured escapee had her arms and legs broken in front of their eyes.
Emerging by sheer chance from that most hideous of grand tours, Heda walked home to Prague in good time for the next disaster. Between 1945, when she got back from Auschwitz, until 1948, when the Communists came to power in Czechoslovakia, there was a brief interlude, during which she had ample opportunity to realize that those who have made compromises under an occupation in order to survive are reluctant to meet anyone tactless enough to return from oblivion. But there were still some people left who had retained the rare combination of integrity and energy, and one of them was the man she married. All too soon, Rudolf Margolius was asked to be a minister in Klement Gottwald's Communist government. Rudolf had his doubts, but as an honest and conscientious man he felt he couldn't turn the job down. He threw himself into the task, ignoring the warnings of less gifted but wiser friends that he was throwing himself into a pit. His intelligence and ability earned their inevitable reward. In the Slánsky show trial, Rudolf was one of the eleven Jews on the list of fourteen accused. The rehearsed confessions were extracted, or rather instilled, under torture. They were well down to the standard of the pre-war Moscow trials. All the prisoners were found guilty of the crimes they had accused themselves of and most of them were duly hanged, including Rudolf. The bodies were burned and the bags of ashes were driven away to be distributed in the woods. But there was ice on the roads. Now look again at the quotation above.
For the murdered idealist's young wife, what happened next was, if possible, worse. The classic Russian techniques of making life impossible for the family of a people's enemy were in full swing, with additional refinements made possible by Czech inventiveness. Heda was thrown out of her job and her apartment, and then additionally persecuted for being unemployed and homeless. After Khrushchev finally blew the whistle on the Stalinist system in 1956, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria all rehabilitated their show trial victims before Czechoslovakia did. Not until 1963 was the truth told, and even then the information was officially restricted to the Party itself. Heda would have been justified in giving up on her country. She has hard things to say about its educated class, too many of whom knew all about the horrors of Soviet communism but thought that the Czech version would turn out more civilized because its apparatchiks—they had themselves in mind—would be more cultivated. But she found many examples of instinctive decency among the common people. She has, however, no sentimentality about anyone, and the most valuable aspect of a valuable book is how she is able to count heads in order to trace the insidious transition from one political catastrophe to another. According to her, there were plenty of democrats in Czechoslovakia after the war who realized the danger of yielding up their country to the next absolutism. But they were guilty about having yielded up their country to the last one. Abandoned by its supposedly liberal allies, the republic had let the Nazis in. During the Nazi occupation, the democrats had been demoralized by fear. The Nazis had crushed them and the Russians had saved them: they had done nothing for themselves. They felt powerless. Perhaps, they reasoned, it would take a new authoritarianism to create and preserve a just order. So they swam with what felt like the tide of history, trying to convince themselves that it was taking them somewhere even as it sucked them under.
All this is recounted in an exemplary amalgam of psychological penetration and terse style. In her few years of relatively normal existence before the 1968 Prague Spring and its bitter aftermath disrupted her life all over again, Heda earned a slim living as a translator from English. Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow were two of her authors: perhaps their lively example got into her prose. The only fault in the book is that some of the remembered dialogue is too specifically dramatized to be credible. She would have done better to paraphrase it. Otherwise, everything is as neatly done as the sentence about the ashes. Her book should never have had to be written; but, since it had, we are lucky that it was done so well. American readers should note that in the U.S.A. it was called _Under a Cruel Star_. A Google search reveals that the book is on the course in several colleges, but it deserves to be lot more famous than that.
KARL KRAUS
Karl Kraus (1874–1936) was the satirical voice of Vienna from the _Jahrhundertwende_ —the turn of the century that marked the last glorious epoch of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire—to the eve of the _Anschluβ_ , which luckily he did not live to see. As a Jew whose comprehensive contempt for bourgeois complacency also embraced virtually every Jewish artist whom he suspected of a taste for success, Kraus had found abundant material for mockery in the old society as it decayed. During World War I he had been tirelessly eloquent on the subject of how the debased language of patriotic journalism had helped to feed lambs to the slaughter. But when the time came, he had comparatively little to say about the advent of the Nazis, and lived just long enough to confess that Hitler struck him dumb. " _Mir fällt zu Hitler nichts ein_ ," he confessed in July 1933. He followed the confession with a 300-page essay about "the new Germany" which J. P. Stern later called "one of the greatest political and cultural polemics ever written," but it remained true that Hitler's personal success left Kraus speechless, because it was beyond satire. Even with due allowance for the famous satirist's waning powers, this was a remarkable, if tacit, admission of a failure of imaginative energy to match a new reality. The new reality was at least as absurd as the old one, but it left him with less occasion to expose its hidden purpose, mainly because the purpose wasn't hidden: instead, it was blatant. The open face of Nazi evil left Kraus wrong-footed. Published, edited and largely written as a one-man enterprise, Kraus's magazine _Die Fackel_ had worked mainly as a _sottisier_ of all the self-deluding things said in the newspapers and periodicals; his cabaret act had worked in the same way; and so had his endless, endlessly self-renewing epic play _The Last Days of Mankind_. But even at the time, the debunking emphasis of Kraus's effort raised the question of whether his satirical view of society was really all that informative, since any society that allows free expression of opinion is bound to spend a lot of time talking foolishly anyway, and can be quoted against itself without limit, and indeed, if it is free enough, without penalty. After Kraus's death the question came rapidly to a head when the Nazis, far from needing to wrap up their intentions in fine phrases, proved that they could be quite frightening enough by saying exactly what they meant. The problem posed by Kraus's high reputation as an analyst of language was repeated later on with the advent of George Orwell, who so convincingly identified the misuse of language with fraudulent politics that it became tempting to suppose the first thing caused the second, instead of the second causing the first.
Today, Kraus's satirical vision, far from being an intellectual lost cause, is a show-business success story: the continuous and unrelenting mockery of the language of official power is institutionalized in the liberal democracies, and especially in the United States, which, since the heyday of Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce in the 1950s, has teemed with political and social satirists, many of them holding stellar positions in the media. It is now part of the definiton of a modern liberal democracy that it is under constant satirical attack from within. Unless this fact is seen as a virtue, however, liberal democracy is bound to be left looking weak vis-à-vis any totalitarian impulse. An ideology, especially when theocratic, runs no risk of demoralizing its young adherents through questioning its own principles, because it never does so. A bright child of his time, Kraus was unusual for his capacity to express his disgust that a free society could be full of things that intelligent people might not like. If, at this distance, he looks na ve, it is only because of the devastation wrought since by systems which suffered much less from disunity. We have come to value, in other words, the humanist approximations that made him impatient. One of them was the female aspiration towards personal liberty. He found the idea embarrassing, forgetting that all aspirations sound shrill until they are fulfilled.
A liberated woman is a fish that has fought its way ashore.
—KARL KRAUS
BUT KRAUS NEEDED a woman to liberate him. He found her in the person of the Baroness Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, the great love of his life. He had loved the beautiful actress Annie Kalmar and after her pitiably early death he never forgot her: but he worshipped her as a symbol. She fitted his idea of the sensual woman whose eroticism would provide the fuel for the intellectual man. Another actress, Bertha Maria Denk, was harder to fit into the same frame because she was very bright, but Kraus managed to talk his way free. From Sidonie there was no escape. Sidonie was the living woman, and didn't even need his money. (Kraus had a private income, but Sidonie's wealth was on a different scale.) The luxury of her company offered him the chance to become fully himself: to live like a prince, lose himself in a passion, cry on a fine-boned shoulder. Knowing that, we can see why so much of his supposedly scorching satire now strikes us a fire in straw. There were people at the time who thought the same, and not all of them were his victims. He had admirers who spotted that by giving the society he lived in more scorn than it warranted he might have too little left over for something worse. His satirical attack was based on the analysis of clichés: in politics, in the arts and above all in journalism. He did for German what Swift had once done for English, and Flann O'Brien would do again. Nothing got past him. He was a one-man watch committee, the hanging judge of the _sottisier_. Anyone who let slip a loose phrase lived to rue it if Kraus caught him. As the self-appointed scourge of self-revealing speech, he was a linguistic philosopher before the fact, a blogger before the Web.
But the world is made up of more than language, and a truly penetrating view, if it is to have scope as well as depth, must get through not just to the awkward facts beneath the lies, but to the whole complexity of events that give the facts their coherence, and to the networks of necessary human weaknesses that even the most developed civilization can't realistically hope to eradicate. The archimandrite of a linguistic monastery, Kraus found human beings guilty of being human, and society of allowing them to be so. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a monument to theatricality, and it was certainly true that hyprocrisy was universal, especially in matters of sex. But at least hypocrisy was human. He was unable to envisage what a society would be like that eliminated the human factor altogether. The Nazi future was not yet available to tell him, but he might have found instruction in the despotic past, had he been historically minded.
He conspicuously wasn't. He belittled the forces that held his world together because he was not sufficiently educated by the incoherence within himself. Had he been, he would have expressed it. His whole stance was to say the unsayable. If he didn't say it, it was because he hadn't thought it: or, having thought it, couldn't face it. Hence his confident ability to say a thing like this: a rock through a window. There are a thousand other Krausian moments like it. He is made up of such moments. The complete run of his magazine _Die Fackel_ —given to me by a cultivated young Austrian aristocrat in expiation for what his country has never been able fully to admit, it occupies a whole shelf of my library in Cambridge—is an asteroid belt of pebbles that have passed through glass. They all share the same unfaltering tone of the self-elected elect: the oracle who can see everywhere except into its own being, and sees through everyone because it has no insight into itself.
Kraus's self-assurance was a pose that he believed was real. If he could have admitted it as a pose, his work would have more to astonish us with than its glowing surface. The golden bowl was cracked, and its richest secrets were in the flaw: but he could not go in there. Schnitzler, whom Kraus had the arrogance to patronize, could interpret the world through knowledge of his own failings. Klimt, another of Kraus's targets, was being lastingly self-exploratory in the very paintings that Kraus found cliché-ridden and sentimental. (The Nazis, with their gift for practical criticism, paid Klimt the tribute of pulverizing his greatest set of murals, in which they saw what Kraus had missed: an unashamed celebration of desire.) It never occurred to Kraus that his vulnerable contemporaries had something to gain through not being self-protective. The loophole in his own armour was his love for Sidonie, but he did not, and obviously could not, make it an energizing subject for his main work. He shunted it aside into his lyric poetry, which is weak precisely because it contradicts his prose without complementing it. Man's love is of man's life a thing apart: Byron meant that as an emphasis. Kraus meant it as an axiom.
What finally happened between the two lovers will always be a secret. The long affair ended too gradually to bequeath the memory of a revealing crisis. ("K.K. so kind, so good," Sidonie told her diary in English, while Kraus was tearing his hair out waiting for a letter.) But it seems fair to suggest that he put on too much pressure, and it was all the wrong kind. He wanted to own her. She wanted to be free. ("I want freedom, solitude. . . .") She told him that his enslavement enslaved her. All the usual things happened. When he showed signs of taking back his independence, she enslaved him again. She was no stranger to guile. But her heart was good—on the testimony of her many friends, she was one of those aristocrats with all the bourgeois virtues—and Kraus, given a modicum of acumen, should have been able to drink from the fountain of her loving kindness for the rest of his difficult life. One would prefer to blame Rilke, who had his eye on Sidonie's sumptuous estate at Janowitz as a plush staging post in which he might one day write a cycle of poems. Rilke was always scouting the country seats of the great ladies for a suitable ambience in which to connect himself with eternity. As his nauseating letters to Marie von Thurn und Taxis Hohenloe reveal, Rilke knew no shame in such pursuits. His bread-and-butter letters are always hard on the reader's stomach. But to shut Kraus out from his possible claims on Sidonie's hospitality, Rilke truly disgraced himself by hinting to her that she courted degradation by keeping company with a Jew. (In his letter of February 21, 1914, Rilke carefully avoided the word "Jew," but she knew exactly what he meant when he warned her that Kraus could only ever be a stranger: to help her figure it out, Rilke underlined the adjective _fremd_. Admirers of Rilke's spiritual refinement will find the letter quoted on page 52 of the second volume of Friedrich Pfafflin's two-volume edition of Kraus's letters to Sidonie.) Kraus, all unknowing that he had been betrayed, went on helping Rilke's literary career, and Rilke went on accepting the help.
Rilke reminds us of the young man who wanted to be a suspect when he grew up. Alas, Kraus looks like a better bet as the culprit. He wanted all the social credentials that an official alliance with an aristocrat would have brought him; and the wish seems understandable, if not particularly edifying. But he didn't want to modify his exalted stance as the seer who needed no other viewpoint than his own. When he went to her he was on holiday, and by marrying her he wanted only to make the holiday official. The biographers seem agreed that she grew to want less of him. It might have been equally possible, however, that she wanted more: some evidence of a change of heart, an expansion of sympathy that she might have ascribed to her own influence. She knew how she inspired him to poetry, but there was nothing of her in his prose, which from first to last was one long tirade of self-assertion. Clearly he felt free to fall apart when safe on her estates: that was the attraction of her comfortable ambience. But he always put himself back together in the same form, and returned to work as the universal castigator of _The Last Days of Mankind_. Too much is made of the discrepancy between the _grande dame_ and the self-despising Jew, and not enough of a more usual difference, between the housekeeper and the nihilist.
Later on, when the Nazis came to Schloss Janowitz, she met some real nihilists and must have had cause to look back fondly on a warrior violent only with words. But in view of her intrinsic worth she had been right to freeze him out. He had loved her for her beauty, position, charm, cultivation and _savoir faire_. But her intrinsic worth went deeper than that. She was the product of a social order, which Kraus had admired only for its accoutrements: i.e., he wanted its benefits without understanding their provenance. Though he was pleased to appropriate the concept of gentility as a talisman against modern opportunism, he had no real capacity for valuing _noblesse oblige_ , which is the long-gestated product of a society of obligations, not of rights, and is almost wholly unwritten. Kraus lived in the written world. He thought that the misuse of language was an incitement to crime. (In his tireless analysis of the bad journalism that came out of the war, he came very close to suggesting that the war had been caused by bad journalism: if only it had been that simple.) But there were worse incitements to crime than misused language, and if he had lived a little longer he might have been caught up in a crime it was beyond his powers of reason to predict. All the politicans and journalists whose bad prose he had laughed at were unexpectedly silenced by a new range of orators who meant exactly what they said, and who took their satisfaction from mangling a lot more than syntax and vocabulary. He would have found that there are forms of speech to which satire does not apply. He lived just long enough to entertain the possibility, and we can be sure that the possibility did not entertain him. When he said that he had nothing to say about Hitler, he was really saying that his life's work had come to nothing.
Famous while he lived, Kraus is cited now as a byword for hard-headed wit by people who have never read more than few paragraphs: his name is invoked rather in the way that Cole Porter invoked Dorothy Parker's, as shorthand for a quality. It's the same sort of lazy journalistic reflex that once made him spit tacks. So was his career a waste of time? Not really, although he might have died thinking so. Though to read him for long at a stretch is like trying to make a meal out of Mexican jumping beans, some of his aperçus are more than enough to make you see why the scholarly commentators should enrol him _honoris causa_ among the Vienna school of philosophers. Anyone who reads a few random pages of Kraus will write more carefully next day, with fear of his blue-pencil eyes as the spur to revision. He knew how to cut the inessential. "Female desire is to male desire as an epic is to an epigram." Try saying the same thing quicker. It was a production in English of _The Last Days of Mankind_ that led Niall Ferguson to learn German, and so helped him towards laying the learned foundations of his fine book _The Pity of War_ , in which Kraus's debunking of patriotic rhetoric is frequently acknowledged. The whiplash speed and snap of Kraus's reasoning can be heard even through the language barrier.
But his negative example is the one that lasts. He embodied the unforeseeable tragedy—made actual only by a cruel trick of history—of those bourgeois Jewish intellectuals who caught out Jewish artists for their bourgeois vulgarity: by helping to undermine the bourgeoisie as a class, and by helping to establish Jewish origins as a classification, the intellectuals unwittingly served two future masters whose only dream was to annihilate them. Above all, his supreme mastery of verbal satire served to prove that satire is not a view of life. It can be a useful and even necessary by-product of one, but it can have no independent existence, because the satirist hasn't either. Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world. The secret of a sane world view is to see virtue in others, and the roots of chaos within ourselves. Kraus had the secret right in front of him, in the soul and body of Sidonie. She was his best self, come to save him. He had his arms around her, but he lost her. We will never know quite how, but there is something about this deadly little aphorism to make us think it more plausible to blame him than to blame her.
L
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) stands at the beginning of German modernity, and right in the centre of the country's post—World War II concern with the recovery of liberal thought from historical catastrophe. If it was felt necessary to pump the mystique out of the whole idealistic heritage of German philosophy, Lichtenberg was the prototype of a German thinker who could be seen as the level-headed smallholder waiting back at the beginning, looking once again like an attractive prospect, now that the smoke had cleared. Mainly owing to Hegel and his long influence, German, as a language of thought, had acquired a bad reputation for the higher nonsense of self-generating transcendentalism. In truth, however, German has as good a right as French to be thought of as essentially terse. (All of its most able prose writers, from Goethe through Schopenhauer to Freud, Schnitzler, Kafka and Wittgenstein, found the aphorism a natural form.) Just as Pascal, in French, began a tradition of compact concrete statement even about the spiritual, so did Lichtenberg in German. He came later, but then the whole of Germany came later. Germany is a young country, and Lichtenberg is one of the reasons that it can still feel that way for anyone who can push back through the curtains of tosh, much of it woven by patriots who believed that only the solemn could be truly serious and only the impenetrable profound. One of those valuable faculty members (he was a professor of physics, astronomy and mathematics at Göttingen) who never lose the trick of talking like a brilliantly amusing graduate student—we can imagine Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, or Richard Feynman at CalTech—Lichtenberg was critically minded about the language of others, unfailingly scrupulous about his own, and never content to settle into a formula. Barred by physical deformity from any easy participation in the passionate emotional life he saw as central to existence, he was nevertheless wonderfully sympathetic to the realities of love and sex: with every excuse to turn away from the real world, he kept its every aspect always in plain sight. Finally it is his detailed and unflinching awareness that astonishes the reader. Scattered through his scores of "Waste-Books" and manuscript notebooks, Lichtenberg's innumerable observations add up to a single demonstration of his guiding principle: that there is such a thing as "the right distance," a sense of proportion. He is the thinker against hysteria, the mind whose good-humoured determination to avoid throwing a tantrum provides us with a persuasive argument that the tantrum might be the motive power of political insanity. In German there are numerous selections and collections, but most of the very best moments are in J. P. Stern's excellent _Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions_ (1959). Nutshells packed as cleverly as an old soldier's kitbag, Lichtenberg's sayings are quoted in the original where that seems helpful, are always sensitively translated into suitably colloquial English, and are thoroughly annotated, from the body of humanist knowledge about shattered Germany that Stern built up after the war. (Born and raised as a Czech, Stern also wrote one of the best short books about the man who shattered it, _Hitler: The Führer and the People_ , in 1975.) Stern first encountered Lichtenberg's name in the pages of Karl Kraus's magazine _Die Fackel_. It would be a mistake, however, to confine the question of Lichtenberg's long delayed but highly welcome influence merely to the sardonic paragraph. His clarity and concision set a standard for expository prose, at whatever length, in the whole of his language, and, by extension, in all languages.
It was impossible for him not to disturb words in the possession of their meanings.
—LICHTENBERG, _A PHORISMEN_
LICHTENBERG IS DESCRIBING a bad writer. There are bad writers who are exact in grammar, vocabulary and syntax, sinning only through their insensitivity to tone. Often they are among the worst writers of all. But on the whole it can be said that bad writing goes to the roots: it has already gone wrong beneath its own earth. Since much of the language is metaphorical in origin, a bad writer will scramble metaphors in a single phrase, often in a single word. From a made-for-television film called _The Movie Murders_ I noted down this perfectly bad line of dialogue: "A fire is a Frankenstein when it's let out of its cage."
A fire can be a caged animal if you don't mind a cliché. But a caged Frankenstein is worse than trite. Frankenstein was not the monster, he was the monster's creator: so the use of his name is an inaccuracy. By now the inaccuracy has entered the language, like the juggernaut that serves us for Juggernaut's car: but one of the things good writing does is to fight a rearguard action against this automatic absorption of error. For example, a competent writer would look twice at "rearguard action" to make sure that he means to evoke a losing battle, and check "automatic absorption" to make sure that it falls within the range of phenomena against which a battle might conceivably be fought. He had better also know that "phenomena" should not be used in the singular, although that knowledge, too, is becoming rare. Competent writers always examine what they have put down. Better than competent writers—good writers—examine their effects _before_ they put them down: they think that way all the time. Bad writers never examine anything. Their inattentiveness to the detail of their prose is part and parcel of their inattentiveness to the detail of the outside world.
In a television interview, Francis Ford Coppola said "hoi polloi" when he meant "elite." There is no reason to think that he would not commit similar solecisms in one of his screenplays if he were to put himself beyond the reach of expert advice, which the more bankable film directors—the ones whose films are marked as being "by" them—are increasingly apt to do. (This tendency, by the way, arises less from the conceit of directors than from the paucity of writers: screenplays depend more on construction than on dialogue, and experienced writers with those priorities are hard to find.) Most of us write "the hoi polloi" when we should leave off the "the" because "the" is what "hoi" means, but that is a point of usage. Using "hoi polloi" to mean "elite" is an outright error, indicating that the speaker has either misunderstood the term every time he has read it, or, more likely, that he has not read much. Unblushing semi-literacy is quite common among film directors, especially those who fancy themselves to have so powerful a vision that they grant themselves not just the final word on the structure of a script but the privilege of creating its language from line to line. We have to forgive them for this: the ability to put a movie script together takes such rare qualities of generalship that the person who can do it is almost bound to succumb to hubris. James Cameron's screenplay for his film _Titanic_ is no doubt a mighty feat of construction. It is also linguistically dead from start to finish. If pressed on the point, he would be able to say that his film made more money faster than any other film in history. He could also say that the visual narrative matters far more than the dialogue, and that his mastery of the screen image would be alone sufficient to refute the charge of inattention to the texture of reality. But there is a clear connection between the film's infantile characterization—which for any adult viewer entirely undoes the effect of the meticulously reproduced period detail—and the dud dialogue the characters are given to speak. None of this would be germane to the issue if the director did not consider himself a writer. But he does, and he is a bad one: a bad writer by nature.
Macaulay's review of the hapless poetaster Robert Montgomery is the classic analysis of the naturally bad writer who gets everything wrong because he is sensitive enough on the question of style to attempt to lift his means of expression above the ordinary. When Montgomery evoked a river that "meanders level with its fount," Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount can't even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay had uncovered the connection between the inability to notice and the inability to transcribe: the double deficiency that Montgomery's highfalutin diction was invented to conceal. Mark Twain did the same for, or to, James Fenimore Cooper, who thought that "more preferable" was a more impressive way of saying "preferable": the clumsily elevated language, Twain argued, was closely linked to the deficient power of observation that made the action of Cooper's Leatherstocking books absurd. When a bad writer borrows locutions from past authorities, he characteristically takes the patina but leaves the metal. Biblical pastiche is a standard way for a mediocre stylist to attempt distinction. Attempting to define the sensationalism of the press, Malcom Muggeridge came up with the slogan "Give us this day our daily story." A doomed effort, because all it did was remind the reader that the King James Version of the Lord's Prayer was better written than an article by Muggeridge. He would have been better off just saying that the press needs a new story every day. Gombrowicz in his _Journal_ (specifically, vol. 2, p. 164) notes that when a writer complicates a truism it is a sure sign that he has nothing much to say.
Julius Caesar wrote with invariable clarity, whether about Gaul being divided into three parts or about building a bridge. Frederick the Great wrote about falconry from direct observation, with no hearsay, and in a plain style. Queen Victoria's letters are models of compact accuracy: she wrote better than Queen Elizabeth I, which is saying a lot. Such practical expository prose by people with non-literary day-jobs should give a measure for would-be professional writers wise enough to build a solid base in their craft before trying to make an art out of it. They will soon discover that even the most down-to-earth of practical writers can scramble their meaning when they are in a hurry, so it must be a craft, and not just a gift. In addition to _A Genius for War_ , his excellent biography of Gerneral Patton, the eminent American military historian Carlo D'Este wrote two essential books surveying whole campaign areas in World War II, _Decision in Normandy_ , about Operation Overlord, and _Bitter Victory_ , about the Allied invasion of Sicily. But a third book, _Fatal Decision_ , is much less satisfactory than the other two because it squanders their chief virtue, which is to record and weigh the facts in a transparent style. D'Este knew all there was to know about the Anzio campaign, but while trying to tell the reader either he got so excited he forgot how to write or else—more likely, alas—he received less than his usual quota of editorial help. Thus we are regaled with his paraphrase of Churchill's strategic view "that the 'soft underbelly' of the Mediterranean is Germany's Achilles heel" (p. 12). But such a blatantly mixed metaphor at least enables you to divine what is meant. Metaphorical content is mixed more inextricably when a standard idiom is unintentionally reversed in meaning, thereby infecting the whole sentence. "For the next eight weeks there was a standoff in the northeastern corner of the beachhead as the 504th were forced into trenches that for sheer misery had nothing on their World War I counterparts" (p. 176). Here "had nothing on" is used for "yielded nothing to," but they do not mean the same thing. When an important book is infested with deeply lurking solecisms, it has to be read twice while you are getting through it once. A less important book, of course, is quickly cast aside.
If language deteriorates in journalism, the damage will be felt sooner or later in writing that pretends to more distinction. In my time, to take one out of a hundred possible examples, it has become common among cultural journalists to use "harp back" for "hark back." If "bored of" should succeed in replacing "bored with" there will be no real call to object, except from nostalgia: "of" does the job at least as well as "with" and anyway such changes have happened in the spoken language since the beginning. But "harp back" scrambles the separate meanings of "harp on" and "hark back," and thus detracts from the central, hard-won virtue of the English language, which is to mean one thing at a time. The solecism gets into the paper because the sub-editors no longer know the difference either, so to see it cropping up in books is no surprise, although a great disappointment. David McClintick's _Indecent Exposure_ is one of the best books about moral turpitude in modern Hollywood. The constant and unavoidable struggle between creative freedom and the necessity for cost controls, with the consequent oscillation between daylight robbery and ecstasies of bean-counting precision, could not be better explained. But the otherwise savvy author uses "flaunt" for "flout," thereby injuring two words at once: "To Cliff Robertson, Columbia's reinstatement of Begelman was not only a brazen flaunting of justice, but also a deep insult to Cliff personally." In a single sentence, an author who has convinced you that he could write anything leads you to suspect that he has read nothing. In the normal course of events, a tactful copy editor might have corrected the error. But by now the barbarians are within the gates, and there seems to be no stopping the process of deterioration even in America, whereas in Britain the cause is lost irretrievably. Backs-to-the-wall raillery from established authors is fun, but won't work. As Kingsley Amis acutely noted, the person who uses "disinterested" for "uninterested" is unlikely to see your article complaining about the point, because the person has never been much of a reader anyway. There is evidence, however, that writers can read a great deal, among all the best exemplars, and still not take in the power to discriminate on critical points of grammar, derivation, usage, punctuation and consistency of metaphor. Prescriptive initial teaching probably helps, but the capacity for such an alertness may be more in the nature of an inborn propensity than a possible acquisition.
The propensity can even appear in hypertrophied form, to the writer's detriment. A good writer of prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but that's another issue.) The good prose-writer's standards, however, should include the realization that he is not writing a poem. Henry James was not being entirely absurd when he complained that Flaubert was unable to leave his language alone. (Proust's qualified praise of Flaubert comes down to the same point.) It is possible to be an admirer of Nabokov while still finding his alertness to cliché overactive, so that passages occur in which we can hardly see for the clarity: and with James Joyce it is more than possible. Somewhere between Tolstoy, who was so indifferent to style that he did not mind repeating a word, and Turgenev, who would sooner have died than do so, there is an area where the writer can be economically precise without diverting the reader's whole attention to his precision. Lichtenberg would have included that area in his key concept of "the proper distance," which he thought crucial to the exercise of reason. Rembrandt, in a reported statement Goethe was fond of, said that people should not shove their noses too close to his paintings: the paint was poisonous.
One drastic side effect of an overdeveloped vigilance is the counterproductive attempt to make description answer the totality of observation. In _Troilus and Cressida_ , Alexander has a phrase for it: "purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight." Attention is necessarily selective: if it were not, we would spend most of our waking hours paralysed by the impact of what we see. The secret of evocative writing is to pick out the detail that matters, not to put in all the detail that doesn't. Consider Joan la Pucelle's lines in _Henry VI, Part 1_ : lines which might not be by Shakespeare, but which were certainly written by someone who knew what he was doing.
_Glory is like a circle on the water,_
_Which never ceases to enlarge itself,_
_Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught._
In reality, when something makes a splash there is always a _set_ of ripples. There can never be just one circle. But the playwright needs only one, so he leaves the others out. If he had been concerned with rendering the natural event, he would have got in the road of the Homeric simile. The simile, not "the object," was his object. More than two thousand years before, the same was true for Homer, who could render an object in passing (the twanging string of a silver bow is rendered in a single onomatopoeic stroke, arguri _0i_ o bi _0i_ o) and was always hunting bigger game. Ezra Pound, typically, was hammering away at a nail whose head was already flush with the wood. There is the occasional good writer who is not a good describer, just as there is the occasional good painter—Bonnard, for example—who can't draw a horse, but in general the ability to register the reality in front of him is a _donnée_ for anyone who writes seriously at all. When Joseph Conrad said the aim of the writer was "above all, to make you see," he meant a lot more than what the writer saw in front of his eyes. He was also talking about what was going on behind them: the moral dimension. In the novella Typhoon, when the narrator is thrown suddenly sideways, Conrad makes you see how the stars overhead turn to streaks: "the whole lot took flight together and disappeared." A scintillating descriptive stroke, but for him not hard. In _Lord Jim_ , he makes you see Jim's shame: much, much more difficult.
It is better to err on the side of too much scrupulosity than too little, but it remains a fact that good writers are occupied with more than language. The fact is awkward; and the most awkward part of it is that for metaphorical force to be attained in a given sentence, the metaphorical content of some of its words—which is an historic content provided by their etymology and the accumulated mutability of their traditional use—must be left dormant. Our apprehension of the Duchess of Gloster's mighty line in _Richard II_ , "Thou show'st the naked pathway to thy life," would be blunted, rather than sharpened, if we concerned ourselves with the buried image of a naked person instead of with the overt image of an unprotected path, and our best signal for not so concerning ourselves is that Shakespeare didn't, or he would have written the line in a different way. (Simultaneity of metaphor becomes a feature of his later plays, but the complexity which is almost impossible to understand at first hearing—and surely, as Frank Kermode boldly notes, must have been so at the time—would not be worth picking at if we gave up on our conviction that Shakespeare himself must have understood the strings before he tied the knots.) To make an idea come alive in a sentence, some of its words must be left for dead: the penalty for trying to bring them all alive is preciousness at best. If such preciousness is not firmly ruled out by the writer, there will be readers all too keen to supply it. In modern times, critics have earned a reputation for brilliance by pushing the concept of "close reading" to the point where they tease more meaning out than the writer can conceivably have wanted to put in; but it isn't hard, it's easy; and the mere fact that their busy activity makes them feel quite creative themselves should be enough to tell them they are making a mistake.
With the majority of bad writers the question never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay "Politics and the English Language," they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of the components are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with the writing too bad to matter, perpetrated by writers who have nothing in mind except to fill a space. What troubles us is the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability. It faces us with the spectacle of a failed endeavour. Somewhere back there, we wanted a world in which everybody would be an artist. Now we are appalled when the duffers actually try. But there is still some point in striving to provide, by precept and example, the kind of free training that the veteran Fleet Street literary editors used to dish out as part of their jobs. When suitably trained, a decent writer edits himself before the editors get to him. An outstanding creative talent is always an outstanding critic, of his own work if of nobody else's. Pushkin lamented the absence of proper criticism in Russia not because he needed help in judging his poems, but because he wanted to write them in a civilized society. _Eugene Onegin_ is a miracle of lightness in which every word has been weighed. When Pope called genius an infinite capacity for taking pains, that was what he meant. The greatly gifted have almost everything by nature, but by bending themselves to the effort of acquirement they turn a great gift into great work. Their initial arrogance is necessary and even definitive: Heinrich Mann was right to say that the self-confidence of young artists precedes their achievement and is bound to seem like conceit while it is still untried. But there is one grain of humility that they must get into their cockiness if they are ever to grow: they must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is an unrelenting self-criticism. "My dear friend," said Voltaire to a young aspirant who had burdened him with an unpublished manuscript, "You may write as carelessly and badly as this when you have become famous. Until then, you must take some trouble."
It is a common failing of all people with little talent and more learning than understanding, that they call more on an artistic illustration than a natural one.
—LICHTENBERG, _A PHORISMEN_
Lichtenberg was late to the game with this manifold idea, although he might have been the first to get it into a nutshell. Shakespeare's clever dolts, spouting their studious folderol as if it were wit, provided a lasting measure of how erudition can drive out sense. _Love's Labour's Lost_ offers not the only, merely the mightiest, confrontation between brain-sick bookmen, as Don Adriano de Armado and Holofernes spend four-fifths of the action warming up for the showdown in which they bury each other with verbiage. ("They have been at a great feast of languages," says Moth, "and stolen the scraps.") In play after play, the typical encounter between two or more such zanies is a disputatious colloquium in which each participant levitates on a column of hot air. A hallmark of Shakespeare's people of substance is never to do the same except in jest. Iago, wise when not jealous and "nothing if not critical," scorns "the bookish theoric" whose talk is "mere prattle, without practice." Clearly Iago speaks for Shakespeare even as he plots against Othello. Ben Jonson's plays teem with mountebanks who raid the tombs of scholarship while picking the pockets of the suckers. The great playwrights infused our language with a permanent awareness of the difference between desiccated eloquence and the voice of experience. English empirical philosophy began in the inherited literary language. That was how the English-speaking nations, above all others, were armed in advance against the rolling barrage of ideological sophistry in the twentieth century. The Soviet craze for assembling a viewpoint out of quotations from Marx and Lenin reminded us of men in tights defending the indefensible with chapter and verse.
Even without Shakespeare (supposing that such a precondition were possible) subsequent English literature would have been well populated with satirical examples to ward off casuist flimflam. In Restoration comedy, the division between true wit and false turned on the same point: true wit might have contributed to a new book, but false wit was always quoting an old one. Molière's typical scam artist talked like a library, but Molière on his own was not enough to inoculate the French language against the pox of learned affectation. The English language had the benefit of repeated injections. The _folie raisonnante_ that ruled Swift's flying island of Laputa was fuelled by book learning, and Thomas Love Peacock, the great student of the connection between high-flown diction and mental inadequacy, made post-romantic nineteenth-century England the focus of the topic: just as Peacock in real life undid Shelley's vegetarianism by waving a steak under his nose when he fainted, so Peacock in his quick-fire novels riddled the inflated language of romantic soul-searching. In Peacock's crackpot masterpiece _Melincourt_ —one of a whole rack of strange books, it stands out by being even stranger than the others—that compulsive classicist the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub, poised on a high rock with Lord Anophel Achthar as they both face imminent death, quotes Aeschylus in the original Greek and Virgil in the original Latin, while Lord Anophel curses him in the original English. (Peter Porter, himself a mighty quoter, though a sane one, has a soft spot for the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub.) The idea—an idea built into the English language over centuries of comic richness—is that learning and knowledge must be kept in balance. In _Love's Labour's Lost_ , Shakespeare's King of Navarre summarized it in advance when he commended Biron: "How well he's read, to reason against reading!"
In Lichtenberg's language, which was the lightly conversational version of German, Schopenhauer extended the same idea by favouring real observation over erudition, and stated confidently that the second sapped the first. German is a language supposedly given to the airy building of conceptual castles, but there is a use of German given to the opposite: those who find Hegel wilfully impenetrable would do well to look at his art criticism, where they will find him down-to-earth, fixed on the object and responding to a work of art as if it were an event in nature. (Kant could never do that: he conjured Spanish castles about aesthetics without ever having seen a painting.) In Italy, the vast edifice of Benedetto Croce's aesthetic theory was erected on the basic proposition that true creativity is a primary function, not to be derived from formal knowledge. He thought the same about formal knowledge: unless acquired through passion, it would count for nothing. Egon Friedell, perhaps the biggest bookworm of all time, deplored bookworms. He could make it stick: he read, and wrote, from a personal hunger that had nothing to do with emulation. But knowing himself to be vulnerable on the point, in his crowning work _Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit_ ( _The Cultural History of the Modern Age_ ) he was always careful to identify sclerotic erudition as a sure sign of decadence in any historical period. In our time, Philip Larkin warned against the consequences of trying to make art out of art. Larkin thought the later Auden had done that, and there is evidence that Larkin was right. But Auden, both the earlier and the later, always presented his artistic enthusiasms as if they had forced their way into his busy head: he wrote as if learning had pursued him, not he it. In his critical compendia, even the most abstruse speculations are given as the workshop know-how of a master carpenter. If he wrote a poem about a painting, it was because the painting had hit him like a force of nature, as an everyday event. Stefan Zweig, in his book _Begegnungen_ (Meetings), squeezed the theme into a single antithesis when he said that in Goethe's life and career there was seldom a poem without an experience, and seldom an experience without the golden shadow ( _ohne den goldenen Schatten_ ) of a poem. First the experience, then the golden shadow. It would be easy to contend that the same is so for all of the art, and all of the thought, that has ever mattered. But is the thought itself quite true?
If it were, this book would be a folly. It might well be the product of more _Belesenheit_ (bookishness) than _Talent_ : as I remember it across the decades, I wrote more fluently when I knew nothing, and may have been talentless even then. But a primary impulse and a lifelong disposition are the very things that tell me Lichtenberg is fudging a point for one of the few times in his life: in a naked proposition there is a hidden assumption. He assumes that an explanation drawn from art can't be natural. The antithesis is false. Art is a part of nature. Art is one of the most natural things we do, and to care about art, and to draw our examples from it, is as natural as caring about our personal experience and drawing our examples from that. It can even be more natural, because it gets more experience in: other people's as well as ours. If we were to say, "I almost had it figured out but Nola Huthnance from next door interrupted me and by the time she finished yakking I lost my train of thought," we would be speaking from personal experience. But if we were to say, "I almost had it figured out but I was interrupted by a person from Porlock," we would be speaking not only from our experience, but from Coleridge's; and being more specific instead of less, because we would have incorporated a recognition that such an event is universal. We would have also conveyed the suggestion that the thing we were on the verge of figuring out was pretty important, perhaps on the scale of the masterpiece that _Kubla Khan_ might have been if Coleridge's flying pen had not been stopped short by a passing dullard. If we didn't want to lose Nola Huthnance, we could just add the poetic reference to her prosaic name (". . . but Nola Huthnance from next door did a person from Porlock . . .") and get two benefits for one. Increasing our range need not cost us our focus: quite the reverse. The person without a range of reference is not more authentically human for being so. He is just more alone.
The root of the matter lies in whether art and learning are loved, or merely used. Among the thirty or forty missing plays of Aristophanes, it would be surprising if there were not three or four well populated with pretentious halfwits: there were men of learning in those days too, and wherever learning is valued there are arid scholiasts who seek merit by flaunting its simulacrum. Pointless erudition has always been ripe for parody. Proust's Norpois puts his audience to sleep by quoting endlessly from diplomatic history, but what makes him funny is that he knows nothing about life, not that he knows everything about diplomacy. (We conclude that he must have been a bad diplomat, but that's by the way, and might not be right.) If Talleyrand had quoted from diplomatic history at the same length as Norpois, Talleyrand could have sold tickets. People who crank out their knowledge of the arts in a mechanical manner gained it the same way. Some of them came to it late, as a social accomplishment. Others were unfortunate enough to be born as Philistines into a cultivated household. (At Cambridge I met one of these: he knew everything about all the arts in many languages, but had a way of proving it that made you want to enlist in the Foreign Legion.) Most of us were luckier, and took in our first enthusiasms as we took in our first meat and drink, with a scarcely to be satisfied hunger and thirst. Choosing one case out of a possible thousand, I first encountered Toulouse-Lautrec in Sydney, in the year 1957. He had died in Paris in the year 1901, but suddenly, and with overwhelming enchantment, he was alive again for me. There were no actual paintings by Lautrec on public display in Australia at that time, but the Swiss publishing firm Skira had just produced its first series of little square books bound in coarse white cloth, with tipped-in colour plates. Eventually I owned them all, but the Lautrec was the first. Not much bigger than postage stamps—big postage stamps from South American countries, but still postage stamps—those little reproductions occupied my eyesight for a week. I could see nothing else. But when I was finally ready to see the world again, I kept meeting Lautrec's characters from the cabarets of Paris—Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and la Goulue—in the streets of Sydney. I saw the rubber-legged dancer Valentin le Desosse bonelessly jumping off a Manly ferry at Circular Quay. It wasn't art instead of life: it was as art as well as life, and the art in life. Years later, when I got to Europe, I was ready for the real Lautrec paintings because I already had some idea of what was coming. And I was immeasurably more ready for Paris itself than I would have been without my scraps of book learning that had given me the living ghosts of Montmartre and Montparnasse. It had never been book learning, really. It was passion: a sudden, adolescent, everything-at-once passion for shape, colour, the permanent registration of the evanescent, the singing stillness of a captured movement, the heroism of an injured man who had forged a weapon to fight time. And fighting time, it collapses space: because of the sumptuous concentration of capital works by Lautrec in the Art Institute, the streets of Chicago are haunted for me by his small, bent but unbroken form. Twenty years ago, filming there very late one night by the lake, I thought I saw him. A beautiful set of roller-skating blonde twin girls came hurtling out of the dark along the esplanade, streaked carelessly through our laggard lights, and were gone before we could catch them. He would have caught them.
And that was just Lautrec. Gauguin did the same for me before I could pronounce his name. (I called him Gorgon.) Degas I gave an acute accent over the "e," not realizing that the "De" was an honorific prefix: "duh" would have been closer to the right sound, and certainly would have conformed to my general reaction when faced with his genius. Adding tear sheets from magazines to a small stack of thin books, I built up an archive of reproductions, calling him _Day_ -ga until a kind woman from Vienna at last corrected me. (She ran a little coffee house in the Strand Arcade. How young and foolish of me not to quiz her on the story of her life.) From then on, I never laughed at anyone who mispronounced an artist's name, because it usually only meant that what he had read had run far ahead of what he had heard, and I knew too well how that can happen. When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be na ve. But it was when we were still na ve that we knew most intimately the lust of discovery, a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never had to fear rejection. Art will always want us. It finds us infinitely desirable. Beethoven's late quartets waited for me for more than thirty years after I first went mad for the _Eroica_ symphony, and when I finally deigned to notice them they didn't even look peeved.
For anyone who loves it, art is as personal as that. The works of art have personalities: they are another population of the Earth. They even behave like people. After Barbirolli prepared the way with his Berlin concerts at the end of World War II, Mahler's symphonies, which had never been played while Hitler ruled, entered the conversation of music lovers in Berlin and were gossiped about as if their sumptuous attractions were a delicious scandal. Under Stalin, one of Shostakovich's most sublime creations took on a secret identity and hid out until the world got better. It holed up in the soundtrack to a Soviet film called _The Gadfly_ , where I finally tracked it down only a few years ago, after hearing it by accident as the theme of a television series entitled _Reilly, Ace of Spies_. A middle-aged man by then, I found it to be the dreamed-of companion of my youth, a melody I would have been pleased to hum and whistle to an early girlfriend, although whether she would have been pleased is another question. But if the works of art have personalities, their creators are a human race in themselves: one that never ages, nor, unlike the Struldbruggs, grows tired of immortality. When you are young, and first meeting them, the artists seem more than human. But to hail the superhuman is always to keep bad company. (Yeats not only should have known better, he did know better: but he couldn't resist the cadence—the reason that Plato wanted to banish poets from the Republic.) Luckily a more thorough acquaintance is bound to teach us that the artists are more than human only in the sense of being even more human than us. It is an important lesson to learn because there is a severe penalty to be paid for the belief than an artist should be beyond personal reproach. We are paying it now, in the cultural press, where too many half-qualified reporters are continuously busy proving to us that our idols have feet of clay. The fault, a double fault, is in the arrested psychological development and the ruinously abbreviated education of the reporter: a propensity to vindictiveness drives him to the task of cutting down to size people who were never giants in the first place—not in that sense, anyway.
Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can't get interested in Caravaggio until they find out that he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio. But we must all be alert to the potentially deleterious effects of letting in too much light on art. It is an essential political study, for example, to examine just what a treacherous piece of work Bertolt Brecht was, to his friends, to his loved ones and to civil society. But the study will lead to nothing if we fail to keep in mind that he was a great poet. Our innocence can't be regained: once we start finding out how our heroes and heroines lived and what they did, we can never go back to our first pure infatuation with what they made. But our innocence should never be forgotten: and if it is remembered, infatuation matures into admiration, as we blend our knowledge of the creators' failings and vicissitudes with our gratitude for what they created. Art is for adults, even when it is made by children. Children, left to themselves, tear up each other's stuff.
Because Lautrec was one of my first great loves, I often think of the very first artist, painting in the cave, as a man with withered legs. Unable to go out hunting, he would probably have been killed off if he hadn't turned out to be so entertainingly good at drawing a bison with a burnt stick. What were his feelings? They were primitive: almost as primitive as the instinct that sent the first hunters hunting, instead of just lying around to die when the edible roots ran out. But the painter, like the hunters, was doing something that was not in the natural dispensation. And as soon as he did it, it was. Though Sigmund Freud's reputation as a scientific thinker is in constant dispute, there can be no dispute about his stature as a writer. He was a very great poet in prose, and he was on top of his form in his essay " _Die Zukunft einer Illusion_ " (The Future of an Illusion) when he said that culture's characteristic reason for being ( _ihr eigentlicher Daseingrund_ ) is to protect us against nature ( _uns gegen die Natur zu verteidigen_ ). He might have added, however, that protecting ourselves against nature is the most natural thing we do: the thing that makes us human. The arts, and learning about the arts, are not additions to life: they are life itself, an expression of life that feeds back into it and helps to make it what it is—and, above all, to _show_ it what it is, to make life conscious. But Lichtenberg knew all that. Dozens of his other aphorisms prove it. He wrote this one on a bad day. Some bookish twerp must have got up his nose.
If reason, the daughter of heaven, were to judge what is beautiful, then sickness would be the only ugliness.
—LICHTENBERG, _A PHORISMEN_
Lichtenberg is saying more than that we should not judge by how people look. He is also saying that we can't help doing so. The operative word of the aphorism is the first word, "If." ( _Wenn Vernunft, die Tochter des Himmels, von Schänheit urteilen dürfte, so wäre Krankheit die einzige Hasslichkeit_ : you can see that my English has dampened the lilt of his rococo German, but it's the best I can do.) We are closer to being reasonable, then, for not caring about appearance; but we are further from instinct. In men, the instinct to admire personal beauty is traditionally held to be more powerful than in women, and women are thus traditionally held to more reasonable on that issue, if on no other. The tradition answers the facts: the only question is whether the facts are biologically determined. Late-twentieth-century feminism put a lot of effort into arguing that a cult of female beauty had been imposed by a consumer society. But presumably a consumer society was not imposing anything on the Greeks when they made Helen's beauty the ignition point for the war that brought the topless towers of Ilium down in flames. It makes more sense to admit the instinct than to deny it. All the evidence of literature, painting, sculpture and the dance suggests that men see divinity in beauty. Except for opera and ballet, music is the art where personal beauty has no value, and is perhaps the most consoling form of art because of that. E. M. Forster was brave enough to say that music lovers—of whom he, of couse, was one—were not a very attractive lot. He was stepping carefully in a minefield. He might have said it more boldly. On that point, music, when not allied with opera and ballet, is fair always. Other art forms very seldom are.
Admitting the instinctive response gives us our best chance to examine it. By saying the instinct does not exist we are merely saying it should not, and condemning even the unattractive to lie. Kingsley Amis, in _Take a Girl Like You_ , pulled one of his boldest strokes when he launched the incurably awkward Graham into a stricken aria about what it is like to be shut out from companionable access to female beauty. The strength of the episode depends on our recognition that he is saying what he feels. We can argue that he ought to think differently, but we can scarcely ask him to feel differently. (The beautiful Jenny Bunn, his interlocutor over the doomed dinner table, does ask him to feel differently, and finds to her consternation that he is almost as angry with her as he is with fate.) We can't begin to be reasonable on the subject until we concede that our response to beauty is unreasonable in the first place. Tolstoy dramatized the truth incomparably—incomparably even for him—when he made Pierre fall in love with the pulchritude of his future wife even while she was busy proving that her head was full of air. Pushing the theme to its outermost artistic limit, Tolstoy shows Pierre obsessed with the shapeliness of her breasts at the same moment when she is obsessed with the shapeliness of her own arm. Translated into a dumb-bunny vocabulary of sighs and silence, she incarnates the neo-Platonic idea of Shelley's that catapulted him to one of his wildest flights of vision: "I am the eye with which the universe / Beholds itself and knows itself divine." Pierre is heading for trouble. He has committed his soul to the care of Candy Christian, whose only real love affair is with a mirror.
_Candy_ would be a much less interesting book if it were merely pornographic. If Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg had wanted to make their little masterpiece hornier, they would have given their heroine a sex drive. As it is, she can be aroused only by men driven mad with need. In a key scene, two Greenwich Village poets (called Jack Katt and Tom Smart as a tactical alternative to calling them Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg) fight like animals for the right to possess her. Their right to possess her is merely notional, because she has already been spirited away for intimate examination by one of the book's endless line-up of randy doctors. In the book the doctors are best equipped to assess her physical perfection. But the fighting poets are a tip-off to an apparently frivolous work's deep reservoir of subversive truth. Southern, working solo this time, made another breakthrough with _Blue Movie_ , which was based on the premise that a serious director like Stanley Kubrick might want to make a pornographic film in which the protagonists were beautiful and the proceedings therefore genuinely arousing instead of disgusting. (The book is dedicated to "the great Stanley K." who, at the end of his career, actually did make a film something like the one in the book, although nothing like as interesting.) As a novel, _Blue Movie_ fatally dispenses with the saving grace of _Candy_ , where the sex scenes are played for laughs. Blue Movie too often plays them straight, falling into pornography's usual trap of trying to show what can only be felt. But the idea that sexual commerce is only accidentally, and not necessarily, divorced from the aesthetic impulse is a valid one.
It would take a scholar in the field (like Dr. Krankheit in _Candy_ ) to work his way through the world's complete catalogue of pornographic videos: there must be thousands of them. But any late-night channel-surfer in hotel rooms around the planet will be all too aware that there is a hierarchy of physical attractiveness even in the strange universe of sexual performance on demand. At the bottom of the pile—she sometimes literally is—will be a woman who seems to be held together only by Band-Aids, tattoos and metal pins. In the middle range, emanating mainly from California, there are women whose body parts have been artificially enhanced to the point where the cameraman has to back out of the room to fit it all in. But at the top of the range there are some women you might, at first glance, conceivably like to know. The men you would never like to know: if you ever doubted that there could be a specific physiognomy of stupidity, these men are there to set you right. They are at their most frightening when fully clothed, struggling with their challenging role as the man who has come to repair the garbage disposal, or the psychologist who must check the tactile sensitivity of a female astronaut just back from space. You have to see them act to realize how dumb a man can look. With their clothes off and their virile members contractually erect, they are merely competitors in some sort of international caber-tossing competition in which they are not allowed to use their hands. The women, as always, provide the interest. Some of them look almost normal: no collagen in the lips, no silicone in the breasts, a thoughtful air of having spent the previous night with a good book, or anyway with _The Da Vinci Code_. What are they doing there?
The quickest answer is that the market has expanded to the point where they can earn millions for spending a couple of hours a day wrapping themselves around an oaf. A slower answer, but perhaps closer to the essential truth, is that they are almost invariably without any acting talent whatsoever. Neither do they look quite as good as Cindy Crawford, so the modelling option is not open. (It probably was, when they were starting off: apparently the progression from almost-made-it model to porno princess is a classic route to the pay dirt.) But they look pretty good. In fact some of them are outright fetching, and this awkward fact understandably multiplies the effect. If the effect of watching pornography is to leave a man who is alone in a hotel room feeling even lonelier, he can expect to feel as lonely as the Man in the Iron Mask. There she is, an Aphrodite de Melos with arms, and they are wrapped around a reasonably plausible businessman with his pants around his ankles. The actor playing the businessman is one of the few male porn stars with a forehead higher than a box of matches lying on its side. He arrived at Aphrodite's mansion in a black BMW and a blaze of sunlight. When he got out of the car, the sun went in. When he rang the doorbell, the sun came out again. (Even in the highest grade of porn video, introduced by David Duchovny in more penurious days, the lighting and the sound tend to be variable in consistency: if she takes her shoes off, stick your fingers in your ears before the shoes hit the floor.) But now he is in character up to the hilt. Even for the critical viewer, it is hard not to envy him. Just as long as she doesn't say anything. Unfortunately she does. Oh no, don't say that. And don't do that with your face. Just do nothing. Alas, they never do nothing. The dream is always spoiled.
Maybe it's that kind of dream. Here is appearance detached from personality, and put to the service of nothing but sex. But in real life, appearance is never detached from personality for long, and there is no such thing as nothing but sex: if there were, there would be nothing in the bordello except naked women. As things are, the women can hardly get into the bordello for the props: uniforms, whips, trapezes, leather masks, torture instruments, plunge baths full of custard. Imagination will not be denied, and least of all when ecstasy is for sale. Everyone wants a relationship. Even if the girl does everything for your eyes, she must also do something for your mind's history. Buñuel, the man who knew most about these matters, condensed them into a single moment in _Belle de Jour_. For the large customer from the Orient, it is not enough to be given Catherine Deneuve in a peignoir. She must carry a little box which, when opened, reveals some nameless atrraction that he has always wanted. We don't know what it is. As he revealed in his excellent memoir, Buñuel doesn't know either: that's the point.
So Lichtenberg is only half right. He is right that reason does not judge beauty. He is wrong in his implication that the instinct which does do the judging is uncomplicated. It is complicated by our dream world, which complicates reason too. Indeed it is on this very matter that we are given our clearest demonstration of how we can never have a purely reasonable response to the world. Reason is poetic: it carries our personal history folded into it. We probably do best to accept that the poetry and the desire can't be separated. In his memoir _Die doppelte Boden_ , Marcel Reich-Ranicki tellingly quotes Kurt Tucholsky. " _Entweder du liest eine Frau oder du umarmst ein Buch_." (Either you read a woman or you embrace a book.) But he doesn't tell us what Tucholsky meant. I think he meant that the two kinds of experience were not just compatible, but intimately involved with one another. At the turn of the nineteenth century, long before an age of political correctness would have punished him for it, George Saintsbury, probably the best-read man on Earth at the time, reached for a simile adequate to the effect on our minds of a successful lyric poem: he said it was like seeing "the face of a girl."
Homosexual men are unlikely to agree. For the heterosexual man, male homosexuality is not impossible to imagine—most of us have an early history of it, in some form—but male homosexual promiscuity is impossible to imagine. Even sensitive souls like Christopher Isherwood seem to have been decathletes of the Turkish bath. Cavafy probably wasn't, but his poems prove that he dreamed of nothing else. The number of sexual contacts enjoyed by the cruising homosexual man in the pre-AIDS era doesn't even sound like enjoyment: it sounds like the history of a pinball in a machine rigged to play forever. Can all these targets have been seen as beautiful? Perhaps it is a hint of what the purely reasonable world would be like: the world in which anybody could be attractive. It might be tough on the women. In the most ruthless set of laboratory conditions we know about, Lavrenty Beria and Mao Zedong, two men who had absolute power to do whatever they wanted in the sexual sphere, confined their attentions only to women they thought beautiful. Beria routinely picked up any pretty girl he saw in the street and took her home to be raped. Barely pubescent girls whom the senescent Mao liked the look of were given the privilege of keeping him young by licking off the dirt that he never removed by any other means. (The story is told in a fascinating book by Mao's doctor, Zhisui Li: _The Private Life of Chairman Mao_.) If both men had lived in a world where judgement was the preserve of reason, no woman would have been safe.
One assumes that in the world of promiscuous homosexual men, there are aesthetic criteria that limit the score to something this side of the astronomical. Oscar Wilde notoriously dished himself in court by saying there was a young man he had not kissed because he (the young man) was too ugly. One can further assume that for some homosexual men the aesthetic consideration is paramount and even disabling. Thomas Mann's writings, from first to last, were full of the _visione amorosa_ : carefully immured in his various castles of domesticity, he sent his imagination on endlessly repeated flights to the ecstatic, which could be found only in the revelation of a young male face. _Death in Venice_ is one of the most powerful expressions of the amorous vision in all literature. For Aschenbach, young Tadzio standing caught by the light in the shallows of the Lido is a message from heaven. But Mann exchanged scarcely two words with the original boy. In _The Confessions of Felix Krull_ , the hero's attractions may well have something to do with the Australian tennis champion Lew Hoad, a hero of my youth, although not quite in the same way: Mann kept a picture of Hoad on his desk, for purposes of inspiration. (The picture is reproduced in the useful iconographical album _Thomas Mann: Ein Leben in Bildern_ , but the player is not identified. I offer his name as my contribution to Mann scholarship.) Had they met at Wimbledon, Hoad would probably have been safe from anything beyond a handshake. As far as we can tell, Mann's extramarital love life was mainly a thing of dreams: a significant glance from the young waiter, an ambivalent smile from the new pool cleaner. From the angle of actual fulfilment, the great writer was out of it: except in his mind.
But the mind is where it is. Even when the body finds its satisfaction, the mind does not find rest. We know this was true for Lichtenberg himself, whose own sexual history was a thing for wonder and pity. A cruelly crippled hunchback dwarf, he found love and marriage, but on a crooked path. Yet he found out enough to become a student of the passions. If he had not been such a student, he could not have composed this aphorism. From the way it is written, we can tell he was a step ahead of its apparent conclusions. He was always a step ahead. He was one of those people who have every excuse to tell us that life is valueless, and yet who love life so much that they can even forgive, if not forget, the fate that condemned them to their long anguish.
There is no surer sign of a great writer than when whole books could be made out of his passing remarks. Each in his way, Tacitus and Sterne are both masters of this quality.
—LICHTENBERG, _A PHORISMEN_
When Lichtenberg wrote this, Sterne was practically his contemporary, so by yoking Sterne with Tacitus he was perpetrating a deliberately shocking boldness, as if we were to say that same lessons could be drawn equally from the letters of Madame de Sévigné and the diaries of Bridget Jones. It is an attention-getting way of promulgating a truth, but the truth had better be true. This truth was. Making marks in the margin of his Shakespeare, Keats noted the quality of Shakespeare's "bye-writing": the local intensities that were better than they needed to be. The awkwardness of Lichtenberg's principle—and really all his principles are awkward—is that it subverts any idea of artisitic unity. Ideally, nothing in a written work should show signs of wanting to hive off and start another work. Practically, it happens all the time, and not always in expository prose, although naturally a discursive argument is more likely to provide instances of a subsidiary statement that asks to be followed up. In _The Gulag Archipelago_ , there is a great moment when prisoners are sweltering in a black Maria while Jean-Paul Sartre is standing a few feet away on the footpath proclaiming the wonders of the Soviet Union. It could conceivably be the start of a different book about the stupidity of philosophers, but in fact it fits. There is another great moment, however, that doesn't. On a prison train, Solzhenitsyn is jammed into the floor of a compartment with about an inch of air to breathe in, and suddenly realizes he is happy. It doesn't fit at all: it is the start of another work, about mysticism—a work that could have been written by the mystical philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev. It could be said that if Solzhenitsyn had not been capable of such moments, _The Gulag Archipelago_ would not be one of the great books about lost possibilities, so it fits after all: but it dangerously leaves the way open to the thoroughly misleading conclusion that extreme conditions have a justification in mystical experience.
The problem of the passing remark crops up most often in novels, and especially in the greatest novels. Theoretically, a great novel should meet a poem's standard of containing nothing extraneous. In practice, great novels are always sinning against that standard, and are usually the better for it. In _Madame Bovary_ , the socially aspiring Emma, invited to the grand ball at the country house, notices that aristocrats are glossier than ordinary people. The observation begs to be the starting point for a sociological treatise on differential nutrition, but it just doesn't sound like her conclusion: it sounds like Flaubert's. If he had said that she _didn't_ notice, and had made the observation his, he would have been telling us more about her. In _The Great Gatsby_ , the scene where Gatsby shows Daisy his beautiful shirts fits as perfectly as the shirts. Gatsby has nothing else to woo her with except the proofs of his wealth: flaunting the shirts, he makes the material spiritual—the key to his character, and the clue to how Fitzgerald can get poetically interested in the Philistine he has chosen as a hero. (The putative mystery of Gatsby's identity is no mystery at all: he is what Fitzgerald would have been if he had had no talent.) When Daisy's coldly amoral friend Jordan Baker moves her golf ball, she tells you everything you need to know about her character. But Fitzgerald was also capable of the passing remark that doesn't fit at all. His narrator Nick Carraway's gift for the aphorism makes you wonder if he was studying Pascal when he was learning to sell bonds. "If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures," Nick says of Gatsby, "there was something gorgeous about him." It was the first line of the book I learned, but I learned it because it broke off from the book. Similarly, Nick's avowal that "Any display of complete self-assurance draws a stunned tribute from me" is a bit too good, because the man who says it is displaying complete self-assurance. None of this means that _The Great Gatsby_ is less than what it is: a masterpiece. But it does mean that one of the characteristics of a masterpiece might be its composer's ability to get in extra stuff without us noticing the strain of the shoehorn. Even in _The Great Gatsby_ , you can tell that Fitzgerald was a notebook writer. Things would go into the notebook that were too good to leave unused, and one way or another he would get them into the novel. Hemingway worked in the other direction. A really good Hemingway short story is an episode from the novel he did not make the mistake of trying to pack around it. By extension, a really bad Hemingway novel is the accumulated sets of notes for short stories he did not write.
In Anthony Powell's _A Dance to the Music of Time_ , there is a tremendous moment just after the lumbering anti-hero Widmerpool, at the height of his pomposity and power, has delivered a boring lecture about an immensely valuable vase. The beautiful but dangerous Pamela comes along and vomits into it. You need to have followed both characters through several novels of the sequence to see the perfection of the coincidence. It fits together like the components of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine from two different shadow factories. But I can remember a line from the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins: something like "Nothing beats the feeling of an interesting woman being interested in us." I thought it sounded like an aphorism from one of Powell's notebooks. I have searched the novels and can't find it, and I can't find it in the notebooks either. Perhaps I heard him say it. I knew Powell well enough at one stage for us to have talked about such things. He was terrific on the mechanics of his craft, but it should be remembered that he found almost everyone clumsy except himself. He has been mocked for that. The truth is that most writers feel the same, because they read other writers professionally and are always on the lookout for a muffed trick.
In _Lucky Jim_ Kingsley Amis is consistently wonderful at separating Jim's particular viewpoint from the narrative. The French have a term, _style indirect libre_ , for the narrative prose that is coloured by the character's viewpoint because the character is in the scene; but the trick of the technique is that the writer's frame of reference must not get into the character's head. In the tour de force comic scene near the end of _Lucky Jim_ when Jim, if he is not to lose Christine forever, must get to the railway station and everything conspires to stop the bus, we are laughing too hard to notice that Jim makes the wrong conjecture about why the bus driver is apparently slumped at the wheel. Had he been struck, Jim asks, by the idea for a poem? Jim does not write poems and so would not know that getting an idea for a poem can render a poet catatonic. It is something only the narrator would know. But at the time, for one reader at least, the anomaly didn't matter, and indeed it still doesn't. I think it is probably the funniest scene in all of literature, so if there is a blemish, it must be part of the beauty. Written works of art aren't perfect. They create the air of being so, but they are too full of life to keep all their own implications within the perimeter. Lichtenberg was warning us against a Procrustean ideal of perfection. No writer, not even Chekhov in his short stories, can be Vermeer. A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say. It is in the nature of his medium to start a conversation within you that will not stop until your death, and what he is really after is to be among the last voices you will hear.
M
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czeslaw Milosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
NORMAN MAILER
Norman Mailer was born in Brooklyn in 1923, educated at Harvard, saw action in the Pacific, and returned to write one of the three American novels that made the war the subject of a serious best-seller, with the word "serious" used in both senses. James Jones wrote _From Here to Eternity_ , Irwin Shaw wrote _The Young Lions_ , and Mailer wrote the book that was most commonly, and correctly, greeted as a modern classic, _The Naked and the Dead_. The unarguable stature of his novel established him immediately in the twin roles of media celebrity and literary hope: an inherent conflict which it suited his personality to dramatize, and which it suited his talent to make a subject, thus opening up a whole new avenue of creative expression that can be summed up by one his titles, _Advertisements for Myself_. Ever since his dazzling beginnings, for a half century and more of unceasing fame, Mailer the holding company and corporate brand-name has mainly been in competition with himself, pitting Mailer the novelist against Mailer the anti-novelist, whose principal incarnation is the writer of non-fiction. The novelist Mailer, as if in flight from his own talent, has always made a point of writing barely readable books—from _Barbary Shore_ to _Ancient Evenings_ , they stretch out in a line that only a tenured academic could love—but he occasionally re-emerges from disaster with a substantial new success: _Harlot's Ghost_ was the fictional effort most like a complete return to form. If there had been whole row of such completely worked-out novels he would have ranked unquestionably with Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow among the novelists giving us the imaginative account of America's post-war emergence as the world's dominant cultural power. It could be said that he chose to do something more interesting, although it is possible that burgeoning alimony requirements chose his course for him. For whatever reason, he preferred to extend the career of the other Mailer, the journalist. Unlike his television sparring partner Gore Vidal, he has never—to his loss and ours—bothered to master the standard set form of the pointed and reasonably brief essay. But he has invented other forms in profusion, some of them running to volume length. In his books of non-fictional prose, such as _The Armies of the Night_ and _Of a Fire on the Moon_ , are to be found some of his most astonishing stretches of imaginative prose. Tom Wolfe, in his entertaining book of essays _Hooking Up_ , is within his rights to contend that his own novel _A Man in Full_ , which took him ten years of research, well deserved its commercial success, the hit parade result that the average, dashed-off novel or glorified think-piece by Mailer fails to achieve. But Wolfe is on dangerously yielding ground when he supposes that the assiduous fidelity of his own social observation is automatically a more interesting quality than Mailer's irresponsible extravagance. Wolfe's diligent reportage is good at observed detail, and he knows how to dress it up with exaggeration, invective and mimesis, but Mailer's prose, even at its most slipshod, has access to moments of poetry beyond the ken of a busy dandy in a white suit. Everything that the cult of celebrity in America can do to destroy an artistic gift has been done to Mailer. Much of the damage he has either connived at, or else has taken an indecent pleasure in recording, as in the wonderfully awful _The Prisoner of Sex_. But the fame machine is right to recognize him as a talent, as if talent can exist as a potential, without solid achievement. It can. As when Orson Welles sat on television doing nothing except reminisce about films that were never even made, the creative imagination can prove it exists merely by suggesting itself. Literary talent, especially, will out even when its owner goes nuts. It might come only in flashes, but without the flashes there was never a true fire. It must be firmly said, however, that the hints demand to be followed back to their source: every student should be familiar in detail with _The Naked and the Dead_ , the book in which an abundant gift fulfilled its duty to history, at the precise moment when American cultural imperialism became, for good or ill, the world's most pervasive political fact.
In the middle classes, the remark, "He made a lot of money," ends the conversation. If you persist, if you try to point out that that money was made by digging through his grandmother's grave to look for oil, you are met with a middle-class shrug.
—NORMAN MAILER, _T HE PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS_, P. 233
IF HE HAD never written a single novel, we would have to call Norman Mailer a great talent, and even a great poetic talent, simply for the richness of his prose. If he had made himself the protagonist of twice as many embarrassing scenes, we would still have to call him disciplined: because in even the most fatuous of his written opinions he is capable of a phrase that opens up the depths of a subject on which he seems determined to sound shallow. He couldn't be trivial if he tried, and sometimes he tries hard. Mailer tried especially hard when he was young, with the result that no considerable writer sounded young so long. Henry Miller, whom Mailer generously elected as a precursor, was less a case of protracted adolescence than of premature senility. Miller, doddering and drivelling before his time, drooled much low-flown foolishness but never volunteered himself as a teenage fantasist. Mailer did, and well into what should have been his mature years: when he suggested, in cold print, that he had met Sonny Liston and seen fear in his eyes—meaning fear of the physical violence that the coiled Mailer might unleash—there was a sort of brilliance to it. (There might also, it should be said, have been an element of truth, although not in the way Mailer intended: professional fighters will go a long way to avoid a brawl with a civilian, because a human skull is exactly the wrong sort of thing to hit with an unprotected hand.)
But there is nothing very brilliant about Mailer's standpoint in this paragraph: it is the same blanket rejection of the bourgeoisie that Sartre tried to wish on Flaubert, and is self-refuting in the same way, by the social background of the man writing it. There is everything brilliant, however, about the comic illustration contained within it. The illustration is not even placed or timed for comedy: it is just thrown in, as if it were being thrown away. (Its introduction is decidedly casual, and even careless: he could have put "that the" for "that that," thus avoiding an awkward mouthful that always looks more mistaken than intended.) The illustration takes off from a cliché: the man who would sell his grandmother is already in the language. But Mailer's man digs though his grandmother's grave to look for oil. You get the sense that Mailer thought of that on the spot—on a flat spot that he saw needed livening up. Somewhere among his many writings about writing—perhaps in _Advertisements for Myself_ —he speaks about the delight he felt when he revised a sentence in the last draft of _The Deer Park_ and hit on the extra few words that brought it to life. With his usual combination flurry of modesty and conceit (Mailer's verbal version of the old one-two) he is enunciating a principle. The principle is simple, but only because its complexity is irreducible. It is the poetic principle. Mailer is no better at analysing it than any other poet who possesses the same gift. All he can do is tap into it when it comes. When it doesn't come, he has to wait; and he has said and done some silly things while waiting. But he has never had to wait long.
Randall Jarrell said that a poet must wait to be hit by lightning. Even in an otherwise demented essay, Mailer can be hit by lightning so often that you can hear his hair fizz. The effect is of brilliant conversation. You are having a drink with him, and he wants to describe someone who will do anything for money. The standard idea comes into his head of a man selling his mother or grandmother. Instantly he sees that the idea needs improvement. Sell her into white slavery? Not good enough. What about if she's already dead? Hallowed ground. Where is the money? Under the hallowed ground. So the man digs through his grandmother's grave to look for oil. Like the inspired talker, Mailer can put it all together in a moment. In jazz, the improvisation that most satisfies is the one that comes out better than it could be written. The quickness of the creative power deceives the intellect. No wonder the young Mailer saw himself as a jazz soloist. Writing like this, he is at his most American, and shows why America is at the heart of modernity—which would be arid if it were merely a sophisticated development, but is at its most rich when the sophistication returns to the emotions. One never stops writing about Mailer and neither does he. In both cases, however, the best reason to do so is that he takes us so close to the awkward reality about talent. It does not belong to its possessor. Its possessor belongs to it, and can find freedom only by accepting that he is a slave.
NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, known to us as Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899–1980), would have been sufficiently famous as the heroic wife and widow of Osip Mandelstam, one of the finest poets of twentieth-century Russia, and therefore one of the most illustrious of Stalin's victims among those luminaries of the old intelligentsia who had stayed on in Russia in the mistaken belief that the Soviet regime would be an opportunity for culture. As the na vely non-political lyric poet soon found, it would have been an opportunity for him to starve, if Nadezhda's scholarly ability to translate easily out of the principal European languages had not helped to pay for the groceries. After the poet was arrested in 1934 (his "crime" had been to write a few satirical lines about Stalin), Nadezhda's translations from English were her only means of sustenance during her long banishment to the provincial towns, during which time, in 1938, her husband finally perished in the Gulag. Only after she was permitted to return to Moscow, in 1964, did she begin to write _Hope Against Hope_ , the magnificent book that puts her at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union and indeed at the centre of the whole of twentieth-century literary and political history. Some would place her book even ahead of Primo Levi's _Se questo è un uomo_ ( _If This Is a Man_ —unforgivably known, in America, under the feel-good title of _Survival in Auschwitz_ ) and Jung Chang's _Wild Swans_ as required preliminary reading for any prospective student enrolled at a university. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis, _Hope Against Hope_ is mainly the story of the terrible last years of persecution and torment before the poet was murdered. Nadezhda and her husband are the most promiment characters, although there is a vivid portrait of Anna Akhmatova. The book's sequel, _Hope Abandoned_ , is about the author's personal fate, and is in some ways even more terrible, because, as the title implies, it is more about horror as a way of life than as an interruption to normal expectancy. Both volumes are superbly translated into English by Max Hayward. Until the collapse of the regime, they were available in the original language only in samizdat or else from printing houses situated outside the Sovet borders. As with Akhmatova's permanently banned poem "Requiem," their final, free and full publication in Russia marked the day when the Soviet Union came to an end, and freedom—which Nadezhda, against mountainous evidence, had always said would one day return of its own accord—returned.
We all belonged to the same category marked down for absolute destruction. The astonishing thing is not that so many of us went to concentration camps or died there, but that some of us survived. Caution did not help. Only chance could save you.
—NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, _H OPE ABANDONED_, P. 67
ONLY CHANCE COULD save you" is the best thing ever said about life under state terror, and it took Nadezhda Mandelstam to say it so directly, bravely and unforgettably. Max Hayward chose the English titles well for his magnificent translations of her two great books. _Hope Against Hope_ is about a gradual, reluctant but inexorable realization that despair is the only thing left to feel: it is the book of a process. _Hope Abandoned_ is about what despair is like when even the memory of an alternative has been dispelled: the book of a result. The second book's subject is spiritual desolation as a way of life. Several times, in the course of the text, Nadezhda proclaims her fear that the very idea of normality has gone from the world. "I shall not live to see the future, but I am haunted by the fear that it may be only a slightly modified version of the past." The memory of what happened can't even be passed on without ruining the lives of those called upon to understand. "If any brave young fellow with no experience of these things feels inclined to laugh at me," she writes, "I invite him back into the era we lived through, and I guarantee that he will need to taste only a hundredth part what we endured to wake up in the night in a cold sweat, ready to do anything to save his skin the next morning." Well, none of us brave young fellows back there in the comfortable West of the late 1960s and early 1970s felt inclined to laugh at her. Schopenhauer had said that a man is in a condition of despair when he thinks a thing will happen because he wants it not to, and that what he wishes can never be. Nadezhda had provided two books to show how that felt. As such, they were key chapters in the new bible that the twentieth century had written for us. In a bible it is not astonishing that some of the gospels should sound like each other and seem to tell the same story. In Primo Levi's books, the theme is often struck that the only real story about the Nazi extermination camps was the common fate of those who were obliterated: the story of the survivors was too atypical to be edifying, and to dwell on it could only lead to the heresy that Levi called Survivalism and damned as a perversion. Survival had nothing to do with anything except chance: there was no philosophy to be extracted from it, and certainly no guide to behaviour. In Russian instead of Italian, Nadezhda said exactly the same thing about life under Stalin: Only chance could save you.
It was the dubious distinction of the Soviet Union to create, for the remnants of the old Russian intelligentsia, conditions by which they could experience, in what passed for ordinary civilian life, the same uncertainties and terrors as the victims who would later be propelled into Nazi Germany's concentrated universe. The main difference was that in Nazi Europe the victims knew from the start who they were, and eventually came to know that they were doomed. In the Soviet Union, the bourgeois elements could not even be certain that they were marked down for death. Like Kafka's victims in the _Strafkolonie_ , they were in a perpetual state of trying to imagine what their crime might be. Was it to have read books? Was it to have red hair? Was it (the cruellest form of fear) to have submitted too eagerly? Other versions of the same story came out of China, North Korea, Romania, Albania, Cambodia. The same story came out of the Rome of Tiberius, but the twentieth century gave something new to history when societies nominally dedicated to human betterment created a climate of universal fear. In that respect, the Communist despotisms left even Hitler's Germany looking like a throwback. Hitler was hell on earth, but at least he never promised heaven: not to his victims, at any rate. It's the _disappointment_ of what happened in the new Russia that Nadezhda captures and distils into an elixir. There were some mighty thinkers about the true nature of the Soviet incubus: Yevgeny Zamatin, Boris Souvarine, Victor Kravchenko, Evgenia Ginzburg, Varlan Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Roy Medvedev and Aleksandr Zinoviev are only a few of them. Generally, however, the artists, if they lived long enough to speak, spoke better than the philosophers. But it was Nadezhda's distinction to speak better than the artists. With no lyrical world in which to find refuge, she commanded a prose more potent even than her husband's poetry, and perhaps that made her the greatest artist of all. She found the means to express how an unprecedented historic experiment had changed the texture even of emotion.
Even the incandescently gifted Anna Akhmatova, with whom Nadezhda had always been involved in intimate bonds of passion, jealousy and respect, never quite grew out of the romantic nature that helped to make her one of the most justly loved of the modern Russian poets. In her poem "Requiem," Akhmatova encapsulated the anguish of millions of devastated women when she wrote "husband dead, son in jail: pray for me." But a romantic she remained, still believing in the imaginative validity of a love affair beyond time. In _Hope Abandoned_ , Nadezhda was able to say firmly that her friend was mistaken. Love affairs beyond time were impossible to take seriously when violent separations in the present had become the stuff of reality. With real life so disturbed, the nature of romanticism had been changed. In the new reality, all love affairs were beyond time.
It is important not to reach conclusions too quickly about whom she means by "we" and "us." An unreconstructed Stalinist, if we can suppose there were such a thing left, might say that she was identifying the class enemy. Quite early in the regime's career of permanent house cleaning—certainly no later than Lunacharsky's crackdown on the avant-garde in 1929—anyone stemming from the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia was automatically enrolled along with remnants of the bourgeoisie in the classification of "class enemy." Variations of the Sicilian Vespers multiplied. Civilized articulacy was as deadly a giveaway as soft hands. (In a development that eerily echoed Shakespeare's scenes about Jack Cade, the Proletkult Komsomols were able to identify a victim's ability to defend himself verbally as certain evidence of guilt.) Eventually any kind of knowledge that had been acquired under the old order was enough to mark down its possessor. Just as Pol Pot's teenage myrmidons assailed anyone who wore spectacles, so the Soviet "organs" discovered that even a knowledge of engineering was a threat to state security. (Solzhenitsyn, it will be recalled, was especially poignant about the fate of the engineers.) Any field of study with its own objective criteria was thought to be inherently subversive. Given time, Stalin would probably have applied the Lysenko principle to every scientific field. To this day, scholars puzzle over the reasons for Stalin's purging the Red Army of its best generals in the crucial years leading up to June 1941, but the answer might lie close to hand. The fact that military knowledge—strategy, tactics and logistics—was a field of data and principles verifiable independently of ideology might have been more than enough to invite his hatred. In attacking his own army, of course, Stalin came close to demolishing the whole Soviet enterprise. But at the centre of the totalitarian mentality is the fear that the internal enemy might go unapprehended. Luis Buñuel gives a poetically condensed rendition of this truth in his _Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie_ , when the chief of police, who has slept like a baby while dreaming of prisoners being tortured, wakes screaming and sweating when he dreams that one of them escapes.
A totalitarian regime's progressively expanding concept of the enemy is the thing to bear in mind when Nadezhda seems to be identifying herself as part of a class. She is really identifying herself as part of a category, and the category includes anyone who might offer a threat to the regime's monolithic authority—which means anyone capable of independent moral judgement. She does not go so far as to propose the possibility of independent moral behaviour: not even a hero can actively dissent if the penalty for recalcitrance is the suffering of loved ones. But she does believe that there is such a thing as independent moral judgement, a quality in perfect polarity with the regime, which can't tolerate the existence of independent moral judgement, and indeed has come into being specifically so as to eliminate all such values.
Throughout her two books, Nadezhda looks for comfort to those whose memories go back to the pre-revolutionary past. But her originality lies in her slowly dawning realization that decency is a human quality which can exist independently of social origins. Without that realization, she would never have been able to formulate the great, ringing message of her books, an unprecedented mixture of the poetic and the prophetic—the message that the truth will be born again of its own accord. She didn't live to see it happen: so the whole idea was an act of faith. Finally her inspiring contention is unverifiable, because when, after the nightmare was at last over, the truth was indeed reborn, it was hard to imagine that such a renaissance could have occurred without books like hers in the background. But there weren't many books like hers, and although it will always be useful to examine how the agents of change received their education in elementary benevolence, it might be just as valuable to consider her two main principles in the full range of their combined implications. One principle was that the forces of unreasoning inhumanity had won an overwhelming victory with effects more devastating than we could possibly imagine. The other principle was that reason and humanity would return. The first was an observation; the second was a guess; and it was the inconsolable bravery of the observation that made the guess into a song of love.
GOLO MANN
Golo Mann (1909–1994), modern Germany's greatest historian, was the third child of its greatest modern novelist, Thomas Mann. After making a shaky start as the unbeloved son outshone by his brilliant siblings Klaus and Erika, the awkward Golo rose gradually to his later status as the family's scholastically most distinguished representative. Some of his historical works were written in the American exile that began in 1940, but by 1952 he was back in Germany for a succession of professorships and for the composition of his major books. _Wallenstein_ , widely proclaimed as his masterpiece, is a hard read in the original and not much easier in English, but his monumental (a thousand pages plus) _Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts_ has the pace of a thriller and is easily seen to be the finest history of modern Germany. A separately published extract from it, _Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945_ , is probably the best single introduction to Germany's twentieth century tragedy, and an ideal book from which to start learning to read German. His memoir _Erinnerungen und Gedanken_ (Memories and Thoughts) has the story of his youth and mental development under the Weimar Republic. As so often with the great historians, Golo Mann is perhaps best approached through his ancillary writings, where his opinions are highlighted. The volumes of essays _Geschichte und Geschichten_ and _Wir alle sind, was wir gelesen_ (We Are All What We Read) show his capacity to get a book's worth of reflections into an article. His detailed trouncing of A. J. P. Taylor's chic views about the purportedly inevitable nature of Nazi foreign policy is a valuable instance of a serious political engagement knocking the stuffing out of a fad. If one writer could represent the recovery of liberal thought in Germany after World War II, it would be Golo Mann.
To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn't have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows.
—GOLO MANN, _G ESCHICHTE UND GESCHICHTEN_, P. 170
THROUGHOUT HIS distinguished career as an historian, Golo Mann tried to warn us against the consequences of attributing inevitability to what happened in Germany when he was growing up. This paragraph is one among many statements of that theme. What makes it especially notable is the way it traces a bad intellectual habit to a psychological propensity. Optimism, cocksureness, Professor Hindsight, call it what you like: there is a disposition of personality that likes to impose itself on the past and turn it into a self-serving cartoon. One becomes a seer in the safest possible way: retroactively. One predicts the past as a dead certainty. Golo Mann, who had been there when it happened, always remembered the uncertainty. According to him, the Weimar Republic didn't have to collapse: after it did, to say that it had to was yet another way of undermining it—sabotage after the fact. Similarly, the Jews didn't have to die, or even have to be classified as Jews. The classification was Hitler's idea, as was the massacre: the second thing following with awful logic from the first. But the first could have stayed in his sick mind, and he could have stayed out of power. If even one of the main factors had been subtracted from the Weimar equation—the inflation, the Depression, the unemployment—then out of power he would have stayed, to haunt the back alleys of lunatic fringe politics where he belonged. Facing the possibilities that were real even though they did not happen, Golo Mann found the most resonant and lasting application of his principle that the surest way to deprive an historical event of its significance is to abdicate from the task of tracing it back to its origins, which will be the more distant the more the event seems like ineluctable fate. And in that long chain of circumstances, anything could have been different.
Golo Mann's first book, published in 1947, was a treatise on the diplomat Friedrich von Gentz, the man whose claim to fame was that he was not as famous as Metternich. An historian's first book is characteristically rich in themes that will occupy him for the rest of his career, but part of the richness usually comes from their entanglement: he knows what he thinks, but tries to say it all at once. Golo Mann's book on Gentz is unusual for what can only be called a precocious maturity. To some extent this was imposed on him: because of the political disruptions in his early life, he was already in his late thirties when he began to publish. Undoubtedly his limpid view came from what he had experienced in the time of the Weimar Republic, and not from what he had read about the time of Metternich. He called the pre-revolutionary period before 1848 a hopeful time. People were full of ideas about how life could be more free and more just. _Aber diese Ideen hatten zu ihrer Verwirklichung durchaus nicht der Revolution bedurft_. But these ideas didn't need a revolution to make them real. This is still a key sentence; and was, at the time he first wrote it, a marker put down for the view of history he would unfold throughout his books, culminating in his masterpiece—which, in my view, is not his _Wallenstein_ (1971) but his _Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts_ (1958). Without question _Wallenstein_ is a mighty book. Its true worth is hard to assess in English because Golo Mann's prose style, when he wrote the book, was at its most dense and therefore at its least susceptible to being translated with decent respect for its unfaltering rhythm. Like his father Thomas, Golo Mann was accustomed to writing a sentence at the full length allowable by German grammar. Like any other language with arbitrary genders, German permits far longer flights of unambiguous coherence than English. The translator of _Wallenstein_ fatally attempted to translate block-long sentences without breaking them up. The result is a meal of nougat, with molasses to wash it down.
But even in the original, where the style is merely condensed, _Wallenstein_ suffers from its inclusiveness: the points are buried in documentary detail, and in the effort to isolate and remember them you feel that your enemy is the book itself. _Deutsche Geschichte_ isn't like that. Memorable from paragraph to paragraph, the book sends you back to itself before you have finished it, just for the enjoyment of seeing complexity put so clearly. _Deutsche Geschichte_ was one of the books from which I taught myself German, and we always have an immoderate affection for the books that brought us into another language. But since I first read it right through with dictionary to hand, I have re-read it twice from cover to cover, and am always using various bits of it as starting points for opening up a specific topic. At its height, Golo Mann's prose approaches the ideal of the continuous aphorism: you find yourself learning it like poetry. In the fascicle marked _Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945_ his analysis of the Weimar Republic's permanent crisis centres on a single formulation. He says that the split between capital and labour was at the centre of politics—the centre from which "the public was indeed governed, but always in a divisive manner." That was the fissure Hitler got in through, like a plague rat through a crack. Not that Golo Mann found the collapse of the Weimar Republic inevitable. There were many times it could have consolidated itself, if circumstances had not conspired against it. In an essay collected in _Gecshichte und Geschichten_ (1963), he excoriated A. J. P. Taylor for Taylor's pernicious certitude on the subject. Taylor said that from the viewpoint of foreign policy the advent of the Nazis meant a return to political realism from the previous liberal dreamland. Golo Mann knew that the liberal dreamland had contained all the real hopes, and that Hitler's political realities were lethal fantasies.
In his _Zeiten und Figuren_ (Times and Figures) (1979), Golo Mann expounded his key concept of _Offenheit nach der Zukunft hin_ —openness to the future. He didn't just mean it as a desirable trait of personality but as a necessary qualification for the historian. By an effort of the imagination, the historian must put himself back into a present where the future has not yet happened, even though he is looking back at it through the past. If a narrator knows the future of his hero, he, the narrator, "is bound to tinge even the simplest narrative with irony." Succumbing too easily to the ironic mode is a cheap way of being Tacitus. The true high worth of Tacitus depended on his being always aware that tragic events had been the result of accidents and bad decisions, and the depth of the tragedy lay in the fact that the accidents need not have happened and the decisions might have been good. In a predetermined world there would be no tragedy, only fate. With his revered Tacitus as an example, Golo Mann was able to form the view that fatalism and frivolity were closely allied: to be serious about history, you had seriously to believe that things might have been otherwise.
Golo Mann could have his weak moments. Too quick to understand Ernst Jünger's flirtation with the idea of a powerfully rearmed Germany, he allowed the possibility of Jünger's genuine detachment from the awfulness of Nazi reality, as if Jünger's aesthetic refinement had been a part excuse for his political indifference. But the part excuse was wholly a defence mechanism. Jünger's _Tagebücher_ should have revealed to Golo Mann—otherwise the most acute of stylistic analysts, on top of his other virtues—that Jünger took refuge in the exquisite as a way of not thinking about the obvious. One is reminded of the indulgence Gitta Sereny extended to Albert Speer: she convicted him only of not wanting to know. But he did know. He always knew. To be civilized is not a hindrance to recognizing the barbaric. The hindrance is the barbaric within oneself. Jünger was wedded to the idea of a strong, militaristic Germany. The wedding made him slow to see what the Nazis were actually doing. Why Golo Mann should have been slow to see what Ernst Jünger was doing is another question. The answer might have had something to do with Golo Mann's long passion for putting a liberal German intellectual tradition back together. He didn't want to throw away an attractive fragment.
It could have been that he just didn't like the idea of denouncing a misfit bookworm. He had been one of those himself. The Manns were not a dysfunctional family, but they were a family of dysfunctional people, and the young Golo had been an oddball even among the Manns. There is a desperately touching passage in his memoirs _Erinnerungen und Gedanken_ (1986) when he recollects, as if it were yesterday (and obviously he always felt as if it were), how he was shut out from some yodelling youth movement. He had an urge to fit in. When he volunteered for the crucial job of going back to Munich to save Thomas Mann's compromising private diaries from the Nazis, he became indispensable at last. But his homosexuality always troubled him more than the same condition troubled his elder siblings, Klaus and Erika. Fractured character is probably what made him an artist among historians. Artists complete themselves in their works. Golo Mann's works are not so much the expression of a complete personality as of a personality completing itself as it writes: he is working himself out before your eyes, the way artists do. With an internal scope to energize his view of the external world, he set the measure for all the liberal German historians to come. E. H. Gombrich's irascible but useful complaint that his generation of assimilated Jews did not regard themselves as Jewish was already there in Golo's writings, enshrined as a principle. (It should be noted that Golo and his siblings were only quarter Jews, which might have got them by; but their mother was a half Jew, which would surely have meant trouble; so he had reasons near home for pondering the matter as the Nazis came closer to assuming power.)
By imposing a racial definition, Hitler did not reveal a reality: he created one, out of his own poisonous obsessions. Similarly, the pundits on the revisionist side of the _Historikerstreit_ in the 1980s had already been discredited by what Golo Mann had written before they were ever heard from. Ernst Nolte and Andreas Hillgruber wanted to call Hitler's wars of extermination inevitable because Hitler was only reacting to what the Soviet Union had already done. Golo Mann had established in advance that there was no such historical tendency except in retrospect. In retrospect, the reader of history is apt to wish that less history had been written, but we are unlikely to feel that when reading Golo Mann. Second only to Thomas in the Mann clan, Golo wrote even finer expository prose than his father. It is sad that Thomas Mann did not live long enough to see the full glory of his most loyal son, but perhaps he guessed that it would come. We are all allowed to predict the future: it is one of the imagination's privileges. But predicting the past is a mischievous habit, and Golo Mann was the first to spot just how pervasive it was becoming, as historians presumed to impose upon events a baleful shape that had stolen into their minds: a shape that was a self-protective reaction to the events themselves—one more version of the small man's revenge for helplessness.
It was no belief: it was a crime committed because of bad literature.
—GOLO MANN, _D EUTSCHE GESCHICHTE_ 1919–1945, P. 138
Golo Mann is the greatest German historian of the twentieth century by a long mile, but when he said this he gave a hostage to fortune. He was trying to say that the Holocaust didn't have to happen. He was certainly right about the bad literature. Anti-Semitism was the claim to profundity of almost every literary halfwit in Germany during the years when Hitler, posing dramatically in front of a cheap mirror, was rehearsing his role as the man with the magnetic eyes.
Unfortunately Golo Mann's idea about the bad literature gave precursorial support to Daniel Goldhagen's suggestion, forty years later, that a whole culture, saturated with what he called "eliminationist" anti-Semitism, had necessarily been bent on the annihilation of a race. Both opinions, Golo Mann's and Goldhagen's, need to be discounted; and Mann's, unexpectedly enough, is more insidious than Goldhagen's, which has the sole merit of refuting itself. Mann's doesn't. Some of the top Nazis can indeed be portrayed as opportunists who did not really believe their own doctrine. By the end, Himmler and Goering were both ready to do a deal to get out; Goebbels, though a dedicated fanatic at the last day, was merely hopping a bandwagon on the way in; and there is even a possibility that Heydrich's hidden motive might have been to offset the rumours about own Jewish background by building up a sufficiently impressive record of eliminating everyone else with the same drawback. (A rumour was all it was, but he might have been able to imagine circumstances in which a rumour would have been all it needed to do him damage.) One question remains, however, and it is about Hitler. If Hitler's anti-Semitism wasn't a belief, what was it?
The less attention we pay to Hitler's mysticism, the more we must pay to his practicality. In the days of the ugly birth of the SS, Hitler just wanted the new elite corps to be a bodyguard. It was Himmler who wanted the SS to be a new order of Germanic knights. At Wewelsburg, his castle in Westphalia, Himmler played King Arthur. Each of his twelve companions at the round table had a suite decorated differently: thoughts arise of Las Vegas and the Playboy Mansion West. Hitler thought all the mystical stuff was nonsense. His fanaticism was entirely on the practical level: what one might call, must call, a true belief. Unencumbered by any metaphysical junk apart from his deluded root perception into the Jewish origins of Bolshevism, Hitler's convictions were unshakeable. Himmler's, on the other hand, were flexible. The same man who talked sinister tripe about a Nordic peasant aristocracy in the east was ready to listen when the Sicherheitsdienst, after two years of intense research into the blindingly obvious, concluded that the extermination policies in Poland and Russia had defeated the political purpose. No doubt with a sinking feeling, Himmler saw the point. But there is no reason to suppose that Hitler didn't see the point as well. He just didn't let it impress him. For him, the exterminations were the political purpose. Self-defeating or not, mass murder was his belief. And he didn't get it from bad literature. Most of the bad literature he read was by Karl May, inventor of a Western hero called Old Shatterhand, who was deadly in pursuit of Indians and rattlesnakes, but not of Jews—a species thin on the ground among the cactus and the sagebrush. Any other literature, no matter how bad, Hitler only pretended to read. He probably didn't even read the anti-Semitic pamphlets. What he did do was listen to their authors shouting racist filth. They shouted it because they believed it, and he got the idea immediately because it is not an idea. It's a belief, and precedes its attendant ideas as the stomach ache precedes the vomit.
HEINRICH MANN
Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), four years older than Thomas Mann but doomed never to catch up, won few of the literary rewards that came the way of his world-famous younger brother. Heinrich's voluminous fictional writings earned him a reputation as the German Zola but were rarely taken seriously as works of art. Though he was never less than a celebrity, he had to watch the laurels he would have liked for himself go to his less prolific but better organized sibling. He did, however, achieve one thing uniquely his: he gave the world a universally appreciable mythical figure. His novel _Professor Unrat_ (1904) featured a respectable schoolmaster who was lured to destruction by a seductive female creature of the demi-monde. Filmed in 1930 as _The Blue Angel_ , the story made Marlene Dietrich a star and, through her, gave Heinrich Mann a purchase on the international popular psyche that Thomas Mann would never equal: Aschenbach, in _Death in Venice_ , is for an intellectual audience, whereas Dietrich's soubrette _fatale_ works her destructive magic in all men's minds to this very day. Critics who dismiss Heinrich as glibly prolific should be reminded that Thomas, though Heinrich's slapdash facility dismayed him, was always generous enough to praise his brother's talent when he saw signs of its coming into focus. Thomas's main trouble with Heinrich was Heinrich's erratic behaviour, which was only intermittently embarrassing when they were both still in Germany, but became a real problem when they were both in exile. Heinrich did not take easily to being a displaced person. In Europe he had enjoyed less prestige than Thomas but at least he was well-known. In America he was a nonentity. Whereas Thomas's books became more famous than ever in translation, Heinrich's got nowhere. He ran easily through the money that he borrowed from Thomas, drank heavily, and his unwise choice of mistress led to the kind of social awkwardness that Thomas—always conscious of his exalted position in the glittering refugee society of wartime Los Angeles—found threatening. Just because Thomas was snobbish, however, is no reason to suppose that Heinrich was some kind of wonderful free spirit. He was the kind of knockabout bore who makes things worse by apologizing for it. But perhaps his erratic sensibility gave him insight. At any rate, it was Heinrich, and not Thomas, who guessed as early as 1936 that the Nazis had an atrocity in mind beyond all reasonable imagining.
The German Jews will be systematically annihilated, of that there can be no more doubt.
—HEINRICH MANN, _D IE DEUTSCHEN UND IHRER JUDEN, COLLECTED IN POLITISCHE ESSAYS_, P. 146.
AS ALWAYS IN any German writings of the modern period, everything depends on the year. In 1936 there were very few intelligent people who wanted to believe that Heinrich Mann's prediction was anything except an hysterical exaggeration. And indeed it was a guess; but what he guessed was the truth. He was able to do so by taking a general view of how the repressive laws had been applied with increasing severity. He deduced the destination from the momentum. Among the people who were already suffering so severely from those restrictions, there were not yet many who were ready to draw the same conclusion. Victor Klemperer's diary from the same year provides an instructive comparison. Klemperer could guess things would get worse, but he didn't yet see that the progressive turning of the screws could end only in death. There were Nazis who didn't see it. The idea of resettling the remaining Jews on Madagascar or some similarly outlandish destination had not yet been abandoned. Historians who, for various reasons, would like to believe that the idea of extermination was hatched much later would never countenance 1936 as a year in which the threat could be realistically conceived of. In Joachim Fest's biography of Hitler, the Holocaust is not precisely a side issue, but it would be fair to say that it is not presented as Hitler's main initial aim. Once in London I met Fest at a launch party and mentioned this essay by Heinrich Mann. Fest said that he had never heard of it, and that he found it hard to believe it had been published in 1936.
Looking back on Fest's books, it might seem strange to suggest that he soft-pedalled the Holocaust. Fest's picture of Heydrich in _Das Gesicht des dritten Reiches_ (The Face of the Third Reich) remains the most penetrating we have, and in his study of the July 1944 plot against Hitler's life, _Staatstreich_ (Coup d'état), he pays proper tribute to the twenty or so conspirators who told the Gestapo that revulsion against the treatment of the Jews was their main reason for getting into it. Nevertheless, over the broad span of his writings, Fest's concern with the Nazis' most defining crime has an oddly soft focus. In the case of his Hitler biography, the soft focus can only be called damaging, and it is hard to see how his hefty book, apart from its chronological completeness, is much superior, for its psychological insight, to Konrad Heiden's pioneering work ( _Hitler: Das Leben eines Diktators_ ) published in the same year as Heinrich Mann's essay, 1936. Hugh Trevor-Roper, among post-war historians the first in the field with his _The Last Days of Hitler_ , was necessarily unarmed with the subsequent scholarship but still got closer to the nub of the matter. (In 2002 Fest reprised Trevor-Roper's crepuscular theme with his short book _Untergang_ , which had some nice maps of the bunker: but I saw no reason to think that Trevor-Roper's pioneering study of the man cowering inside it had been replaced.) Coming after Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock did the first full-length biography that mattered, and it continues to matter most. Bullock reprised his theme with the relevant portions of his stereoscopic _Hitler and Stalin_ , but students should not excuse themselves from reading his first monograph: one of the essential books of the modern world. J. P. Stern's short book of 1975 ( _Hitler: The Fuhrer and the People_ ) offers useful sidelines, but he stands on Bullock's shoulders. Ian Kershaw's recent two-volume effort has not really replaced Bullock, who packed longer judgement into a shorter distance. Though simplicity of heart must always present the danger of obfuscation, there is an even greater danger in too much finesse. While their foul subject was fresh, the first post-war English historians, in early before the smoke had cleared, smelt the Devil. They were right. The lasting merit of Heinrich Mann's prescient statement is that it disarms the defence mechanism by which—even today, and looking back—we would rather classify murderously threatening language as mere rhetoric. As the historians' picture of Hitler becomes more and more elaborate, there is a greater and greater tendency to suppose that his lethality grew upon him in the course of events. But it caused the events.
MICHAEL MANN
Michael Mann (b. 1943) is a director famous mainly for giving his films, no matter how violent their subject matter, a soothingly diffused and pastel look, as if their contentedly vacationing audience were wearing sunglasses even at night. Though Mann had already made movies before he became executive producer of the globally successful _Miami Vice_ , it was for the brushed and powdered episodes of that television series that he first achieved the full development of his characteristic look, which made a hero out of Don Johnson's tailor and turned Florida into an advertisement for itself. Like most film directors with an early history of earning their keep in television, Mann was obliged, however, to learn that the look of the thing came second to the story. (One of his first jobs in show business was writing scripts for _Starsky and Hutch_.) As a consequence, his feature films, pretty as they are to look at, are invariably made coherent by a strong narrative line, and not just by their tasteful mise en scène. _Manhunter_ , for example, is by far the best plotted of the Hannibal Lecter movies, and would be recalled now as the benchmark for the franchise if it had not been sunk in advance by the comparative anonymity of its leading actor. (Later on—"ironically," as they say in Hollywood—the film's obscure leading man William Petersen became, as the face of CSI, one of the most recognizable actors on Earth.) The look of movies helps to form the stock imaginative patterns of the world, and to that extent the director often really is the formative influence. This remains true even though, in the main production centre, there is scarcely such a thing as a successful commercial movie which is not a collaborative venture controlled by a studio that can fire anybody concerned, the director included. Just as the atmospherics of Ridley Scott's _Blade Runner_ now affect the appearance—and even, through the music of Vangelis, the soundtrack—of any movie made anywhere whose subject is the future, so do the atmospherics of Michael Mann's _Heat_ affect the look of any movie made about crime: other directors, whether working out of the United States, Latin America, Europe or Hong Kong, either go with him, towards glamour, or go against him, towards grunge, but they always have his look in mind. What concerns me here, however, is not what happens to the pictures, but to the words. By definition, they are not in a universally appreciable language. But are they in English either? The answer has large implications, especially for international politics. If the troops who come to bring you freedom can't understand even each other, you had better hope that they know what is meant by a white flag.
Let's violate his ass right now.
—MICHAEL MANN AND OTHERS, _H EAT_
THE INFORMER IS being unforthcoming. The informer is on parole. Hard-driving police captain Al Pacino and his faithful sidekick grow impatient. The sidekick suggests to Pacino that they punish the uncooperative informer by arresting him for violating his parole. "Let's violate his ass." That's the way the sidekick says it. Did you get it straight away? Confess.
An extremely advanced foreign student of English might have enough information to realize that "let's violate" is cop-talk for "let's arrest him for violation of parole" and that "his ass" is a standard jive-talk way of saying "him." But a merely advanced student—advanced enough to know all the words in the sentence without even consulting a dictionary—might forgivably conclude that the angry sidekick and the angry captain are on the point of sodomizing their uncooperative informer. The merely advanced student would translate the line accurately and get it hopelessly wrong. (There is even the chance that a slightly less than merely advanced student, educated by correspondence in some region of central Asia where any version of a horse can buy a bride, would fail to realize that "ass" is the American version of "arse," and so get the impression that the two cops are about to commit bestiality with a valuable animal belonging to the informer: but let's leave that one out.) It follows that there is more to translation than transliteration: you need the whole cultural context. It also follows that American cultural imperialism is so powerful it doesn't need to care whether you have absorbed the cultural context or not. It just wants you to see the movie.
British and Australian audiences—to name only two English-speaking markets for the American mass media—are in the position of merely advanced students. For them a line like this might as well have a subtitle. I myself, when I first saw _Heat_ in 1996, had been absorbing the American mass media for fifty years at least. I had seen hundreds of cop shows in which the words "violate" and "parole" had been used in close connection. But when I heard "violate" without "parole" I had to stop and think—not an activity that _Heat_ otherwise encourages. It is a highly enjoyable movie. (I mean as opposed to a lowly enjoyable movie like _Where Eagles Dare_ , in which the fun comes from the stupidity.) Michael Mann's movies are well planned and look very good. His years in the glossy sweatshop of _Miami Vice_ gave him a feeling for compressed narrative and a mastery of pastel composition transferable to any setting, including the morgue. Both qualities are well on display in Mann's _Manhunter_ , the first and by far the most interesting film that draws on the dubious charm of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter. Mann is a director who can make even cannibalism into a fashion statement. With _Heat_ he attained his apotheosis. Unlimited mayhem never looked so balletic. The gun battles are sensational: rather more sensational, one is bound to reflect, than any gun battle could ever be in real life, where a flak jacket would not be enough to protect Al Pacino's head if even one bank robber were shooting at him with a pistol. In the film, Val Kilmer and Robert De Niro both shoot at him for minutes on end with automatic weapons. Fusillades of bullets swerve around his head by magic. In real life he would have only his admittedly formidable hairpiece to keep the hurtling slugs out of his brain. But the director isn't transcribing life, he is choreographing its myths, and especially the myths of male conflict: Mann is a _mano a mano_ man. He thinks in battles. In a Mann film, even when the hero is alone on screen with a telephone, he battles with the telephone.
In _Heat_ , the most sensational battle of all is the hamming contest in the coffee shop between Pacino and De Niro. These two actors have never faced each other on screen before. Each actor knows that this is the shoot-out the audience has been looking forward to for years. Each actor fights with his best weapons. Al Pacino's standard weapon is to SHOUT AT RANDOM. Elsewhere in the movie he employs it freely, but in this key scene he abandons it. Robert De Niro's standard weapon is to repeat a line half a dozen times with slight variations of emphasis. "Clean up and go home," he tells Ashley Judd. "Clean up and go home." Hypnotized by this mantra, Ashley Judd cleans up and goes _home_ to Val Kilmer, so thoroughly has her will been sapped. De Niro's power of repetition is a tried and tested standard weapon. A standard weapon, tried and tested, is what it is. Tried and tested. Tried and _tested_. But in this scene he abandons it.
In the coffee shop, the two knights of the screen have taken off their helmets and laid aside the axe and mace. They have upgraded their weaponry. They are about to go nuclear. They will fight in close-up. Pacino fights with ruminative pauses and a new, noiseless smacking of the lips: a deadly weapon. De Niro fights with a new pout. It is not as extreme as Val Kilmer's pout, but Val Kilmer was born pouting, like June Allyson: Val Kilmer can't _not_ pout. De Niro's new pout is a vestigial, almost subcutaneous pout, a pout more thought than deed. He is proving that he can pout without moving his lips. He also looks sideways without moving his head. He looks sideways only with his eyes: a new subtlety. (All modern screen actors look sideways as much as possible while speaking. There is one called Michael Madsen who will face away from the camera while speaking, giving you a close-up of the back of his head.) Gradually you realize that Pacino and De Niro, like the characters they are playing, will both walk away from this battle. The fix is in. The two characters they are playing respect each other. But the characters could not possibly respect each other as much as the actors playing them respect each other.
Pacino and De Niro have each grown used, during a long career, to acting any interlocutor off the screen. They have met at last only on the tacit understanding that they will act each other _on_ to the screen. Exactly measured by the number of close-ups, their mutual respect will be made exhaustively manifest. The outcome will be a draw. But they have to make it look good. Making it look good, indeed, is the only reason for doing it. Making it sound good is a secondary consideration. To prove this, each man reaches for the deadliest weapon of all: silence. Personally I find this a relief from the dialogue, which isn't bad, but is not very good. In the age of _The Big Sleep_ and The _Maltese Falcon_ , a similar exchange would have been over and done with in a minute at most, with each actor delivering a line memorable forever. But that was then, and this is now. Now the actor does not deliver lines. He delivers himself, usually like a truck full of eggs being unloaded one by one. _Heat_ has a structure, and each of its carefully assembled component scenes has a mood. What it lacks is lines, and why not? It is after something bigger than verbal quotability. But in that case, why throw in a line like "Let's violate his ass"? The only conclusion you can reach is that _nobody knew it was difficult_.
Nobody knew, or nobody cared: it amounts to the same thing. In films, dialogue is a secondary source of narrative, not the primary one. If this seems a cause for grief, it can only be said that there are bigger things to grieve about. (A film has to star Steven Seagal or Chuck Norris before it begins to pose a bigger threat to the language than yellow journalism.) When a semi-literate film-maker proclaims the supreme importance of structure, it might sound like opportunism: but literate film-makers proclaim it too, and are not likely to be wrong. That capable screenwriter William Goldman has written entertaining books to demonstrate how even the most entertaining film can't be written like a book. If the story is not first worked out to make cinematic sense, no amount of excellent dialogue will save it from going straight to video. For those of us who will see any film that Ashley Judd appears in—the definition of star power— _Kiss the Girls_ is a must. The procedural police dialogue is of the highest class: anything Morgan Freeman gets to say once you want to hear twice. But the story is out of shape, so the movie was a box office dud. In _Wag the Dog_ , the dialogue is even better: it is up there with the scripts of pre-war screwball comedy, which is as high as you can go. The film, however, would have joined _Kiss the Girls_ on the long shelf of modern flops if the story had not been so satisfactorily worked out. Quite often the process of making the story work will marginalize even the cleverest writer, and even more often make him or her part of a team, any member of which can be unknown to the others. As S. J. Perelman pointed out in his valuable _Paris Review_ interview, F. Scott Fitzgerald's personal tragedy in Hollywood centred on his deadly knack for failing to spot, at the time, that he was not the sole author of the script he was working on, and for being devastated when he found out later. Though there are writers with star power—Robert Towne when he doesn't want to direct, Joe Eszterhas when he can stay under the top, Richard Price, Tom Stoppard and David Mamet all seemingly without fail—the practice of calling in extra writers is unlikely to change. Nor is a star director necessarily the author, though he might strive to be thought so. A successful movie is usually its own author, like a little city. My favourite example is _Tootsie_ , which I admire as a whole and in every detail, especially from line to line. Like thousands of _Tootsie_ fans I can practically recite the dialogue from start to finish. But I have met very few among my fellow devotees who can name its writers, and I am not even sure that I know all their names myself.
There is no point complaining about the working conditions in an industry which must resolve so many powerful forces if it is ever to produce art. Better to be grateful that it sometimes does. The first credited writer on _Shakespeare in Love_ is probably still cursing Tom Stoppard, whom we bless, because he made the film a delight to listen to. But not even the first credited writer was really the first writer, who was, or were, an uncredited duo: Caryl Brahms and S. J. Simon, joint authors of _No Bed for Bacon_ , a comic squib from the days before Penguins had picture covers. Stoppard never read the book, and probably still believes that some of the ideas he inherited from the first credited writer (the idea of Shakespeare practising his signature, for example) were not lifted from it, along with the basis of the plot. It scarcely matters, because the real first writer of the film was Shakespeare himself, and his co-opted spirit energizes the whole thing: _Shakespeare in Love_ really does make language the true hero of a film, just as he made it the true hero of a play. Film scripts are developed properties, and their written origins can lie far back in time. (Some of the properties are remade over and over: that perfectly shaped late Cold War thriller No Way Out, with Kevin Costner and Sean Young, was built to a verbal template already perfected before World War II.) The confusion arises from the too-persuasive fact that since _The Jazz Singer_ films have used words, and those of us who love literature are always looking for the author of them, because the films we love have words we love too. But if words were as important for the people who make movies as they are for us, those same people would be trying to write books. Filming a documentary in Los Angeles, I met George Peppard at a charity event and made the fan's standard mistake of trying to impress him with one of his own memories. In _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ , he had the privilege of delivering one of George Axelrod's most intricately crafted speeches: three short lines that captured the elegance of Capote's novella, compressed it into a small space, and demonstrated why Axelrod was the first-choice Hollywood scriptwriter of his time. Remembering, as I had always remembered, the precision with which Peppard had hit the stresses, I tried it on him. "I've never had champagne before breakfast before. With breakfast, often. But never before before."
Peppard had forgotten he ever said it. In retrospect, it is hard to blame him. He was in the movie for his face and his acting, not for his sensitivity to language, which, had he let it rule his head, would later have kept him out of _The A-Team_ and its attendant retirement money. At least, when he got something good to say, he showed that he knew it by saying it well. In _Indecent Proposal_ , Robert Redford, in full control of the movie, delivered a speech that pitiably ripped off one of the most cherishable moments in _Citizen Kane_. The pastiche he permitted himself to deliver was miserable stuff; he must have known it was; but he was working on the principle that he didn't have to impress me. He just had to look as if he might impress Demi Moore. In screenplay terms, the heist made sense. None of this means that the words in movies never count. They can: sometimes a single line can sum up the whole screenplay, but only if the screenplay exists as an experience that can be summed up. In _Bullitt_ , the central conflict between the characters played by Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn takes the whole film to reach the point where it can be epitomized in a single word. McQueen says it. The word is "bullshit." In the version edited for television in Great Britain, that one word was snipped out by a blockheaded censor. All you saw was McQueen saying nothing. You could call it a momentary return to silent movies, but it was no return to purity. A good picture had a tiny but vital piece of its heart taken out of it with a pair of scissors. Years later, when Bullitt was on TV again, the contentious word had been magically restored. So the words do count, after all. They just don't count the way we would like them to, as if nothing else did. But they don't in life, either.
What we call a good movie is the product of collective talent. Occasionally it is the product of collective genius. In _Singin' in the Rain_ , the absolute concentration of an entire popular culture at its most powerful, every line of dialogue, and each line of every lyric, is as good as it could be from one end of the miracle to the other. Both in its book and in its songs, it is the best writing by the best writers for film musicals there have ever been, and in order for those writers to even exist, Broadway and Tin Pan Alley had to work like factories on a double shift for more than half a century. But not a word would mean a thing if the people on screen didn't look the way they do while singing the way they do and dancing the way they do. It is hard to imagine the movie without Arthur Freed, its producer, or Stanley Donen, its director, or Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who concocted its marvellous story; but it is impossible to imagine it without Gene Kelly. Not even Fred Astaire would have fitted the same spot, because the character has to be absurdly good-looking. Gene Kelly was an absurdly good-looking man who danced sensationally well, as well as acting well and singing well enough. It took the whole of America, including all of its modern history, to produce one of him. Because he was there, the cast is there, and the immense confluence of productive effort is there, and all those unforgettable words are there. As it happens, _Singin' in the Rain_ is the one film that comes close to the writer's ideal of being written into existence: the whole thing started from a single line, which in the end even turned out to be the title. It was a writer's dream: a film born from a phrase. But Gene Kelly had to be born first. The right face in the right place at the right time in the story—it means that the movies, in their essence, are still silent. In _Heat_ , it has to be Natalie Portman who tries to kill herself, and Al Pacino who discovers what she has done; and all with scarcely a word spoken. The hardest thing for a literary critic to accept about the movies is that the writing in them is finally beyond analysis, because a large part of the writing is in genetic code. Finally, if the casting is right and the emotion is unmistakable, it doesn't matter what the characters say. They can say "Let's violate his ass" and we will pretend to understand, because we have already understood.
THOMAS MANN
So enormous at first glance that he might convince us he can safely be read about rather than read, Thomas Mann (1875– 1955) is nevertheless the twentieth-century cultural figure most likely to keep coming back into the student's life. We begin by thinking we can do without him, and end by realizing that there is no getting rid of him. In his life and in his art, he incorporated every question about the history of modern Germany, and its place in Europe and the world. He began as a conservative believer in Germany's national strength, a belief that was an early source of conflict between himself and his radical elder brother, Heinrich. His novel _Buddenbrooks_ (1901) was the story of a prosperous family that declined _because_ it became artistically more sensitive: still a usefully original emphasis, even today. The student would do better to begin, however, with the brief and easily memorable _Death in Venice_ (1912), and then move on, taking the journey by easy stages, to the monumental novel that set Mann on the path to world fame and the Nobel Prize, _The Magic Mountain_ (1924). In the lofty setting of an Alpine TB clinic, the intensity of what does not happen between the young hero Hans Castorp and the bewitching consumptive Claudia Chauchat raises the subject of Mann's sexuality, which remained a nagging question throughout his career. (The quickest answer is that Thomas Mann the solid paterfamilias also led a fantasy life cast with handsome young men, most of them barely glimpsed in reality: a smile from a waiter could get him started on a novel.) In the early 1930s, when he had already made his opinion well known that Hitler was a threat to all values, the incoming Nazis would have dearly liked to brand their most conspicuous literary enemy as a homosexual. Though Mann's wife, Katya, was a half Jew, Mann himself was all Aryan, but Reinhard Heydrich had correctly identified him as a friend of Jewish culture and had put his name high on a list of those absentees to be dealt with if they came back to Germany.
Mann, out of the country on a reading tour when Hitler came to power, sensibly kept going. Eventually he went all the way to America, where, in exile, he completed his seemingly inexorable rise to prominence as Germany's most exalted cultural figure since Goethe. That he himself thought in those terms should not be allowed to detract from our estimation of him. Like his snobbery, thin skin, theatrical fastidiousness and insatiable hunger for honours, his towering pride was a functional element in his ability to focus his creative energy in circumstances that deprived many of his fellow exiles of their capacity to work at all. Even when occupied with such a huge task as his sequence of novels about Joseph and his brothers, however, he found time to help some of his fellow refugees (Jews included: the idea that Thomas Mann was anti-Semitic is a calumny) and to record radio broadcasts to Germany about what the Nazis were really up to. His long novel _Doktor Faustus_ is often thought of as his final confrontation with the totalitarian menace. The student is likely to find that its subject matter, the composition of music, yields no clear indication of the contending forces. A possibly more valuable, and certainly much more immediately enjoyable, late response to the history he had lived through was _The Confessions of Felix Krull_. Against all expectation, Mann, unshakeably established as the icon and titanic artist, the man of destiny and responsibility, produced, with his time ticking away, a counter-jumping con man of a character with no substance except his own vitality. _Felix Krull_ is even funny, and therefore should be read early on, to provide the student with a lifetime reminder that the sometimes ponderous gravitas of Thomas Mann's career did not necessarily come from within himself, but was imposed on him by an historical distortion that he would have given a lot to avoid. He would have preferred Germany to stay as it was: but it had already stopped doing that when he was a child.
There are several good biographies, but for readers of German there is nothing to beat Marcel Reich-Ranicki's sparkling book about the Mann clan, _Thomas Mann und die Seinen_ (1987). Readers of German also have the advantage of a splendid, lavishly captioned picture book, _Thomas Mann: Ein Leben in Bildern_ (1997). Luckily the real treasures among the ancillary writings by and about Thomas Mann, namely his _Tagebücher_ ( _Diaries_ ), have by now nearly all been translated and annotated. Read in sequence, they are one of the most fascinating ways of following the history of the Third Reich from day to day, and of understanding why, in the end, it was doomed never to prevail. At the very time of the battle of Stalingrad, Thomas Mann, alive and well in Los Angeles, could make an appointment for a manicure. Post-war German commentators who berated him for never coming _home_ (both the West and East German governments offered him every enticement) had a point, but he had the answer. He had never left Germany. Germany had left him. The shelves of any bookshop in Germany today will show the extent to which the nation realized its mistake.
Turn aside, turn aside! Confine yourself to the personal and the spiritual.
—THOMAS MANN, _T AGEBÜCHER_ 1937–1939, P. 291
_A BWENDEN, ABWENDEN!_ turn aside, turn aside! He felt it; he believed it; but luckily he did otherwise. At the time of the disastrous Munich conference in 1938, Thomas Mann's impulse was to put the political world aside forever. Earlier, he had thought that the internationally famous writers could still do something if they teamed up. In Geneva with Paul Valéry, Gilbert Murray, Karel apek and Salvador de Madariaga, he had seen a possible mission for the heavyweight manifesto adorned with multiple signatures of the eminent. But after Munich he wanted to quit, and obviously thought that the resignation could be permanent. Disengagement has always been the artist's temptation and has the advantage of looking like a claim to seriousness as well as a right of refuge. Witold Gombrowicz never questioned it. In the third volume of his _Journal_ (pp. 134–35) we see him reading Sartre's _Situations_ , picking out the sermon on political engagement, and tearing it to shreds. Thomas Mann had arrived at the same conclusion partly from permanent instinct, partly from bitter experience.
Thomas Mann had taken a nationalist political position at the beginning of World War I and it had earned him, in the long term, a reputation as a warmongering reactionary. In the chaotic aftermath he built himself a suit of armour as the unbiddable literary eminence, becoming more and more reluctant to open his visor. His own children execrated him for his slowness to make a public condemnation of the Nazis. (Actually he had several times cried out in warning, but when the time came he thought it prudent to fall silent.) Undoubtedly there was a sense in which he would have preferred never to make a stand at all, even when he was safe abroad. Californian exile suited a personality so theatrical that it could make even retreat into a performance. In April 1941, with a rampant Hitler already on the point of turning east, Mann's idea of a pertinent note in his diary was: _Der Pudel gesund_. The poodle is healthy. He wasn't talking in code. He meant the family dog.
We could hardly be blamed for thinking him a bit of a poodle himself, if we did not have, from the same source, evidence of how much time and effort he was putting into his role as the master spirit of the emigration. He was keeping it alive with his prestige, his connections and, quite often, with his money. The eminent refugees were in his house, taking his hospitality, his advice and, above all, his precious time. In addition, he spoke for them all at a level they could not reach: on the international stage. He was wearing himself out. Abwenden! Turn aside! Forget about it! But against all his inclinations towards a studious solitude, he felt compelled to do the opposite, and when he did, nobody was more effective. As early as September 1942 he was making broadcasts about the massacres of Jews in the east. Having, of course, no access to the Ultra decrypts, he had to put the story together by himself, partly from the detailed reports that were showing up in the Swiss press: but he was transmitting the information in a clear voice at a time when the Allied governments were still using the soft pedal. (The story is ably told by Walter Laqueur in his _The Terrible Secret_.) Later on, there would be plenty of Germans, resident in Germany, who would be ready to claim that they had had no idea of what was going on. Thomas Mann, a German resident in California, knew exactly. His claim to represent the real Germany thus became as unassailable on the political level as it had always been on the artistic one. It had been a long time since he had wanted the idea of art to be connected to the idea of a nation. But finally, at a higher and better level, he was forced back into the identification with which he had begun, and he might even have realized that the historical disaster which had diverted him into an uncomfortable, time-consuming and uncharacteristic position of generosity had also made him a greater artist. If he had immured himself untouchably in Pacific Palisades and Brentwood he might still have given us his _Joseph_. But to give us _Felix Krull_ he had to rejoin the world. The seductive, amoral fabulist Felix Krull is the invention of a man set free; and Thomas Mann was set free by submitting to the bonds of duty.
An epic is a sublimated boredom.
—THOMAS MANN, _T AGEBÜCHER_ 1935–1936, p. 23
Thomas Mann had a knack for the short statement that demands an essay to back it up. Frequently the essay was supplied by him, but the above statement sits unaccompanied in his diaries, seemingly waiting to be joined for dinner. He said it in a restaurant, perhaps while waiting too long for the reappearance of a dish he had sent back. There is truth to it, because it brings in the self-congratulatory element that helps drive the reader or listener to complete the task set by the visible dimensions of a long work. Simply by its outline, an epic demands of us that we submit to having our time consumed, and be conscious of it. There are long works for which this bargain need not be made. _War and Peace_ I would have read in a breath if I could have held my breath long enough. There is nothing boring about it except the overtly philosophical passages at the end, which are tedious in the same way as Chaplin's exhortations at the end of _The Great Dictator_ —they are not only superfluous to the purpose, they betray it by falling below the standard set by the creativity that precedes them. In all other respects, _War and Peace_ works like an ordinary novel—it's just extraordinarily rich. A true epic works in other ways, but always by setting terms for the bargain: the reader must pay in pain. There are Wagnerians who claim to have become so well acquainted with the Ring cycle that they cease to feel the pressure on their behinds even during _Siegfried_ , but they are hard to believe. The _Ring_ , however, is transparent excitement punctuated by the occasional stretch of opacity, like the Homeric epics and the _Divine Comedy_. More problematic is the _Aeneid_ , which reverses the proportions: the Dido episode, and the journey into the underworld that succeeds it, add up to an oasis in a carefully landscaped desert, and it takes a lot of thirstily summoned dedication to convince yourself that those parched miles of dunes, elegantly arranged though they might be, are worth crossing just for the prospect of getting to Troy and watching it burn. The Orpheus and Eurydice episode in _Georgics IV_ shows the intensity of dramatic talent that lay within Virgil's reach, but that only makes things worse when we find out how little drama the _Aeneid_ has, compared with the long swathes of beautiful language with nothing in particular to be beautiful about. As it has come down to us, epic poetry in Latin is a misfire. The great classical historian Ronald Syme spoke the truth in passing, when he said that Tacitus wrote the Roman epics that the poets didn't. One poet did, but his name was William Shakespeare.
Benedetto Croce made a distinction—a fundamental concept for his aesthetics and a handy ad hoc proposition for us—between _poesia_ and _letteratura_. Applying it to the _Divine Comedy_ , he concluded that the bits you like are poetry while the other stuff is merely literature. The same criterion applied to the _Aeneid_ would give you very little poetry amongst all that impeccably crafted verse. In Homer, the Catalogue of the Ships is only an interruption, and is even fascinating: a list of ships and tribes is, after all, likely to be inherently more sonorous than a shopping list of groceries. Though Homer can take his time to get his chores done, you will never have to read far to find something nearly as electrifying as the episode in which Odysseus, washed ashore, wakes up on the beach, looks up into the dazzle of the sun, and sees the outline of the nymph Nausikaa. You can call such moments the stuff of Homer's epics. You could say the same about Dante: stretches of theology are not its norm. Scholars warn us we should be slow to assume that drama always mattered more for Dante than theology did: but there can be no doubt that it matters more for us. Luckily for us, the _Divine Comedy_ is thronged with human beings poetically alive. If only the same could be said for _Paradise Lost_. But except for Adam and Eve, Milton's characters are not of this Earth, and by restricting himself to a superhuman cast-list he faces the insuperable problem that nice angels are not interesting. Lucifer is the hero a _fortiori_. The forces of good are necessarily lacking in vitality, and the poem imposes upon itself a narcotic identification of virtue and bathos. The results are not ridiculous (Philip Bailey's long and justly forgotten poem Festus is ridiculous) but their dignity is all they have, in a language whose heightened decorum is its only purpose: stilt-walking in a toga.
In a monoglot literary context it can be fatal to call _Paradise Lost_ a fizzer—there is no examination school in which it would be wise even to hint at such a thing. (There are plenty of examination schools in which Milton doesn't even get a mention, of course, but that isn't because he is thought no good: it is because he is thought too hard.) Keats didn't like the language of _Paradise Lost_ but he might have lived to think differently, as T. S. Eliot did at a later time. Hazlitt is probably sincere about praising Milton's language; but there is something dutiful about the sincerity; he seems so much more relaxed when praising the language of Shakespeare, or even of Burns. Nevertheless the case for Milton's "high style" has accumulated too solidly to be wished away. There has never been any real liking for the poem's story, however, because there isn't one. It is just an outline, wished into existence out of the desire to write an epic. Even more damaging, the stories within the story are not up to muster either: the saving graces that make the _Aeneid_ worth the space are hardly there. Most damaging of all, there is very little that demands to be remembered. There are lines and even passages that can be memorized, but that's a different thing. I have a friend who studied _Paradise Lost_ at Oxford and has read it constantly ever since. But I have heard him quote Milton only twice in all the years I have known him, whereas he quotes Shakespeare all the time, and as naturally as breathing. There's the difference: _Paradise Lost_ is unspeakable. Virgil should have been a warning for Milton: a got-up epic is not only hard to write, it reads that way. Virgil should also have been a _vade mecum_ : if you have stuck yourself with so schematic a project, get some interesting digressions in at any cost. It was a pity that Aeneas had to leave Carthage, but at least we are given a taste of why Dido wept. Milton's hero should have got himself a girl.
Goethe didn't make Milton's mistake. In _Faust_ the heavenly battle takes place on Earth. Goethe was as infatuated with Mephistopheles as Tacitus was with Tiberius, and with the same artistic result: evil energy was given intense language. As Satan's terrestrial representative, Mephistopheles has the persuasive human voice of Iago, and the divine virtues with which he is at war are incarnated as _ewig-Weibliche_ women you can touch. Faust is occupied with his reasons for touching them, and with what he should do afterwards.
_Denkt Ihr an mich ein Augenblick'chen nur:_
_Iche werde Zeit genug an Euch zu denken haben._
Think about me for just a little moment: I will have time enough to think of you. So says Margarete, and Faust must look into his conscience. What male reader never has? The poem's grand, overarching drama is not about Rome's imperial destiny or a schism above the clouds over Protestant England, but about how we live and think, whatever our circumstances. Only when the witches of _Walpurgisnacht_ rave on too long does _Faust_ run out of human incident, and thus out of interest. It thus offers few opportunities for the reader to score brownie points for endurance. But it does offer some: nearly all epics do. Authors of epics are almost certainly right to suppose that the reader will want to congratulate himself on having stayed the course. Anthony Lane has written entertainingly about how his young love affair with _The Lord of the Rings_ began before he had read the first page: it began when he glanced at the last page and realized that the book was 1077 pages long.
Tabulated through all their various editions, sales statistics for the individual volumes of _À la recherche du temps perdu_ reveal that _La Prisonnière_ has always been the point where most readers call it a day. Those of us who love the book, and never finish re-reading it, must still admit that Albertine's captivity is sublimated boredom with a vengeance. But we don't just admit it: we insist on it. We are proud of our battle honours. And there is even something to the argument that we have to find out how long Proust can go on before we can appreciate how brief he can be. At base, Proust is aphoristic. The pregnant conclusion is at least as characteristic of him as its long preamble. The same is true of Thomas Mann himself. We trust the slow unfolding of a block-long sentence in _Doktor Faustus_ because we know about his knack for the neat statement. It was a knack he could overdo. In 1914 he said, "Germany's whole virtue and beauty . . . is unfolded only in war." Later on he realized he should never have said that. Chastened by the fateful specificity of a youthful certitude, he took refuge in a style that got in all the nuances at once, but the ability to speak about emotions on the human scale was always at the heart of it, and in his last years he proved it triumphantly by finishing (or anyway continuing: for once it was a terrible pity that he didn't go on forever) _Bekentnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull_ , the book we know as _The Confessions of Felix Krull_. It is not in Felix Krull's nature to put up with a moment of boredom, and his creator caught the mood. We catch it along with them both: the delight of the most impetuous of Thomas Mann's books is to be swept away at the speed of the hero's counter-jumping ambition. But we can give ourselves no credit for enjoying Krull's company: the book that enshrines his scapegrace charm is not an epic. To enjoy Hans Castorp's company in _The Magic Mountain_ is a harder trick. It helps if we realize that Castorp, as he sits around in the health resort mainly doing nothing, isn't meant to be interesting: if he were more so, Claudia Chauchat would be less so, because Claudia's only dramatic function is to represent the vitality to which he might aspire if he could only concentrate his energy. But he doesn't have any energy. There is no uniqueness to him: he is a character without character. The same goes, and goes double, for Dr. phil. Serenus Zeitblom in _Doktor Faustus_. His grinding ordinariness is there to make Adrian Leverkühn light up. In the epic, flat patches can be functional. They are counterproductive only when we see no relief ahead.
John Motley's _Rise of the Dutch Republic_ is the only long book that I have ever read right through to the finish in the certain knowledge that it would never come good. In three tremendously uninspired volumes, Motley never writes a memorable sentence until the end, where the little children weep in the streets. I have never forgotten that sentence, but perhaps I set myself that task too, to compensate myself for the insane plan of reading ten pages a day until it was all over. It was an extreme case of what a long work can do for us: etch its highlights into our tired brains by the pressure of its average weight. It helps if the average is high: a passage in Dante about nothing except dogma is still fascinating for its craft. But an average is something any tolerable epic is bound to have, because it can't do without low points. An epic must have historical sweep, in its frame of reference if not in its narrative sequence; and exposition, beyond a certain level, can't be made exciting. The question will always arise more acutely about the poetic epic than the prose epic, because if we find a prose epic disproportionately dull we tend to dismiss it, no matter how good an argument can be made for the longeurs. (Joyce's _Ulysses_ would be a less successful prose epic if it had an even longer stretch of deliberately dud prose brilliantly reproducing the mannerisms of hack journalism.) Our tolerance of the uneventful poetic epic is more elastic from the start, because we have learned to expect less. Spenser is only the third most gifted exponent of the stanza named after him (Byron comes first and Shelley second) and his vast poem _The Faerie Queene_ has a way of concentrating the reader's attention on everything except itself. When I was reading it I had to sit facing away from the window, or I would find myself counting the people on a passing bus. Whether by Ariosto, Tasso, Camões or Mickiewicz, an intermittently fascinating poetic epic might need explication and excuse, but no defence. Scholars must go on defending _The Fairie Queene_ because no common reader can get through it without setting himself a daily quota. Other epics in English are easier on the eyelids, but they all leave Dante safe. Tennyson's _The Idylls of the King_ is nothing beside Malory's _Morte d'Arthur_ , and even in Malory there are roads of dross between the golden castles. Browning's _The Ring and the Book_ is as unspeakable as _Paradise Lost_ : the same greatness, yet the same resistance to being incorporated into memory. But the catalogue could go on, like Homer's list of ships, except that all the ships are holed below the waterline. The only serious epic that is entirely, lyrically successful from line to line is _Eugene Onegin_ , which is really a verse novel. All the other entirely successful epics are comic: in English, they are _The Canterbury Tales, The Dunciad_ and—the pick of the bunch, and the Cullinan Diamond of poetry in English after Shakespeare—Byron's _Don Juan_. An epic that mocks itself can make virtues of its own mechanisms. Otherwise it is doomed to creak forward like a siege engine in a landscape short of citadels. Any attempt to divest it in advance of its necessary dullness will destroy its coherence. An epic compiled from nothing except images is a contradiction in aims. Ezra Pound tried it, and the _Cantos_ is, or are, there to remind us that nobody can make a meal out of condiments, or a statue out of sparks.
Last night I finished reading Heinrich's _Henry IV_ , a unique book . . .
—THOMAS MANN, _T AGEBÜCHER_ 1935–1936, p. 179
Thomas Mann could be generous even about his older brother: something worth remembering when we face the persuasive evidence of just how self-centred the great writer could be. On page 413 of _Tagebücher_ 1937–1939 we find the Pacific Palisades _Hausherr_ and his brilliant children locked in a delightfully catty argument about which of the émigré writers should be awarded _die Palme der Minderwürdigkeit_ —the palm for mediocrity. Should it be Stefan Zweig, Emil Ludwig, Lion Feuchtwanger or Erich Maria Remarque? Even in exile, they all had big sales. It was easy for Mann to feel threatened. Contrary to the opinion about him that has since become commonplace, it took Mann some time to establish himself as the unchallenged literary representative of the eternal Germany. During his first American years, he was often prey to the fear that things were going too slowly for him and too smoothly for others. (This was before Remarque won the affections of Paulette Goddard, but _All Quiet on the Western Front_ had already been a best-seller in English on a scale that Mann was never to know.) Emil Ludwig alone was more than enough to make all the other exiled German writers feel that they were bound for oblivion. Ludwig's biographies of the great made him famous, influential and rich. They also inculcated in their author the preposterous notion that he was some kind of great man himself, a delusion he backed up by living in an appropriate style. Ludwig's Wagnerian standards of comfort were evoked scathingly by Alfred Polgar, an incomparably better writer with an incomparably smaller bank balance. But Polgar was not the only observer to spot the discrepancy between Ludwig's self-esteem and a just measure. Mockery for Ludwig's pretensions was standard throughout the emigration.
It is sad, however, to find Stefan Zweig's name on the list of mediocrities. Zweig thought Mann was an admirer. Mann was the master of the diplomatic letter that took people at their own estimation. He could effortlessly mislead them about his true opinions. But at his best, the diplomacy _was_ his true opinion. He was generous about the importance of other writers in the emigration even if he did not much admire their individual works. The Palm for Mediocrity game is a useful reminder that shared adversity did not necessarily make people into saints. But the adversity was the culprit: the characters were its victims. Among the less immediately spectacular of Hitler's cruel tricks was his ability, at long range and by remote control, to drive different personalities into the same airless trap, where, struggling for a share of oxygen, they found out the hard way that they had never belonged together. After all, for writers to help each other beyond the bounds of friendship is no natural condition. In normal life, they are more likely to be at odds, and if they don't much like each other's work the usual response is not to talk at all. In the emigration, gifted people whose normal destiny would have been to despise each other were put at each other's mercy. Some, like Joseph Roth, were kind to those in adversity. But some behaved badly. Walter Mehring, whose memoir _Die verlorene Bibliothek_ was one of the many inspirations for the book you are reading now, acquired a reputation for accepting financial help but forgetting to be grateful for it. Whether or not the reputation was earned, it still follows his memory. No such accusation has ever attached itself to Thomas Mann. Chronically behind schedule on his latest enormous novel, he hated to be bothered, but he did his duty.
Given all that, Mann deserved his status as a lion. He showed he had the heart for it, and all the more so because it was against his nature. One of his many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was. Left undisturbed, he would have been a monster of conceit. But when thoughtfulness was forced on him, he rose to the occasion, and it would be conceited on our part to assume that the perennial thespian was just being careful not to look bad in the eyes of posterity. Literary pygmies are always making pronouncements about what goes on in the head of a giant, and the pronouncements always sin through over-confidence. They can't really tell what's going on up there. The worst you can say about Thomas Mann is that his ego was so big he took even history personally; but at least he knew it was history. "Poor apek!" he lamented during the war, "He died of a broken heart . . . and Menno ter Braak, the Dutch creator of precious criticism, shot himself on the night Hitler's troops occupied Amsterdam. Two friends, who were lights of my life—and National Socialism murdered them" ( _Altes und Neues_ , pp. 11 and 12). This is actually made stronger, not weaker, by the German reflexive verb: _und der Nationalsozialismus mordete sie mir_. Murdered them for me. Michael Burleigh's admonition in his marvellous book _The Third Reich_ should not be forgotten: the destruction was not just of the creative and the prominent but of the ordinary and the unknown—millions of them. It can be said, safely from this distance, that Thomas Mann did not think enough about them. But he could certainly think of anyone who was a bit like him. Possibly, like most egotists, he thought everyone else was an egotist too. If he had been the egomaniac he is sometimes painted as, however, he would have had no concern even for the prominent: especially not for them, since they were rivals for the limelight.
Heinrich always spelled trouble for Thomas, and not just because Heinrich had made so much noise in earlier times. In fact Thomas would probably have liked it better if everything Heinrich did had scored a hit like _Professor Unrat_ , the book that eventually gave us _The Blue Angel_. Artistically, however, the older brother, by the fastidious standards of the younger, was pathologically facile: a geyser with its own self-renewing supply of soap. All too wearily often, Thomas had to strain his criteria of worth to say that Heinrich had done well. There was also the problem of Thomas's bourgeois propriety: his domestic stability and prosperous façade were essential parts of his armour. Heinrich was a bohemian by comparison, and the more so the older he got. Later on, in Los Angeles, Heinrich's batty mistress was regarded _chez_ Mann as an even bigger embarrassment than Heinrich's indigence, which could be judiciously compensated for, whereas there was no disguising her fathomless capacity to throw scenes. It would have suited Thomas to write off the crumbling Heinrich as a liability who had brought ruin on himself. But Thomas was too aware that Heinrich has come to his final grief only with Hitler's help, and finally there was always the consideration that Heinrich had done some good things despite all. Thomas had thought _Henry IV_ was one of them, had said so, and continued to rate Heinrich at that level of possibility, if not of consistent achievement. In honour of artistic standards, Thomas Mann could put even his own ego into perspective: a Mount Everest yes, but with a picture of itself as only one mountain in the Himalayas, although admittedly the tallest. We should restrain our scorn then, when in Donald Prater's excellent biography of Thomas Mann we see, on page 237, the master spirit praising "my worried modesty." It sounds like comic self-deception, but it was justified by his behaviour. Even without his behaviour, it would have been justified by his art: nobody incapable of humility bothers to rewrite a sentence. Careful composition is an act of renunciation in itself. Thomas Mann wrote too well to be a true monster of self-regard. But with the help of the invaluable diaries we soon find out that in his everyday dealings he could be selfless too, and didn't always need that to be known. After his death, journalistic opinion tried to make an ogre out of him, but that said more about journalism than it said about him. He was one of the first victims of a modern cultural trend: mass therapy for the semi-cultivated, transmitted through supposedly edifying examples of the idol with feet of clay.
MAO ZEDONG
The full evil of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) is continually being rediscovered, because it is continually being forgotten. In 2005 it was rediscovered all over again when Jung Chang, previously the author of _Wild Swans_ , the book that blew the gaff on the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, brought out, together with her husband, an account of Mao's career that pitched the body count of innocent civilians where it belonged, far beyond the total achieved by _Hitler and Stalin_ put together. Jung Chang's Mao biography was greeted as ground-breaking in the Western press. But with due credit for its passion, there was little about the book's factual material that was new. Most of it had been in the previous book that rediscovered Mao's perfidy, Philip Short's _Mao: A Life_ , published to wide acclaim ("A ground-breaking biography"— _The Sunday Times_ ) in 1999. As one who thinks that _Wild Swans_ is an essential twentieth-century book for which Jung Chang deserves our unending gratitude, I nevertheless think that Short's book about Mao has the edge on hers, mainly because it is ready to contemplate the awkward possibility that Mao's thirst for blood might have been acquired over time, rather than inbred. Short, whose languages include Russian and Japanese as well as Chinese, is also much sounder in the field of foreign policy. As to the bottomless squalor of Mao's personal behaviour, especially in his lethal old age, Jung Chang is pre-empted by _The Private Life of Chairman Mao_ (1994), a stomach-turning memoir by Mao's personal physician, Zhisui Li. None of this means that Jung Chang and her husband do not deserve credit for their long endeavours. But the idea that they stand at the beginning of a studious tradition, instead of at a further stage in one well established, is itself a straw in a sad wind. Why doesn't this story stick when told?
Those of us who were at university in the 1960s can remember the vociferousness with which otherwise sane and sweet-natured students professed to believe that the Cultural Revolution was a message to the corrupt West. Yet the facts about Mao's China had already, at that stage, been rediscovered several times. Quite early on after Mao took unchallenged power, the true situation could easily be deduced from the way that useful idiots like Edgar Snow endorsed the regime's official lies. Always, however, the rediscoveries were succeeded by a further forgetting, and the same holds true today, not just in the West, where the pseudo-left has too great an investment in anti-Americanism to admit that there can be a reason for evil independent of Washington's control, but also, and tragically, in China itself, where Mao's image is still not to be mocked without penalty. Eventually Lenin's statues went the way of Stalin's, to the scrapyard. But Mao might well stay up there forever, simply because there is such a thing as horror so great that it can't be assessed even when the facts are known. The truth sinks down when it sinks in, leaving the mind free to operate a more tolerable economy. From the art lover's viewpoint, this might even be a good thing. The catchy opera _Nixon in China_ , for example, could never have been written if its authors had fully realized that the picure they were painting of Nixon's relative lack of dignity vis-à-vis Mao was hopelessly compromised by the real discrepancy between the two historic figures. Nixon, when he killed innocent people, did so as the price of political success. Mao killed them as the condition of it, and killed more by many, many times. Why Mao should have been the more difficult one to despise is a key question for an as yet untapped academic subject: the sociology of the international intelligentsia.
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
—MAO ZEDONG, APRIL 1956, AS QUOTED BY PHILIP SHORT IN _M AO_, P. 455
THE PRETTY RUBRIC looks so harmless even today, now that we have some idea of what it cost. Halfway between a poem and a slogan, it is a small thought that would fit on a big T-shirt. It doesn't even sound wrong. Mao designed it to sound right. For the trick to work, millions of people had to believe the words meant what they said, even though the Party, within long memory, had never rewarded a contentious voice with anything except torture and death. Anyway, the suckers fell for it. The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao's executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.
The hideous outcome of the Hundred Flowers campaign is described in Philip Short's book about Mao, a political biography from whose long march of horror no student should excuse himself a single step. You can get the essence of Jung Chang's _Wild Swans_ in a few chapters, although you owe it to yourself and the author to read the whole thing. But Short's book has no essence; or, rather, it is all essence; you need to ponder the whole lot. For one thing, Mao was not the same man in the beginning as he was later on. _Hitler and Stalin_ both were: in the early days, all they lacked of their later, epidemic awfulness was the power to exercise it. But Mao, who ended by killing a greater number of innocent people than both of them put together, started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves. Mao was no Marxist when he began. He scarcely could have been: Marx was not translated into Chinese until 1918, and Mao had no foreign languages. Nor, it seems, did he have a violent streak. He seems to have believed in a sort of peaceful anarchism. When he took up communism, he was the first Communist leader to break out of the orthodox view about the revolution depending on the urban proletariat. He saw the importance of the peasants, and in 1927 published a thoughtful document on the subject, _Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan_. When the fighting started, he made his troops behave well, apparently in the belief that a measure of decency would earn credit for the movement.
His first attack on his own Party members did not occur until 1931–1932, by which stage Stalin was exterminating whole populations. Mao was a long while cranking himself up to anything on that scale, but when he really got going he kept up the tempo. The Hundred Flowers campaign was rare only in that it depended on a trick. At all other times, the state just went steaming on with its permanent purge. It didn't need trick questions, because nothing a potential victim thought of saying could possibly be of any use anyway. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when Liu Shaoqi published his _How to Be a Good Communist_ , it was greeted as "a big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao-Zedong-Thought poisonous weed." No good Communist could be good enough. Liu was sixty-seven years old when he was driven to his death by the Cultural Revolution, after a dedicated lifetime of carrying out Mao's homicidal orders to the letter. All this was happening while some of my fellow undergraduates in Cambridge were under the impression that Western values were being challenged by whatever was happening in China. They were indeed, and I, for one, had sufficient suspicion of absolute power to guess in what way: but I nowhere near guessed the full horror of the reality. The only explanation is that Mao had even less imagination than we did in the matter of fatalities occurring among Chinese. There are so many of them, so how much does it matter when a few hundred thousand of them go missing?
Perhaps our best hope of understanding what was going on in his mind is to suppose that it was a version of what goes on in ours. Old men continue in their sins because to stop would be to admit them. But to concentrate on Mao's late-flowering monstrosity is surely a misleading emphasis. His early-flowering humanitarianism is a much more useful field of study. When it became clear that there were no democratic means by which it could attain its object, he started thinking about the undemocratic means. The message seems to be that when the possibility of critical discussion is withdrawn, anything can happen, and everything is altered. Among the things altered is logic itself. As Swift foretold and Orwell analysed in detail, totalitarian obsession distorts the logical element within language, cancelling and even reversing its power to specify. Towards the end of Mao's reign, when there was—as there had to be by then, with the whole country in ruins—yet another version of a Leninist New Economic Policy, it was once again discovered that "small scale production engenders capitalism." Any moves towards rehabilitating the unjustly condemned were attacked as a "right deviationist wind of reversing correct verdicts." Correcting reversed verdicts would have been more like it. When Zhou Enlai died, there was true grief: at least he had not been insane. When Mao died, the grief was mainly feigned, except among the young, who knew nothing. It needs to be remembered, however, that to have some idea of what had gone on it was not enough to be older, and to have survived. One needed information, and Mao had so organized his colossal abattoir of a state that information rarely travelled further than a scream could be heard. But that was inside China. Outside China, the story went everywhere, and there was never any excuse for not hearing it. The idea that there was is part of the lie—the part fated, it seems, to last longest.
CHRIS MARKER
The name Chris Marker (b. 1921) is a fiction. His real name was Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve but he preferred to operate under a false identity. Fiction and falsity, by some alchemy never fully explained, conferred on him, according to his many admirers, a greater power to handle his raw material, which was made up of fact and truth. It was a tribute to his talent that this absurd proposition looked quite plausible when you saw his first documentaries on screen. (Some commentators prefer to call a Marker movie an "essay," but they are perhaps too influenced by their memories of when the word "documentary" meant box office death.) _Cuba Si_! (1961) was especially effective. Framed closely in black and white, the Bearded Ones looked wedded to authenticity. Marker struck foreign observers as being by far the best mind of the movement that became internationally famous as the _nouvelle vague_. Admittedly the competition wasn't strong. From the political angle, Jean-Luc Godard was an obvious featherbrain, and François Truffaut had more sense than to make any overt political statements beyond the usual ones about alienation: _The 400 Blows_ incited rebellious youths to become film directors, not to revolution. Later in the decade, when the Paris _événements_ were making world news, Marker came readily to mind as one of the serious voices that prepared the way. Even those of us who suspected that his Marxist world view was as frivolous as everybody else's were impressed by his tone of voice, most notably rich and confident in his must-see movie _Letter from Siberia_ (1957). His documentaries _sounded_ great. They therefore had a big influence on some of the young writers who would later earn a crust in British television. When I was a TV critic in the 1970s I tried to point out, armed by my memories of how Marker had bewitched me, that the filmed documentary was a blunt instrument. Later on, when I was filming documentaries of my own, I took care to disclaim, by making my commentary as self-deprecating as possible, the apparent omniscience that the written voice-over automatically conferred.
Today, documentaries win red-carpet coverage. Almost always, for good reasons, the documentaries that make the biggest noise stem from the left. Usually they lack Marker's spare, literate elegance, but what they inherit from him is his loose relationship with the truth. Even when filmed on the spot, with real people really suffering, the atmospherics tend to the specious and the arguments to the fraudulent. "Actual" hardly ever means factual. Michael Moore's documentaries are conspicuous examples of these failings. In _Bowling for Columbine_ there is a scene in which he inveighs against U.S. planes taking off. He brands their mission as imperialist. But the planes in the footage were taking off for Kosovo, where they saved the lives of thousands of Muslims who would otherwise have been murdered. So that particular stretch of Moore's supposedly factual documentary is saying the opposite of what is true. The big difference between Moore and the founding father of his art-form in modern times, Chris Marker, is that Moore must know that he is telling an untruth. When Moore says that the poor of the world could have clean water overnight if the advanced nations agreed to it, he must know that he is talking nonsense. Marker really did believe that there was a collectivist answer to the troubles of the world. He was the post-war French _gauchiste_ artist-intellectual in a pure form, with the ingenuous version of Sartre's disingenuousness. By the time Marker became well-known, in the early 1960s, the bulk of his most vital work was already behind him. Whether or not Vietnam broke his heart, it certainly cramped his style. Later still, as his dreams retreated, he faded away into guru status. _La Jetée_ (1962), a film composed almost exclusively of stills from which everything is absent including him, was really a premature epitaph, although the lasting strength of his influence demands that attention should be paid to his later showpiece _Sans soleil_ (1982), a brave attempt at the synthetic work that gets everything in. Such a mind-scrambling attempt to say everything at once was a powerful hint that he was really born for the Internet, but had arrived in the world of universal information a few decades too early. Many of us who were floored by his first brilliant works, however, never really got over them.
There isn't any God, or curses: only forces, to be overcome.
—CHRIS MARKER, _L ETTER FROM SIBERIA_
SUCH, IN FRENCH, are the closing words of Chris Marker's 1957 masterpiece _Letter from Siberia_ , which I saw at the National Film Theatre the year I arrived in London in the early 1960s, the decade that was to be visually embodied by the French _nouvelle vague_ , of which Marker's cinema was a central element, the item of intellectual prestige. But I didn't know any of that yet. All I knew, at the time when I first heard it, was that Marker's closing paragraph was a thing for wonder. On screen, there was a big rocket going up, and the total, complex effect of words and pictures was to make what he was saying sound simultaneously lyrical and oracular. But I didn't quite believe what he was saying even as it overwhelmed me. It sounded like a slogan from the anti-God museum in Moscow. I could already think of several forces that were unlikely to be overcome in my lifetime, and indeed could scarcely be dealt with at all unless God and curses were kept well in mind. One of the forces was the force of disintegration still bursting out from the detonation points of contemporary history.
I was in Australia for the _Tampa_ incident in late August and early September 2001. The _Tampa_ was a Norwegian container ship that had picked up a cargo of asylum seekers from their sinking vessel. The asylum seekers had been heading for Australia and they naturally wanted to complete their journey. The Australian government thought otherwise. In the quality press, hundreds of thousands of words were uttered in condemnation of Prime Minister John Howard's insistence that the rescued boat people should not be allowed to land on Australian territory. There was outrage that he had put the arithmetic of controlled immigration ahead of the moral imperative of humanitarian generosity. Some of the outrage aspired to the status of philosophy. Here is an example, from the pen of Richard Flanagan, one of the established writers whom the Australian broadsheets regularly co-opt in their quest for a profound opinion when a matter of moment swims into view—or, as in this case, heaves into sight. "In the end, politics is not about focus groups and numbers; it is about the power of stories to galvanize and forge the thinking of societies" ( _The Sunday Age_ , September 2, 2001). As a novelist, Flanagan has the right to use the language as creatively as possible. But this is a creativity that belittles the truth. Though politics is indeed concerned with more than just numbers, it can't do without them. More important, in the light of events that have happened within living memory—my living memory, if not Mr. Flanagan's—there is nothing reassuring about his contention that politics is concerned with "the thinking of societies" being forged, galvanized or shaped in any way by "the power of stories."
After World War I, the right wing in Germany continued its struggle against democracy by using the power of a story. The story was that the armed forces had been the victims of a _Dolchstoss_ —they had been stabbed in the back. Many ex-soldiers, understandably reluctant to accept that their sufferings had been for nothing, believed the story. How could it not be true, when they felt so much pain? Added to the realities of the inflation and the Depression, the fiction of the stab in the back prepared the thinking of a society for the advent of a sorcerer. Hitler expanded the _Dolchstoss_ story by alleging that the Jews had held the dagger. Many civilians, their lives ruined by financial instability, were ready to believe that their hard-won savings had been stolen by international Jewish financiers. How could the story not be true, when there had been so much grief?
Stalin and Mao each had a similar story, about the rapacious bourgeoisie. Peasants and proletarians were keen to believe it until their turn came to be exterminated. All the tyrannies of the twentieth century were introduced by powerful stories, usually subscribed to by intellectuals before the event—and, in the case of the Communist tyrannies, long after the event. Writing as an intellectual, Mr. Flanagan ought to have been aware of that. But he was too exercised by the supposedly emblematic fate of the people on the _Tampa_. The power of the story was too much for him. It obliterated all sense of numbers, even though the real story was "about" numbers and nothing else. The first number to remember was the number of boat people stuck on the _Tampa_. There were 433 of them, and every one of them was a queue jumper with aspirations to a place reserved for a legal applicant. So if the illegals got onshore and stayed, 433 people who had already been kept waiting would be kept waiting longer. The distress of those in the queue was not seen on television. The distress of those on the ship was all over the media. Though the refugees were kept below decks, the Australian reporters were able to tap into their bewilderment by dint of telepathy, X-ray vision and other paranormal powers traditionally conferred by compassion.
Certainly the condition of the people on the _Tampa_ was not enviable. In the course of the incident their despair, rage and uncertainty became the common property of Australia's intelligentsia, who didn't hesitate to place the blame squarely where they thought it belonged: on the Australian government. Since the Labor opposition seemed to share the Liberal government's intransigence, the opportunity was taken to condemn all politicians as a class. Australian politicians are used to that, but there was a further step: since the overwhelming majority of the electorate seemed to agree with the politicians, the opportunity was taken to condemn the people too. The people had not been so roundly condemned since the referendum of 1999, in which they had declined to embrace manifest destiny and vote for a republic. This time, indeed, they were condemned even more roundly because there were more of them, in the sense that the proportion of the people who were against the illegal immigrants being allowed to land was far larger than the proportion which had been reluctant to accept the necessity for constitutional reform. Once again the intelligentsia found no discomfort in its separation from the people. The people, it was made clear, should have found discomfort in their separation from the intelligentsia. If the people didn't, it went to show how far things had gone. Here was a country which owed so much to the contribution of asylum seekers, and it had so far forgotten its heritage that its population was refusing succour to these new asylum seekers, the ones on the Norwegian ship.
But they weren't asylum seekers. When they were processed, if they ever were, some of them would no doubt turn out to be asylum seekers, in the sense that if they were ever forcibly returned home they would face violent punishment for having left. Most of the contingent were from Afghanistan, where the psychotic Taliban were exerting a tyranny calculated to export the already devout population by millions at a time. But all of the Afghans could have sought asylum in Pakistan, where two million of their fellows had already found safety from the Taliban's thinking about society. Failing that, the Muslim voyagers could have sought asylum in their first main staging point, Malaysia; or in the second, Indonesia. They chose not to do so because their main object was economic advantage, in Australia. There is good reason to believe that the successful incursion of such enterprising people, who had already proved their acumen by raising the exorbitant fare demanded by the people smugglers, would, in the long run, be to Australia's economic advantage as well as their own. (I should say here that the economic case for uncontrolled immigration, with no distinction between asylum seekers and destination shoppers, is made with daunting eloquence by Mario Vargas Llosa in his collection of essays _El lenguaje de la passion_.)
But none of that altered the fact of their real status: illegal immigrant. They had been illegal immigrants when they were still on their original ship, the one that got wrecked after leaving Indonesia. The Norwegian ship had picked them up in order to save their lives. There had been excellent Christian reasons for saving their lives, and at first glance the same reasons seemed to apply to bringing them ashore on Christmas Island. The first glance was all that the Australian _bien pensant_ intellectuals needed. A second glance would have told them that the rescued illegals could have been returned to Indonesia, and that the Norwegian captain headed for Australian waters only because some of his new passengers threatened to kill themselves if he did otherwise. (It was a falsehood that some of the adults threatened to throw their own children into the water, and later the government spokesmen were much vilified for repeating the falsehood as if it had been true: but it was a quite plausible falsehood.) The first glance provided a simpler story, one of those stories that change the thinking of societies. In this story, the illegal immigrants were all instantly elevated to the status of asylum seekers: a bonus for the people smugglers, who thus became humanitarians, like those beret-wearing French Resistance heroes in British and American war movies who smuggle our downed flyers past the patrolling Germans. In reality, people smugglers are no more humanitarian than white slavers, drug dealers or standover men, but if you happen to hold that all refugees have automatic rights superseding the sovereignty of their asylum of choice, then anyone who manages the traffic must be the Scarlet Pimpernel. Such is the power of a story, and this story was _Waterworld by way of A Tale of Two Cities_.
The Australian government, meanwhile, had to deal with the intractable facts. If the illegal immigrants were allowed in, it would be hard to throw any of them out without attracting further opprobrium from the watching world. There was already plenty of that. The Australian press was eloquent about the obloquy which the government's instransigence had attracted from centres of humanitarian opinion all over the world. One of the centres of humanitarian opinion was the World Anti-Racism Conference in Durban, which was unlikely, if you thought about it, to reach any other conclusion. Some of the Australian quality papers ran photographs of "youths" demonstrating in the streets of Durban against racial discrimination. The "youths" looked awfully like Robert Mugabe's "war veterans" expressing their disapproval of white farmers in Zimbabwe. Another centre of humanitarian opinion was Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. The normally astute Paul Kelly of _The Australian_ cited Annan's ringing pronouncements against John Howard's hard-heartedness as clear proof of the damage done in the world's eyes. This was a strong point if you thought that Annan's disapproval of poverty and racism was ever likely to diminish either of those things. (The poverty of his son has diminished, apparently, but we are assured that Annan had no direct responsibility for that.) Yet another centre of humanitarian opinion was Mary Robinson, quondam president of Ireland and now a big noise with the U.N. Robinson asked the Australian people to look into their hearts. Howard assured her that the Australian people had already done that. He kindly forebore from adding that the last time the Australian people had looked into their hearts they had elected him. Robinson's remarks amounted to a libel on a country, Australia, whose record of hospitality had been very good ever since World War II, in which Ireland—Howard didn't mention this either—had declined to fight against enemies whose ideas of immigration control were rather more drastic than anything she could now find to deplore on Australia's part.
Libel was by now the power of the story. There would be plenty more of it to come if the _Tampa_ people were allowed in and then thrown out. If they came in, some of them would stay in, and the precedent would be set for the people smugglers to scuttle a ship anywhere near Australian territorial waters and leave the next bit to the Australian navy. There was also the consideration that Australia has a procedure for accepting prospective immigrants. The result—if it seems monotonous to hear this again, imagine what standing in line must be like—is a queue, and successful queue jumpers inevitably push legal applicants back nearer to the starting point, thereby disappointing them in their legitimate hopes. Paul Kelly published an explanation of why this was not so, but I did not undertand his explanation, although there is no quarrelling with the assumption that the illegal immigrants have more enterprise than the legal ones. In Chicago, Al Capone had more enterprise than the average Italian shopkeeper. It can even be said that he contributed more to the economy, although I understand that there was some argument about tax.
Apart from gumption, courage and determination, what the illegal immigrants have that the legal applicants haven't is money. No doubt the illegals have made great efforts to save it. Nevertheless, they've got it. If you reinforce the principle that illegal immigrants can pay a people smuggler to put them in a position where the Australian government will have to either admit them or leave them to die—many dreams have been brought to your doorstep—you also reinforce the principle that the queue is merely a mechanism for reducing hope to despair, one more mockery for people who have been mocked already. When the Australian intelligentsia had this explained to them, they were ready with their answer: there ought not to be a queue. Everybody should be allowed in. Think of the misery of all the world's injured and deprived. Think of the power of the story.
There is something to it, but only just. For those Australian commentators with an historical perspective—it has lately become fashionable to rent one of these by the hour—the _Tampa_ sailed in the troubled wake of the _St. Louis_ , the liner full of Jewish refugees that left Europe in 1939, was never allowed to land anywhere else, and ended up back where it started, delivering many of its desperate passengers to their untimely deaths at the hands of the Nazis. Most of the _Tampa_ people, however, were simply in search of a better life. It was hard to blame them for that: so were my grandfathers. When you heard the journalists talk about racist Australia, however, it was just as hard to see why anyone should be thought unlucky not to be allowed in. The power of that story—the story about racist Australia—kept on growing until the Bali nightclub bomb took some of the puff out of it. Even then, some commentators managed to convince themselves that the bombers were students of history who were registering their dissatisfaction with the nearness of Australia's foreign policy to that of the Bush administration. But what never weakened the story, strangely enough, was that most of the people who were initially turned away eventually got in. They were diverted to Nauru, they spent time in detention camps in Australia, but eventually they got in. Yet the story persisted. If it did so, it was partly because there is nothing pretty about the detention camps. But here again, the intelligentsia shows invidious haste in holding the Australian population responsible. When adult refugees sewed their lips together in silent protest, it was indeed a daunting sight. Why, however, should their children do the same, unless encouraged to by the parents? The Australian population was asking a question about culture.
The intelligentsia, ever on the lookout for signs of intolerance, regards all questions about culture as racist at the root. That the common voters should ask such questions is taken as evidence of Australia's role as a source of the world's problems, and not as a refuge from them. Luckily the refugees themselves do not agree. They are in flight from a different story. They might not fully understand it as yet, but they have certainly felt its power. In the late 1950s, a man as intelligent as Chris Marker could still feel that there might be such a thing as a totalitarian answer to the world's miseries. That was the story told by his beautifully made little films. But the story wasn't true. Gradually he realized it, and, being at heart an honest man, he steadily lost the capacity to make the same sort of films again. Art had not been enough. When it takes politics for its material, that's the danger that it always runs.
JOHN MCCLOY
During and after World War II, John McCloy (1895–1989) was a key member of the East Coast foreign policy elite, whose story is told in one of the best modern books about American politics, _The Wise Men_ , by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas. The foreign policy elite is often looked on as an old-money nest of privilege in the europhile style, with its members all born into the same lofty social stratum, and attending the same prep schools and colleges. But the fact that it included a man like McCloy, who could, and did, later lay proud claim to having been born on the wrong side of the tracks, is an indication of its true strength: it made room for social mobility impelled by talent and ambition. The other Wise Men were Robert Lovett, Averell Harriman, Charles Bohlen, George Kennan and Dean Acheson. After the defeat of Hitler, the elite, operating through the State Department and its dependent agencies, built the globalized American system of influence and alliance that expressed the principle of containment, the perceived necessity to block the hegemony of the Soviet Union—the necessity which had first been expressed by George Kennan. A complete and final reversal of America's traditional isolationism, this world-embracing U.S. foreign policy is the one that we still live under today: after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the America of global reach might have found itself off balance, but was unable to draw back. A denigrator such as Gore Vidal calls the elite's creation the Security State, but the foreign onlooker needs to remember that Vidal himself comes from the elite's milieu, thus reflecting a far-reaching truth about its power: that it generates even its own contrary forces.
By now, little more than half a century later, the elite's heritage generates not only most of what is said in favour of its policies, but most of what is said against them. Almost everything that matters on issues relevant not just to U.S. interests, but to the world entire, is written within driving distance of Washington. Armed by close contact with polticians and officials, elegant writers such as Elizabeth Drew, and less elegant ones such as Bob Woodward, have given us, in their shelves of books, the history of how the United States has shaped the modern world. This tradition of higher political journalism goes back to Henry Adams, but by now it has got beyond the status of a useful individual study and become both indispensable and all-embracing. Two of the best recent books about the larger conflicts in the world, Fareed Zakaria's _The Future of Freedom_ and Paul Berman's _Terror and Liberalism_ , were both written in the United States. So was Samantha Power's _A Problem from Hell_ , a book which was taken by some grateful foreign critics as evidence of the U.S.'s modern history of imperialistic interference. Actually Power's main conclusion, one she probably didn't want to reach, was quite different. She concluded that nothing stops a genocidal government except armed interference, which, usually, only the United States provides. Whether providing it means inflicting it is the question.
The answer that matters will eventually be arrived at in Washington itself, or else it will not be heeded. The answer, however, will be arrived at through argument, if not through congressional debate. American power is not monolithic. Nor was it in the crucial period after World War II, when there were plenty of voices within the elite who realized that to make anti-communism a popular cause, in order to get the Marshall Plan through Congress, would open the way for McCarthyite demagoguery. They had a right to feel sure, however, that the Marshall Plan itself was benevolent, at least in the sense that it was in America's long-term interests to be disinterested in the short term. There are those who, in retrospect, and with some plausibility, condemn the Marshall Plan, NATO and the rest of the U.S.'s post-war initiatives in Europe as the elements of an imperialist campaign. But plausibility becomes absurdity when they try to frame the United States with a single purpose, as if it had been totalitarian. They would have a better chance of doing this if they confined their attentions to Latin America, where the U.S.'s anti-Communist strategies were truly disastrous: but even then, its agonized internal reaction to a string of public embarrassments (truly unprincipled states never blush) proved that it was not a totalitarian power.
It wasn't and still isn't. It would be easier to analyse if it were. Trying to analyse America and its position in the world, we can't do without the copious literature that is supplied by America itself. Least of all can we do without that literature when it comes to examining America's faults, mistakes and crimes: it's not as if anyone in Europe is going to do a job like Gary Wills or Seymour Hersh. The student in search of a world view can plausibly read in no other language except the English written in America. Doing so, the student could very easily get the idea that America is the world. But at the source of all that literature lies the story of the Wise Men like John McCloy, and they had another idea. Standing sadly victorious in the ruins of older civilizations that they understood and valued, they really did want to bring a complex world back to life, not just to make it over in the image of their own nation. Nor was their grief, and their hope for a better future, confined to Europe. McCloy had an infuential hand in the July 1945 Potsdam Declaration that offered Japan something less harsh than a fully unconditional surrender. If the Japanese war council had spotted the significant gap in the wording that left the way open for negotiation about the Emperor's fate, they might have accepted the offer, and the atomic bombs need not have been dropped. After they were dropped and Japan surrendered, U.S. foreign policy towards Japan was predicated entirely on an occupation designed to dismantle itself after the country had recovered. Whatever the subsequent developments might seem to say to the contrary, at the end of World War II the last thing the American foreign policy elitists had on their minds was a post-war American empire ruled by force. To misinterpret their essential generosity as an assertion of power is to go beyond cynicism into wilful distortion, by which it becomes impossible to give a realistic account of America's actions even when we find them offensive.
An economically stable Europe, with the impetus it can give to free ideas, is one of the greatest assurances of security and peace we can hope to obtain.
—JOHN J. MCCLOY, MEMO DRAFTED WITH HENRY STIMSON AT POTSDAM, QUOTED IN _T HE WISE MEN_ BY WALTER ISAACSON AND EVEN THOMAS, P. 306
ONE OF THE stars of the group of American diplomats and civil servants that was later to become known as the East Coast foreign policy elite, McCloy had just been driven through the ruins of Berlin, where he saw women and children pulling apart a dead horse with their bare hands. The McCloy-Stimson memos on the subject of rebuilding Europe with economic aid were a big stimulus to what eventually happened, but essentially all the members of the East Coast foreign policy elite reached the same conclusion: whatever the putative merits of an isolationist attitude pre-war, a post-war isolationist attitude was impossible for the United States, and the best way of taking a political initiative in Europe would be to help its devastated nations to recover economically. Nor did common compassion allow any other course. Some of the elite's members—certainly Dean Acheson, "Chip" Bohlen and Averell Harriman—thought initially that the Soviet Union should be among the nations offered help. No members of the elite, not even George Kennan, favoured a purely military answer to Soviet encroachment, even as the reports coming out of the Soviet-occupied East European countries became more and more dismaying. Kennan's famous Long Telegram, sent to Washington from his post in Moscow in March 1946, is sometimes interpreted that way. At the time it was being read, indeed, disquiet engendered by Stalin's behaviour in the satellite countries had grown to the point where Kennan's emphasis on "containment" was seen as the only theme the telegram had.
But Kennan's analysis, although distrustful of the USSR's political intention, never depended on purely military means to contain it. They scarcely could have contained it, since the United States, at the conclusion of the war, had pretty well disarmed. It is hard to remember at this distance—mainly because of the success of a long _gauchiste_ programme to rewrite history—that the Marshall Plan did not need to be imposed on the European nations at gunpoint. Nor were there any guns to impose it if it had. It is also hard to remember at this distance that Kennan's distrust of Stalin's intentions, as it was interpreted at the time, would have been understandable even had it been wholly meant. On February 9, 1946, at the Bolshoi Theatre, Stalin made a speech that blamed World War II on the inherent contradictions of capitalism. Lip service was paid to the "freedom loving" Western allies, but only as a preliminary to the renewed emphasis on the time-honoured bugbear "capitalist encirclement." For many of the encircling capitalists, Stalin's Bolshoi speech had a more dramatic effect than Churchill's Iron Curtain speech was to have later on. Churchill's speech merely confirmed them in the impression that Stalin's speech had already created. Stalin's speech itself was merely confirming an impression; the impression given by the Soviet Union's unyielding ruthlessness over Poland; the impression that it would allow no concessions to democracy in any territory it saw as falling within its sphere of influence. Apart from Kennan, who had never believed that "a community of interest" with the Soviets was possible, the foreign policy elite were honourably reluctant to give up their hopes of cooperation with the Soviet Union, especially on the subject of the atomic bomb. Acheson and Stimson were both for international control, which would have entailed giving the secret to the Soviet Union. (It was not yet known that the Russians already had the secret.) International atomic energy control was an aim not ruled out even as the Marshall Plan idea grew closer to reality. Harriman can be called the father of the Marshall Plan but really it had multiple paternity: almost the whole of the foreign policy elite were in on it.
The only real split was over the question of whether the Russians should participate, and even that split was less over the if than the how. Even Kennan thought they should be invited in, at least in the first instance. (He thought they would withdraw when they realized that not only would they have to give up their claim to reparations, they also would be helping to create what they would see as an encirclement by capitalist countries; but at least the invitation would be on the record, so that the United States would not have to take the blame for dividing Europe.) As it happened, the Russians decided the issue. Molotov could have killed the Marshall Plan by joining it. Instead he walked out, on Stalin's instructions. Poland and Czechoslovakia, which both desperately needed economic support in order to recover, were plunged deeper into cold night, and Europe was divided. It remains tantalizing to wonder what would have happened if America had found a way of imposing its economic generosity on the Soviet Union, but we must remember that Tantalus, tied to the stake, was never granted that drink. Stalin's obduracy was the historical fact that defeats imagination. Given his intransigence, no other scenario than armed confrontation was really possible. The idea that the United States chose to fight the Cold War can be discussed, but only in the context of the reality that it could not have chosen to call it off. The Soviet Union had been fighting it since Lenin took power. That was what the Comintern propaganda offensive had meant, and all the deeds that lived up to it. The members of the East Coast foreign policy elite can scarcely be blamed for taking Soviet foreign policy pronouncements at their word.
Nor can they be blamed for subsequent military developments in the European area. A more powerful American military presence was never something that the elitists wanted. Exhausted, like most Americans, after years of tension, they didn't want to maintain the military presence they already had. It was the European countries who wanted the American presence, so that the Soviets could never start something against them without killing Americans. The effective atomic force of the United States in Europe in 1946 was nil. Later on, after a scraping of the barrel, a single squadron of B-29s arrived, but they could not have delivered an atomic bomb even if it had been divided among them. From the beginning, Europe was an economic battlefield, and remained that way even as it filled up with weapons over the course of decades. When trying to decide what kind of economic battle it was, it helps to remember that the argument stressing American economic imperialism is not very good. As in the case of Japan, America did less to penetrate foreign markets than to finance foreign competitors. But there can be no question about the military battle: there wasn't one. From the Berlin airlift until the arms race passed its danger point—which was the point _before_ mutual destruction was assured—all the military developments were logical. Western satirists had fun mocking the gung-ho language from the American side of the face-off (since most of the satirists were American themselves, few of them had any idea of what the Soviets sounded like when _they_ were being gung-ho) but the idea that America's security state grew according to the principle of some sinister initial plan was a fiction in the minds of novelists. It grew, but it grew like Little Topsy. The real danger zone was never Europe, where the two main antagonists were debarred from fighting each other directly. The danger zone was everywhere else, and on this point the East Coast foreign policy elite really was vulnerable to criticism. It had been since the Marshall Plan was formulated, because there was no means of getting the Marshall Plan through Congress without the aid of a Red scare.
The elite had enviable access to the quality press. Acheson leaked information to James Reston, Chip Bohlen to Joe Alsop, James Forrestal to Walter Lippmann: this was an old boy network that left the United Kingdom's looking atomized. The elite had all been to the same prep schools and colleges and they had large influence in the corridors of Washington. But the United States is a democracy, the separation of powers is a fact, and a measure the size of the Marshall Plan could not be pushed through without the consent of Congress, in which, finally, the voice of the people is the voice of God. If Congress had never needed to be persuaded to finance aid to Greece and Turkey, America could have done without the rhetorical commitment to anti-communism which was mandatory from thence forward. (Here lies the fallacy in Gore Vidal's otherwise persuasive argument that in the Security State the American people are not consulted: the American foreign policy measure that troubles us most was launched on a wave of demagogic hot air, for no other reason except to secure the allegiance of the people.) The rhetoric opened the way for the suppurating reality of the junior senator from Wisconsin. Though the sum total of injustices brought about by Joe McCarthy in his whole madcap career scarcely amounted to a single day's depredations in Bulgaria, those who disliked America were given reason for their dislike, and—worse—those with reason to be grateful were given an excuse to express the resentment that the person helped to his feet always feels. Worse still, the domino theory came into operation.
Kennan had been perfectly right about the Kremlin's intention of subverting democratic government anywhere it could be reached: the Kremlin had never had any other intention, nor—to give it points for honesty—had it ever tried to disguise its aim. But it was a big and presumptuous step to assume that if communism became victorious in any country the countries next door would be toppled by the shock. The step once taken, the temptation was very large to make retaliation pre-emptive, cooperating with incumbent authorities, however brutal, against left-wing protest however justified. What François Furet was later so usefully to deplore as America's "limited inventory of evil" came fatally into play. The United States went to war against socialism in all its forms. In Europe it could hardly eliminate social democrat governments once they had been constituted. But in Iran in 1953 it could certainly cancel an attempt to nationalize the oil fields, and in Guatemalain 1954 it could certainly influence an election. From Guatemala to the debacle in Vietnam was a direct road. Bob Woodward tells the story of the CIA's part in this sad process in his lumpily written but vitally informative book _Veil_. But we need Isaacson and Thomas's book to face the full tragedy of the East Coast foreign policy elite's role in putting the country they had served so well on the path to a disaster. Acheson, in particular, could be seen as a figure of Greek tragedy if the true tragic figures were not to be found among thousands of dead soldiers, murdered peasants, and burnt children. But Acheson had been a hawk since long before the first fateful steps down the jungle path into Vietnam. The time when he could envisage cooperating with the Russians was far in the past, at the other end of a long active life. It had been, however, a real desire. What made it impossible was the intractable fact that the Soviet Union was not under the control of the United States.
During the Cold War, a side effect of the antipathy of many Western intellectuals towards U.S. foreign policy, and their distrust of its physical power, was the belief that the United States could change the world in any way it liked. The only brand of American imperialism to which that belief even remotely applies is cultural imperialism. In the long term, U.S. cultural imperialism, wherever in the world it is brought to bear, is bound to be influential. But in the short term, for a smaller country to suppose that it can do nothing to resist U.S. cultural imperialism is a policy of despair, and equally it is a policy of arrogance for us to suppose such a thing on the small country's behalf. When the Japanese army marched into Singapore and ended the period of British dominance in Southeast Asia, the film showing at the fanciest cinema in the city was _The Philadelphia Story_. In her novel _In the Eye of the Sun_ , Ahdaf Soueif tells us what everyone in Egypt was watching on television on the evening of the Six Day War in 1967. It was _Peyton Place_. But America was not influencing the decisions of the Japanese army, and in the region of the eastern Mediterranean it has been a continuous lapse on the part of intellectuals in the Arab countries to think that Israel's foreign policy is exclusively an American creation. One particularly deleterious consequence of that last assumption is that the Arab nations might fail to realize that Israel, rather than be dissolved as a state, and whatever the United States might think desirable, would rather bring the world to an end. Those who credit the United States with a monopoly of powers for working mischief are making the same mistake as those who credit it with a monopoly of powers for doing good. Both sides of the assumption arise from the historical accident that America emerged relatively wealthy from a war that reduced Europe and Japan to poverty for at least a generation, while the Soviet Union, except in the military sense, had been reduced to poverty from its inception and couldn't recover from it unless it changed its ways.
The East Coast foreign policy elite had large powers of discretion in uniquely favourable circumstances, at a time when their initiatives could palpably alter the world. They were cultivated men, many of them of formidable intellectual and scholarly prowess: they did an impressive job of keeping their heads. But it was inevitable that they should fall prey to the sin of pride, which is at its most insidious when dressed as destiny. As I write, the elite is in its last phase, where it begins to forget the car keys through the effort of remembering the door keys. My mentor Gore Vidal is a case in point. He has forgotten that he was born and bred as a member of the very elite whose evil deeds he castigates in his brilliantly written polemics. The way he remembers it, the elite was even more powerful than it was in reality. In 2001 he published an article in the TLS by which he managed to suggest that the foreign policy of the United States tricked the Japanese Empire into a war in the Pacific. With some reluctance I tried to rebut that contention in the paper's letters column. Clearly he took exception to a pupil's rounding on him. But as an Australian I had a good reason. Though Australia's own foreign policy sometimes tries to give the impression that the country's future is bound up with the wholesale burgeoning of the region called the Pacific Rim, this glittering dream could not even be dreamed unless in the presence of a seldom spoken-of reality—the reality of a liberal democratic Japan. In view of this indispensable condition, nothing should be done to favour the belief of Japan's ever-hopeful right wing that it was tricked out of military power by the machinations of Washington. Japan went to war on its own initiative. The reasons went far enough back to look inevitable, but when it came to the point, the Japanese government, such as it was at the time, could have done something else. The same is rarely untrue anywhere in the world. It would help if the world's very large supply of anti-American commentators could decide on which America we are supposed to be in thrall to: the Machiavellian America that can manipulate any country's destiny, or the na ve America that can't find it on the map. While we're waiting for the decision, it might help if we could realize the magnitude of the fix that America got us out of in 1945, and ask ourselves why we expect a people rich and confident enough to do that to be sensitive as well. Power is bound to sound na ve, because it doesn't spot the bitter nuances of feeling helpless. The East Coast foreign policy elite were as bright as could be. In their young manhood, they had seen a lot of the world in which America, they correctly guessed, was bound to play a big part, although not even they could guess how big. They had the mental resources to sound as sophisticated as Talleyrand and Metternich put together. If, in retrospect, they look like big, clumsy children—well, they didn't yet know what it was like not to get their way.
ZINKA MILANOV
Zinka Milanov was born Mira Teresa Zinka in Zagreb in 1906, and died in New York City in 1989, after a long career as one of the Metropolitan Opera's most beloved sopranos. When she retired from the stage in 1968 she had sung a full twenty-nine seasons in New York, to which she had migrated from Europe at the end of what she later called her "lucky year" of 1937. After a preparatory decade of hard work in the Yugoslav and Czechoslovak opera houses, her lucky year had included her debut in Vienna, starring in _Aida_ for Bruno Walter. Walter's recommendation got her an audition with Toscanini for the Verdi _Requiem_ in Salzburg, but her American career was already under way, because she had a contract with the Met in her pocket. She made her New York debut in December 1937, three months before the _Anschluβ_. A whole political study can be made about what happened to European musicians and singers in the Nazi era, but we should not ignore that America had its attractions even before the event: a striking instance of the power of American cultural imperialism, which, even in the high arts, already shaped, from the angle of consumption, the world of classical music as it shaped the world of painting. (That the angle of consumption would eventually determine the angle of production was not yet evident.) All of them made for American labels, Milanov's recordings date from the second part of her career—she was already forty before she stepped into a studio—but they can be recommended as dazzling events for anyone making a start on grand opera. A born mezzo who added her top notes later, she had a voice as rich as blackberry juice in the middle, with champagne sparkling in the upper register. Beginning listeners should avoid boxed sets of entire operas, in my opinion: it is too easy to nod off before the fireworks start. The thing to go for is what used to be called "highlights" records. Milanov singing the showstoppers from Tosca (with Jussi Bjoerling) or Il _Trovatore_ (with Jan Peerce) should be enough to get anyone addicted to opera straight away. Because singers lead very physical lives, what they have to say about the art they practise tends to be refreshingly down-to-earth. Zinka Milanov said something which, if quoted at the right moment, can come in handy for interrupting the momentum of anybody who is dragging too much technical information into the discussion.
Dollink, either you got the voice or you don't got the voice: and I got the voice.
—ZINKA MILANOV (ATTRIB.)
THE VOLCANIC SOPRANO had grown stroppy with an interviewer who badgered her too long on abstruse questions of vocal technique. In her moment of impatience, Milanov produced a nice variation on Duke Ellington's "It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing." I have never been able to find out when she actually said it, or to whom: a standard item of operatic folklore, it had gone from mouth to ear a million times before it got to me. Perhaps every word was wrong. But the idea had clearly remained unaltered, because any artist will say roughly the same thing if bored too long. At the National Film Theatre in London in the early 1960s I heard Jean Renoir say something similar to a questioner who had burdened him with a long analysis of one of the crane shots in _Le Crime de Monsieur Lange_. Renoir said that he made a point of forgetting about technical problems once he had solved them.
In a later generation, film directors became less inclined to forget anything. When a pyramid of explanatory journalism builds up around an art-form it is easy for a practitioner to become so impressed by his own entombment that he starts breathing the rarefied air and relishing the dust. It would happen to trail-bike champions if the media cared. It happens to film directors because the media care about almost nothing but the movies. The movies are as fascinating as a war, and the directors are the generals. There are very few people with the logistic ability to organize a battle between a bunch of averagely talented actors and a computer-generated army of trolls: when such a man is told that he is Michelangelo reborn, he finds little evidence to help him disagree. He soon forgets that he has almost no detectable talent beyond getting other people to combine their talents in accordance with his wishes. Singers, on the other hand, have the advantage of being kept fundamentally humble by the personal, individual and directly physical nature of their gift. Zinka Milanov had a gold-rush chest-voice that practically brought her body along with it when it soared into the grand circle. Quite a lot of that she could do when she was fifteen.
Apart from the very rare exception like Rosa Ponselle, singers must have their voices trained if they are ever to sustain a career beyond the first week. But there is still such a thing as talent, and finally, as initially, it is what matters. There were plenty of singers in Callas's generation who could do what she couldn't: make a transition from the upper register to the middle register without showing the join. But even in the later part of her life, when her upper register was in tatters, she could come powering back into the middle register with a hot roar that boiled the wax in your ears. She made a drama of it, and that was her talent. In her master classes she would try to show how it was done, but her pupils could never learn her unique trick of turning up the voice's darkness like a light as she plunged like a returning space shuttle into the stave.
Nijinsky got all his master classes over in a single line of explanation. When he was asked about the technical secret of his jump, he said: "I merely leap and pause." (Either you got the pause or you don't got the pause.) With all this said and insisted on, however, it should be remembered that the idea that there can be an unstudied, perfectly spontaneous art is an idle dream. Zinka Milanov was merely seeing off a pest when she made her most famous statement. It was true that she had been born with a beautiful voice. But her voice had been trained from the moment its quality was detected. At the Zagreb Academy of Music she spent an entire year on nothing but exercises. For her first Trovatore Leonora, sung in Croatian, she prepared for two years, working on each page a hundred times, note by note. This hard curatorial work went on all her life, even after her retirement from the stage: as a teacher, she stayed in training. She was right to say that she "got the voice," but the essential counter-statement was given in an interview she granted to the magazine _Étude_ in 1940, when she said, about singing well, that "the attainment of this goal is a full life's labour": a dull truth, but true for all the arts. (Prodigies like Rimbaud merely have their full lives early.) It's more fun to talk about amazing talents, and indeed they exist. But the real miracle is the work that goes into fostering them. In movies about artists, that aspect is usually dealt with in a montage sequence two minutes long, because even a hint of the real labour that goes into improvement would take an hour of screen time at the very least. For that one reason, there will never be a credible movie about the making of an artist. Interior concentration doesn't translate to the screen. Exterior impact does. For just a moment, Zinka Milanov was a Central European actress delivering a line in a Hollywood movie, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. The line played well but it was only half true. The true version, however, wouldn't play at all. "Artistic talent is indeed a gift from God, which the artist is obliged to match with the gift of his life."
CZESLAW MILOSZ
Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) was born in Lithuania and grew up speaking Polish. In 1934 he reinforced his career as a poet and freelance writer by taking a law degree. As a contributor to radio he got into trouble under the pre-war right-wing government for his left-wing views. Under a more ruthless regime, his experience at dodging official opprobrium came in useful when he wrote for the underground press in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Representing post-war Communist Poland, he was a diplomat to the United States and, in 1950, to Paris, where he asked for political asylum. He spent ten years in Paris, and students of his writings will often get the sense that he was later more comfortable having his Polish translated into French than into English. In 1953 he published _The Captive Mind_ , a bitterly disillusioned analysis, from the inside, of the influence of Marxist orthodoxy on his generation of idealists. The book, which students should regard as essential reading even today, can now be seen as an early blow at the foundations of the Warsaw Pact. Written before the Berlin Wall went up, _The Captive Mind_ was a key factor in eventually bringing it down. At the end of his decade in Paris, Milosz left for California, where he became established as professor of Slavic languages and literature at Berkeley. In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize, and after 1981 his writings began to be published in Poland: not all at once, and seldom without official doubts, but inexorably. For the regime in its long final crisis, Milosz's international prestige was just too big to ignore, like the Pope's. Milosz wrote poetry, essays and political analysis as if they were all in the one medium, a genre beyond a genre. From the technical angle, this now looks like the next breakthrough after Ortega, early in the century, identified the newspaper article as a vital medium for serious thought. The genre beyond the genres had already been established by Milosz's fellow Polish-speaking exile Gombrowicz but nobody pursued it with quite the copious fluency of Milosz, whose poems and esssays flow into each other as if they belong to the one river system. John Bayley, in his useful introductory essay on Milosz collected in _The Power of Delight_ , says, "By writing in every form, he writes virtually in one: and he instructs in all." Milosz had a wealth of personal experience to base his instruction on, much of it tinged with remorse. As with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, another future liberal who was a servant of the Polish Communist regime after the war, the supposed puzzle of Milosz's unfortunate allegiance can be quickly solved: the Poles had no reason to trust anyone. With his background so thoroughly poisoned, the miracle of Milosz's writings is his range of fellow-feeling: he can talk about modern history and the contradictions within liberalism as if we, his listeners, had been made wise by the same childhood.
The scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics and atheists.
—CZESLAW MILOSZ, _V ISIONS DE LA BAIE DE SAN FRANCISCO_, P. 224
THAT THE BIBLE, for a Western civilization, is the common good of believers and non-believers ought to be obvious, but for some reason it is a truth hard to see except when that same civilization is at the point of collapse. Milosz had seen a civilization collapse: like any of the post-war Polish writers awarded the privilege of growing to adulthood, he had been obliged to wonder whether a national culture can be said to have any roots at all after the nation itself has been obliterated. It has to be remembered that the typical Polish writer was Bruno Schulz. But for that to be remembered, Bruno Schulz has to be remembered, and the main reason he was so easily forgotten is that a Gestapo officer blew his brains out. It happened in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942, when Schulz was only fifty, with the best of his career ahead of him. Schulz's little book _The Cinammon Shops_ had the promise of a genius that would take time to realize itself, because the nature of time would be one of the things it would define. Even if he had never written a word, he would have been a hope for Poland's future just for how he could paint and draw. He was a walking fountain of talent, and the flow was stopped almost before it started, by one bullet in the right place. But at least he was heard of. Among the younger elite obliterated by the Russian firing squads before the Nazis even arrived, there were probably more like him. There were certainly more in the Warsaw ghetto, where the cultural life (plangently evoked by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his long interview _Die doppelte Boden_ ) was like a university of dreams. Alas, the university had a direct rail connection with the slaughterhouse, and all that beautiful promise went into smoke. It took Roman Polanski, by his very existence, to remind us of what had ceased to exist: a whole generation of young talent was destroyed, and if Polanski had not been blessed with an inconspicuous personal appearance even he would have shared the fate of his mother. When the war was over, the memory of all this was not: for the artists who had come through, the pit was only a step behind them. When they looked over their shoulders, they could see right into it. In that direction, there was little else in view, except rubble. Milosz was living with that knowledge when he said this about the scriptures.
Looking for something to count on, he found the Bible in the ruins. For us, blessed with a more comfortable set of ruins—even if the streets are more dangerous, most of us live better now than we did in the houses we grew up in—there seems less to be afraid of: we can persuade ourselves that history is a linear development, in which even the eternal can become outdated, and be safely forgotten. Perhaps our own catastrophe will never come in any readily intelligible form, so it will never matter if there is nothing to go back to, no past to legitimize the permanent present, which will legitimize itself by doing us no evil except by its puffball bombardment of triviality. There is always the chance that our confident iconoclasts are right. Milosz is telling us not to bet on it, but perhaps he was unlucky. Like the Polish intelligentsia that was wiped out half by one set of madmen and half by another, he was just caught in the squeeze, and had his heart broken even though his body walked away.
You can be a non-believer, however, and still be amazed at how even the believers are ready to let the Bible go. In England, the most lethal attack on the scriptures has been mounted by the established Church itself. The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece compiled at a time when even a committee could write English. The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Vesion was the work of men who did not realize they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that: Dwight Macdonald (his hilarious review is collected in his fine book _Against the American Grain_ ) had to give up looking for traces of majesty and start looking for traces of literacy. Those responsible for the NEB probably did realize they were atheists: otherwise they could scarcely have been so determined to leave not one stone standing upon another. For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God's living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy, and the perpetrators like vandals. When I joined in a public protest against the rejigging of the Book of Common Prayer, a practising Christian among the London editors—it was Richard Ingrams, editor of _Private Eye_ —accused me of being in bad faith. He hated the new prayer book even more than I did, but thought I could have no reason for sharing his contempt. But it was my book too. I had been brought up on the scriptures, the prayers and the hymns. I had better reasons than inertia for deploring their destruction. Milosz had the same reasons. The scriptures had been his first food. For me, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics—all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion. But for Milosz, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against a much more dangerous language, the language of legalized murder. We have to imagine a situation in which the state was so oppressive and mendacious that the Church looked like a free institution, and its language sounded like the truth. Milosz was well aware that the record of the Church in Polish politics had not been brilliant. One of his many braveries, post-war, was to give an unflinching account of Poland's institutionalized anti-Semitism, a strain of opinion in which the Church had always been implicated. We should also strive to remember that any German lover of his Bible must cope with the knowledge that its classic translation was the work of Martin Luther, whose loathing for the Jews was well up to Nazi standards. But we are not talking about our love for a Church, whether Catholic or Protestant. We are talking about our love for a book, and what we love is the way it is written. Rewriting it is not in the realm of the possible, and any attempt to do so should be seen for what it is: the threat of destruction.
Sooner than become the enemy of its own classical texts, the Anglican Church would have done better to seize the first opportunity of disestablishing itself. However tenuous, its offical connection to the state has been enough to saddle it with the doomed ambition of maximizing its popular audience, like a television channel in desperate search of more viewers who eat crisps. Separated from a fully secularized state, it might have fully enjoyed the only civilized condition for a religion, which is to provide a spiritual structure for private life. Only a secular state can be democratic; although the democracy will soon be in trouble if the private citizen is deprived of a spiritual code, to be acknowleged for its moral example even if he does not believe in its divine provenance.
With the possible exception of Buddhism, no religion we know about is capable of allying itself to the state without working to the destruction of liberty. Less commonly noted is that it will also work to the destruction of itself, by trivializing its own teachings, or rendering them obnoxious in the attempt to impose them legally, instead of by exhortation, example and witness. In its proper sphere, private life, a religion can keep its teachings as pure and strict as it likes, as long as they do not break the law. It is also free to protect its own sources of spiritual nourishment against the fatal obligation to make them universally intelligible. We can be sure that one of the consolations the Pope brought to Poland in 1979 was a few words of Latin. That he spoke Polish helped him to be understood, but that he also spoke Latin was the reminder, thirsted for by the faithful, that there was an eternal language which the years of the captive mind had not managed to corrupt. There were many among the faithless who were glad to be reminded too.
Evelyn Waugh's correspondence teems with bitter complaints at the time when the Church adopted a vernacular liturgy. He hadn't, he said, become a Catholic in order to applaud the Church's clumsy adaptation to the modern world. He wanted it not to adapt. He wanted, that is, a refuge. Those of us brought up as Protestants, but who later lapsed, found out, when the doors closed behind us, that we hadn't lapsed quite as far as we thought. We had lapsed into unbelief, but not into stupidity, and the spectacle of our one-time cradle rocking to the clappy-happy rhythms of half-witted populism was a betrayal of something that had once impressed us at least enough to invite rebellion. I don't want the teachings of Jesus taken from me. He might no longer be my redeemer, but he is still my master. If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version of the New Testament. But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity congruent with the impact Jesus must once have made on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counselling. We are surrounded by voices telling us that everything will come right if we learn to love ourselves. Imagine the torments of Jesus in his passion, if, on top of the sponge of vinegar and the spear, they had offered him counselling as well. Exiled in California, Milosz saw enough of America's culture of personal fulfilment to wonder what he had got himself into. But he never forgot what he had got himself out of—a repression so arid that it left him thirsty for a language he could respect, even though it came from a book he couldn't believe.
EUGENIO MONTALE
Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was Italy's most famous poet after World War II, and eventually established himself beyond challenge as the living embodiment of his country's humanist culture in modern times. Immediately memorable even when he was obscure, he was the nearest thing to a national lyrical voice since D'Annunzio, and a distinctly more enticing prospect. Whereas the posturing D'Annunzio had been one of the harbingers of Fascist hysteria, Montale, growing up in the Fascist era, was a portent of the more level tones of the liberal democracy to come. Educated in the fine shades of love, loyalty and emotional truth during histrionic times, he gave everyday sanity a lyrical voice for which his recovering country was grateful. His Nobel Prize in 1975 was welcomed as a sign of restored national prestige. Every educated Italian knows at least a few lines of Montale. People familiar with the standard episodes of Dante and lyrics of Leopardi can usually quote from Montale's famous poem about the sunflower ("Bring me the sunflower mad with light"). Beginning readers of Italian can be confident that a few hard hours spent between a dictionary and Montale's first, reputation-making collection, _Ossi di seppia_ ( _Cuttlefish Bones_ ), will promote them directly to the hub of Italian literature in the twentieth century, and give them a phrase or two that everyone will be delighted to recognize. One of the young Montale's principal objects was to tame rhetoric, the verbal inflation to which an over-musical language is prone. (The hardest trick in an Italian poet's book is to avoid rhyme: Montale could dodge it forever.) There have been many attempts to translate the masterpieces in Montale's main body of lyrical poetry. All have failed, but at least they have provided a wealth of parallel texts. For a long while the task of translating his exemplary critical prose looked equally doomed, but Jonathan Galassi finally did an acceptable job with _The Second Life of Art_ (1982). Galassi sometimes misses the easy rhythm of a Montale sentence, but he always catches the dry neatness of its argument. Widely read in several languages but devoted to the value of common experience, the urbane and affable Montale was an enchantingly down-to-earth writer in every form he touched: even his most difficult poetry is full of concrete detail. He was also a singer (his early training provided the bedrock for his superb music criticism) and a painter. Alas, it was revealed after his death that a certain knack for sleight of hand had been among his talents: some of his reviews of English books had been written by a student, with whom he split the take.
Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of some coldly worked out experimental discovery.
—EUGENIO MONTALE, _A UTO DA FÉ_, P. 81
IN HIS CRITICAL PROSE, Montale often reminds you of Flaubert's insistence that we don't love literature. Montale didn't love literature either: not in the sense of drawing his principles from it. He practised literature. As a practitioner, Montale was ready to countenance experiment. He had time for Ezra Pound. When he said, in reference to Pound, that talent presupposes dignity for anyone on whom it is conferred, he was being forgiving about Pound's politics. He knew he was being generous: Pound flagrantly represented the sort of capitulation to Fascist rhetoric that Montale had not made. But Montale felt no need to be generous about Pound's technical experiments in fragmentation and panscopic allusiveness. Montale simply thought they were legitimate: as he said much later of Auden, it didn't matter how lyricism happened as long as it happened. In his own era there were hermeticists in whom he was determined to detect the lyricist even when they themselves had given up. What Montale loved was music, and that was where this cry from the heart came from. He was born and raised as a musician—he could sing at professional level—and was there as a critic at most of the first nights that counted in the long last gasp of the classic Italian opera. Budding critics of television or the movies, if they really want to know how the response to a cultural event can be turned into a critique of the whole society behind it, should get a reader of Italian to take them through a few paragraphs of _Prime alla Scala_ , Montale's splendid compendium of the best pieces he wrote about the _teatro lirico_ on its way to exhaustion. What destroyed it—or anyway, what marked its destruction, since cause and effect were hard to distinguish—was intellectualism. Late in his life, Montale was in the audience when the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono tried to persuade the Italian musical public that he had been sent to make their lives more significant with a Marxist arrangement of notes. Early in his life, Montale had also been in the audience when the great last operas of _verismo_ had made the audience's lives more significant without Marx getting a mention: all it had taken was melody, orchestration and thrilling theatrical effect. Montale was thus ideally placed to point out that Nono was a brain in a bottle.
We should concede, however, that the contrast between the truth of nature and the experimental discovery is not always clearly marked. Stravinsky, when he ventured into the atonal, did not sacrifice feeling: and presumably he would not have gone there unless he felt the need for a new range of opportunity. The Impressionist painters thought they were being scientific, and in the matter of the analysis and combination of colours they actually were. In the Renaissance, perspective was an experimental discovery, and must, with its chambers and mirrors, have looked cold enough until you saw the results. Vermeer's studio probably looked more like an optical laboratory than the simple rooms he sets in front of us. In all the arts, and at all times, there have been technical experiments. Rhyme must have felt like a technical experiment when it was being discovered, and probably sounded like it when its discoverers were exploring its possibilities beyond the immediate bounds of sense. In modern writing, I have had it explained to me, by admirers of John Ashbery in his later phase, how the stutters and elisions of his diction are a release mechanism for modulations of tone. To me they sound like the merest gesture towards complication, but so did the repetitions of Philip Glass until I listened harder. (The harder I listened to Stockhausen, however, the more his repetitions remained merely repetitive.) The real problem with Montale's protest is that in the earliest days of his poetry—at the time of _Ossi di seppia_ and _La bufera e altro_ —he might have been vulnerable to his own suspicions if he had come back from the future. In the lush context of Italian lyricism, his acerbities of diction were an experiment. They just happened to be a fruitful one. In his heart of hearts, he knows that the two terms of this statement are not as polarized as he makes out. He was just finding a polite way to say how much he hated self-consciously modern, wilfully unseductive, sedulously rebarbative, proudly repellent, unapologetically giftless music. In any kind of bad art, it is when the gift is gone that the experiment really does take over—the eternally cold experiment that promises to make gold out of lead, and bricks without straw. Leaving coldness aside (and we should leave it aside, because barren artistic experimentation can also be done in a white hot frenzy), it might be useful to mention that Montale, in another essay, came up with the perfect term for a work of art that had no other subject except its own technique. He called it the seasoning without the roast.
True culture is what remains in a man when he has forgotten everything he has learned. This, however, presupposes an absorption, a profound penetration of his character.
—EUGENIO MONTALE, _A UTO DA FÉ_, P. 313
Montale was careful to say that we should take it in before we forget it. Ezra Pound is famous for saying roughly the same thing (he said culture begins when we forget what book a fragment came from) but the idea is easier to accept from Montale. We can safely assume that his vast reading got into his writing, as a distillation if not as a frame of reference. After his death it turned out that the vast reading had not been quite as vast as we thought. He read widely in foreign languages and made the citations to prove it, but some of his reviewing of books in English had owed an inordinate amount to an assistant, who not only read those books, but wrote the pieces about them that were published under Montale's name. Montale had always modestly called English _una lingua che non si impara mai_ —a language that one never learns—but here was evidence that he had found it even harder than that. It was an almighty scandal even by Italian standards, but eventually died down in the Italian way. Nobody ever supposed that Pavarotti sang worse for having finagled so much tax money, and in the long run it was tacitly conceded that Montale, after a lifetime of hard work, had a few easy hours coming to him in the bar while some young hopeful knocked out the article for tomorrow's _Corriere della sera_.
Scandals aside, Montale's learning in languages other than his own (including in English: he really had read a lot of it at first hand) was an abiding astonishment, and in Italian he had quite simply read everything that counted. On top of his knowledge of literature, there was his knowledge of painting: his praise of Roberto Longhi's art criticism is an act of communion with the great scholar that could beguile any lucky Italian student of art history and lead him by an enchanted route into the principality of literature in the next valley. Longhi knew how to write about painting; Montale knew how to write about writing about painting; and the chain of response has no weak links until it gets to you. Your turn, and welcome to civilization. And to cap his knowledge of literature and the plastic arts, there was his knowledge of music, which amounted to something far beyond expertise: if not the incarnation of the art, he was the incarnation of its appreciation. Take all his critical competencies together, and you get an enchanting picture of a man who illuminated his life by saturating his mind with the arts. It is quite easy to convince yourself that the results show up in his poetry. But don't we have to take the connection on trust? His poetry is not notably allusive to the arts. How do we know that his character was profoundly penetrated by them? What if he not only, in the superficial sense, forgot everything he learned, but actually and radically forgot the lot?
In conversation, Martin Amis once disturbingly suggested to me that no matter how much you admire a novel, after about a year you forget everything in it. He was proposing a rule of thumb, not a law of thermodynamics, but judging from my own experience he had a point. The reason I keep on reading _Lucky Jim_ and _The Great Gatsby_ is that otherwise I would be certain to forget them, and I know it's time to read _Madame Bovary_ again when all I can remember is (a) Emma's lewd cab-ride in Rouen, (b) her being impressed by the physical glossiness of the landed gentry, and (c) her husband's lack of success with his operation on somebody's—whose?—foot. When so much goes, what is it that remains, and can it usefully be called an absorption? It might be better to call it a habit. Perhaps we just get into the habit of passing good things through our minds, and the better the things, the better the habit. It might also be that the passing through is the essential event: a polishing of the pipe, like El Dorado's throat.
We all know trainspotting types who remember useless things. They can have fun with it when they meet a fellow sufferer. But there is nothing amusing about the man who has hurled himself at an exalted art-form and remembered it all. Some of the worst cases have had it hurled at them in early life, and so are not really responsible, but you do meet near-maniacs who chose their fate in the years of maturity. I knew a man once—knew him briefly—who could refer to every aria in every opera by its first line, and always in the original language. He couldn't just do it for Verdi and Puccini. He could do it for Janá ek and Moussorgsky. Worse than that, he couldn't _not_ do it. During a single interval in the Crush Bar at Covent Garden you would see people departing from him as if launched by a catapult. I knew another man who remembered not just the full cast but all the technical personnel of every film he had ever seen. I wished the two of them in hell together, but at various times each chose me for a victim, and it was an ugly reminder that when it comes to art, forgetting is almost as important as remembering. I love memorizing poetry, but only the poetry I love, and I pity anyone who, without even trying, remembers all the poetry he reads. At Sydney University, one of my contemporaries had that affliction, with the result that his early career was distinguished by his winning a prize with a poem which had previously, in a large part, been written by someone else—a very public embarrassment. Without the capacity to forget, we would not be able to go back to something we love with the delicious twin certainties that it will yield a familiar pleasure of the highest quality, and still be new all over again. The triumph of Proust is that he can give you that feeling on first reading. He can do it because he set himself, in his earliest years, to remembering what it felt like to forget.
Memory tests: in Michael Frayn's novel _Towards the End of the Morning_ , what does the hero say to reassure himself when he notices the rust eating the paint-job of his car? (It's the good strong brown undercoat showing through.) (But what is the name of the hero?) In _Portnoy's Complaint_ , what does Portnoy say his real name is when he is trying to convince the Wasp girl skater that he is not Jewish? (Porte-Noir.) And what is his name for the fantasy girl who puts out every time? (Thereal McCoy.) (But what is the real name of the fashion model he calls the Monkey, and why can't you remember that, if you can remember the title of the Yeats poem he recites, or half recites, to win her favours?) (It was "Leda and the Swan"). You can remember the name of the weekly show that J. D. Salinger's Glass children appeared on ( _It's a Wise Child_ ) but was it radio or television? And at the end of _Franny and Zooey_ , how many of the Glass children are dead? Is it "Sergeant X" or "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor" that features the Dostoevsky quotation "Gentlemen and teachers, I ask you, what is Hell? I submit it is the agony of being unable to love"? Was it inscribed by a Nazi official, by his wife, or by the protagonist? In which novel by Evelyn Waugh does Mrs. Stitch drive her little car down the steps of the men's lavatory? What kind of little car?
In the paragraph above, there is not a novel, novella or short story mentioned that I have read fewer than three times, and in every case I am not only dimly aware of things I half remember, but painfully aware of things I have forgotten. It gets even more painful when it comes to painting. When the Courtauld collection was still in Bloomsbury I must have looked at Manet's _A Bar of the Folies-Bergère_ at least a hundred times. There is a man in the mirror: probably he wants her for a mistress. On which side of her head does his image appear? I am damned if I can remember. But perhaps, if one could remember everything, one would be damned indeed. In the last weeks of a slow dying, it might be better to forget. One hopes that there will be a saving mechanism to it, a kind of mental economy. In my prime I thought that H. L. Mencken's fate—semantic aphasia—was the most cruel possible affliction for a man who had given his life to words: a punishment for love. But from the inside looking out it might have felt like a release.
A release from memories of beauty might be just the ticket: what else, after all, would they make you do, except long for what you can't have, more life? Perhaps we will forget what was lovely and remember what was true. Already, at no great age, I sometimes fancy that I can feel that happening. Recently, for the tenth time at least, I sat through a video of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet _Winter Dreams_ , in the brilliantly sensitive television production by Derek Bailey. All over again I was ravished by what MacMillan did to make Darcey Bussell and Irek Mukhamedov dance as if they were mad about each other. Yet once again I am already forgetting the steps, while remembering better than ever what I have never forgotten since I first saw the work: the unsensational and quietly desperate _pas de deux_ in which Darcey Bussell and Anthony Dowell act out the extinction of their marriage. When the lovers dance, they fly: they fly into a passion. When the married people dance, they die—almost nothing happens. But their doomed little movements are the work of MacMillan's choreographic imagination at its dizzy height. At one time, by his invitation, I was going to write for him a spoken ballet about Nijinsky. I suppose the project never really had a chance, but it paid off in that I saw a lot of him. Since the first time I saw _Mayerling_ I had always thought he was a genius, and in the other full-length ballets evidence went on accumulating that any MacMillan _pas de deux_ for lovers was an ignition point of modern art—a floodlight on the possibilities of human movement as a plastic equivalent for poetry. He was an easy man to embarrass, so I had to be careful how I told him what I felt, and when he declined into his last illness I shamefully ran out of things to say. I would like to think that this is a way of saying them. (A tip to young writers for when they grow old: if you have felt gratitude for a fellow artist's life, don't content yourself with telling him personally: say it in public—someone who knows neither of you might take heart.) I thought MacMillan's talent so great that it got beyond the beautiful. When his lovers danced sublimely, you could take it for granted. But when he found a steady poetry for slow heartbreak, he gave us something to remember at the point of death. You get no prizes for seeing that his first _pas de deux_ for the lovers in _Mayerling_ is beautiful. But there is a prize for seeing, in _Isadora_ , that his _pas de deux_ for Isadora Duncan and Paris Singer grieving for the accidental death of their children is beautiful too. If it ever came to the point where a lifetime's memories of artistic exaltation shrank to nothing except a single image, an image of dignity would be a good one to see. One would want to retain at least that much. But Montale must have had that idea in mind, or he would not have talked about the inevitability of forgetting in a way that emphasized the quality of what is remembered.
MONTESQUIEU
Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755) is one of our ambassadors in history. Like Thucydides, Tacitus and Montaigne, he represents us in the depths of time, as if his mind were a space station built by the modern world and positioned in an observational orbit above the surface of the past. His well-known commemorative medal, on the other hand, makes him look like a projection into the future from the Senate of ancient Rome. The real man was a creature of his age, and very good at being so. Noble birth helped, but his brilliance was not of the kind that precluded sociability. He was a hit in the grand salons and no stranger to frivolity. _The Persian Letters_ (1721), his first famous book, started as something of a joke. A measure of his success is that today we regard its central trick as commonplace: foreigners observe our society and find it strange. The French society that Montesquieu's two imaginary visiting Persians described was in fact heading downhill towards revolution, but it was delighted to be so wittily told that it was in a mess. Montesquieu was a Persian visitor himself when he spent two years in England, moving at the highest level, fêted everywhere: a period of observation that was to yield crucial results for his later work. First, however, came his _Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline_ (1734), a thriller which is probably the best port of entry for the new reader. His undoubted masterpiece is heavier going: _The Spirit of Laws_ (1748). One of the formative books of the modern world, it is still, in a hundred different ways, relevant today. Perhaps, at the moment, it is most conspicuously relevant in the critique it implicitly delivers of its ostensible subject, multiculturalism. Montesquieu had practically invented the concept that all cultures evolved in different ways from separate imperatives; and in _The Spirit of Laws_ he continued that theme, but by then he had seen the danger. In allowing the suggestion that all cultures might be equally valuable, room had been left for supposing that they might be equally virtuous. To guard against this, he advanced the further proposition—buttressing his argument with reference to the British constitution he had studied at first hand—that beneath cultural variety there were, or should be, values that did not change. In modern terms, he was concerned that a legitimate delight in the multiplicity of cultures should not develop into an ideology, multiculturalism: an ideology that would entail the abandonment of any fixed concept of justice. Seemingly in the face of his own cultural relativism, Montesquieu declared that justice was eternal. There is a fine introductory essay to Montesquieu by Isaiah Berlin (collected in his _Against the Current_ ), but Berlin strangely failed to see that Montesquieu's point had deep consequences for liberalism, which Berlin thought a matter of contending values. Montesquieu thought the same, but he thought there was a fixed point. Proposing, at least by implication, a liberalism dependent on a hard core of principles, and not just on tolerance, Montesquieu thus made a decisive pre-emptive intervention into the debate that we are having now.
It is not impossible that the things which dishonoured him most served him best. If he had shown a great soul from the start, the whole world would have distrusted him; and if he had been hardy, he would not have given Antony time for all the extravagance that led to ruin.
—MONTESQUIEU, PLÉIADE EDITION, VOL. 2, P. 137
AFTER FINALLY LEARNING enough French to put myself in a condition where he might teach me more, I found Montesquieu too big to begin at the beginning. The above citation was the passage that addicted me to him. Dipping at random into one of his Pléiade volumes, I chanced on this characterization of Augustus, and knew very soon that I would be occupied with Montesquieu for a long time into the future, so I put the books away in full confidence that when I came back to them later I would be reading nothing else for days on end. That was how it worked out, except that the days turned to weeks. (I own two complete sets of the Pléiade Montesquieu now, one to be occasionally carried with me on my travels, the other to be kept always safe at home against a rainy day, such as might happen at the end of the world, an event that would have left him sad but not stunned.) Decades before, when I was first a student in Sydney, North's Plutarch had had the same effect. The big, ugly Modern Library edition was hard to love from the outside, but hard to leave once you were in. I could see straight away what Plutarch had done for the posters on Shakespeare's marquee. Even today, I can't believe that the lists of dramatis personae for _Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra_ —my favourite plays on a Shakespearean roster in which almost all are favourites—would strike us as quite so rich if Shakespeare had not already found Plutarch to be a crowded bench of well-established characters all looking for what Hollywood used to call Additional Dialogue. Beyond that obvious connection, would all the other Shakespeare plays be the same as they are without Plutarch: that is, without the idea and the example of character being destiny? Montaigne, said Stefan Zweig (in his _Europaisches Erbe_ —The European Heritage), read history not in order to become learned, but to see how other men had handled events, and so set himself beside them. By assessing the behaviour of prominent characters in history we find a measure for ourselves. But one of our first assessments of ourselves is that we would be unlikely to attain such a magnificent objectivity on our own: we need our guides to the human soul, and among them Montesquieu is hard to beat, because he can withhold his moral judgement to the cracking point without letting go of it. Obviously he does not much admire Augustus as a man; but he can see Augustus's greatness as an emperor; and finally he can see the connection between Augustus's greatness and his not being much of a man. This is quite a feat of detachment. Most of us would table our decision long before that.
Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forbearance that not even Tacitus could show. Montesquieu, it should be said, thought the world of Tacitus, _"qui abrégeoit tout_ parce qu'il voyoit tout." ("He abridged everything because he saw everything." Perfect.) Tacitus was charmed by Tiberius, but only as a maiden with a soft neck is charmed by the approach of a trained vampire. Like Tacitus, Montesquieu could appreciate Tiberius as an artist of bastardry. "There is no crueller tyranny," said Montesquieu, "than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice." A connoisseur of murderous casuistry, Montesquieu was impressed by the efficiency Tiberius brought to the business of perverting the judicial system. From a distance of sixteen hundred years, Montesquieu rewarded the imperial perpetrator with the quality of his prose: _"les couleurs de la justice"_ is a magnificent phrase, one of those perfect formulations that should be left in its original language as a tribute to the culture from which it emerged. Tacitus had seen that Tiberius not only wanted the Senate to be servile, but despised it for flattering him. Yet Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind. "Like most men, he wanted contradictory things; his general politics were nowhere in accord with his particular passions. He would have liked a Senate free and capable of making its government respected, but he also wanted a Senate to satisfy, at all times, his fears, his jealousies and his hatreds: finally the statesman gave way contentedly to the man." We are left free to deduce a universal principle. Unless constrained to do otherwise, the statesman will always give way to the man. Lord Acton's later observation about the corrupting nature of power is already there, and already expounded in apprehensible human terms. Part of the impact comes from our recognition of what has happened so often within ourselves: the feeling of relief and release as we slip from a rigid civic obligation into a spastic self-assertion.
Montesquieu was well aware, however, that the dolorous road of arbitrary imperial power led far past the point set by the demoralization of the sane, and that beyond the corruptible personality there was such a thing as the outright psychopath, demented from the womb, or anyway from the cradle. Montesquieu had no doubt that Caligula was crazy. But Montesquieu is able to enrich his condemnation—to make it an analysis, and not just a bleat of anguish—by examining how Caligula's blatant insanity did not preclude subtlety of intellect, and might even have encouraged it. He drew Caligula as a sophist of cruelty. Descended from both Antony and Augustus, Caligula said he would punish the consuls if they celebrated the day of rejoicing established in memory of the battle of Actium, and that he would punish them if they didn't. (For the puzzled or the innocent, here's how it worked: Antony lost the battle of Actium to Octavian, the future Augustus. Therefore, those who celebrated the battle dishonoured Antony, while those who didn't dishonoured Augustus. The way was thus left open to punish everyone.)
By entertaining the possibility that cruelty could be allied with a kind of artistic ingenuity, Montesquieu pioneered a field of study that we by no means exhaust by reading the Marquis de Sade: if only it were so. Many of de Sade's effects were merely cumulative, and anyway they were almost all fictional. They were ideas he masturbated to in gaol, and the quill was the only conduit between his imagination and reality. He didn't have an office with a telephone. In the twentieth century, alas, one of the ways that the same brand of madness proved itself in power was by the ingenuity which added, to physical tortures unseen since medieval times, a range of psychological tortures which had been thought to have died with the nuttier Roman emperors. If Saddam Hussein needed to acquire by education what he did not have from instinct, he could have learned from Stalin the techniques of mentally destroying parents by attacking their children. ("My handsome son Uday," we can imagine him saying, "is looking forward to meeting your daughter.") But not even Stalin's ingenuity was without precedent in ancient times, and Hitler's fondness for _Sippenhaft_ —the German term for punishing the innocent family along with the guilty criminal—was a direct hand-on from Tiberius. (Stalin's penchant for obliterating the entire family of an Enemy of the People was not really _Sippenhaft_ , because he was cleaning up a whole bourgeois element anyway: i.e., they couldn't _not_ be guilty, so there was no arbitrariness to the punishment.) On a less exalted level in the infernal Nazi world, Victor Klemperer, in his diaries— _I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End_ —records the exquisite dilemma of the Dresden Jews in the years when they supposedly still had a life, before the Final Solution officially got under way.
Victor Klemperer is sometimes given a niggling press because he seems lost in everyday detail. But when everyday detail was so horrible, to record it was an act of heroism, and nobody who has read his diaries should lose an opportunity of pointing out to anyone who hasn't that they constitute one of the great documents of the twentieth century. At the heart of the document is the perception that the Jews were placed under designedly intolerable psychological pressure from the first day of the new regime. When they were still granted the luxury of travel by tram to their increasingly distant places of decreasingly remunerative work, they were permitted to ride only on a platform which could not be reached except though a compartment they were forbidden to enter. Their dilemma was between either walking to and from work, which was steadily less possible, or boarding the tram and facing almost certain punishment. The "almost" made things worse: if there had been no alternative to staying at home and starving yourself and your family to death, it might have been easier to face. But there was an alternative. The alternative, however, was to face the dilemma. A more delicately calibrated mechanism for inducing neurosis in human beings could scarcely have been devised. But devised it was: though it would be a relief to hear that the idea had simply evolved without a creator, there can be no doubt that some perversely talented Nazi factotum sat down to a desk and thought it out. Like Tacitus only more so, Montesquieu deserves our thanks for preparing us to face our own time. Tacitus thought that there were arguments for the use of torture. Montesquieu agreed, but said that there was something in our nature that cried out against it. Tacitus predicted what we have to face, but Montesquieu predicted us facing it, and thus ranks even higher among those men of the past who tell us that the future was always there—or anyway that enough of it had already happened to reassure us that the rest was not really unprecedented, just anachronistic. There is thus a kind of solace in reading them, saddening though it is; and with Montesquieu the solace becomes an inspiration, as if our doubts had met their voice.
I believe that the thing above all which ruined Pompey was the shame he felt to think that in having elevated Caesar the way he did, he had lacked foresight. He accustomed himself to the idea as late as possible; he neglected his defence in order not to avow that he had put himself in danger; he maintained to the Senate that Caesar would never dare to make war; and because he had said it so often, he went on saying it always.
—MONTESQUIEU, PLÉIADE EDITION, VOL. 2, P. 127
Apart from the hundred ways that this is better than anything in Gibbon, think of its pedigree. The psychological analysis of powerful men was already there in Thucydides: our Alcibiades is his Alcibiades first and foremost. It was there again in Sallust and Suetonius, and above all in Plutarch: through discovering in North's Plutarch the minds of other great men, Shakespeare discovered his own. If there had been no translation of Plutarch, Shakespeare might have learned the same possibilities from Montaigne alone, because Montaigne was saturated with the absorbed judicial powers of everyone we have so far mentioned, and nothing is more certain about Shakespeare than that he knew Montaigne by heart. Add all these names together, however, and even including Shakespeare you still do not reach a sum of political analysis that touches Montesquieu, of whom it can be said that not even his supreme artistic talent could lead him to a premature conclusion, and that he could find within himself the wellsprings of all human behaviour while yet maintaining a benevolent sanity. Pompey, when he became champion of the people, sacrificed his influence among the aristocrats. Unlike Julius Caesar, he lacked the instinct to hedge a bet. The two men were equally charismatic and equally ruthless, but eventually Caesar took control of the end-game. It could have happened only because Pompey had a psychological weakness. Without denigrating Pompey's intelligence, Montesquieu tells us what the weakness was, and makes the story of a mentality as gripping as a thriller. (The same thrill is what the numberless readers of a book like _The Da Vinci Code_ are really after: they have just chosen arid territory in which to seek it.)
The mind perfectly open is usually vacuous: Montesquieu's is full of linked perceptions, a warehouse of networks in which truths connect with each other seemingly by themselves, because the medium, his prose, is so transparent. But the best way of knowing that psychology is not a science is that Montesquieu was its master, and was such an artist. There is a truth about mentality that Montesquieu would have taught us if Shakespeare hadn't: somewhere behind even the most universal comprehension there must be an individual mind. To take the two of them as a single example: they could not be so like each other if they were not so different. Here is Shakespeare being Montesquieu, in Timon of Athens II: 2. Flavius, for what must be the millionth time, is trying to make the prodigal Timon see prudent sense.
_Ah! When the means are gone that buy this praise_
_The breath is gone whereof this praise is made:_
_Feast-won, fast-lost . . ._
That would be Montesquieu if it did not sound like Shakespeare, and it sounds like Shakespeare not just because it is in verse, but because, in the third line, its otherwise uninterrupted prose argument is momentarily condensed beyond the point where we can go on failing to notice that it is something written in transcendence of the power of speech. Shakespeare, even in prose, has the essence of a poet; and Montesquieu takes his prose always towards the unalterable interior balance of poetry; the extremes touch. The power of generalization is the same, because in each case it is energized by an unsleeping gift for specific psychology. Whether or not Montesquieu was right about Pompey, for example, he was right about you and me. Once we invest our opinion, we hang on to the investment; so the more we have at stake the more we risk, even by doing nothing. And the more powerful we are, the more likely we are to stick to our rusty guns: because it was firmness of purpose that made us powerful.
Montesquieu's Pompey resists being told the obvious, and answers by his behaviour the question why: he is obtuse in the matter because he is Pompey. Montesquieu has traced the blind spot to the centre of the character's vision. Degas developed a fault in his eyesight which eventually meant that he could not see when he looked straight ahead. Pompey has a dead patch in the centre of his moral retinas, and it makes him Pompey. In the same way, Shakespeare gives us the essence of Timon, who can't see that his generosity will destroy him; and of Coriolanus, who can't see that he must either woo the people or else decline to be their tribune. These are big things not to see and it takes big men not to see them.
Or it can take a big villain. In my time—this actually happened while I was alive, although fortunately I was not able to be present at the scene—Josef Stalin refused to believe that Nazi Germany would attack the Soviet Union. There is some doubt about the initial motive for his folly, but the best guess is that it sprang from the madness which placed ideological considerations above all others, even above the ability to maintain a state over which he had spent the best part of his life manoeuvring in order to assume control. Stalin had purged the Red Army of its best generals: deprived it, in fact, of its entire operating elite, and therefore of the ability to fight. If he had engineered the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in order to give himself an opportunity to finish carrying out the purge, that would have been a logical chain of events, even if it started from an unhinged premise. If he thought, however, that there would not be a battle because his army could no longer fight it, there was no logic to his course of action at all. Under scrutiny, the second and stranger thought process seems the more likely, because everything he did next was equally deluded. Stalin staked his by now worldwide reputation for infallibility on his judgement that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact meant what it said, and that Hitler would not attack him while it was still in force. If Hitler had not already proved that a document signed by himself meant nothing to him whatsoever, Stalin's own behaviour—in which no promise had ever outranked expediency—should have warned him that his opponent might repudiate a bargain which both of them had reached in the first place out of nothing but the cynical desire to share the spoils of a ravaged Poland while putting the democracies at a potentially ruinous disadvantage.
Yet Stalin, of all people, put himself in the position of declaring his faith in Hitler, of all people: and Stalin stuck to it even as the dissuasive evidence became overwhelming. By the eve of Operation Barbarossa, the Soviets had been supplied from the West with intelligence that described the German preparations in detail. The Ultra decrypts, fed to Stalin by personal order of Churchill, gave the German order of battle all the way down to the individual units. The Soviet intelligence authorities had long overcome their suspicions of a Western trick. Even without Ultra, they had plenty of evidence from inside German-occupied Poland and from inside Germany itself that an invasion was imminent. High-echelon Soviet intelligence officers continued trying to put the evidence on Stalin's desk even after it became clear that they were risking his wrath, and therefore their lives, by doing so. The spectacle of otherwise impeccably ruthless men ready to commit suicide in order to tell him the truth did nothing to shake Stalin's convictions. Instead, they were confirmed. His orders that the forward troops were to give no signs of being ready to defend themselves—lest the signs provoke the Germans—were not rescinded. They were reissued, up to and beyond the hour of attack. As a result, the invaders rolled forward almost unopposed. The attack was a long way into its first day before the flood of information at last gave Stalin pause for thought. When he paused, he collapsed.
As a measure of how well he had organized his monopoly of power, his disgusted colleagues felt that even in those circumstances they had no favourable opportunity to kill him. To the world's enduring loss, they fed him pabulum on his cot instead of smothering him with a pillow. In consequence, he was given the chance to recover from his nervous breakdown and resume the leadership, with a characteristically unlimited surplus of lies, wasteful violence, stupidity and perversion. Though he had enough sense to kick the propaganda effort screaming into reverse and transform the catastrophe from the Party's blunder into the Great Patriotic War, the illusion that the Communist Party saved the nation was to flourish from an early date. Mainly because of the immense mental investment by Western intellectuals in the Soviet Union's existence, the truth has taken more than half a century fully to emerge, but it was widely known in the Red Army from the first weeks of hostilities. Stalin not only came close to losing the war in its opening stages by his arrogance and ignorance, he found, later on, the most expensive possible way of winning it. From start to finish, there was not a single successful battle that could not have cost a fraction of its casualties: a fact attested to even by the Stalinists among the officer corps who managed to survive not only the war, but the peace. The peace proved almost as dangerous as the war, because finally Stalin had the temerity, once again and with not a tinge of irony or common shame, to purge his own army, which had got above itself by being indispensable to him: the very thing, probably, which had led him to purge it in the first place. From the end of World War II until the present day, it has been a constant source of bilious entertainment to hear desk-bound Western intellectuals, all of whom know even less about strategy than I do, praise Stalin as some kind of military genius: an opinion exactly coinciding with his own, and just as utterly divorced from reality. It ought not to matter, but there were too many good Russian soldiers who found out the hard way that the German army was only the start of their troubles. Their souls cry out from the snow, the minefields where they were used as human detonators, and above all from the prisoner-of-war pens, where, given up by the hundred thousand to please the will of a ruler for whom they mattered less than dirt, they were starved to death by another maniac who achieved the difficult feat of caring for them even less. I still can't believe that these obscenities happened in my time, and that during the Anzac Day march through Sydney in 1946 I was actually wearing a forage cap with a badge on it celebrating Stalin's heroism and genius. Now sixty years have gone by and my heart is with the young Russian soldier who starved to death in one of the prisoner-of-war compounds. I don't know his name, and by the time hunger and the weather had finished with him not even his mother would have known it. The words of the Persian general at Salamis are still with me: "Where are the names of those who perished?" Stalin, of coure, had a very good memory for names on death warrants: we ought to grant him that. But of the broad judgement and the detailed knowledge that it took to run military operations, Stalin had not a trace: not a scintilla, not a smidgin. Any historian who contends otherwise is simply incapable of giving up an illusion, for fear of the exertion that might be brought by reappraisal. What kind of history is that? Alas, it is scarcely even therapy.
A similar obstinacy to Stalin's was shown by Hitler, although Hitler had a better excuse. In his early campaigns, Hitler really did seem to know more than his generals. But it was mainly because he had a better estimation than they did of the state of mind prevailing in the opposing armies. When, in the second phase of the war, the opposing armies were better prepared to resist, Hitler's inflated conviction that his own general staff didn't know what they were talking about proved fatal. (The best argument for the general staff's being even more at fault than Hitler is provided by Alan Clarke's _Barbarossa_ , a book which should not be belittled merely because its young author later grew rather too doe-eyed at the Führer's memory.) Though all the surviving generals pretended after the war that they had tried to dissuade him from his folly—the smart ones, spotting the danger of seeming to hanker after a more successful Nazi Germany, pretended that they had tried to dissuade him from war altogether—there were in fact few at the time who dared to say a word. Rundstedt and Guderian were both sidelined for telling him that his "no retreat" policy did nothing but rob the armoured formations of their mobility and ensure defeat. Manstein, the most able soldier of the lot but also the best psychologist, rarely raised his voice because he knew that Hitler would pay it no heed. In his book _Verlorene Siege_ —Lost Victories, and thank God they were—Manstein says a great deal about how frank he was with Hitler. Even though the success of his fighting withdrawal prolonged the war, we ought to give Manstein credit for getting his way in the matter of the retreat from the Caucasus. But the officers who approached him in hopes that he might join a coup were all informed that what he had to offer Hitler was loyalty, not opposition. How Hitler had earned such loyalty remains in question, but bribery might have had something to do with it. Certainly it had nothing to do with Hitler's military understanding, which Manstein found out the hard way was a bigger threat than the enemy. (It was while Hitler was visiting Manstein's forward headquarters that the Russians, by refraining from an air attack, offered tacit evidence of their opinion that Hitler's continuing in supreme command would serve their interests.) Hitler proved incapable of listening to advice, even to the advice that might have saved his reputation from disaster. Insanity won't do for a reason: he was already insane while winning his victories, but he could listen then. The most likely explanation seems to be the one Montesquieu discovered for Pompey. Because he had said it so often, he went on saying it always.
There can be a stubborn investment even in cruelty: Daniel Goldhagen, in his unfortunately famous book _Hitler's Willing Executioners_ , is too much startled by the not very amazing fact that the Nazi concentration camp guards went on maltreating their victims even when the game was up. They had always done so: to stop voluntarily would have meant admitting that it had all been useless. The most spectacular example of blind stubbornness in the World War II period was the behaviour of the Japanese officers in high command who not only wanted to go on fighting after the war was clearly lost, but actually seemed to believe that some kind of victory could still be won. Or it should have been the most spectacular example, but the palm belongs to Stalin. By a quirk of personality, being right about military matters was so important to him that he added millions of innocent lives to the total his political vision had already cost his unfortunate nation. For his ideological crimes there might have been some justification: certainly foreign observers as intelligent as Jean-Paul Sartre thought so. But for Stalin's pig-headedness in the face of towering evidence that he had made a mistake there was no justification at all. The consistent irrationality of his behaviour from the eve of the war to its end is well recorded by Dmitri Volkogonov in his indispensable biography of his father's murderer. What concerns us here, however, is its normality: the pre-emptive, silent tantrum that we call a refusal to listen, and the disabling consequences of realizing that we ought to have done so. Montesquieu transfixes the issue with that single word, honte. It is the shame of the child who has been caught out. Though Montesquieu understood all evils, it was not because he could trace them to suppressed propensities for evil in his own nature. He was too good for that. It was because he could trace them to memories of childhood: those memories which reading helps us to outgrow, but not to forget. Not even the uproar in the nursery, however, could make Montesquieu despair of human nature. He said he had a better opinion about himself when he read Marcus Aurelius, because Marcus Aurelius gave him a better opinion about people. One feels the same about him.
ALAN MOOREHEAD
Alan Moorehead (1910–1983) was among the most prominent of Australian cultural exports after World War II, when his books of non-fiction such as _The Blue Nile_ attracted a wide following in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as in his home country. His rise to international fame had begun during the war itself. He was one of several Australian war correspondents who took the opportunity to employ, on a wider stage, the journalistic proficiency they had developed after several years of hard slog in the newsrooms of Sydney and Melbourne, along with the fluent, easily correct prose that they had learned to write in the Australian school system. Moorehead was there for the battles and the conferences through North Africa, Italy and Normandy all the way to the end. The hefty but unputdownable _African Trilogy_ , still in print today, is perhaps the best example of Moorehead's characteristic virtue as a war correspondent: he could widen the local story to include its global implications. By extension he later did the same for his home country: resident in Italy, he inaugurated the era of expatriate Australian writers which continues into our day. There were Australian musicians and theatrical figures who lived abroad before the war, and in recent times Australian artists in every field have colonized the world, but the post-war waves of expatriate Australian writers would have been less confident about their adventurous enterprise without Moorehead's pioneering example of the confident interloper who showed how it could be a positive advantage to come from somewhere else. No writer did more than Moorehead to put Australia into the world picture as the most striking example of the old empire's having produced, in its disintegration, vital new centres of creativity. When Moorehead was starting off, most Australian artists in any field thought of Britain as "home," the infinitely richer mother-culture whose approval would validate them. Today the position is reversed: the British would like to know Australia's secret. This demonstration of how colonialism can turn back on itself was well understood in advance by Moorehead, who set up his post-war European camp in the full knowledge that it was an advance post for Australia's forthcoming cultural expansion, although not even he could guess how successful the expansion would be.
A startling amount of the productivity was his. Of his many books written in his self-imposed exile, _No Room in the Ark_ , a charming tribute to the African wild animals, is a good example of his knack for getting there at the right moment and spotting the trends: in the Africa from which the old empires were at last retreating, the animals had become a resource, and the resource was threatened by mismanagement. Typically, he had spotted a theme which would be important in the world's immediate future. The final effect of Moorehead's accumulated work, so much of which stays as fresh as when it was written, is to convince you that to be born and raised in a prosperous liberal democracy not only confers the energy to see the world as it is, but the obligation to make sense of it, on behalf of all those deprived of the opportunity.
Outside, the street vendors came by, and the cries of the Cairo street vendors are just what you would expect them to be—entertaining and romantic in the evening and merely damnable in the early morning when you are trying to work. There was one man who brought such nameless pain and misery into voice that I was forced to the open window to listen. He was selling bath mats.
—ALAN MOOREHEAD, _A FRICAN TRILOGY_, P. 189
BEFORE THE LATE 1930s there had been individual Australians who had sailed away to make a world impact both in the high and the popular arts—Nellie Melba, Robert Helpmann, Errol Flynn—but with the opening of World War II it started to happen in waves, and the first wave consisted of the war correspondents. Of those, the most dazzling was Alan Moorehead. Counting as Australia's first really conspicuous gift to international English prose, Alan Moorehead achieved the peak of his fame after the war, with his two best-selling books about nineteenth-century African exploration, _The White Nile_ and _The Blue Nile_. But he was building on a solid reputation laid down during the war itself, when he was writing at his best. Though the Nile books have their merits, I have always found them shapeless, just as their author, I suspect, found the explorations indeterminate: nothing much was decided, argument was endless, and narrative was defeated. Moorehead retraced the steps of the explorers but all the paths were overgrown and didn't tell him enough about what things had once been like. The _African Trilogy_ , on the other hand, has a neatly monumental story to be told in the present tense. From being down and almost out, the Allied forces in North Africa came back against the Italians and Germans, brought them to battle, and defeated them. Moorehead was there to see it all. In this latter respect he had a big advantage over another star Australian war correspondent, Kenneth Slessor, who had made the hideous mistake of allowing his demanding wife to encumber him with her presence during the biggest assignment of his life as a journalist. While the battle of El Alamein was being fought, Slessor's wife required his presence in Jerusalem to help her go shopping. The most important Australian poet of his generation, Slessor had linguistic gifts outranking even Moorehead's, but there was no substitute for being there: Slessor wrote the best poem about the North African campaign, "Beach Burial," but he wrote it after the event.
Moorehead was almost always there for the event. Travelling light, he had nothing except the official censorship to interfere with the flow of his prose as it went back to Fleet Street in the form of dispatches. His copy was world-famous at the time and has stayed good: it represents the best title to the encomia that the late-twentieth-century Australian prose writers, with Robert Hughes in the van, have lavished on him ever since. They are quite right. Moorehead could control his tone even when the circumstances were at their most intense: the hardest thing for a correspondent to do. To take the most obvious comparison, he was a far better reporter on combat than his friend Ernest Hemingway, whose cadences he sometimes borrowed, and always to his detriment. But he never made the mistake of borrowing Hemingway's self-importance. Hemingway always wrote as if the action revolved around him. Moorehead wrote as if he had just happened to wander into it: the common experience of the war. Paradoxically, he sometimes had to feign this knack for happenstance. His _sortable_ qualities of charm, good looks and cultivation gave him the entrée everywhere. (Then as later, the simplest classical tag from an Australian would stop the show with an English upper-crust audience, and Moorehead could quote from Theocritus and Horace until the officers' mess was drunk dry.) On top of the parlour tricks he was a terrific fixer, showing the Australian lurk-man's perennial talent for hitching a ride into the forbidden zone.
For reporting a modern war, Moorehead's only but irritating drawback was a lack of sympathy with machinery. Even about weapons he had a nose for the big picture—he was able to tell Beaverbrook personally that when the Allied tanks came up against the German ones after D-day, the Allied tanks would be outclassed—but when it got down to nuts and bolts, a shape in metal did little for his senses. He was the sort of writer who said "microphone" when he meant "loudspeaker." Another Australian, Paul Brickhill, aiming unerringly at an empire-wide audience of bright schoolboys, wrote a series of hit books ( _The Great Escape, The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky_ ) that inadvertently showed up the extent to which Moorehead had failed to penetrate the mentality of all the young men who had been propelled by the war into a new, classless world of high technology. (It was to be of high social significance that there were few English-born popular authors capable of duplicating Brickhill's achievement either: but what matters here is that Moorehead didn't.) To that extent, Moorehead was stuck in the mud. His renowned social mobility was employed mainly among the upper classes. There was another story emerging from the machine shops, but he missed it. (In the next generation of Australian social historians, a sympathy with technology and industry would put Geoffrey Blainey in the forefront: but his emphasis was regarded, and regarded correctly, as an initiative without precedent.) Though Moorehead had marvellous powers of evocative description— _vide_ the passage about the anthills in chapter 5 of _Rum Jungle_ —they just weren't aroused by anything technical, which meant that a whole dimension of tone was missing from his reportage, because World War II was a technical war.
The dimensions that were present made up for it. For a world war, he had a world mind. He understood the global interconnections of the battle zones from the start. He had a fully European intelligence as only a colonial can have: a cosmopolitan view that enabled him to assess the European tragedy without lapsing into chauvinism. Few Australian intellectuals, then or later, could match his capacity to see that Australia, far from frittering away its military resources, was making a necessary contribution to its own defence by throwing its efforts into the battles in the Middle East. In recent years, as the revisionist interpretations of Australia's connection with Britain reached an apotheosis of myth-mongering in the seductive theory of Other People's Wars, a position like Moorehead's became hard to understand. Now that the tide of politically inspired fable is receding, his view should look coherent again, and even more intelligible, because it outlined a recalcitrant set of facts, and if the facts had not been so awkward, the urge to deny them might never have arisen. Moorehead was one of the first Australian intellectuals able to overcome their cleverness and see what their much-patronized politicians saw: that there was no question of a world war leaving Australia out. A nose for grand strategy put him miles ahead of any other Australian reporter on the beat. (A possible precursor was indeed antipodean, but from New Zealand: the cartoonist David Low, although he, we should remember, was spectacularly wrong about the war before it actually started.) Moorehead's own country was not the only one to reap the benefit of his fair-mindedness, but a compatriot can be forgiven for attending first to what he said about the Australian troops. He reported faithfully and truly that in the long, hard preliminary slog to Benghazi they were crucial in reducing the Italian army from a fighting force to a liability. Moorehead blinked no details of the fiasco on Crete. Naturally if there had been less censorship he would have been able to be scathing about the blunders, but he left room between the lines for his bitterness to show. He was firm, however, on the critical point: the Australians had participated in an action which, though it failed, played a vital role in delaying Operation Barbarossa, and thus influencing the war in Russia. Seeing how the defeats fitted into the victories, he never made the intellectual's characteristic error of searching through a jigsaw as if it had a key piece. With _War and Peace_ as a knapsack book, he was able to complement Tolstoy's key insight—everything depends on morale—with an insight of his own: morale depends on everything.
At this range it might be hard to imagine how important it was to be a good writer stating such complex and vital truths. In World War I, with Keith Murdoch's fanciful press campaign placing such disproportionate emphasis on the Dardanelles, there was no comparably imaginative prose available to stress what the Australians achieved on the western front. To this day, few Australians, even when they are students of modern history—alas, especially when—have any idea that their countrymen played a significant role in the final breaking of the deadlock in the trenches at the end of World War I. (Philip Knightley has been almost the only popular historian to mention the matter.) Thanks to Moorehead, however, the importance of the 9th Division at Tobruk in World War II is not as easily overlooked. Without the Australians and New Zealanders, the Germans might have prevailed in the desert, and thus been far more free to act decisively in Russia. Only for Hitler was North Africa a sideshow. Rommel knew better. So, to his lasting credit, did Moorehead. He could see how each part of the war affected every other part—the hardest aspect of a world war for a writer to deal with, since writers are so likely to get lost in particulars. In a war, however, the particulars resonate across the world, and the penalty for not being able to follow them is to miss the picture.
Later on, when the centre of attention switched to the European mainland, Moorehead was careful not to let his cat burglar's gift for access affect his broader judgement. After the war another Australian expatriate, Chester Wilmot, capped a brilliant success as a BBC war reporter by emerging as a literary heavyweight in many ways comparable in stature and ability to Moorehead. Wilmot, in his best-selling book _The Struggle for Europe_ , gave a partisan view favouring Montgomery's thesis that he could have thrust straight through to Berlin if Eisenhower had not stopped him. Wilmot had allowed Montgomery to bowl him over. Moorehead did not. Moorehead had befriended Montgomery in Sicily, had secured unequalled access to his headquarters in Normandy, and was eventually given the green light to write a biography. Montgomery kept back some of the most explosive stuff, including his diaries, but on the whole he gave Moorehead the inside track. It would have been easy for Moorehead to overdo the gratitude. In retrospect, he might seem to have done so: he swallowed Montgomery's preposterous line that the delay in pushing on beyond Caen was deliberate, and wrote almost nothing about Arnhem's magnitude as an unnecessary disaster. But for the time, Moorehead's 1946 _Montgomery_ was a probing book, and remains a well-balanced one. Moorehead proved himself capable of spotting the fatal flaw in Montgomery's technique at his wartime press conferences: Montgomery patronized the correspondents by forever trying to pre-empt their job of turning technicalities into simplicities. Over and above the question of Montgomery's merits and deficiencies, Moorehead was well able to see—as Wilmot calamitously didn't—that Eisenhower was Montgomery's superior in character and judgement. Finally, Moorehead was not seduced by the cosy glamour of the nearness that had been granted to him. He was too successful a seducer himself.
When dealing with stars, it helps to be a star. All the Australian war correspondents were gifted operators, but Moorehead had that invaluable extra attribute of being at his ease in a grand headquarters. High plaster ceilings and marble floors did not overawe him. He was one of those colonials who, through being hard to place, can place themselves anywhere as long as they are given a few minutes to dust their shoes and straighten their ties. In Cairo he was given letters from Auchinleck and asked to deliver them to Wavell in Delhi. In Delhi he had a long close-up of the brilliance of Sir Stafford Cripps—whom he might have overestimated, if Denis Healey was right in calling Cripps "a political ninny of the most superior quality" ( _The Time of My Life_ , p. 471). Moorehead also recorded an unsettling insight into the intransigence of Gandhi. Challenged about the possible effects of relying on passive resistance to dissuade the Japanese, Gandhi was forced into his fallback position of averring that not even the Japanese could kill every Indian. Moorehead, who already had some idea of what Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union added up to in terms of population control, clearly had his own opinions. At such points, the _African Trilogy_ is not just about World War II, but about twentieth-century history in its grim totality. But rather than claim too much for a book that already holds more than we have a right to expect—it was, after all, written on the spot, and often on the run—the reader probably does best just to enjoy the neatness of detail and the refreshing flow of common sense, the clear water supply of sound judgement from a young man who had realized, without having his head turned, that the world's crisis was his opportunity. The sense of destiny is in the dignified vigour of his prose, not in the magnitude of events. In that respect, he was the harbinger of the Australian voice that the world has since come to know, value and envy: the voice of common eloquence, speaking the way the Man from Snowy River used to ride. Unaffectedly confident, content to evoke without straining for effect, Moorehead described "the wonderful turquoise sea at Alamein, when the sunlight strikes the white seabed and is reflected back to the surface so that the water is full of dancing light and colour." Thus having established that he knew how to say just enough, he had the authority of tone to say what was profoundly and lastingly true about the Australian 9th Division that came into the Alamein line after two years of fighting.
"Tobruk had discovered the Australians to themselves." It was a piercing historical insight, which I had the privilege of echoing with a whole heart while reporting the Sydney Olympics more than fifty years later; and I was well aware whose voice I was copying. One way or another, all the expatriate writers in my generation have found themselves paying their tribute to a majestic progenitor. He could have handled success better. He should never have allowed _The New Yorker_ to cripple him with the notoriously arrhythmic restrictions of its house style, but he had a Mediterranean house to keep up, and money talked. His first book about a world war, however, was the start of something for the country he left behind. In a few pages, Moorehead placed himself at the centre of the discussion about Australia's relations with England—such as they had been, and such as they would be in the future. Proponents of an Australian republic have a good case, but it will remain incomplete until they take in what Moorehead wrote. It was surprising to find that Robert Hughes, so convinced and convincing an admirer of Moorehead's, should have forgotten what his mentor said on the subject. He said what good writers always say: that history is the field to which you must first submit if you would turn it to use.
PAUL MURATOV
Paul Pavlovich Muratov (1881–1950) shows just how brilliant somebody can be and still be a forgotten man. Essayist, critic, novelist and playwright, he was also the most learned, original and stylistically gifted Russian art historian of his time, and he wrote at least one book well equipped to last beyond his time and ours as well; but today it is as if he had never existed. What went missing wasn't him, but the Russia he grew up in. As with Diaghilev, he had all the artistic wealth and burgeoning energy of pre-revolutionary Russia as a context, but unlike Diaghilev he had no means of taking the spiritual substance of his context with him when it was time to run. In 1914 Muratov edited the magazine _Sophia_ , promoting his ideal of a perennial classicism. He had already written a travel book meant to embody that idea: _Obrazy italii_ , a title which is usually translated as The Images of Italy, although The Forms of Italy might be a better way of putting it, because he talks about much more than just paintings, taking in sculpture, buildings, gardens and the layout of cities. (We have a certain latitude in translating the title because the book itself has never been rendered into English.) The Revolution in 1917 was a powerful hint that the idea of a perennial classicism had a shaky basis in reality. The hint soon became a storm. After 1918, Muratov was associated with the only bookshop in Moscow which remained unregulated by the state. Called the Writers' Library, it was a wonderland of a market in which the bibliographical treasures of Tsarist Russia were exchanged for grain, clothes and firewood. (Readers of Italian can find the story on pages 4 and 5 of Muratov's Google entry, where Michael Osorgin, with the help of Claudia Zonghetti's suitably elegant translation, tells the almost unbearable story of the writers and the scholars shaking from cold and hunger as they traffic in their doomed treasures.) Banished in 1922, Muratov went on the road, deprived for the rest of his life of any scholarly resources except his memory. In the 1920s he was in Berlin, as a valued member of the vibrant émigré community evoked by Nina Berberova in _The Italics Are Mine_ , the best single book written about Russian culture in exile. Berberova played chess with him, and always remembered him as "a whole and accomplished European": large praise from her, who was so conspicuously that very thing herself. (Berberova said a beautiful thing about Muratov. "He was always in love in a balanced and quiet way." She also said that he was "a man of inward order who understood the internal disorder of others.") At some point, along with several other books, Muratov managed to publish _Obrazy italii_ in the definitive edition mentioned below. In the 1930s he was in Paris, where he acquired a reputation among left-wing intellectuals as an anti-Bolshevik—a very plausible development. During the war he was in Ireland, pursuing an incongruous new career as a military journalist: he wrote an account of the Russia campaigns for Penguin, thereby telling the almost laughably ironic story of how the Nazis were defeated by the same forces that had earlier ruined his life. As far as I can piece his story together, Ireland was his last stop. I could have left him out of this book and nobody would have noticed. The history of humanism in the twentieth century has managed to bury _Obrazy italii_ , and nobody cares. Our idea that if a book is good enough it can never disappear is thereby proved false, because _Obrazy italii_ is one of the most dazzling books of its type ever written. Can something so wonderful be allowed to vanish? Muratov himself was probably reconciled to the possibility. In that tragic bookshop called the Writers' Library he had seen a whole culture breaking up, like a stricken submarine in the abyss. So he had no illusions. But he didn't give in, and his subsequent career as a wandering scholar proved that there can be such a thing as a heroism of the mind.
Del Sarto's golden arms don't make us forget for a moment his everlasting internal mediocrity, just as Wölfflinn, by laying bare with such clarity the laws of "classic art" in del Sarto's composition, tries vainly to discover in it for us one of the heroes of the High Renaissance.
—PAUL MURATOV, _O BRAZY ITALII_, VOL. 1, P. 277
CAN A GREAT book vanish? The fate of Paul Maratov's _Obrazy italii_ (which I prefer to translate as _The Forms of Italy_ , exercising my prerogative as one of the few people alive who have ever picked up a copy of it) suggests that it can. The book is seldom mentioned now, and the name of its author does not crop up often even in histories of the Russian emigration after 1917. (From all the Russian departments of all the universities in the world, the Web reveals a grand total of three scholars, one French and two Italian, who are on his case.) For a long time, when I began to read in that field, I never knew Muratov had been there. Looking back on it, however, I am glad to have discovered Muratov comparatively late in my life. His taste was too sure, and his view too wide, to have been much use to me earlier. It was his bad luck, and indeed the whole of modern history's, that one of the most accomplished of all writers on art remained almost unknown to the international reading public: but it was my good luck, because when I found him I was ready, and his masterwork _Obrazy italii_ hit me like a long and beautiful poem. Ostensibly, the work is a three-volume prose treatise, published in the original Russian by the Leipzig émigré publishing house Z.J. Grschebin-Verlag in 1924. But for the mature student armed with patience and a sufficiently large Russian-English dictionary, Muratov's first few paragraphs have a surprise in store. Cool as equations, they are as rich as lyrics, and when it transpires that there are thousands more of them to come, the enthralled reader finds it hard to believe his good fortune.
There are many unknown masterpieces in the world, but they usually get that way because they were never very good. The Forms of Italy is a genuine unknown masterpiece. As a book on the Italian Grand Tour it not only stands directly in the tradition of Goethe, Gregorovius, Burckhardt and Arthur Symons, but it is better than any of them. (Better than Goethe? Yes, better than Goethe.) Muratov went to all the towns and cities, knew everything about the art and literature, had unfaltering judgement, and packed the whole complex mental and physical experience into tight, clear paragraphs saturated with meaning and sensitivity. The book is just too good to be true, and until somebody translates it into appropriately neat English the enthusiast will always run the risk of being thought to have made it up. It exists, though. I own two sets, and one of them is in front of me now. The three volumes are tiny, in a unique format which was probably specified by the author himself: shorter and squarer than crown octavo, bound in faded red linen, they slot into a maroon paper-covered cardboard box. There are black-and-white photogravure illustrations of some of the more famous paintings, frescoes, fountains and buildings, but mainly all you can see as you flick through is creamy white little square after creamy white little square of tightly packed black Cyrillic letters to a grand total of about a thousand pages of text. The magic is in the writing, and magic it really is; not flowery, but lavishly fruitful; sense and sensibility in their most condensed yet fluent congruity of form. It would be almost a relief if his judgement had sometimes lapsed. An ephemeral element might have been a comfort. But uncannily, indeed hauntingly, he spoke with an authoritative timbre that seemed to come from the future rather than the past, as if his testament, published in exile, was the harbinger of a time when the devastation of modern history would be put into reverse.
When I was first in Florence in the 1960s I swallowed Heinrich Wölfflinn's line on Andrea del Sarto hook, line and sinker. The Phaidon edition of Wölfflinn's _Classic Art_ was with me as a handbook when I toured the churches, cloisters and galleries. It enshrined his proto-structuralist thesis that the artists of the Cinquecento had been engaged in a quasi-architectural approach to composition in the form of a steadily more compact pyramid, with the logical development—a Leonardo cartoon was here adduced—that several members of the Holy Family should end up sitting on each other. Andrea del Sarto, according to Wölfflinn, brought this monumental formal trope to a _ne plus ultra_ climax. After him, the aberration of Mannerism began, with Pontormo as a particularly flagrant example of incipient monumentality sabotaged by neurasthenia. With the aid of Wölfflinn's treatise I became a scolding bore on the subject of the Cinquecento. On the Quattrocento, less hindered by academic assistance, I was capable of the odd independent judgement—I could see that any developmental theory that denied a high place to Paolo Uccello must have something wrong with it—but when it came to the High Renaissance I had a seeing-eye dogma, and the snorting beast was provided by Wölfflinn. Pontormo was right there in front of me (I was lodging only a few blocks from Santa Felicità and could see one of his supreme achievements every day just by stepping through the front door) but I had managed to convince myself, by repeated shouting over too many beakers of cheap chianti, that del Sarto was the last true exemplar of the titanic impulse. I doubt if even Muratov could have impinged on an obtuseness so well ingrained: unless, of course, he had got there first. But his book lay far in my future: far enough, luckily, to give me the remorseful but acute satisfaction of having expanded my view before his opinion had the chance to endorse it.
Over the years I came to appreciate Pontormo and Bronzino without benefit of clergy. The impact was all the sweeter when I found Muratov echoing my enthusiasm about the young Pontormo's fresco cycle in the Medici villa called Poggio a Caiano. He called the fresco cycle "one of the most surprising and beautiful productions of Italian art." The key word is "surprising." In a serenely dazzling ten-page stretch of prose, Muratov responds with a whole heart and mind to the _unexpectedness_ of Pontormo; to the way a youthfully fulfilled and tirelessly original career like his just shouldn't have been there at that point in time; to the unanticipated refreshment, through one prodigiously gifted young man, of a tradition already buried by success. Muratov also seemed to take Bronzino at the same estimation I did, as a hard-edged paradigm of iconic excellence with an unplanned but inescapable literary application, someone who painted in a way one would like to write, presenting the clean-cut relief of a cameo no matter how large the canvas, his unoccupied planes of colour as precisely calculated as his embroidered detail: a unique combination of the broad brush and the engraving tool.
But the true revelation of Muratov's book was how his high standard of aesthetic judgement extended into the society and politics of the artistic context. He wasn't the first writer who had treated Italian cultural history in this way, but nobody, not even Gregorovius or the mighty Burckhardt, had come near Muratov's ability to compress an encyclopaedic erudition into a dramatic prose narrative. The consideration did not escape me that this was what Marxist cultural analysis ought to have looked like but conspicuously didn't, even when it came from the pen of Walter Benjamin. (What did escape me was that Diaghilev's writings on art, at the turn of the century, had already established the cultural parameters within which Muratov later wrote: that not even Muratov, in other words, had sprung full-blown from the head of Zeus. In culture there is never an innovation that does not spring from a tradition, because the interweaving of innovation and tradition is what culture is.)
How could, how can, such a prodigy of a book go missing? Egon Friedell's _Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit_ , a comparable effort in a field where few comparisons are possible, was threatened with death but proved impossible to kill. Unlike its author, it was invulnerable. Too many refugees took a copy with them in their baggage. Friedell's lifetime testament was surrounded with affection and protected on its journey. Muratov's equivalent achievement was forgotten. The Russians in exile, except to the limited extent that they, too, were a Jewish émigré community, did not provide a framework in which the book might be remembered. Nor did Russian émigrés of a conservative background, or even a merely liberal one, necessarily find favour among the Western intelligentsia, which for the next fifty years devoted enormous resources of inattention to helping ensure that the Soviet Union's official trivialization of the bourgeois heritage would be carried by default. There was no émigré publishing house of Russian provenance that could equal the success of Phaidon or Abrams in translating itself into English while still preserving the core achievement of its origins. It might have helped if Muratov had gone to America, like, say, Ernst Kantorowicz, the fabulously erudite author of a book about Frederick II that achieved the piquant distinction of finding favour with Mussolini, Hitler and Goering. But as a student of current events Muratov was last heard of in Ireland during the war, writing and editing the Penguin volume on the Russia campaigns. No American university ever put money and effort into codifying his reputation and achievement with an appropriate archive. The Phaidon archive, alone, would be sufficient to ensure the continued existence of Friedell's key works: but I wonder if there is a proper shelf of Muratov's books anywhere in the world. As well as my two separate sets of _Obrazy italii_ , bought in London and Buenos Aires, I own his _Fra Angelico_ , translated from French into English in 1928: since all the plates were monochrome, it nowadays rates as junk even in those doomed second-hand bookshops that have mainly scrap for stock. During the late twenties and early thirties, he brought out several books in French: I have his book on Russian icons, _Trente-cinq Primitifs russes_ , published in Paris in 1931. There was at least one other book in Russian, a little pamphlet on Cézanne. (It was published in Berlin in 1923, perhaps as a rehearsal for _Obrazy italii_ : I bought my copy in Oxford, and it already looked as if it had been chewed at the corners by two different sizes of rat.) His Penguin on the World War II battles in Russia is on the shelf too, and I suppose it gives his career an unlooked-for illumination, such as Max Friedländer, say, might have provided for himself if he had spent the last year of his life writing a treatise about ice hockey. But looking at my undocumented grab bag of Muratovian scraps, I can't help wondering how to make sense of it all.
The point is that I shouldn't have to do the wondering. It ought to be a task for scholarship. The thing I _really_ wonder about is what the Russian departments of the British universities have been doing with their time. Unlike their American equivalents they haven't got much money, but even now, as the Cold War demand for interpreters has shrunk, they have had the benefit of dozens of Ph.D. students all requiring to be given suitable subjects. Surely the scholars and creative artists who were lost to the terror and disenfranchised by the emigration constitute a reservoir of potential theses that might have actually contributed to knowledge instead of just furthering careers. On the walls of my library are three Suprematist paintings by Nina Kogan, who taught on the faculty of Malevich's Unovis art collective in Vitebsk from 1920 through into 1922, at the very time when Muratov, in the Writers' Library in Moscow, was engaged in the melancholy task of measuring out the country's literary heritage by its weight in black bread. Though Malevich at that time was keen on the idea that the work of his colleagues should all look the same, Kogan's looked different: she used the standard Suprematist kit of squares, oblongs and floating bits and pieces, but she gave them a pastel lightness hinting at the airborne boudoir of a futuristic angel. She stood out, even though Unovis was an outfit dedicated, in all lack of irony, to the precept that the artist's individual personality should vanish. No Unovis artist at the time, of course, had any conception that the state would eventually take steps to guarantee just such a result. By late 1922, however, the official cultural organs were making it clear that the opinion of the artists would not necessarily be heard first in the question of which direction the arts might take. (It was about this time that Muratov was lucky enough to be expelled from the country.) A woman of integrity surrounded by men with the souls of gangsters, Kogan stayed on in Russia, sincerely believing that she had a duty to her country's future. Her faith was rewarded with the inevitable persecution and eventually, most likely during the siege of Leningrad, she disappeared into the whirlwind. In my wishful thinking, she starved to death along with all the poor souls who weren't awarded the survival ration: but there was a purge on as well as a siege, and it is more likely that the hoodlums got her. The final judge of the relevance of her airily lyrical art to the monolithic purposes of the state was probably an NKVD slave driver in Siberia. There is one slim monograph about her, published in Zurich in 1985 to accompany a retrospective exhibition. The booklet was given to me by the proprietor of the Paris boutique Petroushka, where, over the course of years, I bought several of her strangely lovely little pictures. "Nina Ossipowna Kogan" says the title page. "1887 Vitebsk–1942(?)" In that bracketed question mark lies the tragedy. _Sunt lacrimae rerum_ , and the tears are a frozen lake with no clear shore: no wonder they get into everything. But at least, for Kogan, there is a booklet. Where is there anything about Muratov?
In one of his more charming fits of silliness, William Saroyan once said of George Bernard Shaw, "I am that man by another name." I am not sure if I am Paul Muratov by another name: he knew much more than I do, and to the extent that I can construe his Russian fast enough to catch its rhythm, I have a dreadful suspicion that he wrote better as well. But I am very sure that I am that man with another fate. When I leaf through the tiny volumes of his magisterial book, I see the love of art rewarded by the distortion of a life, and the quietly desperate affirmation of creativity in the face of unrestrained destruction. I would like to think that I had the same passion, but except from hearsay I know little about the same destiny: not even enough, perhaps, to be sufficiently glad that I know no more. To die guessing that you will be forgotten is one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?
N
Lewis Namier
LEWIS NAMIER
During what he called the Nazi era, and in its thoughtful aftermath, Lewis Namier (1888–1960) was a figure of immense prestige in British academic and intellectual life, to the point that many of his fellow historians were able to call their country civilized simply because it had given him refuge: they didn't have to like him. Of Russian heritage, born Lewis Bernstein in Poland, he was a Jewish refugee in search of a homeland. To his adopted country, Britain, he devoted microscopic attention. The mark of his historical method was to study the written records of Britain's representative institutions right down to the level of the names on the electoral lists, an approach which yielded a body of meticulous factual material that tended to overwhelm the conclusions he drew from it, thus making his major books hard to enjoy now. His journalism, on the other hand, was, and remains, a model for acerbic style and pointed argument. Namier's knighthood makes him sound like an etablishment figure, but his professorship at Manchester between 1931 and 1953 tells the truth about how the Oxbridge mandarinate preferred to keep him at a distance. In their own defence, they could say that his frustrations stimulated his productivity: a classic argument of the genteel anti-Semite. A better defence was that another Jewish academic, Isaiah Berlin, scaled the heights of both the intellectual world and polite society. The truth of the matter probably lies there. Namier simply lacked charm. But he could write Engish prose with an austere beauty that leaves Berlin's sounding verbose. The influx of talented Jewish refugees was one of Europe's most precious gifts to Britain in the twentieth century, but Namier's career, which dramatized the story in almost all its aspects, reminds us not to be sentimental about it. A gain for the liberal democracies was a dead loss for the countries left behind. Poland's twentieth-century tragedy was already there in Namier's rise to success in his new homeland, and if he had possessed a light touch to ease his course, the disaster would only have been more evident.
Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.
—LEWIS NAMIER, _C ROSSROADS OF POWER_
COMING TO ENGLISH as a second language, there were twentieth-century political refugees who wrote it with mastery: Joseph Conrad could do almost anything with his adopted tongue that any native writer of discursive prose had ever done before. There were even those who wrote it with primal, poetic genius, as if they had been born and grown up bathed in the richness of its etymology and idiomatic nuance. Vladimir Nabokov is the first example that springs to mind, and the last to be eliminated from discussion, because there will always be equivocal admirers who think that the beauty of what he could achieve with English was the real reason he could never tear himself way from the mirror.
But the exiled European writer who really got the measure of English, with the least show and the most impact, was Lewis Namier. Early to the field, he arrived in England in 1906 as a refugee from the pogroms in Poland. His stylistic achievement has never been much remarked because he was not thought of as a writer. He was thought of as an historian—which, of course, he was, and a renowned one. He would have been a less renowned historian, however, if he had not written so well: as with all truly accomplished prose styles, his was a vehicle for emotion and experience as well as for a sense of rhythm and proportion—the griefs and hard-won knowledge of a lifetime are dissolved into his acerbic cadences, and his neatness of metaphor epitomizes the gaze long grown weary but which misses nothing. His prose had hooded eyelids, but they were never quite closed. You can see his alertness in the single sentence quoted above. For primitive, improvised instruments, "wooden plough" is already good. For an isolated, not very well rewarded endeavour, "lonely furrows" is a pretty development; and "most successfully when we strike sand" is a poetic climax that drives a prose argument deep into the memory. The line of thought is a trek into pessimism: he is really saying that the historian's research tools work only when the work they do is not worth doing. But by the distinction of his style he exempts himself from the stricture, and by implication he exempts anyone else who can see the problem—and if it is put as clearly as this, who can't? So there is a game being played here, for high stakes. Hence the drama.
Namier was always dramatic, although in some of his central work he tried his best not to be. With his capital piece of original research _The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III_ he piled up impeccable credentials. The book was a hard grind to write and proved it by being a hard grind to read: like the tireless counting of heads that Ronald Syme brought to the study of ancient Rome, Namier's archival burrowings left no doubt that he was serious. But even here, with the air full of dry dust, he was establishing a dramatic principle: he was talking about the individual people who made up a class. He was doing the exact opposite of what the Marxists did, which was to talk about a class as if it formed its individual people. Though a convinced determinist, Namier had no time for big ideas. He hardly had time for the arts and sciences, about which he was unusually dispassionate for one of his background. Namier studied the parish registers and the electoral rolls in the urge to know about the individual lives which, he was convinced, were in the end unknowable. In a lifelong flight from the murderously abstract, Namier was making the other European contribution, which was pre-eminently the contribution of the émigré Jewish intellectuals—the contribution which could see developments in history but refused to accept that they tended towards a culmination. He had already seen how they could tend towards tragedy.
In his incidental writings that dealt with the diplomatic and political prelude to World War II, and the issues raised by the war itself, Namier brought his gift for drama to its fullest flower. It is meant neither as an insult nor as a paradox to say that he did journalism the favour of writing it like a journalist. Fifty years later, his buttonholing immediacy remains a shining example of what journalism can do. Contributed to the whole range of British upmarket publications—the _Times Literary Supplement_ , the _New Statesman_ , the _Listener_ , etc.—his pieces were collected into a row of books which any serious student of modern English prose, let alone of history, should seek out and treasure, because more than any other books by anybody they give you the full weight of the event even when describing only a fragment. I have a row of them before me now; substantial demi octavo volumes bound in black or dark blue linen and stamped with silver titles: _In the Nazi Era, Europe in Decay 1936–1940, In the Margin of History, Conflicts_. One of them, although written as a set of instalments for the magazine _Political Quarterly_ , was conceived as a complete book: the marvellous _Diplomatic Prelude 1938–1939_. Much of it was written before the relevant official papers were released, but his guesswork was dauntingly good, and remains penetrating to this day. Namier's academic contemporaries often punished him in print for his tendency to wander off the point into a forest of footnotes, but on the strength of his journalism you would say he had cogency in the blood. Put together, the books constitute a short but weighty shelf of some of the most vivid higher journalism in English since Hazlitt, although behind them is a far greater depth of learning—an extravagance of mental impulse for an arresting economy of effect. Writing at the time instead of later, he couldn't always be right, but he was never less than pertinent, even when, the circumstances being what they were, he faced the task of matching with his style a sadness that shrieked to heaven. In 1942 he was saying—saying without crying, and God alone knows how—that the Jews would have to be withdrawn from Europe after the war and go to their new home. He couldn't yet be certain, or didn't want to be certain, that Hitler and Himmler had concocted a radical new way of withdrawing them from Europe, but his fine essay is certainly written in the context of that terrible possibility. As Walter Laqueur has convincingly argued, the code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park was getting the news about the massacres in the east almost from their inception; and though circulation of the news was restricted to the very highest levels in order to protect the Ultra secret, it was definitely talked about. Namier, a born stalker of corridors, was not the sort of man to miss a significant word—or, for that matter, a significant silence. Though Namier never wrote a single book about the Holocaust, its significance permeated all his work from the moment he got wind of it.
With the war over, Namier showed his unusual powers of character analysis when it came to assessing the suave special pleading of the surviving German bigwigs who directed their appeals towards a higher tribunal than the one at Nuremberg. ("The factual material in these books," he wrote in _In the Nazi Era_ , "is mostly of very small value." He meant that they were lying.) He wasn't fooled for a moment by Halder's claims that Hitler had buffaloed the Wehrmacht into an unwanted war. Fifty years later, Carl Dirks and Karl-Heinz Janssen in _Der Krieg der Generale_ were able to quote chapter and verse from the military archives to prove that the German armed forces were always a long way ahead of Hitler in their expansive ambitions. Namier guessed the truth just from listening to the denials. He respected the decency of Beck but correctly spotted that the other surviving generals were looking for an alibi by blaming Hitler for the army's build-up to aggression in both west and east. Namier blew a melodious but piercing whistle over Halder's niftily calculated pamphlet _Hitler als Feldherr_. Namier had been warning the world since the 1930s that the Nazis were backed up by a German political culture whose authoritarianism would always amount to savagery if given the green light. He could be thought of as a sort of reverse anti-Semite on the subject, if it were not such a bad joke.
At Cambridge, the gusto and the speakable narrative style of J. H. Plumb rubbed off on a whole school of young historians. Nowadays, by consulting the chronology, I can shamefacedly compute that while I was dancing to mainstream jazz in the annexe of the Red Lion in Petty Cury, the real action was in the bar, where Simon Schama was listening to Plumb—or, more likely, Plumb was listening to Schama. Namier had no such influence. Lacking Isaiah Berlin's personal charm and clubbability, Namier was slow to gain status as an establishment figure. A. J. P. Taylor found academic preferment elusive because of his opinions, the flamboyance with which he expressed them, and his Fleet Street outlets, which were deemed undignified. Namier missed out on the grand invitations for more personal reasons. An honorary fellowship at his beloved Balliol came late and might never have come at all. The drawback of academic fellowship in the ancient English universities is that fellowship means what it says. An Oxbridge college is like a London club with slightly less miserable food and wine. Conviviality counts for at least as much as gravitas. The chaps are supposed to get on with one another. With a thick accent that didn't always make his dogmaticism sufficiently hard to decipher, Namier was unusually disagreeable in a context where merely to disagree was to be disagreeable enough. He was a wet weekend in Lwów. In the long run this was probably a lucky break for both him and us. Isaiah Berlin—the truth must still be whispered—wasted far too much time at grand dinner tables. Like F. R. Leavis, Namier was condemned by his personality to the monastic dedication that the college system nominally favours but in fact frustrates. His mere presence at Manchester helped to put the redbrick universities at the heart of post-war intellectual achievement in Britain. His solid brilliance helped to give the writing of history in post-war Britain a weight of seriousness that not even the United States could match. America had the power: in the East Coast foreign policy elite, a scholar-diplomat like George Kennan was shaping the world. But Namier was understanding it: there was a difference, and part of the difference was conferred by Namier's prescient awareness that to draw up a balance sheet was Europe's privilege, and precisely because its power was broken. Namier obviously found that fact at least as liberating as inhibiting. The title of one of his later books, _Vanished Supremacies_ , was not entirely a lamentation: vanished supremacies could mean values reaffirmed. One of the old man's strengths was that he was a realist without being a materialist: abstract ideas were never his strong suit, but the concrete idea of a spiritual value was not alien to him. So-called _realpolitik_ had destroyed the world he came from but had not infected him. He was not a plague carrier.
What was he, apart from an historian of unquestionable eminence? For most of us, the eminence is unquestionable because we are never going to know much about his special subject. Eventually he cut down on his journalism and went back to parliamentary history, where he disappeared into the archives and never emerged alive, so that only a specialist can decide whether he was valuable or not. But his achievement as a stylist is apprehensible to all. He was one of those refugees—Sir Nikolaus Pevsner was another—who helped to make an exhausted Britain conscious of its lasting strengths. Pevsner did it through listing the buildings, and Namier through reaffirming the supple empiricism of the language. The war having been decided by the New World's gargantuan productive effort, the United States should logically have become the centre of the Western mind as well as of its muscle. Men like Namier ensured that the Old World would still have a say. With their help, it was English English, and not American English, that continued to be the appropriate medium for the summation and analysis of complex historical experience. With Namier's example to the forefront, Britain became the natural home for a language of diplomatic history, which is essentially concerned with that range of events, beyond America's ken, in which power can't be decisive. The echo of Namier's voice can be heard in Abba Eban's enthralling book _Personal Witness_ , perhaps the most remarkably sustained work of intricate diplomatic exposition ever published. When Eban talked, it could have been Namier talking. Eban said of Yasser Arafat that he never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Namier said things like that. Though he said them in the thick Polish accent that he never lost, they all depended on his croquet champion's mastery of an adopted syntax. It was Jewish humour, but it employed all the resources of the English language, as once it might have done with German. You couldn't call it a shift of power, because there was no power involved. It was a realignment of civilization.
One of the measures of our commitment to civilization is the extent to which we realize that material strength can never be more than a part of it, even if the part is essential. (An admirer of Talleyrand's cunning, Namier nevertheless found his craving for money not only pathological, he found it—a telling word—"pathetic.") Namier died as he had lived, largely unloved. There was nothing cuddly about his person, and nothing charming about what he said, except if we are charmed by a style adequate to the grim truth. We ought to be. What finally matters is the holy books, and how they are kept. If I had to choose a tone of voice in post-war expository prose that was commensurate with the importance of what had just happened to the world, I would choose the tone of Sir Lewis Namier. At Cambridge a history don once caught me reading the essays of Lord Acton. The don considered that Acton had deserved his high reputation at the time but "of course he's out of date now." I suppose it is possible that Namier's researches into the structure of politics at the accession of George III will eventually go out of date. But it will be a fateful day if historians cease to read Namier's incidental prose, because incidental was the last thing it was: it was vitally concerned with all the issues of his age, many of which are still the issues of ours. And one of those issues, by implication, is the most troubling that faces the humanist heritage: how are we to pass it on in its full complexity, and what can transmit that except style? Namier said of George Canning's letters to George IV that they were "brilliant, incisive, at times even boisterous." Although it is not the first word we think of in relation to Namier himself, "boisterous" must eventually be used for him too. He saw, and indeed foresaw, the whole European tragedy in modern times; yet somehow he persuaded it to give him energy. There was something biblical in that, like a prophet drinking oratorical inspiration from the splendid cataclysm of a sinful city punished by divine fire. Sometimes an artist is measured by the steadiness with which he holds himself when history leaves him no alternatives except to speak or weep. If he speaks, he is a seer: but when there is grief in his voice even though it does not break, we call that poetry.
O
Grigory Ordzhonokidze
GRIGORY ORDZHONOKIDZE
Grigory Konstantovich Ordzhonokidze (1886–1937) is sometimes given retroactive credit because he died mysteriously during Stalin's terror campaign in the late 1930s, and therefore might have been some sort of proto-liberal who, despite his curriculum vitae as an Old Bolshevik, had been secretly at odds all along with the course towards absolutism. There can be no doubt that in the year of his "suicide" he protested directly to Stalin about the free hand given to the NKVD, and it seems probable that in the mid-1930s he had more than once expressed doubts about Stalin's excesses: a sign of independence which certainly spoke for his bravery, and might well have ensured the subsequent mysterious death all on its own. But his earlier record was of a factotum thoroughly implicated in repressive measures that neither he nor other grandees of his rank thought excessive at the time. Indeed he wasn't just implicated in those measures: in many cases he planned them. One of the few non-Russians ever to serve in Stalin's government, he was born in Georgia, joined the Bolsheviks in 1908, and during the Civil War was instrumental in bringing the Caucasus under Soviet control, with appropriately firm methods of persuasion. Moving to the economic sphere, in the 1920s and early 1930s he led the forced march to industrialization, with an impact on the civilian populace that would have looked excessive enough if he had not been so confident about acting as one of the instruments of history. If he did indeed become a member of the "moderate bloc" that some historians would like to think made an attempt to rein Stalin in, his motives for joining it would have had to be the result of considering some of his own past actions, about which he was on record as being unrepentant, if not untroubled. From our position now, at a safe distance from the ideal State which at one point he was proud of having helped to build, we can see that his true historical role was to provide us with a standing joke. He really did believe, and really did say, that the people who inflicted the suffering suffered most.
Our cadres who knew the situation of 1932–1933 and who bore the blow are truly tempered like steel. I think that with them we can build a State the like of which the world has never seen.
—GRIGORY ORDZHONOKIDZE TO SERGEI KIROV, JANUARY 1934, QUOTED IN _L E LIVRE NOIR DU COMMUNISME_, P. 239
NATURALLY ENOUGH, this immortal statement was first made in Russian, and had to be translated into French for its appearance in _Le Livre noir du communisme_ in 1997. Further translated into English, it needs more translation yet: into its true sense. When Ordzhonokidze talked about the cadres who "bore the blow," we need to know that the blow they bore was the supposed necessity to _inflict_ injustice, not to suffer it. (They had been inflicting it since Lenin decreed that the Party would have to rule by terror.) In other words, we are being asked to sympathize with the butchers, not the victims. As Primo Levi was to warn the world after the Holocaust, it will always be in the interests of the perpetrators, after a great crime is identified, to say that they, too, were helplessly caught up in it, and also suffered. But Ordzhonokidze was saying more that that. He was saying that the perpetrators were the true victims.
In the period 1932–1933 Stalin staged the first of his great massacres: the immense disaster comprising the collectivization of agriculture, the liquidation of the kulaks, and famine exploited as a social weapon. His second great massacre was still ahead: the Yezhovchina, the comprehensive terror of which the 1938 show trials were merely the small component that the world heard about. But the two-year jamboree of repression euphemistically cited in Ordzhonokidze's grotesque letter was bad enough. The upper-echelon officials, many of them the very same Old Bolsheviks who later on would be eliminated almost to a man by the bureaucrat they had foolishly allowed to inherit Lenin's keys of office, had faithfully carried out their orders to mow down the innocent. Anyone who had qualms did not allow them to affect his trigger finger. Ordzhonokidze should really be talking about the ruined lives of hundreds of thousands of blameless citizens. But the only suffering that interests him is the supposed wear and tear on the nerves of those deputed to carry out the destruction. By implication he includes himself and Kirov among their number: a brotherhood of martyrdom. This brand of sentimental fellow-feeling is not uncommon among mass murderers and presumably helps to sustain them in their shared memories. One of the Einsatzgruppen chiefs, Paul Blobel—the distinguished leader of Einsatzkommando 4A—said after the war that the liquidators were the real unfortunates. "The nervous strain was far heavier in the case of our men who carried out the executions than in that of their victims." (Quoted, along with much other similarly noxious testimony from the hard-done-by, on page 364 of Heinz Höhne's _The Order of the Death's Head_. Not a book for the beach.)
It is not recorded that Kirov declined the honour of being addressed as one who summoned up his bravery for the challenging task of making war on the defenceless. Because Kirov was later murdered in his turn (in 1934, the year the letter was written) we tend to forget that his own record as a murderer was exemplary, with the White Sea Canal—which efficiently depleted the number of those prisoners who built it but was never dug deep enough to float a ship—as his masterpiece. But the fact might be remembered when the Kirov ballet company next comes on tour to a theatre near you. Petersburg is no longer called Leningrad, but the Maryinsky company, when on tour outside Russia, is still called the Kirov, presumably on the assumption that the ballet audience abroad remains clueless enough to believe that Kirov had once had some sort of background in the fine arts, like Sir Kenneth Clark or Sir Jeremy Isaacs. Kirov's background was one of unrestricted power and the extermination of blameless human beings. A measure of our slowness to face up to the real history of the Soviet Union is that the expression "Kirov Ballet" does not strike us as obscene. The expression "Himmler Youth Orchestra" would. So, to be fair, would "Pol Pot Academy of Creative Writing" or even "Madame Mao School of Calligraphy." The subsidiary Communist regimes have been stripped of their prestige: acquired late, it was quick to go, and it would be an uncommonly servile Western ideologue who still said, or even thought, "hands off democratic Kampuchea." But the Soviet Union, an earlier and more massive event even than Communist China, has retained its legitimacy, at any rate to the extent that some of its historical figures are still granted a stature that was always ludicrously at odds with their true significance. The regrettable tendency of intellectuals to worship power is exemplified by their readiness to attribute dignity to men who could prove their seriousness about politics only by slaughtering anyone who might disagree with them, as if ruthless nihilism were a testimonial to dedication, and an utter lack of mercy a mark of strength: if you can't stand the blood, get out of the abattoir.
Few among the intellectuals of the civilized world ever made a comparable investment in the future of Nazi Germany, so they had no trouble condemning it even before it fell, and showed no reluctance to analyse its workings. As a result, we are well acquainted with the retroactive soul-searchings of Nazi functionaries who were obliged by circumstances—circumstances beyond their control, according to them—to list mass murder on their curriculum vitae. Whereas we tend, erroneously, to think of the Soviet Union's Ordzhonokidzes and Kirovs as rare birds, we know that for the Nazis an upstanding blockhead like Gustav Franz Wagner was standard issue. As second in command under Franz Stangl, Wagner was the man in charge of the day-to-day business of the extermination camp at Sobibór. The place was supposed to be a bad dream but Wagner made sure that it was even worse than it needed to be. Rather distinguished in his personal appearance, he had a talent for supererogatory sadism that made the few survivors of his hellhole grateful for the relative humanity of those among his myrmidons who were content to devote themselves to mere murder instead of prolonged torture. Interviewed on film in his old age, he was full of the difficulties of the "hard task." Such language echoed Himmler's with the cold precision of a pistol shot in a brick-built barracks. Himmler was always telling his lovingly nurtured young SS officers how hard it would be for them to overcome their natural compassion. He had the same grim news for senior members of the party. At the October 1943 Posen conference (the one where Albert Speer was present according to eyewitnesses but absent according to himself) Himmler wrung all hearts by painting a picture of how the high-ranking party officials sitting to attention in front of him would have to put their civilized German values into abeyance while they continued to face the seemingly endless challenge of obliterating the sub-humans infesting Europe. "The hard decision had to be taken to have this people disappear from the face of the earth." Touring an alfresco prisoner-of-war pen near Kiev, Himmler demonstrated his own fragility by fainting dead away when he was accidentally confronted with real blood instead of a statistic. But he nerved himself to the job. He made the sacrifice. He bore the blow.
In both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the class of professional exterminators divided fairly neatly into homicidal perverts who couldn't get enough and routinely squeamish placemen who had to get used to it. The second category necessarily outnumbered the first by a long way: under both regimes, there was a large reservoir of men and women who were not much more insane than us but who, in extreme circumstances, could be talked into, or could talk themselves into, extreme behaviour. In that respect the regimes were mirror images of each other. When the long reluctance of the world's intellectuals to admit this disturbing fact was at last overcome—and until the collapse of the Soviet Union the admission never looked like happening—the pendulum swung the other way. The first and loudest voice of the _Historikerstreit_ , the acrid verbal battle between German historians that broke out in 1986, Ernst Nolte was only the most conspicuous example of a scholar who wanted to argue that the Communist ideology had brought the fascist ideologies into being, by a process more like cloning than parturition. On the whole, however, we have gained from the two great streams of unreason being seen in parallel: a full body count has at least had the merit of depriving apologists for the left (necessarily the more eloquent, because nobody except a psychopath ever apologized for the right) of the opportunity to excuse communism by saying Nazism was quantitatively worse.
But the drawback of bringing the two main ideologies closer together has been to encourage the assumption that a system of belief can explain the killing. Such an assumption springs from the familiar tendency—and in some ways it is a commendable one—to invoke a complex mental preparation for an elementary human act. The absurdity becomes manifest in the political sphere when its proponent, as he must, finds himself trying to establish similarities between the mental processes of a sophisticated intellectual like G. Y. Zinoviev and a lumbering maniac like Saddam Hussein. Zinoviev said—and therefore, presumably, thought—that the Revolution should wipe out innocent people as a matter of course. Saddam Hussein seems to have believed something similar. But really it doesn't matter what such different men believe, or think they believe. What matters is that they behave the same way, hence allowing us to deduce that what really interests them is unchallenged power, for which the necessity to commit murder is seen as a small price.
Here one ought to put the best possible construction on things and assume that most of the desk-bound mass murderers arrive at such a solution only in answer to problems clogging the in tray. In harsh actuality, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that some of the great killers became political figures in the first place for no other purpose except to wipe out their fellow human beings when they got the chance. Like Stalin, if with a touch more charm, Lenin was always vicious: a fact which, for more than seventy years, was the very last to be admitted by the international left intelligentsia even though men who had known him personally, and believed in his cause, had said so from the earliest days of the regime—even though Lenin himself had said that the regime must rule by terror. But as always, the psychotic cases are morally less edifying than the apparently normal ones. Ho Chi Minh is a more instructive exponent of state terror than Pol Pot because Ho could rein himself in: leaving aside the routine massacres through which he established himself in unchallenged power, he didn't start the class war against his bourgeoisie while the military battle remained unwon. But after his death, with the battle decided, his successors resumed the business of class war in accordance with his known wishes. Pol Pot dismantled his own victory straight away by killing everyone whose help he needed: probably because he needed their help, and found the dependency an unbearable challenge to his endlessly spiteful ego. From that angle, perhaps the most instructive example of all was Mao Zedong. The great leader began as some sort of anarchist who eschewed violence in the belief that reform could be achieved by example and persuasion. When he decided otherwise, he began killing people in large numbers. Eventually the numbers grew so large that they outran imagination. It wasn't even enough for them to be innocent: they had to believe what he believed, and thus be guilty of no other crime except the crime of not being him. It wasn't even enough for them to die: they had to die in agony, and the climate of fear worked best if they could be induced to inflict the agony on each other. In my ideal university, Jung Chang's _Wild Swans_ and Philip Short's Mao would both be on the course, but there would be a danger of making the young student despair of life. Even at my age, the story of modern China can make me wonder if my life was worth living.
But there was good news. After Mao's death, somebody put the brakes on. Those blandly smiling Chinese authorities who wonder aloud why Western liberals are so concerned with the Tienanmen Square incident of June 1989 are not quite so cynical as they seem. By Mao's grandiose standards, an atrocity on so diffident a scale—the dead scarcely added up to a village, and Mao was accustomed to obliterating people by whole cities at a time—was truly less than nothing. No doubt any of us exposed to even half an hour of life in a present-day Chinese re-education camp would emerge gibbering if we emerged at all, but the truly orgiastic frenzy of torture and killing that went on under Mao seems by now to be a thing of the past. The juggernaut looked unstoppable, but it was stopped. The only possible conclusion is that someone knew which levers to pull, and wanted to pull them. The great mystery of the socialist totalitarian regimes has been not how they grew into killing machines—in retrospect, nothing seems more logical—but how the machines were put into reverse. When Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, it was remarkable enough. More remarkable still was that Khrushchev came to think that way, having started out as a standover man of impeccably murderous credentials. He still didn't think that way entirely, as the Hungarians found out later the same year, but he was a different man from the Khrushchev who had carried out Stalin's bidding in the Ukraine: a "task" which necessarily included extermination on an epic scale.
Khrushchev began his career as an apparatchik capable of any crime the state ordered. But when the time came and he saw the glimmer of a chance, he didn't want to live that way any longer. Nor did Brezhnev. In contrast to Khrushchev, who was bright for a thug, Brezhnev was a dim bulb, but once safe in his appointment he could have done something to steer the Politburo back towards the cult of personality if he had really wanted to. Instead, he resolutely submitted to the restrictions of "collective leadership"—the only term or phrase in his pitiably mendacious official biography that means exactly what it says. Khrushchev and Brezhnev, with their sordid background in the classic massacres, are even more instructive exemplars than Andropov, the man who changed everything. Andropov could never have changed everything had not his immediate predecessors first changed something. For him it was comparatively easy: no doubt he had signed the orders for a few hundred young hotheads to be given the treatment in the psychiatric hospitals, and he had certainly been active in the re-education of the Czechs in 1968; but in his deeper past there were no stretches of permafrost or pine forest with thousands of bodies under them. It was easy for him to print off a special edition of _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ and make his bright young officers read it. He wasn't going to get into trouble with the KGB. He _was_ the KGB. The real breakthrough was further back, when the first mass killers got tired of killing. Against all the odds, it happened. When you think of the blood on their gloves, it doesn't seem much of a comfort: but if you want to live in hope, you have to deal with some very raw material. And if you want to see an end to the kind of "State the like of which the world has never seen," you have to accept that for some people there is nothing more habitual than to do their worst, and that the sole function your fine opinions might perform, and always at a tangent, is to affect those people at the moment when they begin to wonder whether being ordered to torment their fellow human beings might not indeed be a blow, and scarcely to be borne any longer.
P
Octavio Paz
Alfred Polgar
Beatrix Potter
Jean Prévost
Marcel Proust
OCTAVIO PAZ
Octavio Paz (b. 1914) is not only the great poet of modern Mexico, but the great essayist. Nobody in any of the main Western languages does more to demonstrate the closeness of those two forms. His every poem opens up a topic, and his every essay glows with treasurable turns of phrase. In his capacity as essayist he can be approached with confidence by the beginner in Spanish, because Paz's prose style might have been put on earth specifically as a teaching aid to that language. Attractively wrapped in coated white paper by the Spanish publishing house Seix-Barral, his collections of essays are almost beyond counting and cover every artistic subject. They leave the reader amazed that their author ever found time to be a poet. That he found time to be a man of action as well beggars belief. In the Spanish Civil War he fought on the Republican side. In the 1960s, in his role of diplomat, he was Mexico's ambassador to India. His engagement with the politics of his own country was unceasing and often tempestuous. All his artistic enthusiasm, and all his political experiences, yielded material for poetry: he was the embodiment of Goethe's principle that there could be no event in life without the golden shadow of a poem. In the light shed by this active volcano of high-quality creative activity, the award of the Nobel Prize in 1990 made his admirers wonder why some previous recipients were not shamed into handing their prizes back. Of the old imperial European countries, Spain has been the most conspicuous example of a homeland having its energy restored by the creativity of its colonies. From Rubén Darío onwards, the writers of Latin America were conscious of their mission to restore the intellectual force of the Spanish world. We can pick favourites among the twentieth-century exemplars—Sabato and Vargas Llosa are among mine—but Paz is up there with Borges no matter what we think of either. As it happens, I think Paz's homage to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is one of the most romantic books in the world, and would still have made him a master if it had been the whole of his work, instead of only a hundredth part.
Faced with the disappearance of the correspondence of Sor Juana, the melancholy provoked inevitably by the study of our past is transformed into desperation.
—OCTAVIO PAZ, _S OR JUANA INÉS DE LA CRUZ_, P. 181
IN OTHER WORDS, he was in love with her. Any man who reads the book will feel the same way about its heroine, and wish for himself Paz's Camusian good looks, the dark charm with which he has always carried his immense learning. He had all the qualifications to think of himself as her saviour from the solitude of the cloisters. Luckily he remembered, as we must remember, that the lyrically gifted beauty's life as a nun was a life she chose. Our own salvation is to reflect that it was not necessarily the love of Christ that drew her to the convent in the first instance. In Mexico, in the age of the Baroque, learning was a man's business. Colonial Mexico had been founded by the conquistadores, and their suits of armour were still standing in the hallways of the haciendas. Mexico is still a macho culture today. Imagine what it was like then. In her childhood, Juana de Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana was so gifted that she taught herself Latin in a breath. She dreamed of going to university and at one stage planned to pass herself off as a boy so that she could enrol. Finally the would-be Yentl had to face facts. Her grand name had no money to back it up. Much courted for her beauty and lively personality, she could have picked a rich husband and so gained the leisure to read and write. But she didn't want to sell herself. The convent was the only recourse. Though her faith was real, it undoubtedly came in handy. If we can't look on her lifelong piety as lip service, we can see it as a part expedient, and so dream of joining the long line of suitors who came to her at the convent. One of them might have succeeded, although, as was bound to happen, there has always been much speculation about her sexuality. Some believed that she was a man all along.
Even Paz thought she had a male mind. Women dream of her as men do, and might even be closer to the truth. There was a direct connection from the convent to the viceregal palace, where her poems were valued as evidence of the colony's growing place in the world. One of the vicereines was as attentive as any male suitor. She was the splendidly named and titled Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Condesa de Paradis y de la Laguna. This time the big name had all the accoutrements, but with the wealth and the position went blue stockings. The accomplished and superior Condesa de Paradis was drawn to Juana Inés as one intellectual aristocrat to another. Since the nun could not go to the palace drawing-room, the Countess of Paradise and the Lagoon went to the book-lined convent cell. The nun wrote poems in praise of the noblewoman's beauty. The vocabulary of adoration was standard for the day, but there is no mistaking the passion, even after the lush lilt of her Spanish is cut and dried into English.
_You are the queen of the flowers_
_Hence even the Summer begs_
_The pinks of your lips_
_The roses of your cheeks._
When the movie is made, undoubtedly they will grapple, albeit discreetly. In real life, they almost certainly didn't, but Sor Juana wrote some of the loveliest poems of her career, which means that she enshrined her passionate appreciation at the apex of Spanish poetry from all eras. When talking of her talent, the first thing to do is throw caution to the winds. In a single sonnet by her, there is a single moment that suffices to put Mexico in the centre of the Spanish literary world. The sonnet is the one which seeks to dismiss the praises ( _"desmentir los elogios"_ ) lavished on her portrait, and the moment is the last line, an inspired, legitimate and dazzling variation on Góngora: _"es cadaver, es polvo, es sombre, es nada."_ (It is a corpse, it is dust, it is shadow, it is nothing.) The moment would carry less weight without the argumentative solidity of the thirteen lines leading up to it. Her sense of form was monumental even when playful. As in her life, in her poetry she brought the Renaissance to the Baroque: in the first fully self-conscious artistic age, she rediscovered the sense of discovery.
How could so free a spirit have shut itself away from the world? Perhaps to get a better perspective, and anyway her solitude was strictly a metaphor. For year after year, her cell teemed with visitors, most of them bearing new books for her library. It was like a coffee house in there. Her _tertulia_ was the hub of literary life in the colony. But the Church was a long way yet from tolerating the idea of a secular civilization. At forty, but already near the end of her life, she was called to order by her confessor and by her archbishop: she had to renew her vows. The Condesa de Paradis, her best mentor and protectress, had already left for Spain, never to return. In Madrid, the countess financed the publication of the first volume of Juana Inés's poems. Juana Inés was launched on her journey to the future, but in the present she was finished. In the same year that she renounced the world all over again, she dispersed her beloved library. Her papers and letters were scattered with the books. Paz's grief about the correspondence is hardly excessive: if we had the letters, we would have the whole story of a Creole culture becoming aware of its strength. Surely the letters would have been populated with all the voices of her _tertulia_. Books will be written endlessly in speculation about what her informal writings would have contained. Paz's was far from being the first book on Sor Juana, and there will be many more. But there will never be a book quite as exciting as his, because he is a poet at her level of intensity, and a prose writer who can get his poetic intensity into a paragraph. Her correspondence, he goes on to say, would have been a document to place her with those of her seventeenth-century contemporaries—not in Madrid or Lima or Mexico but in Europe proper—who were inaugurating the modern era. The correspondence was lost through sheer carelessness: the Spanish carelessness that Paz defines in scathing terms. "It is said that the passion that corrodes the Spanish peoples is envy; but worse and more weighty is carelessness: the creator of our deserts." When he brings in a phrase like _creadora de nuestros desertos_ , Paz shows us the transatlantic cable that runs from Unamuno and Ortega to himself and Vargas Llosa: the charge of energy that brought Spanish civilization to life again, offshore in the Americas. Spanish expository prose in the twentieth century was a miracle that these men created, but they didn't dream it up out of the air. There was already a long heritage of rhetorical strength in the poetry, where the telling phrases lie separate that would later be strung together in a coruscating style.
One of the many virtues of Paz's continuously thrilling magnum opus about the brilliant creature Juana Inés is his success at bringing out the prose qualities in her poetry: the concentration of intelligence, the toughly argued sentence. For any beginner in Spanish, his book about her is one of the texts to put beside a big dictionary and construe line for line and word for word, in full confidence that none of the effort will be wasted. You will hear two people who never met each other talking across time, and realize once and for all that the reason most critical biographies fail is that the biographer falls out of love with his subject. Paz falls further and further in, and we go with him.
ALFRED POLGAR
Alfred Polgar was born in Vienna in 1873, educated in the cafés and established himself early in his adult career as the unsurpassable exemplar of German prose in modern times, even though he never, strictly speaking, wrote a book. In 1927 his success as a writer of reviews, essays and articles took him to Berlin, and in 1933 the success of the Nazis almost deprived him of his life. He escaped the day before he was scheduled to be arrested. As a journalist dependent on the size of his audience, Polgar still had outlets in Vienna, Zurich and Prague, but his position steadily became more desperate. "I love life and I would never willingly leave it," he told a friend, "but it is leaving me." In 1938 he left Vienna on the night train to Zurich only a day before the _Anschluβ_. Luckily he was able to follow the exile trail—Prague, Paris, Spain—all the way to America, although he knew before he got there that he was ill equipped to flourish. He was set in his ways, and he had nothing to sell. On the American market, his approach to writing would have been useless even if it had not been confined to the German language, because it was also confined to German-speaking society: his prose and its subject matter were aspects of each other. In Hollywood he was a beneficiary of the MGM programme that paid refugee writers for screenplays that would never be filmed. Well aware that this was tantamount to being given a free ticket to a soup kitchen, he was ashamed to take the money, but he had no choice. He was no longer young enough to master Engish in the way he had mastered his mother tongue.
On his home ground, Polgar had made German the ideal instrument for a body of prose so charged with the precision of poetry that it gives a picture of his era no other writer could match for wealth of registered detail and subtlety of argument: not even the magnificent collected journalism of Joseph Roth is quite in the same class. Polgar's prose is probably fated to remain accessible only to readers of German, who can approach it through several one-volume selections. The best of these, chosen by Polgar himself from the nine separate volumes of his writings, was published in West Berlin in 1950 under the title _Auswahlband_ (Choice Volume). Another selection, with the conspicuous omissions that you might expect, was published in East Berlin in 1975 as _Die Mission des Luftballons_ (Mission of the Air Balloon): Polgar had too much prestige to be repudiated as a bourgeois writer. There is an excellent biography, _Alfred Polgar_ , by Ulrich Weinzierl. After the war Polgar returned to Europe but felt unable to settle in Austria or in either version of Germany, despite his being greeted as a hero wherever he went. He died in Zurich in 1975, with his immortality already established by a whole constellation of _kleine Schriften_ (small writings) that Marcel Reich-Ranicki rightly defined as "an immaculate unification of tact and intellect, conscience and taste." Marlene Dietrich wanted Polgar to write her biography. Sadly, the project came to nothing.
Abel, if he had fled from the murderous attentions of his brother Cain, would as an emigrant have had to put up with an even more bitter inconvenience. He would have had to wander the world for the rest of his life with _the brand of Abel_ on his forehead.
—ALFRED POLGAR, PART OF THE FRAGMENTARY ESSAY "TOWARDS A CONTEMPORARY THEME"
IF I HAD what it took to translate the separable remarks of Alfred Polgar and collect them into a book, _The Brand of Abel_ might be the title. Most of his remarks, however, don't separate out: they are bonded into his feuilletons, a form that Karl Kraus hated so much he blamed Heine for inventing it. But Kraus couldn't write an essay, for a reason that Polgar nailed in a single, ostensibly praising antithesis: "He wasn't a constructive talent: he was a critical genius." (Polgar also said of Kraus that if he had lived, he would have had no-one left to attack.) Polgar could write an essay. His every piece forms a rhythmic unit from start to finish. Occasionally, however, a sentence can be carried off on its own. Those were the sentences Kurt Tucholsky was probably thinking of when he said that Polgar wrote _filaments of granite_. (Filaments of Granite wouldn't be a bad title either, but it would fudge the point.) The brand of Abel is one of the filaments. The brand of Cain belonged to the scriptures we already possessed. The brand of Abel belongs to the scriptures that the twentieth century wrote for us: the books, the articles and sometimes the single statements that evoke the human disaster. In that new book of the holy word, witnesses to the modern multiple apocalypse speak with precise resonance. The qualifications for having even a single statement recorded in that sacred text are punishingly high.
But the man who is there a thousand times over is Alfred Polgar. A measure of how dreadful his era was is that it took everything he had to express it. A measure of what he had is that he could. It should never have happened, of course. So much lyrical talent should never have been required to deal with such an artificially contrived misery. At the most it should have been occupied with the tragedies of ordinary life, the events that Nadezhda Mandelstam was later to subsume under her concept of the privilege of ordinary heartbreaks. But as things happened—as Hitler made them happen—Polgar was presented with the dubious opportunity of gathering all the gifts with which he had so brilliantly reflected life in the German-speaking civilization and bringing them to the task of recording its disintegration. It would have been a daunting enough task for a much younger man. But when he went into exile he was already sixty-five. In Vienna and Berlin he had been at the top of his profession. Leaving it all, he was penniless. What little money he had made from selling his library was used up, and he had reason to believe that he would never make any more. Where he was heading, they spoke English, and he was too old to master it.
When the _New Hellas_ left Portugal for New York on October 4, 1940, among the passengers were Heinrich Mann, Golo Mann, Franz and Alma Werfel, and Alfred Polgar. It was a convocation of the talents, but it is fair to say that even the imperious Alma, who had been loved by every important man in Vienna, knew which among her attendant male companions on the ship of the saved had a gift from heaven. Polgar was the one who could raise their tragedy to poetry. "Many attempt without success to make up for their lack of talent with defects of character." He could afford to say so, because his strength and depth of character were in everything he said. "A commonplace soul is often uncommonly spirited. But dreck is still dreck, even when phosphorescent." He could afford to say that too, because he was never flashy. Most of his best effects were achieved with nothing more than a subtle shift against a prepared expectation. Sometimes you can barely hear the swerve. "To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil. With the Nazis this won't be easy. They know exactly what they're doing: they just can't imagine it." Drawn with a single calligraphic stroke from a fine brush, the distinction between knowing and imagining was crucial to him. Armed with that, he could make literature from the bare facts, however sad. "The striking aphorism requires a stricken aphorist." We can almost convince ourselves that he welcomed disaster.
He hated every minute of disaster. "It is the destiny of the emigrant that the foreign land does not become his homeland: his homeland becomes foreign." Along with his books, he had left everything that sustained his imagination far behind. "When everything has left you, you are alone. When you have left everything, you are lonely." In Hollywood Polgar was too proud to accept his helplessness without an interior rebellion. As Hannah Arendt records, there was a phrase among the refugees for how they felt about America: _Dankbar aber ungülcklich_ (thankful but unhappy). Polgar was too gracious to say it, but he felt it. (Sometimes he almost said it: he was the one who called Hollywood a paradise over whose door is written "Abandon hope.") Those who would like to believe that Thomas Mann was an anti-Semite have to deal with the undoubted fact that he reached deep into his pocket at a crucial time to save Polgar, who he realized was his equal as a guardian of the soul of the German language. (It was Mann who said Polgar's prose was marked by a lightness that plumbed the depths.) Throughout the war, Polgar wrote for such German publications as there were; and after the war he went back to Europe in a kind of belated triumph; but he was never again the force he had once been, and today he has no international reputation whatsoever. He foresaw the reason. "My spiritual handwriting can't be translated."
In the doomed attempt to translate it, we should switch our attention from his last phase to his early glory, in which his exuberant sensitivity to the scope of civilized life can still be appreciated even if the English words chosen to duplicate it are clumsily assembled. Among his other talents, Polgar was a theatre critic who could write a weekly review that chronicled a whole society. Our own greatest theatre critic, Shaw, was limited as well as focused by his playwright's agenda. Polgar, though he had dramatic gifts of his own (with Egon Friedell he wrote the most successful full-length cabaret script of the years between the wars), had no such limitation. He could see the whole play, and the whole world with it. To pit one critical genius against another, hear him on _Pygmalion_ : "A comedy about a man who turns a girl into a lady, but in doing so overlooks the woman." Writing about his beloved Büchner, Polgar pulled off a character analysis so penetrating that we have to go back to Coleridge to find an equivalent. Polgar said this of Büchner's Danton: "His withdrawal from blood and terror is no moral withdrawal. His capacity for political murder has simply ceased, fallen out of his soul like an object out of an open hand grown tired of holding." Polgar thought Büchner's talent had been on the Shakespearean scale: high and knowledgeable praise from a critic whose interest in Shakespeare knew no limits. Polgar said of Shakespeare's Richard II: "He was, with God's blessing, a weak, empty king, and becomes, with God's ill-will, a full, fruitful man, out of whom necessity presses sweetness and wisdom. He falls upward into depth." First the argument, then its compression. Polgar said of _The Merchant of Venice_ : "Among empty masks made lifelike for a single evening by Shakespeare the master wig-maker, Shylock is the only face." Year upon year, Polgar would track every production of plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, Hauptmann, Pirandello. Wonderful is the only word for his long comparison of Ibsen to Wagner. His sequence of essays on Ibsen leaves Shaw's equivalent effort looking thin. Polgar never gushed; he was discriminating even in his worship; but the wellspring of his enthusiasm was a grateful love.
We should think of that first before we begin to enjoy his limiting judgements. Critics are always remembered best for how they sound when on the attack. _Schadenfreude_ lies deep in the human soul, and to read a tough review seems a harmless way of indulging it. But the only critical attacks that really count are written in defence of a value. It was because of his admiration for competent practitioners that Polgar assaulted the incompetent. He could be hilarious while doing so, but never for the sake of being funny. Lesser critics look for opportunities to pour on the scorn. Polgar would rather have avoided them. When forced to the issue, however, he left no man standing. Witness the neatness with which he evoked Hermann Bahr's Napoleon turning back defeat with a strategic master stroke. "He emits the deathless words 'All battalions forward!,' draws his ceremonial dagger, and exits stage left in the direction of Lombardy, which he is seen in the next act to have conquered." The young Kenneth Tynan would have been proud of that. Polgar's demolitions were usually instantaneous. He called Sacha Guitry's _Desirée "a jeu_ even older than _vieux_." He said of _Man and Superman_ : "the audience gets an exhausting idea of the inexhaustibility of the subject, and is bored brilliantly." Of a young actress: "She is pretty, and tactfully concerned that the optical pleasure she provides shall not be disturbed by technical requirements any more than necessary." Of a bad playwright: "Saying nothing is the mother tongue of his art." But occasionally Polgar decided that a bad playwright, especially if he had earned an unwarranted reputation, needed something more effective than a skewering: he needed to be rubbed out. One such unfortunate was the fashionable darling Raoul Avernheimer. Polgar granted him the favour of a complete paragraph. At the risk of interfering with its remorseless build-up, I will try to render it in English:
Civilization and culture, if they are left in peace long enough by war and pestilence, generate mould. And over this mould a layer of dust forms. And in this layer of dust microscopic life-forms settle. And these microscopic life-forms generate excrement. And in the breakdown-products of this excrement even less visible life-forms find their domicile. And these life-forms, as long as they are resident within the periphery of Vienna and eligible to vote in the central electoral district, generate the world portrayed in the comedies of Raoul Avernheimer.
Let it be said again that Polgar could write that way not because he was cruel, but because he was comprehensive. The proof is in the subtle judgements he made between the two extremes of praise and blame. He admired Max Reinhardt's independence and industry, but knew where to find fault. Some of Reinhardt's productions Polgar found not only stylized, but sterilized. (The alliteration is there in the original.) Bound in ties of friendship with Egon Friedell, Polgar greeted the polymath's _Judastragödie_ with only two cheers. He noted his friend's "peculiar fencing stance: on the tip of the sword with which he attacks flutters the white flag with which he surrenders." Friedell could have done without Polgar's praise for his brains: "High intelligence, from which the blessing of refreshing words falls in a shower, offers here a rich substitute for art." In his letters, Schnitzler reveals how wounded he was by Polgar's criticism. He would have been wounded less if Polgar had called him a bad writer. But Polgar called him a good writer who was doing the wrong thing, indulging himself in "the opal tint of his half-bitter, half-sentimental scepticism." Werfel would not have enjoyed hearing that his diction was "palate-irritatingly over-spiced." (Werfel forgot the imputation long enough to grant Polgar one of the best things ever said about his style: he said that Polgar had the gift of catching deep-sea fish on the surface.) If Schiller could have come back from the dead, he might have wondered why he made the trip when he heard Polgar point out that _William Tell_ "isn't a protest against tyranny, only against its misuse." When we call a critic deadly, it should be because he knows about life, and will not accept its being falsified. Polgar was suspicious of the theatre, which he called "a charlatan that works real magic." His love for it was an intelligent love. He tested it against the world, not by its own standards. Hence the permanent validity of his mocking advice to a bad critic: "Take aim, let loose. And when your arrow sticks in, draw a target around its buried point. That way you will score a bullseye every time."
Alfred Brendel put me on to Polgar. Brendel knows everything about the Viennese coffee-house wits, and carries in his pocket an anthology of their best sayings, individually typed out on slips of paper. Away from the piano, Brendel's fingertips are usually wrapped in strips of Elastoplast. (So would mine be, if they were worth ten million dollars each.) When you see those bits of paper being hauled from his pockets by his plastered fingers, you realize you are in the presence of a true enthusiast. Brendel gave me the name of every card in the pack, but told me to be sure of one thing: Alfred Polgar was the ace of diamonds. The advice saved me years. I probably would have got to Polgar eventually, but by getting to him early I was granted the entrée to a whole vanished world, because Polgar is the gatekeeper. Though a shy man, he knew everyone, because everyone wanted to know him; and he had their characters summed up. As for his own books, they put me on the spot. The way he wrote about everything at all levels confirmed me in what I had been trying to do, but the quality with which he did it was a poser. A single dull page would have been a relief, but there wasn't one. Travelling a lot at the time on filming trips, I found his titles in second-hand bookshops all over the world: wherever the refugees had gone to die in peace, and their children had sold the books because the old language was the last thing they wanted to hear again. On Staten Island I found half a dozen, and there was a bunch of three in Tel Aviv. Strangely enough, Munich teemed with them: despite instructions, fewer Jew-infected books were burned than the Nazis would have liked.
The original Polgar volumes are delectable to look at. Usually they are bound in light cardboard of a primary colour made pastel by time, and the format is small enough to fit the pocket. But the bindings are fragile, and easily crack. It was encouraging to discover, in the 1980s, that Rowohlt was putting out a multi-volume complete edition on thin paper, strongly bound. The editor could not have been better chosen. It was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a long-time admirer of Polgar who was unlikely to muff the job. Nor did he, but the edition is unsatisfactory in one crucial respect. Each piece comes to an end without a sign of its provenance: to find out when it was written, you have to turn to the critical apparatus at the back of the volume. There was some reason to divide his work into its genres, although it would have been better arranged in a pure chronology, to show how his diversity was operating all the time. But to leave the dates off the pieces was to connive at a trick of wish fulfilment. German literature in the twentieth century was fated to lose its self-sustaining monumentality. The point came when everything depended on which year a piece was written, and then which month, and even which day. Glossing that over, you miss the story of how politics invaded art and came close to killing it. The complete edition would be a tomb if Polgar did not have a spirit that can shine through marble. You can see that I am unable to stop borrowing his tricks. But the real trick is to borrow his tone. Nobody should try who can't write English as well as Polgar wrote German, and I'm afraid that lets me out. It was hard enough, for this note, taking him on a sentence at a time. But he could write a whole essay like that: joined-up writing in excelsis.
BEATRIX POTTER
Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) is as much belittled as flattered by her reputation of being the children's author that adults should read. What child would be impressed by that? She herself was not amused when Graham Greene wrote a semi-serious article about her. She wasn't interested in being a semi-serious subject. W. H. Auden was nearer the mark when he praised her outright as an artist of prose. So she was, and her little books would have been treasurable even without her drawings. Her stories attract tweeness towards them—the Peter Rabbit ballet must be hard to take for anyone except a very tiny child—but are never winsome in themselves, mainly because of her tactile, yet quite tough, feeling for language. She could luxuriate in the polysyllabic without making froth of the meaning: a rare, and strictly poetic, discipline. Some of the post–World War II writers for children got their poetry from rhyme and rhythm: James Thurber in _The Thirteen Clocks_ , Dr. Seuss _passim_. Others got it from atmospherics: Maurice Sendak notably, Roald Dahl less tastefully, and J. K. Rowling by ransacking a sorcerers' warehouse stocked with all the magic gear since Grimm's first fairy tales. (In Harry Potter's world, it's only rarely that the _language_ is magic, although Durmstrang would sound like a witty name for a school to any twelve-year-old reader familiar with the history of German literature.) Beatrix Potter got her poetry from prose: which is to say, from speech, concentrated. Written in an age when it was still assumed that children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn't immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by just overhead, and reaches up, while the parent is reminded of the historic privilege of being born into a civilization where the morality of children's books, even at their worthily meant worst, has evolved through supply and demand, and not been imposed by the state according to a plan. In the old Soviet Union, there were children's books that preached the virtues of informing on one's parents. Beatrix Potter had her own ideas of civic virtue, and most of them are still ours, although we might be more inclined than she was to ask what happens to those animals who go to market involuntarily.
Pigling Bland listened gravely; Alexander was hopelessly volatile.
—BEATRIX POTTER, _T HE TALE OF PIGLING BLAND_, P. 25
PEOPLE WHO DID not have Beatrix Potter read to them as a child soon learn to envy their own children. The luxury of her diction seems an unfair treat for the young to those of us who meet it for the first time in later life. My daughters didn't mind being compared to the hopelessly volatile Alexander, as long as I kept saying it. Children like to hear good things said a thousand times, so it helps if the good things are as good as this. _The Tale of Pigling Bland_ is especially rich in pointe-shoe examples of Potter's gift for exquisitely elevated linguistic deportment. In the next paragraph to the one in which this sentence occurs, we find that Aunt Pettitoes gives to each piglet a little bundle, "and eight conversation peppermints with appropriate moral sentiments in screws of paper." Bright young listeners will savour the "appropriate moral sentiments" as if they were the peppermints. More important, they will savour the appropriate moral sentiments even when they aren't quite certain what appropriate moral sentiments are. If you, as an adult, happen to be there when the meaning teeters on the point of sinking in, it can be quite a moment. Poets, especially, are likely to be humbled: this is the transitional point where the art they practise begins and ends.
The only flaw in _The Tale of Pigling Bland_ is that the piglets are going to market, yet there is no mention of the probability that they themselves will one day be on sale there in altered form. Bacon is frequently mentioned, but its significance is not alluded to by the author, which rather leaves it to the reciter: a difficult moral decision. In the story of Timmy Tiptoes, Potter is more straightforward about the fate of mice: cats kill them. With that much admitted, the _deus ex machina_ that saves Timmy Tiptoes is saved from sentimentality. Timmy Tiptoes gets stuck in the trunk of a tree because the Chipmunk has tempted him to eat too many nuts. Potter finds two ways of being unforgettable about Timmy's nut-eating. The Chipmunk " 'ticed him to eat quantities." The reciter will find that his audience is suitably curious about "enticed" being reduced to " 'ticed," but is fascinated beyond delight by the "quantities." (For days afterwards, hopelessly volatile small people will be discovered to have eaten "quantities" of whatever it is they eat at all.) The _deus ex machina_ is "the big wind" that blows the top off the tree. There is no suggestion that a big wind could save Timmy from a cat. There is, however, an implicit suggestion that something will save Pigling Bland and the hopelessly volatile Alexander from becoming bacon. No doubt there had to be such a let-out. Potter was, after all, writing children's books. It is a mark of how good the books are, however, that the merest hint of ordinary uplift is a shock, as if Jane Austen had forgotten to mention money.
JEAN PRÉVOST
Of all the casualties among the French Resistance, Jean Prévost (1901–1944) was possibly the most damaging loss to the future of French culture. Before the war he had stood out as a journalist with a wide range of enthusiasms, and, in a startling number of them, solid credentials: someone who could write so well had every reason to consider himself a literary figure, but his writings about sport were given additional weight by the fact that he was a sportsman as well. He enjoyed every aspect of a productive democracy and might, had he lived, have run into trouble with the left, because his range of enjoyments suggested that a capitalist society might be more fruitfully various, and less alienated, than Marxist theory allowed. Alas, the question of his future never arose. He joined the Resistance as an active member and was killed in the fighting. As I try to contend in the following note, his brave death, and not his conformist history, might have been the real reason his name took so long to come back to life. Jérôme Garcin's _Pour Jean Prévost_ is the essential, and still virtually the only, book devoted to a career short of time but long on implication. Suggesting as it does that one of the duties of a writer might be to place himself in danger, his life is probably fated to be more of a curiosity than a model.
But my soul is a fire that suffers if it doesn't burn. I need three or four cubic feet of new ideas every day, as a steamboat needs coal.
—JEAN PRÉVOST, QUOTED BY JEROME GARCIN IN _P OUR JEAN PRÉVOST_, P. 111
JEAN PRÉVOST WAS forty-three years old when he was killed in battle against German troops in the Vercors on August 1, 1944. He was one of the few writers who were verifiable heroes of the Resistance and thus he was fated to die a double death, because in the post-war period the French intellectual world's climb back to health was long and slow and at a shallow angle. Figures who had been compromised were found less challenging to deal with than those who had been truly admirable. The admirable, indeed, became the negligible. Neither Prévost nor Marc Bloch was granted a tenth of the attention lavished on such flagrant collaborators as Drieu la Rochelle, Rebatet or Brasillach, whose graves were heaped with wreaths of understanding, sympathy and, all too often, outright approval, as if to have had friendly dealings with the enemy had somehow been evidence of an adventurous commitment. I wish I was exaggerating the case, but anyone who doubts it would only have to measure the short list of material written about Prévost against the whole shelves written about Drieu.
Before the war, Prévost had combined within himself, and seemingly without effort, two different writing careers, one as a student of literature and the other as a journalist writing at a high level on subjects which had not previously always enjoyed the quality of attention he brought to them. His studies of Stendhal and Baudelaire remain important to this day. (He had not yet quite finished the book about Baudelaire when he died fighting.) His journalism about cinema and architecture was better informed than most academic opinion on the subject, and far more engagingly written. He was a champion boxer who knew sports from the inside. As Jérôme Garcin notes in the study that rescued Prévost's reputation from its oubliette, "he was not pardoned for wanting to talk about everything and to be read by everybody." As the junior prodigy at Gallimard, as the whizz-kid of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ , he was looked down on by the established writers even when they were honest enough to admire his verve. Mauriac piously warned him against _"cette prodigeuse facilité_." To get a picture of Prévost's personality, you don't have to put together all the ways his contemporaries approved of him. All the ways they disapproved of him would do it. Prévost was humanism reborn: its hunger, its scope, its vitality and its inner light—an inner light produced by all the aspects of life illuminating one another, in a honeycomb of understanding. As Garcin says, for Prévost _encyclopédisme_ was a way of being. Behind the relaxed good looks, his interior mood was "a ferocious appetite nourished by a permanent anguish." None of it would have worked without his pure heart. A passion for justice and a genuine sympathy with the common people—much of his concern about architecture was on their behalf—ruled out any ideological commitment. After the war, pure hearts were hard to find. Sartre had the unmitigated hide to look down on Prévost's memory. The reason for Prévost's "failure," opined the all-comprehending philosopher, was that Prévost had not been confident enough to follow his star.
Unlike his fellow Resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of the German soldiers, but Sartre left that bit out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so ably represented in the thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labour once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was now broken up into separate specialities, each with its resident panel of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture. The separate practitioners in these fields all had their own reasons to forget that a man like Prévost had ever existed. But the single thing about him that everybody wanted to forget was his clear, clean decision about fighting the Nazis. That decision had been of a piece with the unpretentious nobility that marked all his work, including the popular journalism, which never flattered his readers except by making them feel talented. You can see what Sartre was afraid of. First of all, Prévost really was the Resistance fighter that Sartre only pretended to be—a pretence we could forgive him for, if he had not later on accused others of cowardice. But what must really have scared Sartre was the lingering memory of Prévost's literary personality: the liberal, humanist, democratic gusto which would have ensured, had he survived the war, his ascent to the status that Sartre, after the accidental death of Camus, was able to enjoy unchallenged—the savant, the philosopher, the critic of life and literature. On that last point alone, the point of literary criticism, the books that Prévost did not write after the war are a lost library to break the heart. As with Marc Bloch in the field of history—but even more sadly because a gift like Prévost's is harder to come by—a gap opens up that the imagination can't fill. You find yourself unable to calculate the damage. Perhaps we can get an idea by trying to imagine what would have happened to critical journalism in English if Orwell had been killed in Spain
MARCEL PROUST
Marcel Proust (1871–1922) wrote a long book that even the most casual reader usually makes longer by adding notes on the endpapers. _À la recherche du temps perdu_ exists to be annotated. A commonplace book in the classic sense, it is, itself, a set of annotations to all the works of art that Proust has read, looked at, listened to or otherwise enjoyed—and to everything he knows about nature, natural science, love, sex and the workings of the mind. This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading Proust in several editions over the course of forty years. (In view of that threat, I have confined myself to a single short essay at this point, but you will have noticed, elsewhere in the book, that reflections on Proust tend to creep in when other writers are under consideration: a ubiquity of relevance by which, when it is acknowledged, one of his admirers will often spot another, whereupon they will start discussing Proust in lieu of the previous topic.) Forty years and no end in sight. _War and Peace_ is big book too, but you are through it comfortably in a week, and all set to start again one day. _À la recherche du temps perdu_ is never done with, because it keeps growing while you are reading it. Like no other book in the world, Proust's book leads everywhere: a building made of corridors, and the walls of the corridors are made of doors. The student can happily find an entrance through the Modern Library's six-volume _In Search of Lost Time_. This covetably handsome set, bravely decorated with photographs of the author, is basically the 1920 Scott Moncrieff translation (published serially throughout the 1920s under the title of _Remembrance of Things Past_ ) which was revised in the 1980s and 1990s by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright. The whole enterprise took three-quarters of a century fully to materialize in English, and no student's bookshelf should be without it. But it might not be long before the urge arises to read the text in the original.
This urge should not be resisted. Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust's tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught. There are whole levels of complexity that can be opened up by an elementary knowledge of written French, and the elementary knowledge is likely to expand usefully as the _recherche_ goes on. I myself learned what French I have from reading Proust. It took me fifteen years before I could read confidently during the day without a dictionary, and even then I took home a list of words to be looked up in the evening. (A Larousse is essential to back up an ordinary dictionary: as Pasternak said of Pushkin, Proust is full of _things_.) But the mental improvement was well worth any feelings of inadequacy. The idea that your French needs to be perfect in the first place if you are to appreciate France's greatest writer is as absurd as the idea that you need to be able to read music in order to appreciate Beethoven's late quartets. If Beethoven had thought that, he would never have written them. Similarly, with Proust, a book entirely dependent on its language would not have interested him. When he was younger he was preoccupied with style, but always as a measure of compression and intensity; and he put the preoccupation behind him when he matured into a freedom that was all discipline, and a discipline that was all freedom.
Even his social climbing was dedicated to his art. There can be no doubt that he found the high life fascinating, but nothing is too mundane to get into the book, and its true aristocrats are artists. In Britain up to the present day, even in the work of such a clever critic as John Carey, it is often assumed that the concept of high art, because it was once the property of the landed gentry, is part of a traditional mechanism to repress the common people, and should therefore be denied its prestige. The Americans suffer less from that idea, but if it ever needed countering, the mere existence of Proust would be enough to do it. He places art firmly in the possession of those who love it, whatever their origins might be. His gentry, in fact, are those most likely to succumb to the epidemic Philistinism of the prejudice against Dreyfus. Zola was the most famous liberal commentator on the Dreyfus case but it was Proust who saw the matter through. In foreseeing the corrosive effects of licensed anti-Semitism on the civil order, Proust opened yet another door, the one leading into the accumulating political disaster of France between the wars. How so frail and troubled a man could have had all this strength and wisdom in him is a mystery. The mystery has been often explored, but George D. Painter's two-volume biography _Marcel Proust_ is still the book to read about his life. (William C. Carter's single hefty volume is a valuable corrective but not a replacement.) The best single critical book is Jean-François Revel's _Sur Proust_ , if only because Revel firmly warns us off the standard wild goose chase of looking for the novel's structure. It might have one, but only in the sense that we think we have learned something about the structure of the universe when we are told that space is curved.
"There is no man, however wise," he said to me, "who has not, at some time in his youth, said things, or even led a life, of which his memory is disagreeable and which he would wish to be abolished. But he absolutely should not regret it, because he can't be assured of becoming a sage—to the extent that that is possible—without having passed through all the ridiculous or odious incarnations that must precede that final incarnation."
—MARCEL PROUST (ELSTIR'S ADVICE TO MARCEL), À _L'OMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEUR_ , P. 457
IN PROUST THERE are few figures that the narrator finds lasting cause to trust, but Elstir, the veteran and venerable painter, is one of them. The sage, said Elstir, must forgive himself his past faults. Elstir forgot to add that the sage should also correct them. Proust says it for him elsewhere: those we like least are those most like us, but with the faults uncured. It is always dangerous to say " _This_ is what we read Proust for." There are people who read Proust just for the clothes. But those of us who read Proust for his remarks about life will always be wondering whether _À la recherche du temps perdu_ is really a work of art at all. A work of imagination: yes, of course, and supremely. But is it a novel? Isn't it a book of collected critical essays, with the occasional fictional character wandering in and out of it? After the composer Busoni read _Du côté de chez Swann_ , he complained to Rilke that although he had quite enjoyed the opinions about music, he thought the rest of the book was a bit like a novel. Isn't it a work of encyclopaedic synthesis? Thomas Mann, in his diaries, took notes on the way that Proust had taken notes. He especially praised the detail of Proust's interest in flying beetles. Isn't it a work of philosophy? Jean-François Revel, in his brief book _Sur Proust_ —the commentary on Proust that almost gives you the courage to do without all the others—is clearly fascinated with the possibility that Proust might have restored philosophy to its position of wisdom. Often, in the long shelf of his writings, Revel argues that philosophy, having ceased in the eighteenth century to be queen of the sciences, has, in modern times, no other role except to be wise. In _Sur Proust_ he casts his author as a character in a drama: the drama of philosophy reborn. Revel calls _À la recherche_ one of the rare books that even in their weaknesses offer an example of "totally adult thought."
Proust's example drives Revel to philosophical aperçus of his own. Passion, says Revel, consists of seeing in the finite an infinity that doesn't exist. Revel floats the notion that Albertine might have been an even more interesting jailer had she been faithful: the thin end of a wedge into Proust's view of sex and jealousy. (E. M. Forster, from closer to home, had similar reservations, and erected them into a principle designed to cover Proust in general: he said that Proust's analytical knife was so sharp it came out the other side.) On the political plane, Proust is praised by Revel for keeping a level head against collective barbarism through his moral intransigence and his _perspicacité_ psychologique. The collective barbarism was the anti-Semitic nationalism already poisoning French politics when Proust the social butterfly was preparing to write his novel. Revel is only one reader of Proust, but his readings are enough to hint at the richness that _À la recherche_ would offer us even it were only a collection of critical remarks. It is, of course, much more than that: but one of the reasons it is much more than that is that it is never less. These qualities of non-fiction are useful to remember when we realize how many qualities of fiction the longest of all novels does not possess. It has, for example, no structure worth speaking of, and probably would not have attained to one even if Proust had been given another ten years to work on it. Characters would still have shown up twenty years too young at the last party, or twenty years too old, or simply still alive when they should have been dead. Devotees who say that _À la recherche du temps perdu_ reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?
Q
Edgar Quinet
EDGAR QUINET
Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was born in the aftermath of the French Revolution and lived out his life in its long shadow. Nowadays he is hardly ever read for himself, and only rarely cited, and then usually for a single remark. In his lifetime, however, he was a public intellectual of the type we know today, his opinions argued over by everyone who had an opinion. An admirer of religion who drew the line at the Jesuits, he gave lectures on the latter subject that caused so much controversy they were suppressed by government order. In the next revolution, in 1848, he was on the barricades, and voted with the far left in the National Assembly. Exiled to Brussels after the coup d'état, he settled in Switzerland in 1857, not returning to Paris until the fall of Napoleon III. During the siege of Paris in 1870 he was conspicuous as a patriot. Before he died in bed, five years after the Commune, he had written a shelf of books about the philosophy of history. Apart possibly from his autobiographical fragment _Histoire de mes idées_ , published in 1855, most of his books now excite no-one. But a single line, the one quoted below, made it all the way to the 1990s, because it had presaged an idea whose time had come.
But this success, where is it?
—EDGAR QUINET, QUOTED BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL IN _F IN DU SIÈCLE DES OMBRES_, P. 246
QUINET'S CELEBRATED single line came from a less celebrated single paragraph, but the paragraph is worth quoting in full, because it evokes a specific context that has refused to go away. He wasn't just giving us a handy witticism to trot out every time somebody made a mess and called it a triumph. He was talking specifically about the connection, in the absolutist mentality, between claims and crimes.
The persistent illusion of the terrorists is to invoke a success in order to justify themselves before posterity. In effect, only the success can absolve them. But this success, where is it? The terrorists devoured by the scaffolds that they themselves erected, the Republic not only lost but rendered execrable, the political counter-Revolution victorious, despotism in place of the liberty for which a whole nation swore to die: is that success? How long will you go on repeating this strange nonsense, that all the scaffolds were necessary to save the Revolution, which was not saved?
But we need the paragraph only to remind us of the context. With that given, the line stands alone, ready to be imported into any argument about the event that did most to shape modern poltical history. Quinet's unsettling sound bite about the French Revolution was echoed by Jean-François Revel and François Furet, both of them careful to give Quinet the credit. "Far enough from the revolution to feel only fleetingly the passions that troubled the view of those who made it," said Tocqueville in _L'Ancien Régime et la révolution_ , "we are yet still close enough to be able to enter into and comprehend the spirit that brought it about. Soon one will have difficulty doing so: because the great revolutions that succeed make the causes that produced them disappear, thus becoming incomprehensible through their very success." But the question "Where is the success?" was already being heard under the Second Empire, from a few awkwardly sceptical voices of which Quinet's was one. There had always been aristocrats to ask it, but Quinet was an intellectual. Had the French Revolution been worth the agony?
"Where is the success?" is another version of Orwell's answer to the contention, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, that you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Orwell asked: "Where's the omelette?" Nobody sane seriously doubts that in the case of eighteenth-century France, democracy had to come: but was the Revolution the best way, and didn't it help to ensure that the democracy was incomplete? The question has always turned on whether the Jacobinist terror was inevitable. (The most gargantuan expression of Jacobinist terror, the massacre in the Vendée, did not become a question until late in the twentieth century: the bones were a long time coming to light. Nowadays, mass graves can be seen by satellites.) The same question divided the _gauchiste_ left and the independent left in modern France, and still does divide them everywhere in the world. If you can't have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform without revolution. Anyone who "accepts the necessity of Jacobinism" wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted. More than a hundred years had passed since Quinet had contended the same thing, and the idea was still considered too paradoxical to be entertained. One can safely conclude that the impressive combined death toll of revolutions in the last century will go on being considered as justifiable well into the next.
R
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
MARCEL REICH-RANICKI
Marcel Reich-Ranicki (b. 1920), by far the most famous critic in Germany between World War II and the millennium, continues, into the twenty-first century, to exercise, over the German literary scene, a dominance which some writers prefer to regard as a reign of terror. Actually there can be no real argument about the fairness of his judgements—a fact which, of course, makes his disapproval feel even worse for those found wanting. He writes so well that his opinions are quoted verbatim. Victims of a put-down are thus faced with the prospect of becoming a national joke. Most of those writers whose later books were savaged by him had their early books praised by him: those are the writers who become most resentful of all against him. Well equipped to look after himself, he is hard to lay a glove on. Watching magisterial figures such as Günter Grass vainly trying to get their own back on Reich-Ranicki is one of the entertainments of modern Germany. Even those wounded by him would have to admit, under scopolamine, that he can be very funny when on the attack. Hence their intense enjoyment of the moment when history caught him out. Deported from Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto in 1938, Reich-Ranicki survived the Holocaust but stayed on in Communist Poland after the war, and first pursued literary criticism under East German auspices. When he finally defected to the West he forgot to tell anyone that he had been a registered informer under the regime he left behind. Almost everybody was, but he made a mistake in letting someone else say it first. The scandal whipped up on this point did something to offset his impeccable wartime track record as a Jew on the run from the Nazis. But despite the extra animus aroused by what was taken to be his lack of contrition when discomfited, common sense eventually prevailed and his story as a survivor of Nazi horror returned to the centre of attention, especially after he published, at the turn of the millennium, his autobiography _Mein Leben_ , which became a best-seller. There was an English translation, called _The Author of Himself_ : but understandably it made little impact, his name being so little known outside Germany. Within Germany, he is as well-known as any chancellor, and more likely to last in office. Few critics in any country have ever so outstripped the poets and novelists in being literature's living representative, but there is no mystery about the reason. Vastly and yet vividly learned, his judgement alive in every nuance, he writes with a wonderfully seductive clarity which will be especially appreciated by the beginner in German, who could learn the language from this one writer, just from the way he writes about other writers. His favourite form, the short essay, makes for an easily digestible bite-sized chunk. Collections of these short pieces fill a shelf, and there couldn't be a better way into German literary culture, from the poetry to the politics and vice versa. He writes even better in praise than in dispraise, but, as usually happens, the dispraise is more fun. Reich-Ranicki, well aware of that fact, has often pointed out that a literary culture deprived of rigorous criticism would soon die of niceness. He is obviously correct, but that doesn't stop other writers hoping that he will be nice to them, and from protesting loudly when he isn't.
We shouldn't call a critic a murderer just because it is his duty to sign death certificates.
—MARCEL REICH-RANICKI, _D IE ANWALTE DER LITERATUR_, P. 88
AT THE VERY END of the twentieth century, Germany caught a lucky break. The best-seller lists were dominated for an entire year by _Mein Leben_ , the autobiography of Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Germany's toughest literary critic had written a life story to entrance the nation, but the lucky break didn't come just from the remarkable fact that a man of letters with an unchallenged title to a marble plinth was encamped on top of the best-seller list as well. It came also from the fact that he was a Jew. A large part of his story was about the quirk of chance by which he had survived the Nazi era. It became part of Germany's story, however, and against all the odds, that the most dreadful century of its history was rounded out by an act of redemption. New generations were rushing the bookshops to find out about the crimes that the older generations had committed. Anti-Semitism had been officially over since 1945. Now, in 2000, it was culturally over as well. It might still be said to taint the culture, or even to permeate it: but not to dominate it. A Jew was in the driving seat. So that, at last, was the end of that.
Reich-Ranicki himself was unlikely to burst into tears of joy at these signs of atonement. One of the factors that made his best-selling triumph so satisfactory to the onlooker was that here was no figure of affection being handed a lifetime achievement award. Throughout his career as a critic—which, if you count in his first journalism written in Poland and East Germany, covers the entire post-war period—he has been notoriously unbiddable. A characteristic collection of pieces was published in 1984 as _Laute Verisse_ , which pretty well means "Naked Hatchet-Jobs." In actuality he has a wide range of literary sympathy and is one of the rare critics in any language who can be as enjoyable in approbation as in the opposite. He has always had a way of recommending a book that sends you flying to find it: try _not_ to read Theodor Fontane's nineteenth-century classic novel _Effi Briest_ after Reich-Ranicki has got through praising it. But there can be no denying that he is a tough customer, and some of the living writers on whom he has passed negative judgement have made their wounded feelings known. There have been pitiable whimpers and loud squeals from the injured, and when MR-R (just as the _Kaiserliche und Königliche_ Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be called k.u.k in print because it had to be mentioned so often, Reich-Ranicki is customarily referred to by his monogram) was caught up with by his pre-Western past, there were plenty of literary onlookers who found it hard not to enjoy his discomfort. The facts said that he had never done much for the Communist government of East Germany except to go through the motions of informing on people who had no secrets to keep, but for once MR-R was on the back foot, and fellow scribes who had been decked by him were glad to see it, especially if they lacked his gift of being vitriolic. One of his abiding flaws is to suppose that writers offended in their dignity have the expressive power to answer him if they wish. Commendably eager to avoid praising himself, he is slow to realize that his easy habit of buttonholing an audience through a newspaper is more than just a trick, it's a talent.
But the gift for being vitriolic counts for nothing unless it is contained within the larger gift of being appreciative. Nobody minds being knocked by the kind of critic who does nothing but knock. What hurts is being knocked by the critic whose praise you would like to have, and every living writer in the German-speaking countries would like to have MR-R's endorsement. The same would probably go for the dead, if their opinion could be consulted. MR-R is a critic who has always written as well as any writer, so even his most bitter enemies are aware from the starting gun that his own literary status is already settled, although he has never claimed such a thing for himself. He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how _they_ would have done it. Following Friedrich Schlegel, MR-R said it of the greatest German writer, Goethe. To say of the author of _Faust_ that he was too much of a poet to know much about the arts was pretty bold, when you consider how much Goethe knew about everything, but it was characteristic of MR-R to take on the biggest example and make his argument stick. What he really meant was that Goethe's critical judgements were all self-serving, and that the fact should be remembered when you are under the intoxicating impression that Goethe, to make a single point, is invoking the whole aesthetic world. MR-R has always held that the business of judging a book is strictly ad hoc: he professes not to like the criticism that sets itself up as "an alternative airfield" and uses the subject as a pretext to stage an airlift of everything the critic wants to bring in to prove himself powerful. For MR-R to take this line was an act of self-denial, because he himself was very well equipped to play the _uomo universale_. Just because he has an incurable knack of making himself sound arrogant shouldn't deafen us to the truth of his humility. Advancing the principle that the great artist can't criticize with a pure heart, he has been ready to live by the unspoken corollary, that no objective critic can be a great artist. He has been ready to live by it, but he could never make it stick. He writes too well. No wonder he is feared.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki writes so well that he can point a critical judgement and make poetry of it, so that you remember the prose aperçu like a balanced line of verse. In his book _Nachprüfung_ he calls Joseph Roth a _"Vagabond mit Kavaliersmanieren"_ (p. 210). A vagabond with the manners of a cavalier: the perfect way to remember Roth, of whom we can be sure that when he was drinking himself to death in Paris in the late 1930s, he made no disturbance. Here is something more about Joseph Roth from the same source, and this is even better, because it captures what made the texture of Roth's writing so enchanting: "He always made it easy for his readers and often made it hard for his interpreters." But in the German the antithesis is less ponderously arranged: _"Er hat es seinen Lesern immer leicht und seinen Interpreten oft schwer gemacht."_ MR-R, as you can see, does the same: his German is so plainly carpentered that a beginner feels at home in it, and so neatly joined syntactically that it is hard to translate without pulling it to pieces. To round out the subject of MR-R's admiration for Roth, it should be said that MR-R also possesses the creative critic's essential gift of being able to quote from any source but always to the purpose. The man of letters Karl Heinz Bohrer said that Roth was a moralist out of stylistic purity, and a stylist out of moral sensitivity. Not even MR-R can improve on that, so he quotes it: just what a good critic should do, but it takes humility to do it—the kind of humility that needs an air of arrogance to protect its Delphic mission.
MR-R has never been just a stylist judging style, although there are worse things to be than someone who can do that. He can get to the heart of a writer and stay there, sometimes for decades. In the heart of Thomas Mann he set up shop. His book on the Mann family is the first thing to read on the subject (although first you should read the subject, which takes a good chunk of a lifetime) but if he had never talked about any of them except Thomas Mann he would still have done a lot to get the titan in context—and from the inside, which is the hard part. _"Er hat fast nichts erlebt und fast alles beschrieben."_ He experienced almost nothing and described almost everything: it was too true to be cruel. MR-R takes that truth as an invitation to extend his enquiries, not to shut them down. He has never stopped being interested in, or being interesting about, Thomas Mann; but always on the understanding that Thomas Mann devoted his life and art to needing no such assistance. So why is a critic necessary? Well, there are all those other critics who aren't, and they will hardly shut up unless contested: someone has to speak plain sense. There was a lot Thomas Mann could do, but he couldn't always do that. In the style of a great creative writer, too many clarities collide and make rainbows: sorting out the spectral maelstrom is a long job.
There have been other great names that MR-R has felt no compulsion to cling on to. He has always been a great one for echoing Tallulah Bankhead's vocal judgement during a self-consciously advanced production of a play by Maeterlinck: "There's less in this than meets the eye." Admirers of Walter Benjamin were disconcerted to find that MR-R thought him short of the very thing he was supposed to have in abundant stock: profundity. MR-R thought Benjamin the critic made a mistake in trying to think like a writer. MR-R skewered Benjamin's character on the basis of Benjamin's snobbish remarks about Walter Mehring's social background. (Mehring was a catchpenny writer of lyrics and sketches under the Weimar Republic, and in exile he was a bit of a liability, but he was also a genuine lover of books, as his lament for his lost library, _Die verlorene Bibliotek_ , subsequently revealed.) When you consider that Benjamin's prestige as a pundit continues to be almost as high within Germany as outside it, you begin to grasp just how brave MR-R can be, or at any rate how cocky he can sound. On his ZDF television talk show _Das literarische Quartett_ he regularly advances the outrageous opinion that no contemporary novel longer than 500 pages can possibly be worth reading. (A book of transcripts from the show, collected under the snappy title ". . . _und alle Fragen offen,_ " comes in at 768 pages, but is very much worth reading.) Though his fellow panellists and most of the television audience secretly agree with him, they all delight in ascribing such opinions to his choleric impatience, and indeed he always looks as if he is about to bite the book he is holding in half, even if he says he likes it. But the short shrift he customarily extends to the profundities of _Kunstwissenschaft_ ought not to be ascribed to the supposed brevity of his attention span. He has taken the time to understand what the higher criticism is on about. He just doesn't agree with it.
MR-R wants the critic's job kept down to earth. Really he wants the writer's job kept down there too. In a culture where the sublime has always seductively beckoned, his has been a useful corrective emphasis: a shift of direction towards talking turkey and away from _Mumpitz_ , that useful German word for exalted twaddle. There is a danger of know-nothing savagery, but he offsets that by knowing everything. Politically clued up, he has always been able to approach contemporary German writers through what tends to be their blind spot, which is their attitude to liberal democracy. In a cockfight whose flying feathers have not yet settled, MR-R leapt on Günter Grass for flirting with the notion that at least the old DDR had had a system of belief. (Graham Greene used to peddle the same line about the West's deficiency in faith, but apart from Dwight Macdonald there was no Reich-Ranicki to tear into him.) Contrary to the received opinion among MR-R's more embittered opponents in Germany, he has always been hospitable enough to any writer who has found the capitalist West deficient in human values. He just punishes any lingering suggestion that the totalitarian East might have had a surplus of them. His credentials were impeccable: the East was where he came from. The credentials looked less impeccable when it turned out that part of the price he paid for staying in the East at the end of the war was that he had to turn stoolie, but his personal history—though he made a mistake in not admitting it before it was revealed—couldn't invalidate the attacks he launched on writers in the East after he himself had made it to the West. Regretfully but firmly, he dismantled the claims to seriousness of those East German writers who did not, as he did, take it on the lam, but who stayed on, compromised with the State, and flourished. He argued, surely correctly, that the compromise not only turned their opinions to apologetics, it turned their literature to propaganda. But the unyielding strictness with which he said so has understandably been held against him, and raises the question of whether a critic should ever throw a stone without remembering his house is made of glass.
When we look at the quoted statement carefully, however, we see that MR-R is claiming no such right. The death certificate is signed by a doctor. It is the death _sentence_ that is signed by a judge. The judgement MR-R is talking about is the diagnostic one about whether the work presented to him is alive or dead, not about whether it should live or die. As long as this is borne in mind, it seems to me that the irascible arch-critic is on strong ground. He is often called _Henker_ , hangman, but it's a nickname. At most he is a grave-digger, and what would we do without those? We have a right, though, to ask grave-diggers for a modicum of tact. Hamlet met one with the saving grace of humour. MR-R's humour is real and often hilarious, but he would do better to make his fellow-feeling more obvious more often. In old age, heaped with honours and uncontested in his position, he continues to write as if he had not yet made it. One of the most piquant complaints in his autobiography is how he was not made to feel at home in the German literary world: it is a complaint that goes all the way back to Jakob Wassermann, whose case is cited in MR-R's indispensable pocket book _Der doppelte Boden_ (The False Bottom). Under the Weimar Republic, Wassermann was nationally famous but felt he did not belong. MR-R, nationally famous in a democractic Germany half a century after the Holocaust, still feels the same. If it is the condition of the Jew in Germany, then the condition is historically incurable. (There is a lot to prove that the German intellectual world has done everything in its power to make amends.) But it might be just personal. Not many artists feel secure in their posts, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki is an artist if anybody is: an artist of criticism if you like, but for anyone who can write a sentence the way he can, the option to rule himself out is not open. As MR-R has always been the first to insist, a critic is not a scientist, because there is no Golden Yardstick: no _Metermass_. That leaves the critic as either artist or factotum. MR-R claims the lower status, but the way he writes condemns him to the higher. I came to German late, and it has sometimes been a hard tussle with my thick wits: but knowing what I know now, if I had never learned it to read anyone else, I would have learned it just to read him.
JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL
Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out. The best way of defining his style as a writer is to say that there is something as good as that in every paragraph. No political commentator anywhere is so consistently entertaining on such a high level. Revel's youthful beginnings were as a courier in the Resistance. After trading in his thorough academic preparation as a philosopher for a career as a working journalist, he set out on a long attempt to bring French political journalism back towards philosophy, by developing, over the course of twenty-five or more books, a dense consistency of liberal views always underpinned by both a deep background in historical reading and a close observation of daily events. The close observation fed a good memory, which made him the bugbear of his _gauchiste_ opposite numbers, because he remembered things they preferred to forget: to the end, he retained an impressive knack for tracing the latest progressive fad back to its roots in the orthodoxy before last.
In succession to Raymond Aron, and on a par with the eloquent ex-Communist François Furet, Revel was part of France's comeback from the depths of glamorous but perilously self-deceiving radical chic. Several of his books, most notably _How Democracies Perish_ , earned international fame. It could be said that in the United States at least one of his opinions made him too famous: his notion that democracy might have to give up some of its liberties in order to protect itself was, when translated into English, far too popular on the American neo-conservative right, as Hendrick Herzberg pointed out at the time. But Revel is at his most rewarding when read in his own language, which he writes in a style that the beginner will find gratifyingly clear in its structure, memorable for its vivid imagery, and consistently funny. Revel is brilliant in attack, but always remembers to dismantle the man's position and not the man. He has a lively appreciation of how people can get stuck with a view because it has become their identity. In 1970 his book _Without Marx or Jesus_ was an early guess that America would not be universally admired for making a totalitarian hegemony impossible. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Revel was prescient about how nostalgia for a collectivist social solution would continue to infect the left. By extension, he foresaw the crisis that would be brought to liberal democracy by an ideology of multiculturalism, because it would automatically undermine liberal values at home without even needing to pay allegiance abroad. Perhaps Revel's single best book about the world picture is _L'Obsession anti-américaine_ (2002, translated as _Anti-Americanism_ ), which ranges far more widely than its title suggests, persuasively tracing the development of globalized terror from its origins in the threat, not that the Palestinians might be denied their own state, but that they might gain it in a way that accepted the existence of the state of Israel. The best book about him is by him: his 1997 autobiography Le Voleur dans la maison vide (The Thief in the Empty House). It is impossible to imagine any of his dogmatist opposite numbers writing anything so human, self-deprecating and charmingly troubled. No wonder they loathe him. Outwritten, outpointed and outraged, French _gauchiste_ commentators have always consigned Revel to the far right, but they find it hard to make the classification stick. When it comes to the welfare of the common people, he was all too clearly more to the left than they are, never having succumbed to the intellectual opportunism that cherishes a non-existent class struggle as the motor of social progress.
During the preparation of this book for the press, Jean-François Revel, full of years and honours, died at the age of eighty-two. Though the pseudo-left throughout the world went on calling him a right-winger to the very end, it was always apparent, to anyone with an ear for his sardonic music, that he was a popular champion in the very best sense of the term. He began on the left, and, in the only sense that really matters, on the left was where he finished: vigilant against all powers that hold the common people in contempt, including the power that claims they can be coerced into being free.
There are no genres, there are only talents.
—JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, _L E VOLEUR DANS LA MAISON VIDE_, P. 311
REVEL, WHEN HE wrote this in the late 1990s, was defending the status of journalism against lofty minds who presumed to despise its immediacy. In France, the philosophers, the sociologists and the savants in general had always enjoyed an automatic superiority to journalists, because for the savants the unit of thought was the book, whereas for the journalists the unit of thought was only the article. Books outweighed articles. Revel had good personal reasons to question this hierarchy. The philosophers in particular, with Sartre always in the ascendant, had an impressive record of getting the post-war world wrong, whereas Revel and some of his fellow journalists had been getting it right. Revel was too modest, however, to quote from his own works in order to demonstrate that the mainspring of this talent was a capacity for compression that left the philosophers sounding vapid. They weren't just peddling falsehoods, they were pumping the life out of the language while they did so. Revel pumped the life in. He could do so from an historical perspective, which always helps. On the matter of Malraux's inflated prestige as an omniscient pontifex of the visual arts, for example, Revel could go all the way back to Hegel for evidence that real knowledge about art sounded less like a tinkling cymbal. Hegel, said Revel, actually looked hard at paintings and judged before he theorized. Revel found the French art-history tradition critically short of of Jewish scholars. Elie Faure, august author of that platitudinous tome _L'Esprit des formes_ , had emerged not from a proper scholarly tradition but from a vacuum, and Malraux represented the same vacuum with better publicity. Revel scorned that kind of high-falutin cultural globetrotting for its second-hand world-historical verbiage ( _"le verbiage historico-mondial de deuxième main"_ —the sandbag swings more elegantly in the original). He called it vulgarization in an ampule. But the phrase that counted was _déclamatoire prétentions métaphysiques_. It was the claim to philosophical status that riled him.
Well schooled in philosophy himself, Revel thought the philosophy that mattered most had always begun from the level of well-written journalism, which was in touch with the world and had a professional imperative to keep the contact while making specific propositions. He put a premium on the thinking that did not give itself a licence to get above writing. The danger of that position is to overvalue simplicity: its proponent had better be able to suggest everything else while he zeroes in on a neat precept. Revel could, and can: we need the two tenses because he gets better as he gets older. His prose, right down to the epithet, demands to be unpacked, and it is a long time before we see the bottom of the suitcase. He is the master of the non-moronic oxymoron. In any language, practitioners of broadsheet commentary love the oxymoron as a device, because it hints at a pipeline to profundity. But an oxymoron from Revel always pays its way. He was the first to come up with a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: "retrospective clairvoyance." In an everyday piece for a newspaper, he called terrorism "systematized delirium." Most authors of a treatise on the subject would be very glad to think of an expression as rich with implication as that.
Even in straight expository prose—no rhetorical devices, no tricks—he has the gift of putting a large argument into a small space, usually when he is summarizing what he has just been expounding. In a searing article on the deliberate dumbing-down of the French education system, he encapsulates the possible consequences: "a non-selective diploma is a passport to unemployment." (Note the resonance of the buried metaphor: a passport implies a foreign land, which is what unemployment is.) In Britain, Kingsley Amis got into the language with a phrase about the same theme: _More will mean worse_. (He actually _wrote_ it in italics, which helped the op-ed journalists to home in on it without the tax to their poor brains of reading it in context.) But the strength of Amis's point depended on his treating education specifically, as an absolute; and the strength was also a weakness, because he had no inclination to extend his view to a social tendency. Revel's phrase leaves the way open for an argument about whether a proposed cure for social ills might not exacerbate them. Always characterized by the _bien pensant_ left as a diehard right-winger, Revel was fruitfully obliged to go on pointing out that he was in fact a liberal democrat who was genuinely concerned that doctrinaire _gauchiste_ measures would leave the underprivileged less privileged than ever. Being misrepresented can be a stimulus, and in France Revel could depend on being misrepresented from all directions. He was energized by a vivid knowledge of what the states in the East had been like when their official thinkers had been in a position to translate their vilification of a dissident into practical action.
As things are now, it is getting hard to imagine just how reluctant the French intelligentsia was to give up on its righteous commitment to the international anti-capitalist dream. "A school of thought that knows itself to be in decline," said Revel in _La Connaissance inutile_ , "fights all the more furiously to conserve its identity." As it became clear that the West, in order to bring communism to ruin, didn't have to do anything except exist, the French left became more vindictive, and not less, against liberal democrat commentators of Revel's stamp. The left actually intensified, instead of diminishing, its insistence that the Communist world was beseiged by hostile forces. Revel got his answer into a nutshell: "The Communist world is indeed a fortress besieged, but from within." His critics might conceivably have one day forgiven him for thinking like that. But they have never forgiven him for writing like that. They would prefer to call his way of putting things irresponsible: mere journalism. At the end of 2001, Bernard-Henri Lévy published his portentously titled _Réflexions sur la guerre, le mal et la fin de l'histoire_. A commentator with philosophical credentials, Lévy is so madly fashionable that his new book appeared in the vitrines of the fashion boutiques along the Boulevard St. Germain. More than three decades having elapsed since the events of May 1968, Lévy has had the time, and the good sense, to work his way to an acceptance of liberal democracy. But from the way he states the position he now holds you wouldn't know that it had been held from the beginning by men like Revel, who never gets a mention.
Later in the same passage from _Le Voleur dans la maison vide_ , Revel goes on to confess that whenever he wrote an article he was always thinking of how it would fit into a book. This confession might seem contradictory: if talent matters and genres don't, why should a journalist publish books at all? But the question answers itself. The attraction of journalism is that one runs no lasting risks. But that's just what encourages the sloven. I prefer to be encouraged by a man like Revel, who has always written even the most fleeting piece as if he might need to defend it on the day of judgement—and for any craftsman proud of his work, of course, the day of judgement is always today. _Ce jour_ : journalism. In French the connection is obvious. In English, we tend to forget that journalism means today, and we are seldom encouraged to remember that history is made of nothing else except one today after another.
Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence.
—JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, _L A CONNAISSANCE INUTILE_, P. 153
This is an example of Revel restraining himself, rather than letting fly. The propensity of left ideologists to argue from a sense of history while lacking a sense of fact has always got his goat, but he has managed to stay coherent. Sometimes one wishes that he would sideline the suave sarcasm and give way to a bellow of rage. On the same page of the same book, Revel quotes Regis Debray's ringing assurance, dating from 1979, that "the word Gulag is _imposed_ by imperialism." (The italics are there in the original French, where they have even more the effect of a proud smile from a man in tights who has just farted a blue flame.) Debray's confident pronouncement would have been bizarre enough in 1959, when even Beauvoir must have been having doubts, but for 1979 it was a striking example of the determination of the French far left to call their retreat an advance. Revel was the first to spot that those ideologists who did give up parts of their position became very angry if it was suggested that they had done so in response to criticism. "Those who hold the monopoly of error reserve to themselves the monopoly of rectification."
Revel had always been good at cutting a section through the mechanism of the totalitarian mind so that you could see the cogs turning. Raymond Aron had begun the job in his _L'Opium des intellectuels_ , where he pointed out the essential difference between a sense of history and an ideology. A sense of history reveals variety, and an ideology conceals it. Revel made an advance on Aron by picking up on the bullying aspect, the set of coercive mental habits that made an ideologist a totalitarian even in his way of thought. On a later page of _La Connaissance inutile_ –and also, with the appropriate scholarly back-up, in _Pourquoi des philosophes_ —he pinpoints Heidegger as a case of _totalitarisme dans le démarche discursive_ , tirelessly and needlessly accumulating affirmatives: "terrorist tautology" in the style of _Hitler and Stalin_. In _Le Voleur dans la maison vide_ , Revel drew sad conclusions about the ideologists in general: "The intellectuals have the opportunism of the exterminator" (p. 231). After the verbal battle of a lifetime, he had come to accept that the reason for the readiness of the intellectuals to connive at mass extermination was that their language was itself a totalitarian instrument. Hence the hollowness of what he called the eternal dream of the _bien pensant_ left: _un totalitarisme végétarien_ (p. 557). The reluctance of ex-ideologists like Bernard-Henri Lévy to acknowledge their debt to Revel is quite understandable. He isn't telling them that they were bad writers because they thought that way. He is telling them that they thought that way because they were bad writers.
RICHARD RHODES
An American journalist with showbiz status, Richard Rhodes has a diva-like shyness about revealing his precise age, but the records show that he graduated from Yale in 1959, which probably means that he was born somewhere around 1938. Like many of us who were children during World War II and found out while we were growing up that the world we inherited had been shaped by technology to an unprecedented degree, Rhodes pursued a fascination with machines and systems. Most of the eighteen books published under his name are about technical matters at a high level of complexity, which he can talk about with professional expertise. At various times he has been a visiting scholar at both Harvard and MIT. On subjects other than science and technology he can fall prey to catch-all sociological theories—for the machine buff, there is always the temptation to think that society is a machine too—but on purely technical matters he has a rare knack for putting difficult topics in clear, and even self-effacing, prose. He is also a novelist. With his work in that area I won't pretend to be familiar, but at least two of his non-fiction works are compulsory reading, and one of those is a book that every student of liberal democracy should know in detail. _The Making of theAtomic Bomb_ (1986) depends on a thoroughness of research that would scarcely have been possible without the author's being supported for five years by the Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (The availability of aid on such a scale is probably the chief reason that the United States produces so many more of this type of writer than say, Britain: it isn't just their unabashed can-do attitude, it's the depth of their back-up.) Rhodes deserves personal credit, however, for having done an unusually judicious job in tying the story together.
In a still rarer feat, he has managed to dramatize a technical story without fudging the science. The spectacular nature of some of the human material on display might have helped in this dramatization. The minds assembled at Los Alamos were often histrionic characters even when they shrank from human contact, and the way Robert Oppenheimer marshalled their talented and sometimes temperamental efforts was a theatrical event. But finally the object they were all after depended on physics and engineering, and Rhodes's real triumph is to make a drama out of those things too. The narrative catches the reader up in an excitement that is unlikely to suit his proclivities, unless he believes in advance that it was necessary not only to build the bomb, but to drop it on a city.
On the latter issue, Rhodes lays out the case without fudging the arguments on either side. Those who think there is only one side, against the bomb's use, will discover that Oppenheimer was never among their number. Even though the war against Germany was over, he thought there was a case for using the bomb to bring about a quick and certain end to the war against Japan, and he presented the case with logic hard to fault. Oppenhimer's sensitivities about the nuclear weapons he had been instrumental in bringing into existence were concentrated not against the uranium bomb but against its successor, the hydrogen bomb. Rhodes, again with the aid of a couple of large foundations, tells the story of the hydrogen bomb too, in _Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb_ (1995). The second book is as uncompromisingly thorough as the first but necessarily less fascinating, because the moral problem remained notional. The hydrogen bomb was too destructive to be used in war, and the fact was plain to any given government, which would rein in its own military leaders if they thought it could. As it happened, it was in the United States, during the Cuban missile crisis, that the military got closest to starting a global thermonuclear war on its own account, when the air force, and especially its Strategic Air Command, tried to provoke the Soviet Union into action, against John F. Kennedy's clear orders as commander in chief. The Constitution held, but only just. Since the end of the world came that close, it is easy to argue that the development of nuclear weapons was evil in itself: even those ready to contemplate that the nuclear strike against Japan might have been an acceptable price for shortening the war are usually less ready to concede that the threat of a fried planet might have been the price of freedom. But liberals should face two uncomfortable possibilities; first, that it was a necessary evil; second, that nothing else, in the Cold War years, could have stopped the two major powers from fighting. The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past, administered by better men. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.) But the past was administered by men as clever as they were at the very least. The chief virtue of Rhodes's book about Los Alamos it to give you the feeling of how a group of the cleverest men on Earth combined their best efforts in the belief that building a bomb to kill a hundred thousand people at a time was the only thing to do. There can be moral discussions of the modern world that don't take that fact in, but they won't be serious.
Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller were not, however, the first to conceive of using a nuclear chain reaction to initiate a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen.
—RICHARD RHODES, _T HE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB_, P. 375
IN HIS _the War Against Cliché_ , Martin Amis hilariously demolishes—nukes, to use one of his favourite verbs—a book about sex written by this same Richard Rhodes. On the evidence of the quotations adduced by his reviewer, Rhodes's sex treatise must indeed be a disaster. I can't bring myself to read it, but partly because I would like to retain my respect for the author of two of the best books I have ever read about science and technology, _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ and _Dark Sun_. Though it might not apply to sex, where some of the secrets are buried deep, Rhodes has a nose for the enriching detail. The immediate consequence of reading the above quotation is to find out who was the first to conceive of a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen, and thus of the device that we later came to know as the hydrogen bomb. Guess forever and you will never guess.
It was the Japanese physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara. He gave a lecture on the subject in Kyoto in May 1941, seven months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Hagiwara was also very early in the field on the subject of uranium isotope separation, with particular emphasis on plutonium ( _Dark Sun_ , p. 77). Later on, the plutonium option was to become the biggest single Allied secret of the war, outranking even the secret of the code-breaking operations. Though Rhodes doesn't say so—he doesn't need to say so—Hagiwara's precocity raises interesting questions about what Japanese physics might conceivably have achieved if the initial strategic plan of Japan's armed forces had worked out and America had been quickly brought to terms. We can tell ourselves that the strategic plan would never have worked out. We can also tell ourselves that Japan would never have been able to match its physics with a concerted technological effort comparable in its vastness to the one with which the Americans were able to back up the brain-work in Los Alamos: but we can't tell ourselves the second thing with quite the same confidence that we can tell ourselves the first. Post-war, after a defeat amounting to total destruction, Japanese technology got itself together again well enough. If there had been an early truce, leaving time to get organized, there is no telling what might not have been accomplished, although even the Japanese now commonly say that there would have been no fully modern reform of their science and industry if it had not been for the defeat and the occupation. Rhodes is probably right, however, to stay off those paths. His best gift is to present the facts and let the reader do the awed speculating. (The disqualification of justly forgotten techno best-sellers like Robert Jungk's _Brighter than a Thousand Suns_ is that their authors, short of information but long on excitable prose, stifled the reader's reaction by trying to echo it in advance.) Rhodes, aware that he is dealing with genuinely high drama, goes easy on the theatrical effects. We learn that when Niels Bohr was in Cambridge he brushed up his English by reading _David Copperfield_. When Fermi was building the first reactor in Chicago, the graphite slabs were hefted into position by the college football team in mufti. (Captain Future, block that kick!) At Bikini on March 1, 1954, the Castle Bravo H-bomb shot was a fifteen-megaton runaway. The merit of Rhodes's books is that he withholds moral judgement long enough to bring out the creative atmosphere generated by brilliant people working together on vast, novel projects. _In The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ he can even make you see how an ugly customer like General Leslie Groves might be just the man to have around if you are trying to build an atomic bomb that will work. The awkward implication is that if you want to do without the company of General Groves, you must organize a world free of conflict. Such a world is hard to imagine, but perhaps Rhodes thought that establishing the principles of stress-free sex was the way to start.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
For those who look on the arts as a kind of celestial sports competition, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is up there with Bertolt Brecht for the title of German Poet of the Twentieth Century. The standard view of the contending couple is that Brecht's poetic art was dedicated to social revolution, whereas Rilke's poetic art was dedicated to art. There is a lot to be said for that view as it applies to Rilke, because few writers who have died so young covered so much aesthetic ground. Born in Prague, he studied art history there and also in Munich and Berlin. The personalized melancholy of his early verse gave way to an overt quest for God after he made two trips to Russia, where he met Tolstoy and the Pasternak family. (Lou Andreas-Salomé, a recurring figure in his life as she was in the lives of many other famous men of his time, was along for the ride up the Volga.) In Paris he got himself appointed secretary to Rodin. An ideal aestheticism took over from mystic revelation in the poems of _Neue Gedichte_ (1907). Some would say that his strongest and least self-consciously ethereal verse was to be found in that volume. Showing signs of believing that he had arrived at the apotheosis of art, he ascended to the empyrean in his _annus mirabilis_ of 1922, when he wrote all of _The Sonnetsto Orpheus_ and all of _The Duino Elegies_ : works in which the Poet is elected (some might say self-elected) as the only shaping force capable of dealing with natural energy. Rilke's verse is hard to translate but some of the middle-period verse comes across in parts. The prose is a better bet, especially the deliberately approachable _Letters to a Young Poet_. When he actually had so much to say that he wanted to be understood, Rilke turned out sentences that you could write a book about.
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, _G ESAMMELTE WERKE_, VOL. 5
THE MOST OFTEN quoted thing Rilke ever said in prose, this was his equivalent of Mae West's "Come up and see me some time." She never said it quite that way, just as Bogart never quite said "Play it again, Sam." But Rilke did say, pretty well exactly, this. He said it, of course, in German, where it sounded even more stately, because in German "fame" and "name" do not rhyme, so there is no cheap chiming of start and finish. Neat as it is in either language, however, here is a good example of a sentence begging to be misunderstood. The idea behind it is at least half right, although it would have no force unless it was partly wrong. To take an example: the actress Marion Davies remains famous only for being the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. The facts, however, say that she was an extremely talented comedienne, well capable of earning a high salary in her own right; and that she genuinely loved Hearst, who was in awe of her. It did him credit: though he could have had any woman who was available for money, he loved talent.
But the facts are hard to get at. Her films are not in circulation. The film that makes the myth is _Citizen Kane_ , which, since the title character is based on Hearst, reinforces the idea that Marion Davies was a casualty, because Kane's mistress in the film is an insufficiently gifted singer forced to humiliate herself to gratify Kane's egotistical dreams for a young woman he loves like a toy. The cumulative power of a myth, and the difficulty of dispelling it, are both demonstrated by how generations of high-IQ film society attendees have prided themselves on their knowledge of _Citizen Kane's_ biographical subtext, down to and including the supposed fact that "Rosebud" was Hearst's pet name for Marion Davies's clitoris. In Rilke's sentence, _Inbegriff_ could possibly be translated as "essence," but since the dictionary gives us the alternative "sum total" we might as well use it, because in myth-mongering the driftwood helps build the edifice. The _Inbegriff_ of misunderstandings about Marion Davies would be very hard to shake even if a showreel of her comic moments on film were to be tacked on to the end title of _Citizen Kane_ , however it was reproduced in whatever medium. Orson Welles did a terrible thing to William Randolph Hearst. To assault the tycoon's reputation was one thing, and no doubt Hearst deserved it. But to belittle the woman he loved was cowardly, and it is worth wondering whether the crime remained on Welles's conscience, and thus helped to explain some of his self-destructive behaviour in later years. Whatever the truth of that, there can be no doubt that Welles contributed mightily to the corroboration of Rilke's remark. The fame of Marion Davies survived her death, but it had little to do with the woman who had once been alive. It was a sum total of misunderstandings.
Fame can be polarized between two contrary distortions and leave its true human subject untouched in the middle. Brecht is a classic case. As the poet and playwright of the international left he was revered by the progressive intelligentsia across the world. After Stalinism at long last became questionable, the international left was only reinforced in its fashionable authority, and Brecht's reputation along with it: he was thought to represent what had been permanently valuable in the socialist world view. Apart from the operas, whose value was seldom challenged (only Lotte Lenya ever dared to say that Brecht would have been nothing without Kurt Weill), the plays were thought to be profound analyses of world capitalism in crisis. In my time as a student in Sydney in the late 1950s, _The Good Woman of Setzuan_ was mounted with reverence and greeted with awe. The amateur actors concerned with the production, many of them my friends, had no idea that the body count of Mao's Great Leap Forward was still mounting even as they fretted over trying to remember their lifeless, hectoring lines about the difficulty of jolting Chinese peasants out of their selfish ways. (It was from the producer of _The Good Woman_ that I bought my set of the Brecht-Weill opera _Mahagonny_ , on the understanding that if he had not been strapped for cash by the inescapable effects of world capitalism in crisis, nothing would have induced him to part with it.) Even as late as my undergraduate years in Cambridge, Brecht's unswervingly charmless _A Man Is a Man_ was one of the Cambridge Theatre Group's gifts to the Edinburgh Fringe, the production having been given into the keeping of an earnest young theatrical vagabond on the grounds that he had once been with the Berliner Ensemble.
On subsequent investigation it turned out that he had been with the Berliner Ensemble only to the extent of sweeping the stage, but the mere connection was enough, such was the blinding effect of Brecht's renown. The Berliner Ensemble was a long time turning into a bad joke, and indeed the joke was never as bad as all that: when the ensemble's touring company of _The Threepenny Opera_ visited London in the early sixties, Wolf Kaiser as Mackie Messer showed what a decade or so in the same role could do for an actor's polish. (He also showed, with his perfectly believable naturalistic impersonation of Mackie's charismatic _savoir vivre_ , that Brecht's theories about the alienation effect were balderdash; but that's by the way.) In the long run, however, there was no reversing the erosion of Brecht's shamanic prestige as the personification of radical theatre. Friedrich Torberg's post-war criticisms of Brecht's plays could not be dismissed as right-wing propaganda, although Torberg's connections with publications partly financed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom were naturally used to blacken his name. (We have to imagine an intellectual climate in which it was thought that only a secret payment from the CIA could explain a sceptical reception for Brecht's views on the Western conspiracy against socialist benevolence.) It had been apparent since _The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui_ that Brecht had never had any intention of telling the truth about the central facts of politics in his own time. He knew what the truth was: nobody knew better, he just wasn't going to bring it in, even by implication. Above all, the main truth was left out. According to his dramatic works, Nazism, not just at the beginning but throughout its career, existed because capitalism willed it so, and communism was the soul of freedom. In the end, there was no considerable audience left anywhere, west or east, for such a fantastic interpretation, and Brecht's reputation as a seer melted away in good time to be replaced by a contrary reputation based on the repellent details of his real-life biography.
He emerged as an ice-cold, ruthless, self-serving egomaniac contemptuous of all decencies, and especially pitiless to the women who made the mistake of paying him allegiance. Even people who admired his work have given pen-portraits that turn the stomach. The psychologist Manès Sperber never lost respect for Brecht's dedication to his gift, but Sperber was a witness to Brecht's ruthless manipulation of actors and despised him for it. Marcel Reich-Ranicki's admiration for Brecht went far beyond Brecht's gifts as a poet: Reich-Ranicki really thought that Brecht was a force in the theatre. But Reich-Ranicki has given us an account of a face-to-face meeting from which Brecht emerges as such a titanic pain in the arse that you wonder why Reich-Ranicki didn't reverse his lifetime opinion on the spot. That he did not is a tribute to Brecht's aura. It might also, however—and here is the crucial point—have been an instance of accurate critical estimation. Somewhere in between the thoroughgoing con man Brecht was in real life, and the hollow prophet he was as a man of the didactic theatre, Brecht was a great poet. In the twentieth-century annals of German poetry, he shares pre-eminence with Rilke, who was no paragon of humanity either.
Rilke's fame, however, was based on the assumption that he embodied art for art's sake. Since the evidence for the assumption was overwhelming, his fame was impregnable. He had no other allegiance, and certainly no political one, to distract him from his pursuit of the exquisite. Everything in his life had to match up to the refinement of his wife, and if his wife didn't fit the picture, she had to go. His notepaper was as beautiful as his handwriting. He was as careful in his dress as Beau Brummell. The various settings in which he wrote poems were chosen from a catalogue of the great houses of Europe. Titled women who owned the houses found themselves in receipt of his finely judged letters, delicately suggesting that if hospitality should be extended to him when the wind was in the right direction, masterpieces would ensue. The famous Schloss Duino, where he wrote the elegies, was not the castle that its name implies, but an Italianate palazzo with suitably comfortable quarters in which elegies could be written in lieu of rent. Rilke's perfect taste accompanied him beyond death. Volumes of Rilke correspondence are still coming out from the publishing house Insel Verlag, all of them in the same prettily proportioned format. By now I have a five-foot shelf of books just by Rilke himself, let alone of books about him; and still there is no end in sight. I could never throw the stuff away. It looks too good.
And somewhere in the middle of it all is the relatively thin sheaf of poetry that justifies the bustle. Poets in English continue to line up for the inevitable failure of translating his short lyrics. The best translations I have seen are from Babette Deutsch but everyone falls short, even J. B. Leishmann, who devoted his life to translating Rilke poems both big and small. Though Rilke would be a bad reason to learn how to read his language, after you have done so he rewards you by proving, especially in such short lyrics as " _Das Karrussel_ ," that he really was a wonderful poet. But you can't chase up all the ancillary stuff without getting as precious as he was, and there is dangerous moment when, in the elegies, "the tear trees, the fields of flowering sadness" start sounding like fine shades of meaning, instead of forced exercises in sentimentality. Rilke had too much civilization, just as Brecht had too little: their matching deviations from normality make both of them toxic company. Take the two of them together and you barely end up with one man you would want to have a drink with. You also get a pretty fair idea of just how important it is to estimate a writer through his own language, and not through the language that gathers around him. Hannah Arendt has been much criticized for "Forbidden to Jove," her essay about Brecht collected in her book _Men in Dark Times_. (This could be the moment to print a health warning: while Arendt's journalism is nearly all valuable, her formal philosophy is nearly all unreadable.) John Willett, one of Brecht's principal devotees and translators, vilified Arendt for that essay. At first glance, there is indeed something absolutist in the way Arendt assures us that Brecht ruined himself as a poet by praising Stalin. It reminds us of her thesis about the desk-bound bureaucrats who drove the Holocaust: an explanatory idea that left too much unexplained.
But a second glance is advisable. Even as a poet, as a master of lyric forms in which he could say anything, Brecht was inhibited by all that he could not bring himself to say about real life in the East. If his poetry is a tree, there is a whole side of its trunk missing. But we would hardly care if it were not for the sky-filling majesty of what is left. For most of his readers in English-speaking countries, the way to his poetic achievement was not open until the great parallel text came out in 1987. His use of German had always been colloquial, compressed, innovative and (" _in der Asphaltstadt bin ich daheim_ "—I am at home in the city of asphalt) street-smart: hard to get at for a foreigner. In other words, there were no other words: even Rilke had been easier to translate. Thanks to the devotion of his translators to social minutiae, the supremely sociable courtier's relentless preciosity of diction was something that a non-German reader could get a handle on, whereas Brecht's tap-room argot remained strictly a foreign language. Even a linguist like Michael Frayn benefited from the new crib. I know that because he must have read through it in the same week I did. Meeting at a first night—one of his, as I remember—we got to the subject within a minute. Frayn said Brecht's poetry had astonished him. I had to agree; and by then, perhaps rather piously, I had thought that nothing could astonish me about a man I had long since identified as the creepiest major talent of modern times. In the long view of history, Brecht's fame as a creep will prevail, as it ought to. An unblushing apologist for organized frightfulness against the common people whose welfare he claimed to prize above his own, he was really no nicer than Sir Oswald Mosley, and a lot more dangerous. Brecht's fame as a poet will depend on a wide appreciation of what he could do with language, and there lies the drawback: because the more you appreciate what he could do with language, the more you realize how clearly he could see, and so the more you are faced with how he left things out. You are faced, that is, with what he did _not_ do with language.
Talent usually earns forgiveness, but there are good reasons that linguistic talent earns it least. Auden was right to pardon Kipling and Claudel (as his rhyme had it, he pardoned them "for writing well") and eventually Orwell would have pardoned Auden for so glibly sanctioning "the necessary murder": but nobody would have forgotten what anybody _said_. There is something about words that sticks. Painters are usually given the benefit of the doubt by writers: i.e., writers patronize painters. Picasso, for his backing of communism, is seldom given the same bad marks that we give to Brecht. Picasso was late to the game; he occasionally had the grace to be embarrassed by the outrages of Soviet foreign policy vis-à-vis the satellite countries; and anyway, he was "only" a painter. His character is more likely to be judged by the way he treated his women than by the way he read the newspaper: judged and then excused. In writing, talent intensifies crimes. In painting it dissolves them. Picasso will never be famous as a painter who abused his women, any more than he will be famous for having given aid and comfort to a totalitarian regime. He will always be famous as a great, protean painter—the great painter of his time, with only Matisse as a rival.
In that respect, Rilke's statement needs to be amplified. Fame is not only the sum of the misunderstandings that can grow around a name, it also depends on the understandings that do not grow around it. Somehow Picasso's domestic behaviour and political allegiance have not adhered to his central reputation. We are probably not wrong to be thus lulled. When a noxious idea turns up in a painting, it is more likely to make us smile than retch. Like painters but even more so, musical performers are issued at birth with a get-out-of-jail-free card. In my first year in London I heard Walter Gieseking play at the Festival Hall. I was not much bothered by his connection with Nazi Germany. If I had known then just how much of a Nazi he had been, I might have walked out, but I would have missed some good Beethoven. At least Gieseking was a German. Alfred Cortot was a Frenchman, and therefore would have been something worse than a Nazi sympathizer even if he had just played the piano at Parisian soirées well peopled with grey and black uniforms—a Sacha Guitry of the keyboard. Actually he did more: he was an active collaborator, denouncer and thoroughgoing rat. But he is not famous for it and probably shouldn't be. After Rubinstein, two of the major players of Chopin are Rachmaninoff and Cortot. Rachmaninoff fled from totalitarianism and Cortot stayed to profit: but they both sound wonderful. At Covent Garden and the Festival Hall during my first years in London, you could hear German conductors who had been forced to flee and others who had chosen to stay: I heard, among others, Rudolf Kempe, Karl Böhm, Hans Knappertsbusch, Herbert von Karajan and Otto Klemperer. Everyone knew that Klemperer went into exile and that Karajan had a Nazi party number, but who knows now, of Kempe, Böhm and Knappertsbusch, which one stayed on in the Third Reich? (Trick question: they all did.) And who cares?
Well, of course we should care. The question is how. In the brains department, and therefore in the area of moral responsibility, conductors traditionally rate above performers. Hearing and watching Elisabeth Schwarzkopf sing Strauss's "Four Last Songs" with maximum purse-lipped projection of the umlauts, I had no trouble resisting the impulse to throw her a Hitler salute as a reminder of the sort of audience she had once wowed in Berlin. But if Furtwängler had been conducting the band it might have been a different matter. Ronald Harwood wrote an excellent play about Furtwängler ( _The Dividing Line_ ) raising all the moral issues, and there were plenty to raise. The only point Harwood missed was Hitler's 1944 offer to build Furtwängler a personal mini-bunker as a reward for his staying on in Berlin to conduct morale-building concerts. Furtwängler turned down the offer, generously suggesting that the bunker might be built for a few workers instead. The prodigiously gifted old ass seems genuinely to have done his best to keep civilized values alive. He just never realized that his services to an ideal world of art had been co-opted in advance by a force dedicated to its ruin. He was not alone in the anomaly. There were Aryan conductors who saved Jewish orchestra members from death, or at least delayed it. Unfortunately there were no Aryan conductors who, by lending the regime their prestige, did not aid its legitimacy. And over and above the conductors, at the exalted level of composer, the argument is even less equivocal, although still not quite as clear-cut as with the writers. The playwright Gerhart Hauptmann stayed on, first of all because he was adulated; second because he was too old to run if he didn't have to; and third—he said so himself—because he was a coward. ( _Weil ich feige bin_!) His reputation was ruined, as it deserved to be: but we should be sorry for its being so ruined that we can no longer appreciate just how revered he was before the Nazis came to power. (Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a raging theatre buff when young, saw everything of Hauptmann's and generously records the euphoria in his autobiographical writings.) Understanding, not misunderstanding, became part of the _Inbegriff_ of Hauptmann's fame, and destroyed it utterly.
But the same thing never happened to Richard Strauss, who stayed on for two of the same reasons: he was at the height of his renown, and, as an Aryan who didn't have to run, he felt old enough to excuse himself from doing so by choice. The third reason, cowardice, he was always too arrogant to plausibly claim, although his bravery soon evaporated when the Reichskulturkammer leaned on him. Stefan Zweig, whom Strauss had invited to write the libretto of _Die Schweigsame Frau_ (The Silent Woman), was disinvited in a tearing hurry when the Nazis got to hear about it. Like Heidegger but perhaps more plausibly, Strauss took pains later on to pretend that he had never been part of the Nazi landscape. The landscape he preferred being part of was the apocalyptic heap of rubble down which he strode in 1945 to tell the GIs that he was the composer of _Der Rosenkavalier_. While Wagner was alive, there were no mass exterminations of Jews at German hands. While Strauss was alive they died by the million. It was Wagner who took the rap. Strauss got away with it, partly because he was shrewd enough to look a bit daffy when the conversation got awkward, but mainly because his music proposed no analogy more embarrassing than _Also Sprach Zarathustra_ , and was mainly about love, usually between a couple of sopranos, one of them in velvet pants. Filming once in Chicago, I called on Georg Solti at the opera house during a break in his afternoon rehearsal. I was trying to nail him down for an interview about Chicago, not about his own career. Clearly this was not a diversion of emphasis that he particularly relished, but he invited me to his dressing room to discuss the matter further. I was able to tell him, truthfully, that I thought his _Eugene Onegin_ was one of the greatest opera sets ever recorded. He took unbridled praise no worse than I did and sent me out into the empty auditorium with the assurance that I had a surprise coming.
He was right about that. Strolling on to the stage came the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The maestro appeared in front of it, raised his baton, and launched into the opening measure of _Also Sprach Zarathustra_. Being Solti, he didn't get further than the first eight bars before he brought the whole thing to a halt in order to re-educate a violinist, but I was already carried away by the magnitude of an historic moment. Here was a man whom the Nazis would have killed on the spot, and he was playing one of their tunes. But of course it wasn't just theirs: that was the point. It was ours—something that Strauss must have realized, even while the Nazis were trying to bend him to their odious purposes. After all, he wasn't a fool: just old, conceited and weak, and at some time in our lives we are all of us those things, although not, if we are lucky, all at the same time. The writers know straight away when they are being weak, whereas the composers can kid themselves for decades at a stretch. We think of the Soviet Union's favourite epic novelist, Sholokhov, as a shameless liar, but of the composer Khachaturian as just a hack. Perhaps we should think worse of Khachaturian, since all the evidence suggests that for a true musician in the Soviet Union the price of seriousness was to suffer unmistakeable humiliation through being obliged to kiss the badly barbered behind of one cultural commissar after another. Shostakovich, on his own anguished confession, was a case in point. (And lest there be any doubt that Solomon Volkov's recension of Shostakovich's memoirs, even though largely a fantasy on Volkov's part, had solid roots in reality, it should be noted that Ashkenazy settled the question in an article he wrote for the May 5, 2000, issue of the _Financial Times_. He wrote it because he had grown sick of listening to clueless debates about the basic facts of the regime from which he, unlike Shostakovich, had been lucky enough to find a way out.)
It remains a moot point, however, whether there was ever any such thing as specifically totalitarian music. Watching a couple of well-built slaves doing their love dance in _Spartacus_ , it is hard not to think of all those people freezing to death in Vorkuta while pig-eyed Presidum members at the Bolshoi were doting on the ballerina's bare thighs, but that was scarcely Khachaturian's fault. (The divine Plissetskaya, incidentally, as her memoirs written late in life reveal, was well aware that she was dancing for murderers: but she was a dancer, and where else was there to dance?) In Sydney when I was first a student, Carl Orff's _Carmina Burana_ was introduced to me by a European refugee who probably had no idea that its composer found favour with the kind of people who had gassed her family: there was nothing in the music to tell her, except perhaps a certain predilection for bombast. If Prokofiev had never gone home to Russia, he might not have written _Romeo and Juliet_ , but he would still have been Prokofiev, not Stravinsky. There is enough historicist determinism in the world without our straining our wits to attach it to people who think up tunes. _Doktor Faustus_ has some of Thomas Mann's most marvellous writing in it, but there is something crucial it does not include: we get no idea of how Leverkühn's bargain with the devil shows up as music. The safest bet is that it showed up as boredom.
There is a marvellous piece by James Thurber about an heroic solo aviator who earns the worship of America before anybody realizes that he is a prejudiced buffoon who will be a public relations disaster if sent abroad to represent his country. Finally he has to be pushed out of a window. Clearly Thurber meant Lindbergh. In real life, Lindbergh could never be manoeuvred close enough to a suitable window, but in the long run something more drastic happened. He was justly famous for his bravery and skill as a lone flyer. But when his baby was kidnapped and killed he showed a kind of courage that the media didn't like: reticence. The way was prepared for his reputation to collapse when the isolationism he favoured (the America First movement) was discredited by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Understanding, it seemed, had gathered around his name, and certainly, on close scrutiny, there was nothing noble about his fondness for the dictators. (Gore Vidal, while making a good case for Lindbergh's isolationism, neglects to explain why anti-Semitism had to be part of the package.) But there was a later phase, less known, that ought to be part of the picture. Lindbergh tested high-performance aircraft, probably shot down a Japanese aircraft in combat, pioneered long-distance routes for Pan Am, and generally lived out a productive life. His fame is in two parts, like Brecht's: he is the hero and the villain. For the thoughtful, it is in three parts: he is also one of the first victims of the celebrity culture. (There would have been no kidnapping if he had not been so publicized that even a stumbling halfwit had read about him.) But it ought to be in at least four, because behind all the personae determined by events there was a personality that remained constant. He valued self-reliance, and possibly valued it too much: it made him hate collectivism so blindly that he thought fascism was the opposite, instead of the same thing in a dark shirt. Yet there is something magnificent about a man who could make a success out of any task he tackled. To complete Rilke's observation—and it is an observation, because it answers visible facts—we must accept this much: to measure the distortion of life we call fame it is not enough to weigh the misunderstandings against the understandings. We have to see through to the actual man, and decide whether, like so many artists, he is mainly what he does, or whether he has an individual and perhaps even inexpressible self, like the lonely flyer.
VIRGINIO ROGNONI
Virginio Rognoni was born in Corsica in 1924. A student of law and a practising lawyer after World War II—the period in which the new democratic Italy was transforming, sometimes insufficiently, the embarrassing inheritance of the Fascist legal system—he rose to prominence as professor of institutions of civil procedural law (a typically Italian mouthful of an academic title) at the University of Pavia. In 1968 he was elected to parliament as a Christian Democrat. After the kidnapping and eventual assassination of ex–Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) in 1978, Rognoni was put in charge of the Ministry of the Interior, his chief task being to defeat the terrorists. The job took him five years, and produced enough dramatic action to keep the Italian movie and television industry supplied with plot lines until the present day and presumably beyond. At the time, however, the tension was all too real. Neo-fascist bombers got into the act on their own account and the legal system looked like an unarmed prophet. But Rognoni's chief triumphs were in court. Historians from either wing generally agree that the Red Brigades were finished from the moment that the American General James Lee Dozier, whom they had taken hostage, was recovered alive in 1982. After his success against the terrorists, Rognoni went on to a number of political posts, the most important of them concerned with legal reform. His effectiveness as vice president of the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (Superior Council of the Magistracy) can be argued about indefinitely by sceptical critics of Italian politics, who suffer from no shortage of subject matter, those on the left always able to detect the hand of the CIA, those on the right always alert to the revival of Communist subversion in a new disguise. But nobody can seriously deny that Rognoni played the crucial role in confronting a genuinely dangerous threat to democracy and neutralizing it by reasonable means. Right-wing theorists continue to believe that there was a terrorist mastermind (" _grande vecchio_ "—grand old man) who escaped. Left-wing theorists continue to believe that the terrorists were right-wing _agenti provocantori_. Sensible people prefer to concentrate on what Rognoni thinks of the matter. Luckily his opinions, closely allied to his vivid memories, are available in print, providing a crucial text for all humanist students beginning to grapple with the question of how a liberal democracy can maintain its integrity when forced to defend itself against misuse of the freedoms it exists to cherish. Since Lincoln himself wondered aloud how a state dedicated to liberty could be strong enough to protect it, there is no blame attached to not having a ready answer. As Rognoni found out, however, the answer is, or had better be, there within ourselves, waiting to be discovered. When faced with an ideology of opportunist violence it helps to have some principles in advance, before the pressure of events starts reinforcing the idea that expediency might be a principle in itself.
In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it, it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy.
—VIRGINIO ROGNONI, _I NTERVISTA SUL TERRORISMO_
IN ITALY, THE publishing firm Laterza puts out an attractive series of booklets devoted to interviews with leading cultural, scientific and political figures: Alberto Moravia, Gianni Agnelli, Enrico Fermi, Federico Fellini and many more are among my own collection. To the new student of Italian, I can recommend the series as an autostrada into the culture. You can hear the language being spoken at its top level, and the subject matter is real: sometimes all too real. This interview with Virginio Rognoni is one of the best. He had impeccable credentials to pronounce the opinon quoted above. As minister of the interior between 1978 and 1983, Rognoni was the man on the spot in the period the Italians still call _gli anni di piombo_ —the years of lead. It was a period in which the extreme right and the extreme left staged a shooting and bombing competition which held the spectators on tenterhooks, because they were among the targets. As the death toll mounted, Rognoni was under tremendous pressure to arrogate emergency powers to himself: not least, of course, from the terrorists, who would have liked nothing better than for the state to adopt illiberal means. Rognoni resisted the temptation and settled in for a long battle. The blessed day when a full thirty-two leaders of the Red Brigades were sent to gaol—it was Monday, January 24, 1983—happened on his watch. Terrorism in Italy wasn't over, but its back was broken. Rognoni, a prime target himself, had done his job. Though he was accused by the left of pursuing left-wing terrorists harder than he pursued right-wing terrorists, the facts prove his neutrality. He was a good Catholic, but so were plenty of the terrorists, even among the Marxists. His enemy was not the left, but terrorism _tout court_ , which he, better than anybody, knew was cherished by many of its adherents as an end in itself, rather than a means to justice. In other words, evil had become a career for the otherwise unemployable, and there would be no end to it unless it was stopped.
Accusations of police torture were frequently made, but Rognoni sounded convincing when he rejected them. Occasionally he could not reject them, and had to explain. He said that some agents had got angry because of atrocities and had exceeded their authority. That sounded convincing too. The impression he gives is of a man to whom terrorism was so repugnant that the planned use of counter-terror to fight it would have been inconceivable. We can safely draw a clear line between him and the "dirty war" _caudillos_ in the Americas: sadists who, when it came to leftist insurgency, had no other idea than of getting their frightfulness in first. What we have to ask ourselves is whether Rognoni's attitude to terrorism makes sense as a universal principle. It certainly made sense for Italy, which, however sick ( _malato_ ) it might have been, was a functioning democratic system. The Brigate Rosse, if they had had their way, would have converted their country from a producer of wealth, however badly distributed, into a producer of poverty. But it isn't hard to name countries, calling themselves democracies, in which injustice, to the idealistic young, seemed so deeply institutionalized that terrorism occurred to them as the only workable response. They might have been wrong. They might have done better to choose exile, or direct martyrdom. (When they were detected, they were martyred anyway.) They were bound to find themselves among strange bedfellows. It takes a very confident onlooker, however, to suppose that he could never have found himself harbouring the same impulse. One of the strengths of the most unsettling works of art ever devoted to the subject, Gillo Pontecorvo's _The Battle of Algiers_ , was that some of the terrorists looked convincingly inspired by idealism when they were getting ready to sacrifice themselves. They were all too willing to sacrifice innocent people as well—Pontecorvo didn't gloss that over—but inspired they were. Desperation had brought them to it, but inspiration was what it was.
Religion makes inspiration easy. Young Hamas and Al Qaeda suicide bombers of today are promised a place in paradise, as of tomorrow. It sounds more attractive than dying for dialectical materialism. But even a nominally Marxist terrorist is seldom likely to risk his life for communism. He risks his life for the oppressed. (Should he succeed, they will almost certainly end up more oppressed than ever, but he is too young to have read the books that prove it.) Our revulsion comes from his readiness to kill innocent people other than his own, but the mathematics might seem convincing. Kill a few innocent people in a nightclub now, and that will save the lives of thousands later. (In the 1960s, the mathematics were put into a book, Robert Taber's _The War of the Flea_ : a little classic of casuistry which can be recommended, with a health warning, to anyone who doubts just how dangerous the French intelligentsia could be in that period.) He assumes that there can be an economy of killing, and the awful truth is that he is not entirely absurd to think so. An economy of killing was in the minds of the terrorists who helped to found the state of Israel. Britain, the mandatory power, was a democractic state within the meaning of Rognoni's definition. Theoretically, it was open to persuasion by democractic means. Practically, the Israeli activists didn't think it was. (It should be remembered that British foreign policy had spent years looking as if it had been designed to support their view. The pre-war quotas set against Jewish immigration into Palestine had retained their lethal effect even after the war, with British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin's ill-disguised self-satisfaction being remembered in Israel as a particularly offensive insult.) The terrorists of the Stern Gang, and the more militant members of the Irgun, saw no means of dissuading the British from their tutelary mission except by terror. The strategy was assumed to have worked because Britain gave up: _post hoc ergo propter hoc_. (We can be sure that this apparent chain of cause and effect has been in the minds of IRA strategists ever since.) When the Irgun massacred the Palestinian inhabitants of Deir Yassin—the empty houses could still be seen in my time, only a short walk into the suburbs of Jerusalem—officers of the Haganah protested. Bar Lev, Haganah commander in the area, wanted to arrest the Irgun leaders, one of whom was Menachem Begin. David Ben-Gurion didn't listen. It seems a fair inference (I have heard even anti-Zionist Israeli liberals implying it) that terrorizing the Palestinian population into flight was a deliberate policy.
These considerations need to be kept in mind by anyone who, like myself, believes in the state of Israel's right to exist and regards the concerted attack by the Arab nations in 1948 as ample reason for Israel to be concerned in perpetuity about defensible borders. But it was worse than unfortunate, it was tragic, that the apparently efficacious use of terror threw a long shadow. When the Arab countries had their man of the hour in Anwar Sadat of Egypt, the man of the hour in Israel was none other than Menachem Begin, whose pedigree went back to Deir Yassin. Actually it went back further than that, into an experience under the Nazis which taught him that the only answer to threatened extermination was to fight with any means: moral considerations were a culpable luxury, for which your own innocent people would have to pay. The two major totalitarian earthquakes of the twentieth century—the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany—had a seismic influence on the Middle East: wave after wave of distortion, the waves interfering with each other in a pattern so complex that it looks like chaos.
But there was one influence easy to isolate. The state of Israel was built by people who knew all too much about terror. Failure by the Arab powers to grasp this fact led them to the supreme stupidity of threatening extinction to people who had been threatened with it already by experts. But Israeli leaders who take a hard line against Palestinian insurgency are asking a lot if they expect automatic moral condemnation from onlookers for the latest suicide bomb delivered by a young Palestinian with a ticket to the beyond. The PLO has a suitably disgusting track record in which the Black September massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972 was merely the most attention-getting point. Hamas will probably top that sooner or later. But the state of Israel's own track record goes back far beyond Ariel Sharon's dubious achievements in the Lebanon refugee camps. (All he did was stand by, but it was a murderous indifference.) It goes back to an act of terror by the Irgun. It goes back to the King David Hotel collapsing in Jerusalem. When it did, the perpetrators got what they wanted.
Now their descendants must convince the Palestinians that similar means will never work. The Palestinians would be easier to convince, of course, if their activists, and the Arab nations that stand behind them, had any real idea of the continuous historical tragedy that led up to the installation and consolidation of a Jewish settlement in Palestine. Unfortunately the standard of informed commentary on the Arab side has been kept ruinously low by the absence of an independent, secular intelligentsia. I met Edward Said, and liked him as anyone would. He had distinction of mind written all over him. He must have been already sick by then, but he looked haunted as well, and I don't think it was just by his outrage at Israel's behaviour. He was haunted by the ironic fact that his only natural allies were liberals within Israel. An inch away from Amos Oz and a thousand miles from Vanessa Redgrave, Said was an isolated figure, and he himself could never admit in print that the Arab nations dished their cause in advance by not persuading the Palestinians to accept their own state in 1947, and by combining to attack the nascent Israeli state in 1948. If he had, he would probably have been assassinated. (As the assassination of Sadat proved, the Arab irredentists, like the Zionist ultras, have always been unerring in picking off any incipient mediators.) In the Israeli press, a constant feature is a _sottisier_ of what the official Arab publications, including school textbooks, say about the eternal iniquity of the Jewish race and the holy necessity to eradicate it from the face of the Earth. The Israelis scarcely need to quote any of that stuff out of context. Most of the remarks could have come out of the divinely inspired mouth of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem at the time when he was in Berlin urging Hitler to get on with it.
Compared with terrorism in the Middle East, terrorist campaigns elsewhere in the world tend to strike us as half-hearted: Low Intensity Operations, as regular forces are wont to call them. We should resist that emphasis, or lack of emphasis. There has been nothing half-hearted about terror in Northern Ireland. But there again, ambiguity looms. The Republic of Ireland owes its existence to terror. Terror worked. It was a terror campaign that forced the local constabulary and the British forces to counter-terror. Not only the nauseating activities of the Black and Tans, but what the British army felt compelled to do to maintain order, was sufficient to demoralize the London government and bring about Home Rule. Since partition, the IRA in the North, even when apparently dormant, has worked for the same result, and not entirely without success. At one stage even Conor Cruise O'Brien was suggesting that a further partition was the only solution. It was possible to imagine the Protestant enclave being driven in upon itself to the point where its members would go home. Certainly the terrorists were dreaming of something like that. If the Protestants had not been a majority in the North, it might have worked. Confined by a shorter perimeter, no longer a majority in the North but still a minority within an almost united Ireland, the northern Protestants would be reduced to the position of the _pieds noirs_ in Algeria, who pointed out in vain that they were home: they were born there, and had no other home to go to. But there was always France, where the new man in charge, Charles de Gaulle, having first pretended to listen to them, yielded to the inevitable. The inevitable had been made so by terror. Without the terror, the French army would not have been driven first to torture, then to demoralization, and finally to subversion. Democratic means would never have changed the domocracy's mind: or so the National Liberation Front strategists, armed with a plenitude of historic evidence, preferred to believe.
For Latin America, the situation has been analysed by Mario Vargas Llosa with clarity, subtlety and an admirably firm hand. A one-time leftist himself—his years at Sartre's feet turned his head, until Camus began to set it straight—Vargas Llosa found on his return to the Spanish world that the arguments in favour of Marxist insurgency were a confidence trick. New students of Spanish (who would be wise to start with books of essays anyway) could hardly do better than to track Vargas Llosa's long series of articles on the subject: they run right through his landmark collection _Contra il vento y marea_ and on into his late-flowering, consistently brilliant _El lenguaje de la pasion_. He paints a repetitive but startling picture—the same thing happening again and again, like successive frames in a strip of film—of insurgent groups such as Peru's Tupamaros subverting the institutions of their countries to the point where a militarized junta launches terror in its turn, with the result that the institutions erode, underdevelopment plunges to new depths, and the oppressed in whose name the insurgents acted end up more helpless than ever. He gives a classic account of a remorselessly recurring pattern. But not even Vargas Llosa can quite bring himself to face the possibility that if the institutions weren't working in the first place then a convulsion was what they needed.
The standard promise of the terrorist is to reveal the true nature of the state by unmasking the police force as militarists and the military as fascists. In the Americas, that was roughly what terrorist insurgency did. In Argentina, for example, it was only when the bourgeoisie found its own children being taken and tortured that it woke up from its habitual complacency: and the complacency had been complicity, in corruption, exploitation and the deeply damaging sleep of reason. Throughout the Americas, after the CIA's ground-breaking adventure in Guatemala in the 1950s, there were many young idealists with good cause to believe that the oppressor, drawing on support from Washington, would go on robbing the common people forever. The results of that belief were disastrous, and particularly so for the common people. But the belief can't be dismissed. Vargas Llosa, with an artist's mind and a politician's practical knowledge, is understandably reluctant to reach the philosopher's uncomfortable conclusion that chaos might have been constructive. But terror, if it was criminally foolish in presuming to dramatize the true nature of states, was historically functional in dramatizing the desperation of societies content to call themselves moribund rather than admit themselves unjust. Luckily, apart from all the dead Indians, everyone involved spoke the same language. When a proper dialogue started at last, they all understood each other. It is some comfort to realize that bright young idealists in Latin American universities today are reading about these matters in the crystalline Spanish of Vargas Llosa rather than in hasty translations of Regis Debray's inexcusably irresponsible diatribes. But the voice of a man like Vargas Llosa rings so clearly now only because the air was cleared in the first place of its perennial miasma. If the Americas had waited until the United Fruit Company had evolved into a benevolent institution, they might still be waiting. Finally the disastrous pro-strongman foreign policy of the United States was reversed under President Reagan. When Reagan came to office, only two of the U.S.-favoured states in Latin America were democracies. When he left office, there were only two that weren't. It was one of the great foreign policy revisions in recent history, but it didn't happen because Reagan was a genius of sympathetic perception. It happened because there had been telegenic chaos. None of this means, of course, that dead terrorists should be venerated as heroes. Most of them were ruthless dogmatists and many of them were homicidal maniacs. But the problem remains of the ones who were neither.
We have to go a long way down the world's scale of enormities before we find a terrorist scenario that looks like pure farce. When we do, it's probably because we don't know enough about it. Already we forget that the fantasy politics of Germany's glamorous young terrorists in the Baader-Meinhof era had real victims. In the Basque area of Spain, the terrorists are currently collecting what they call "war tax" from their own civilians: pay up or get shot. It looks like the reductio ad absurdum. At one time a regular holiday-maker in Biarritz, I was very glad when a Basque bomber from south of the border, taking a rest from his little war while he constructed a new device, blew himself through the front window of one of my favourite bars and wound up in pieces all over the Rue Gambetta. (Don't think it didn't strike me that I would have been less glad if I had been in the bar at the time.) On top of my holiday from London, I got a holiday from pity. To the onlooker, the Spanish government would appear to have done its best to give the Basques everything they want. It seems, however, that they want their own country, coterminous with their own language and culture. When the Slovaks wanted that, Vaclav Havel gave it to them. (Some of his own colleagues thought he was foolish to do so, and that he permanently impoverished the Czech Republic as a result.) But the Spanish government, we are told, is not in the same position to be generous. Too much of Spanish industry is in Basque territory. It is the mission of the ETA terrorists to persuade the Spanish government that their cause is just. It doesn't seem so to me: it doesn't even seem sane. But there are some young Basques who are ready to face torture for it. To steel themselves, they torture each other. Faced with that kind of determination, the first idea we must give up is that terrorists are not serious.
The idea we must never give up is that they are not rational. Not even Israel was necessarily a unique case. The Irgun could have wrought suitably unacceptable havoc on a target that was not alive. But it would have taken more resources than they had, and anyway the chances were good that the British, exhausted from the war and with the will to empire fading fast, would pack up and go home. In all other cases, the consequences of killing the innocent are predictable only in the sense that the terrorists will alienate the best elements among their own political sympathizers. The IRA put its own cause back by years when it blew up a London bandstand that contained nothing military except musicians. The whole idea of a soft target is a misconception. Insurgents could choose the hardest target, themselves. All the evidence suggests that if dramatization is the aim, there is nothing more dramatic than a suicide in the right spot. When the Vietnamese monks set themselves alight in central Saigon, the flames were seen in Washington. When Jan Palach set himself alight in Prague in 1968, the flames were seen in the Kremlin. There was no immediate effect—the sequel was years of oppression in each case—but suppose there had been twice the number of human torches the next day, and twice as many again the day after that, and so on? In recent years the use of demonstrative suicide has expanded to include innocent victims. So far it hasn't worked: probably because it can't, in the sense that those groups wedded to it as a weapon have no clear aims that can be granted. (Palestinian suicide bombers, for example, want the dissolution of the state of Israel, a wish that will be granted only on the understanding that the whole area is dissolved along with it, by the atomic bombs that the Israelis would presumably use if the state caved in.) It hardly needs saying that if suicidal terrorists returned to leaving the innocent out of the equation they would no longer be terrorists. But by confining violence to themselves they would be dramatizing one thing for certain: the sympathy for the oppressed that made them ready to give their lives. Young people who see _The Battle of Algiers_ —and they should all see it, although not, I think, before they are old enough to vote—will identify that sympathy as a creative force, and they will not be wrong. In the bar afterwards, however, we might find it hard to resist asking them what they suppose Algeria is like to live in now, almost half a century after the oppressor was put to flight. It isn't like Italy, that's for sure. But there lay Rognoni's big advantage: he was starting with a country that knew what it wanted to get back to, before it went anywhere else.
S
Ernesto Sabato
Edward Said
Sainte-Beuve
José Saramago
Jean-Paul Sartre
Erik Satie
Arthur Schnitzler
Sophie Scholl
Wolf Jobst Siedler
Manès Sperber
ERNESTO SABATO
Ernesto Sabato was born in Buenos Aires in 1911 and studied physics and philosophy at the University of la Plata. For the first part of his long career he combined science with radical politics. In 1930 he joined the Juventud Comunista and by 1933 he had risen to become secretary of that embattled organization, but his doubts about Stalin had already begun. Reluctant to let the Party go, he eventually sought renewal of his faith by enrolling at the School of Leninism in Moscow. Luckily he had got only as far as Brussels when news of the Moscow trials led him to break a journey which, he later admitted, would surely have ended in his premature death. At the Curie Laboratory in Paris he went on with his study of physics, and was present when the French did enough work on the atom to give an idea of the destructive power that was on its way. Sabato, always prone to thoughts of suicide and large questions about life and death, was suitably impressed by the prospect of doom for all mankind. After 1945 he did no more physics, giving himself full-time to writing, painting and education. But when he wrote articles in dispraise of the Peron regime, the public education system was no longer a field open to him, and he had to transmit his ideas by writing. His novels—most famously _The Tunnel_ (1948)—are important, but unwieldy for the beginning reader. His essays provide the ideal approach to his teeming range of opinion, almost all of it reasonable, even when camped beween the dream world and the world. During the war over the Malvinas in 1982 he took Argentina's part but that didn't stop him burying the last credentials of the junta with his editorship of _Nunca Mas_ (Never Again, often called simply the Sabato Report), which detailed and analysed the atrocities of the military regime. He was even better than Borges at being interviewed, so when they talked with each other they could cut out the middleman. The transcripts of their dialogues are delightful. Sabato's non-fictional prose is collected in half a dozen attractively presented volumes of essays which he himself, as a pedagogue, might have designed as magically unputdownable textbooks for foreigners learning to read Spanish. In his later years, after he was medically declared to be too blind to read and write, he has concentrated on his painting: a typically category-busting gesture from a writer so good at convincing the rest of us that we aren't looking hard enough, and especially not into our own memories. Sabato's memory of his radical years has served him well. Protected against snobbery, he never fell for the illusion, rife in the elevated Argentinian literary world, that art was only for the elect. He thought that even humble journalists could share the glory of a genius, simply by pointing out that he was there, and thus offering him the consolation of understanding. Sabato has a phrase for it: _la infinita liberacion de no saberse solo_. The infinite liberation of knowing that one is not alone. I should add, in fairness, that there are young intellectuals in Argentina who find my admiration for Sabato incomprehensible. They remember that he, too, like Borges, sat down with the generals. But I rememer that he stood up again; and his prose, which they find stifling, I find lucid. But that could be the usual effect of reading in a language not one's own: one is too easily impressed.
Only a thick skin can defend itself, and the characteristic of an artist is an extreme delicacy of skin.
—ERNESTO SABATO, _E NTRE LA LETRA Y LA SANGRE_, P. 126
IF I HAD my time again, I would never react publicly to criticism, no matter how unjustified. Unless the point in dispute is a point of fact, all you can do by doing so is to cooperate in your assailant's aim of getting you onto your back foot and keeping you there. But this is mainly a tactical consideration. The injunction that you should not _feel_ criticism is an impertinence. After all, when you criticized other people, it was on the assumption that they would feel it, or anyway ought to have done. Savagery of critical expression can often be put down to the critic's belief that his subject, having become renowned, has attained a position of power, and might not be troubled unless well whipped; with the conscience-saving clause that the hurt will not go deep, because its recipient is too well-armoured with the world's rewards. Success has given him a thick skin. But as Sabato was right to point out, for an artist there is no such thing as a thick skin. Sometimes his thin skin has to bear the weight of complete steel, but it will suffer from that too: the burden of seeming toughness is hard on the nerves, and you can't wear a suit of armour to bed without losing sleep.
In his diaries, Thomas Mann made what sounded like anti-Semitic remarks about the critic Alfred Kerr. Mann was no anti-Semite, but he flew off the handle because Kerr had belittled him in print. (Mann, with some justification, thought that he was Goethe, so making him feel belittled was easy: all you had to do was suggest that he was only Schiller.) Proust's invariable response to adverse criticism was to write to the critic at great length. When the first volume of _À la recherche du temps perdu_ came out, it was panned in _Le Temps_ by a blundering hack called Paul Souday. Proust wrote to him in detailed protest, and over a period of years invited him several times to dinner. Souday later claimed to have discovered Proust. In effect, Proust had disarmed his tormentor by taking him at his own absurdly exalted estimation. From my experience as a critic, I would have to conclude that no writer of any kind or degree is content to be taken any other way. Anthony Powell and Patrick White had in common an elephantine capacity to remember the perpetrators of an unfavourable notice: White sincerely believed that they were all in touch with one another. He kept a list. When I heard that I was on it, I wondered if he would send his seconds, or some large man carrying a tyre iron. I was also struck by John le Carré's private reaction to a bad notice I gave his long novel _The Honourable Schoolboy_ , which I thought, and said, was a put-up job. Le Carré did not react in public, but in private he spread the opinion that I was conducting a vendetta. Since, in the same article, I had called _The Spy Who Came in from the Cold_ a masterpiece, it would have been a strange vendetta.
Le Carré would have been on solid ground if he had confined his annoyance to the industrial fact that a negative notice in the _New York Review of Books_ could be of no help to his new book's prospects in America, and might well have damaged them. I would guess, however, that he threw his toys out of the pram because I had suggested that his new book was a dud by his own standards. The compliment involved in that kind of condemnation never registers. I once saw a famously cool literary friend of mine turn angry enough to commit murder. A collection of his critical pieces had just been dismissively reviewed in the _Times Literary Supplement_ , the burden of the review being that somebody of my friend's high talents should not be wasting his time writing journalism. The paper's reviewers were still anonymous in those days but my friend knew who the culprit was: a notorious dullard. The victim pronounced anathema not only against the dullard for writing the review, but against the editor for printing it. Clearly he would have liked to see the guilty pair lashed back to back with cable and used as landfill in the Thames estuary, but only after being toasted to the point of death with a flame-thrower. I was so shaken by the spectacle of his white lips and clenched fists—one of the fists had a pint of beer in it, so there was danger from flying glass—that I had trouble remembering three pertinent facts. The dullard's sedulous mediocrity was fully revealed in his piece for all to see; almost every piece in the book that he had reviewed was more intransigent than the review; and it had been scarcely twenty-four hours since the victim, in that same pub, had given me a withering lecture on my absurd sensitivity to criticism.
But injured pride knows no reason: a fact I know from my other experience, as an author. It took me many years to grow out of the assumption that any adverse criticism was a personal attack. It _felt_ like a personal attack. Sometimes it was meant to feel like that, but common sense should have told me at the time that a limiting judgement can be written out of regret as well as spite. After all, I would have been outraged if anyone had dared to suggest that my own limiting judgements on other authors were written out of anything except an objective care for literature. The fly in the ointment (what W. C. Fields called "the Ethiopian in the fuel supply" until he was stopped from doing it) is that an author's work is his personality, so he can't help feeling that any aspersions cast on it are cast on him. Realizing this to be so is one of the secrets of survival in the literary world: as so often happens in life, the strength that matters is gained from recognizing your weakness. Without going so far as to forgive yourself for it, you have to get it in perspective. The price of not doing so is a disabling petulance. Confidence must be preserved somehow, but to assume that everyone who criticizes you is out to get you is a bad way of preserving it.
One once-famous contemporary playwright always operated on the assumption that any hostile critic was motivated by envy of his fame, money, house and wife, all four of which were on display in the colour supplements from week to week. He missed out on listening properly to advice he should have heeded, because the day came when his major revenue stream consisted of royalties from Norway. I learned my own lesson when someone I knew and loved told me that I should be counting my syllables along with my stresses. We were having a huge fight at the time and I thought that everything he said against me was meant to wound. Some of it was, but on that point he was right. I learned another lesson when I finally realized that the point he had been right about was the hardest one to forgive him for. Even when they are confined to private interchange, these prickly sensitivities amount to the most uncomfortable thing about the creative life. One of the many advantages conferred by a general knowledge of the arts is the evidence it provides that not even the greatest figures are immune. What makes them great is that they are not disabled. Verdi longed for Wagner's praise, but eventually wrote _Falstaff_ without it. Renoir was right to be mortified when Degas found him wanting. (Where Renoir went wrong was in dismantling some of the strengths of his technique in an effort to correct the weaknesses: he should have trusted his public.) Keeping an eye on yourself is a hard but necessary task. Much as it hurts, criticism can help you do it. A thick skin, taking nothing in, turns dry and cracks. The thin skin is the strong one. It wasn't just generous of Sabato to say so: it was realistic.
The tango . . . is the strangest popular song that mankind has ever produced, a popular song which is also the one and only introverted, even introspective, dance.
—ERNESTO SABATO, _E NTRE LA LETRA Y LA SANGRE_, P. 131
About the tango, Sabato intuited what Borges didn't: that this strangest and most lovely of all dances is a self-assessment made compulsory by music. Borges is often given credit for a love and understanding of the tango, but the sad truth is that he declared it dead by the way he loved it, and missed its meaning by the way he understood it. When he came back from Europe to Buenos Aires in the twenties he did some leg-work in the low-life haunts of the _compadrito_ , the bad guy of the bars and brothels. He concluded that the best of the music and the dancing was already over, when in fact it had just begun. But Sabato, if he said more than Borges ever did about the tango, still did not say much. Sabato sometimes gets the credit for the famous definition of the tango as a sad thought, dancing. It is nice to know that he was sensitive to the idea, but the idea was not his. As he was always careful to acknowledge, the definition was coined in the 1930s by a vernacular poet, Enrique Santos Discepolo. There were many gifted tango lyricists in Buenos Aires. Some of them were more celebrated than he was—Carlos Gardel was world-famous—and a few of them were almost as prolific, but nobody was both as gifted and prolific as Discepolo. All the literature that will ever really matter about the tango is in his lyrics. The acid jealousy is in them, and the dirt and the danger. They can be read with profit as an example of what an unrecognized poet can do with his freedom from respectability. But they can't be read with as much profit as they can be listened to. Even with Discepolo, the words take you back to the music, and the average lyric by a less inventively observant writer never leaves the music, because it is too thin and predictable. The usual tango text is a sob story that clinches almost every quatrain with the word _corazon_. (Try substituting our non-resonant little word "heart" and you'll see straight away why most tango lyrics don't translate.) Accumulating over decades, the treasury of tango lyrics, repetitive though it is, already represents a large potential distraction from the music, and hence from the dance.
Unfortunately scholarship, which rarely dances, has an imperative of its own, and has been inexorably crowding into the act. In one language or another, there is a new book about the tango every month. There are whole sociological treatises on how the dance started. Was it a ritual parade of mutual ownership staged by a hooker and her pimp? Was it an elaborate ruse by two gay gauchos to placate a fractious steer? The one thing certain is that the news first leaked out from La Boca, the low-life port district of Buenos Aires. It definitely didn't come in from Africa with the slaves, because there weren't any. If the denizens of the bars and brothels did not actually invent the _milonga_ and transform it into the tango, why did people of such low expectations develop an art-form so infinitely, so incongruously, so _needlessly_ elaborate? (Because the tango's improvised steps, like the moves in chess, rapidly extrapolate towards infinity, you will never dance the same tango twice unless you repeat the whole pattern from memory, on an empty floor.) How did it all happen? Since the origins are blurred, the opportunities for speculation are endless. As happened with jazz, the main threat posed by scholarship is that it will raise the tango to the level of respectability, and thus drain away some of the excitement. But comfort can be taken from the piquant fact that the tango has never become socially acceptable in its country of origin. For the upper classes of Argentina, the tango is a low-life event, and President Carlos Menem, by his avowed passion for the dance—in the ten years of his presidency from 1989 to 1999, he must have mentioned it a thousand times—only proved that his origins were on a par with his hairstyle and stacked heels.
To hear Menem tell it—and I heard him tell it, when I interviewed him in his office—he is a _tanguero_ born and bred. In fact he can dance about three steps, which at least puts him ahead of Eva Peron, who never danced the tango in her life. Since her death, of course, she has been dancing it more and more all the time. In the movie of _Evita_ —fun fascists burn the boards!—the tango goes on all around her, as if it had been the national dance of Argentina. It never was, still isn't, and probably never will be as long as there are young females of good family who want to look as if they are saving themselves for a suitably elevated marriage. Strangely enough, there _is_ a country which has the tango as its national dance: Finland. But an Evita story relocated to Finland was never on the cards.
If the tango has yet to complete its conquest of the country that gave it birth, it has certainly conquered the rest of the world, almost certainly because of its unique combination of beauty and difficulty: it is lovely if done well, but doing it well takes intense application. In Japan, for example, where ballroom dancing is taken very seriously, the tango is correctly judged to be the dance that leaves all the other dances looking elementary. It should be said in haste that the Argentinian tango is not really a ballroom dance at all. For a long time, the ballroom version of the tango was the only version the world knew about. Hence the impression, still widespread, that the dance is assembled from struts and poses, with a rose being passed from one set of bared teeth to another, as in _Some Like It Hot_. Gradually the touring tango shows from Argentina have supplemented that impression with a more subtle one, and among dancers all over the planet the tango is now seen to be a truly international culture in itself, with a full attendant panoply of legend, protocol, dress code and scholarship. Quite a load for a mere dance to carry.
And a dance is all it is. It's _the_ dance, and you have to take it seriously or you'll never dance it, but if you can't laugh at yourself along the way you'll crack up before you get there. This is especially true for a man. A woman can learn the steps with reasonable ease, but a man, because he must lead, will be face to face with his own character when he finds he can't. Previous experience in any form of dancing which entails holding on to a partner will be a help, but it won't be enough to keep him from despair as he once again, for the tenth time that evening, steers a woman into trouble. Apart from her twitching hand and trembling back, the thing to grasp is that a minute's dancing is worth a month of talk. A lot of what comes with the dance is fascinating, yet still irrelevant. What's unequivocally worthwhile is the music, but it's possible to go overboard even for that. By now even the wax cylinders of the first tango bands are on compact disc, proving that the sumptuous texture of the tango sound was there from the start. The sound has always had a drive that needs no drums: the bass fiddle, the pacemaker guitar, the staccato sob of the _bandoneon_ squeezeboxes and the plinking pizzicato of the strings combine to provide the inexorable momentum. On top of the momentum the melodic interplay gives continually varied signals for the leader to alter his steps and for the woman to decorate hers with a kick or flicker of her free foot. The texture has always been an invitation to musical talent, and to trace the achievement of the individual composers and bandleaders like Anabal Troilo, Enrico Cadicamo, Oswaldo Pugliese or Carlos de Sali is almost as rewarding, in each case, as following Duke Ellington through the late thirties and early forties.
Standing at the post–World War II peak of the tradition, Astor Piazzolla was certainly a prodigy, but he might also have been a portent, not to say a nemesis. As a working member of Troilo's orchestra, Piazzolla was boiling with so many of his own out-of-tempo ideas that he had roughly the same effect as Charlie Parker on Jay McShann's sax section. When Troilo warned Piazzolla that people didn't come to listen, they came to dance, he might not have been wrong. Piazzolla pushes the characteristic rubato of the tango to a point where only an expert dancer can respond to it, and tango music is dead if it loses touch with the dance. Collect the records by all means. A Japanese tango fan who goes by the name of Baba has accumulated more than five thousand of them. Several times a year, Baba makes the thirty-five-hour trip from Tokyo to Buenos Aires in order to bury himself in the record stores on and around the Avenida Corrientes. By my calculations he will never finish listening to the discs he already owns even if he spins them only once each, but one salient fact saves him from being a clinical case of _tango loco_ : he must be practising his moves while he listens, because he dances pretty well. Several times in Buenos Aires after midnight, I have seen him dancing to the music he loves so much. He has a nice long tread and a neat swerve that he must have perfected while dodging around his free-standing stereo speakers back there in Japan.
Baba has been listening with his feet, and so should we all, because they are trying to tell us something. They are telling us that we can't hear that bewitching music in its full whining, weeping, surging succulence until we see it danced. What was once true of jazz is still true of the tango. The rhythmic measure of pre-bop jazz was the human heartbeat, and the way to feel it fully was to watch dancers fling each other about. The rhythmic measure of the tango is the human breath, and you can feel it fully only when you watch dancers perform the visual equivalent of a sigh of regret and a moan of bliss. You have to see the sad thought, dancing. Even if I had been a mere onlooker, my own involvement with the tango would have been worth it for what I have seen. Not just in Buenos Aires but in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, New York, Nijmegen, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Auckland I have seen men and women, right in the middle of a jammed salon, create something for which only the word "poem" can serve the turn: the word "sculpture" would be too static. If I hadn't been present, I would never have known, because these were poems written to be thrown away. No minicam will ever be able to capture those moments, even if it follows the dancers through the crowd. The observer has to be there, with the thing observed.
As to the question of how a man of my generation feels about women, I detect, at the eleventh hour, signs of improvement. Undoubtedly it was the sight of old goats with pretty young women in their arms that helped draw me into the tango world, a man in winter longing for a touch of spring. It is also inescapably true that sex and the tango are in close connection. But to be connected, things first have to be separate, and the beginner soon finds out that if he regards the salon as a make-out mall he will not get far. The attractions are real and the jealousies are awful, but they are usually more about dancing than about desire. In Buenos Aires, I have danced with women old enough to be my mother, and got furious when they danced better with their husbands. So if the passion to possess has not been quelled, at least it is operating on a scale less narrow. On the whole, I have seen few fields of human activity where the deep urge to love has come closer to being tamed and civilized. I am not even sure, any longer, that the urge to dance might not lie just as deep. On those terrifying nights of compulsory jollity in Stalin's dacha, when the maidservants had been dismissed and the crazy old killer kept his drunken ministers awake until dawn, he would make them dance, and occasionally join in himself. His madness and their fear had reduced them all to a condition so primeval that they might as well have been wearing skins, yet dancing is what they did. There is a neutrality to dancing, if only because people, while they are doing it, can't easily do anything else. Even a war dance happens before the war, not during it. Hitler and Goebbels both heard a tango orchestra, and quite approved. A pity they never got addicted, because as any man who tries it is bound to discover, it can't be done without humility, and if you haven't got much of that, you have to get some, or else give up. Sabato was right about the introspection. A man who wants to find out who he really is should try watching the woman he loves as she dances the tango with a maestro.
EDWARD SAID
Edward Said (1935–2003) was the most spectacular intellectual asset of the Palestinians in exile. Because he had been exiled all the way to Columbia University, where he was professor of english and comparative literature, it was possible to say, as the perennial crisis in the Middle East continued to shape his scholarly and critical work, that he was caught between New York and a hard place. But there is no call to doubt his integrity just because he had been raised in transit on luxury liners, laurelled at Princeton and Harvard, and otherwise showered with all the rewards that Western civilization can bestow. What can be doubted is his accuracy. His influential book _Orientalism_ (1978) painted a picture in which Western students of African, Arab and Eastern cultures had practised racist imperialism under the guise of a search for knowledge. The book was hugely influential: its "narratives of oppression" became the tunnels through which non-Western academics came to preferment in the West. Said's ideas found such favour on the international left that he became a whipping boy for the right, but it is important to say that there were some Arab thinkers who equally found _Orientalism_ a wrong-headed book. According to them, it encouraged a victim mentality by enabling failed states to blame the West for their current plight: a patronizing idea, common to the Western left, which the emerging non-Western intelligentsia would find that much harder to rebut when endorsed by someone with Said's credentials and prestige. Though most of Said's Western admirers were never aware of it, this ambiguity marked Said's written work thoughout his career: he was continually telling the people he professed to be rescuing from Western influence that they were helpless in its embrace. A quality of self-defeating ambiguity also characterized Said's role as a practical diplomat. In 1988 he helped secure the breakthrough by which the Palestinian National Council finally recognized the State of Israel's right to exist, but in 1991 he resigned in protest at the Oslo peace process, before Arafat had even had a chance to scupper it. If a solution had been secured it could well have meant that the lives of everyone involved on the Palestinian side of the negotiating table would have been forfeit, but Said was unlikely to be put off by Arab extremists, who for a long time had been threatening him with death in one ear just as loudly as extreme Zionists had been threatening him in the other. Yet Said was exemplary in his insistence that Israel had an historic claim in Palestine and that anti-Semitism, with the Holocaust as its centrepiece, had better be understood by the Arab nations or there would be no end to the conflict. When he simplified history, it wasn't because he was a simpleton: though many a buffoon hoped to acquire points for intelligence by sitting beside him, his dignity was unimpaired, and he still looked wise even when accompanied by Tariq Ali looking serious.
Said's writing on the arts, at its best, has the exuberance that his writing on one art, music, always has. He played the piano to professional standard: a piquant demonstration that the Western and non-Western worlds of creativity had not been symmetrical. But his answer to that was convincing: if both sides had not created the music, they could both perform it. After his death, his orchestra plays on: the West-Eastern Divan, founded by him and Daniel Barenboim, has performed in the Occupied Territories. Said was an accomplished and charming man who presented his admirers on the left with the dangerous illusion that by appreciating his writings they were being fast-tracked to an understanding of the history of the Middle East in a refined form, without having to study it in further detail. There were non-Western scholars who thought that he had the same illusion about his nominal subject, and that no Orientalist has ever been more damagingly superficial than he. There can be no doubt, alas, that some of his themes were cartoons. His argument that every Orientalist racist imperialist scholar since the Enlightenment was furthering the territorial ambitions of his home country broke down on the obvious point that the best of them came from Germany, which before the twentieth century had no colonies to speak of. Simply because they believed in the objective nature of knowledge, the great European students of foreign cultures were all humanists before they were imperialists, and often defended the first thing against the second, out of love and respect. Today's Indian scholars of Indian languages further the work of English scholars whose names they revere, one fact among the many that Said found it convenient either not to mention or never to know. Also his idea that Napoleon had wrecked Egypt's advance into the modern age was not one shared by Naguib Mahfouz, who said that Egypt had Napoleon to thank for everything modern it possessed. Said was right to this extent, however: Occidental intellectuals find out very little about what is thought and written in the Oriental world. Very few of Said's admirers in the West could begin to contemplate the fact that there are some bright people in the East who thought of Said as just another international operator doing well out of patronizing them, and with less excuse. I finished writing the piece that follows not long before Said finally succumbed to cancer, and I have left it in the present tense to help indicate that I was treating him as a living force, brave in a cause that was very short of his kind of soldier.
I pressed harder. What about the admiring caresses lavished by the camera on Mathieu marching into Algiers?
—EDWARD SAID, _R EFLECTIONS ON EXILE_, P. 286
ANNOYINGLY UNDATED except for its opening phrase, "A few months ago," Said's essay on Gillo Pontecorvo is the account of a personal meeting that probably took place in the late 1990s, by which time Pontecorvo had not made a film in many years. But he had once, in 1966, made a film that Said continues to admire as a masterwork of political analysis: _The Battle of Algiers_. I feel the same, but for different reasons, and by focusing on the second of these two quoted sentences it is easy to make the difference plain. Said wants the film to be an outright condemnation of imperialism, with no concessions made to the forces of oppression. Said thinks that the French claims to have extended civilization to Algiers had nothing to be said for them, and that the rebellious native Algerians, whatever atrocities they might have committed, were well within their rights, considering the magnitude of the atrocity that had been committed against them. I want the film to be what it is. It certainly does condemn imperialism, but it shows that the French imperialism in Algeria was the work of human beings, not automatons. It need hardly be added that Said is right about how their apparently successful colonial efforts in Algeria corrupted the French into illusions of manifest destiny. Elsewhere in the same book, Said gives an exemplary caning to Tocqueville, who was respectful enough about the repressed minorities in America, but who chose to despise Islam when he became gung-ho for a French Algeria.
Said's only mistake, but a crucial one, is to question Pontecorvo's directorial emphasis at the exact moment when Pontecorvo is being most sensitive. At his most sensitive, he is at his most comprehensive, and comprehending. In letting the camera, and thus the audience, be impressed by the French general's heroic stature as he marches into Algiers at the head of his paratroopers, Pontecorvo shows why he ranks with Costa-Gavras as a true _auteur_ of the political film. In Costa-Gavras's film _The Confession_ , there is a similarly penetrating moment when Yves Montand, released from gaol, meets his torturer in the street, and can show nothing except embarrassment, while the torturer (Gabriele Ferzetti) assumes that the victim will join him in blaming the whole episode on unfortunate circumstances. These are human reactions, in all their ambiguity. In _The Battle of Algiers_ , the paratroopers' commander, Mathieu (in real life he was General Jacques Massu), is greeted with rapture by the _pieds noirs_ as he leads his soldiers down the main street. They cheer, weep, do everything but lay palm fronds before his polished boots. He is greeted with hosannas because he looks like a saviour. Here is the man who will take the necessary measures to ensure that our innocent children are no longer blown to pieces in the nightclubs and restaurants. When the camera is on him, it has the eyes of his worshippers. If the camera bestows admiring caresses, it is because the crowd is doing the same.
Since 1834, generations of the French in Algiers had grown up believing they inhabited part of France. In 1963 they believed de Gaulle when he said that Algeria would stay French. To them, the paratroopers looked like the guarantee that it would do so. The paratroopers believed it too, and the film, in its tragically logical unfolding, shows that belief being undermined by horror at the tenacity of the other belief that they encountered, and at what they must do to fight it. " _Non siamo sadici_ ," the general tells the press: "We are not sadists," and one of the measures of the film's unique subtlety is that we believe they are not, even as they set about doing sadistic things. There is a key moment when a couple of the paratroopers say a respectful "Courage!" to the man who is about to be tortured. Said might legitimately have objected to that. In any military group conducting interrogation by violence, no matter how reluctantly the policy is pursued, there are always a few genuine enthusiasts who relish the opportunity to make their sinister dreams come true. But Said's objection is directed elsewhere, at the very idea that the French in Algeria might have had a point in thinking that they had something to protect.
Wedded to his conviction that imperialism is always and exclusively a force bent on destruction, Said writes as if the French could have had no reason to believe in their _mission civilisatrice_. He writes as if they would only have had to take thought to see the truth. But they had been bred to believe that there was something to it. In the opening sequence of the movie, Pontecorvo showed that their belief was an illusion. As the future insurgents look on silently from the gaol window, an anonymous colleague, with frightening efficiency and speed, is executed in the courtyard. Civilization means the guillotine. But the _pieds noirs_ thought the repression of the natives was incidental, not fundamental. They had developed a culture, had some reason to believe in its superiority, and were concerned to protect it. (There is a constant assumption behind Said's writings that multiculturalism, in imperial times, was an a _priori_ view that had to be suppressed by propaganda, rather than a view which grew out of the imperial experience as a result of the contact.) For the French in Algeria, their mission to rule by right was an understandable belief. Even Camus shared it to a certain extent: he could be single-minded in despising Nazism and communism, but he was in two minds about Algeria until his last day. How would Said have had Pontecorvo film the scene in question, the one about the paratroopers arriving in Algiers like redeeming heroes at the striding heels of their suave commander? Should the actor playing him have been uglier, even though Massu looked like a film star in real life? Should his dialogue have been less subtle, even though Massu was well aware that a holding action was the best that could be hoped for, and said so? Should he have been wearing a swastika armband?
Said has similar objections to the glamour of the Marlon Brando character in Pontecorvo's other big political statement, _Quemada_! The imperialist looks too good. This bothers Said even though _Quemada_! like _The Battle of Algiers_ , is scrupulous in attributing all the impetus and justification of history to the insurgents: scrupulous, relentless and disturbingly convincing for those of us who doubt the efficacy of the outcome. Said doesn't doubt it, yet he detects in Pontecorvo a lingering tendency to admire the envoys of established power. The same tendency can't be imputed to Said. One detects in him a puritanical determination to remain unsullied by the blandishments of his own cultural sympathies. As a critic and man of letters he has an enviable scope, but it is continually invaded by his political strictness. It would be foolish to blame him for this. If he had a secular Islamic intelligentsia behind him, he could leave a share of his self-imposed task to others. But he is pretty much on his own, and needs his absolutism if he is to fight his battle. Though his aesthetic judgements are often finely nuanced, there can be few nuances in his basic political position, so he is easily put out when the same turns out not to be true for an established Western radical he would like to admire without reserve. At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo, he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent, and proud of it. But Pontecorvo, until 1956, was a Communist, and Said has underestimated—or, rather, overestimated—the grandees of the Italian Communist intelligentsia. Few of them ever embraced the privations of the proletariat. The Italian intellectuals of the post-war _sinistra_ might have paid lip service to Gramsci but their true models were among the perennial left-leaning artists of Europe: the Picasso who disguised his limousine as a taxi, and the Brecht whose rough-looking blue work-shirts were tailored for him out of matted silk. The luminaries of the Italian left were concerned with taking their place in a current society, not a future one. Fundamentalism was corrupted by the temptations of civilization, and Said might eventually reach the conclusion that it would be better if the same thing could happen in the Islamic world.
In his fine long essay "Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation" (appearing as chapter 36 of _Reflections on Exile_ ) there is an encouraging sign that he has already reached it. He notes that the Lebanese writer Adonis, like Salman Rushdie, was reviled for suggesting that a strict literalism in the reading of sacred texts kills the spirit. Said is only a step away from saying that no text is sacred. He is brave enough to take that step: he is used to having his life threatened. His other fear is the disabling one: the fear of giving aid and comfort to the automatic enemies of Islam. But one is not necessarily an enemy of Islam for saying that although all good books are holy, no book is the word of God. Even the greatest books are the work of human beings, in all their frailty. Without the frailty, there would be no art, or even any thought. When Said saw the general up there on the screen looking so seductive, he thought that he had caught Pontecorvo in a weak moment. But the weak moment was a moment of strength. Pontecorvo had asked himself: "How would I have reacted, if I had been a French Algerian, and had been there in the street for the arrival of the strongman who had come to reassure me that my life had not been wasted?" By looking into himself, he was able to see everything else: the sign of the artist. As for Pontecorvo the ex-artist, he made those commercials in order to maintain his way of life as a figure of prestige, a man who counts. And after all, the prestige was impressively brought into play when Pontecorvo strode forward as a headline act in the demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan. There he was, up there on the screen: the great director, being lavished with the camera's admiring caresses. One imagines that Said was pleased enough to see that.
SAINTE-BEUVE
Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) was the illustrious nineteenth-century French man of letters who got a bad press from a long line of good writers, from Flaubert through Proust to Vladimir Nabokov: it was his bad reputation, rather than his renown, that outlived him. The student should be slow to join in the denigration. Sainte-Beuve really was the greatest literary critic of his time, even though he sometimes gave too much praise to mediocrity, and not enough to genius. Nor did he miss out on every genius. His advocacy and understanding of Victor Hugo led to a close friendship, although his love affair with Madame Hugo was not calculated to reinforce it. That was probably the best thing about Sainte-Beuve's multifarious energy (he was poet and novelist as well as critic): he was willing to live outside the categories. He had a nose for the everyday, and he found the everyday everywhere. For such a writer to make criticism his main creative effort was without precedent. Throughout his life, the weekly essay was his characteristic form, and finally it was the wealth of observation, invention and reasoning that he was ready to pour into an apparently casual piece that marked him out. Read today, his volumes of weekly pieces are still a good way of building up strength in one's reading of French, because even when the subject was ephemeral he gave it permanence with his registration of contemporary detail, so the reader is usefully driven to the dictionary and the Larousse. (The presence of that latter volume on your desk is a sure sign that you are on the right track.) As a literary grandee, Sainte-Beuve took a prominent place at the celebrated Parisian restaurant Magny's, where all the literary world came to dine and the brothers Goncourt surreptitiously wrote down the conversation. (Dinner at Magny's, by Robert Baldick, can be recommended as ranking high in the sumptuous genre of gossipy books about Parisian artistic life.) The concept of a literary world—a milieu which surrounds the outstanding literary figures, ameliorates their natural isolation and incidentally provides an honourable and useful life for those who are not outstanding—was represented for nineteenth-century France by Sainte-Beuve, as it was represented for eighteenth-century England by Dr. Johnson. The literary world turns the café into a campus, with conversation as a permanent seminar. Sainte-Beuve's triumph was to have his conversations with the public as well as with the writers. In the universities he was less uniformly successful. Appointed by Napoleon III as professor of Latin poetry at the College de France in 1854, he was shouted down by rebellious students. Later on, as a senator, he retrieved his reputation as a champion of liberal thought. He had set the style for the public intellectual speaking through a newspaper column to an audience of those either literate or aspiring to be so. The role was open to abuse, but it became the natural centre of critical energy, and modern civilization owes Sainte-Beuve a permanent debt for having played his part without stinting his talents.
Every circle of society is a little world apart; to the extent that one lives in it, one knows everything and believes that everyone must know the same things; and then, ten years, twenty years, thirty years having gone by, the circle is broken and vanished, not a sign is left, nothing is written down, and one is reduced to guessing about the whole thing, to bringing it back on the basis of the vaguest hear-say and through feeble echoes.
—SAINTE-BEUVE, FROM A LETTER COLLECTED IN VOL. 17 OF HIS _C ORRESPONDENCE GÉNÉRALE_, AS QUOTED IN _T IMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT_, OCTOBER 3, 1975
QUITE APART FROM its manifest truth, this is Sainte-Beuve at his best: a best we can't afford to ignore. Plenty of his critics—critics of the critic—have striven to help us forget all about him. Ernst Robert Curtius thought that Sainte-Beuve's long critical career had given French literature a coherence and a continuity that were absent from German literature because no comparable figure to Sainte-Beuve existed. But very few figures comparable to Curtius have ever shown the same enthusiasm about Sainte-Beuve, and many of them have decried him as a shameless puffer of journey-work, the exemplar and protector of the second-rate. Nabokov, always on the lookout for novelists unjustly praised, loathed him, and with some reason. Sainte-Beuve certainly had a gift for slighting the gifted while rabbiting on endlessly in praise of mediocrities. Flaubert poured the energy of genius into the job of demonstrating how thoroughly Sainte-Beuve had misunderstood him in the matter of _Salammbô_. As for Proust himself, it can be said that his whole career was one long version of his polemic _Contre Sainte-Beuve_. The music critic Edward Hanslick carried a comparatively slight burden: as the object of Wagner's scorn, he was the involuntary model for Beckmesser in _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_ , but at least he had only one opera aimed at him. Sainte-Beuve was the target for the whole of _À la recherche du temps perdu_. He was lucky to be dead.
But in literature there is, or ought to be, such a thing as a right of precedence, and the chronological facts say that Sainte-Beuve sounded like Proust before Proust did. At one stage I read all the way through the collected _Causeries du lundi_ columns in a bunch of disintegrating paperbacks I bought from a _bouquiniste_ on the Left Bank. With torn and faded yellow wrappers thinner than their pages, the books were sadly battered little bundles that fell open anywhere and eventually fell apart. It was one of the ways I learned French: a _lundi_ a day, underline every word you don't know, keep going for as long as you get the sense, look up the hard words afterwards. Later on I replaced those tatty collections of Sainte-Beuve's weekly output with a glistening Pléiade set, and although I never took the Pléiade volumes down from the shelf with the same alacrity, they had their use, principally for checking up on just how completely the star critic had missed the point of most of the great writers of his time. Had Nabokov exaggerated about Sainte-Beuve's peculiar tolerance for the uninspired? Not really. Eventually, in a fit of madness, I supplemented the set of Sainte-Beuve's literary criticism with a complete Pléiade three-volume set of his unwieldly sociological masterpiece _Histoire de Port-Royal_ , just in case I ever wanted to get on top of whatever he had had to say about Jansenism. It hasn't happened yet, but might. My point now is that with all these books of his on my shelves, I still would have missed this particular paragraph, because even though I read him for his tone rather than as a guide, and therefore could have read him writing about anything, it still would have been unlikely that I would have read the correspondence through. I have all the correspondence of Voltaire, and enjoy dipping into it: but I will probably never read it through. You need to be very mad about an author to follow him down all his alleys, because you will be spending time on his minutiae that you could be devoting to someone else's main event. (Sometimes the correspondence is the main event: Madame de Sévigné put everything she had into her letters, and there is nowhere else to find out who she really was.)
The blunt truth about all the attendant writings of even the greatest writers is that we must almost wholly rely on the machinery of scholarship, publishing and reviewing to draw our attention to the little things that piece out the big picture. Somebody had to edit at least seventeen volumes of Sainte-Beuve's general correspondence, and somebody else had to read them with reasonable thoroughness, before a piece could appear in the TLS from which I could seize this paragraph and copy it out into my journal. I did so for two reasons: for the truth of what it said, and because it reminded me of Proust. At the time—more than a quarter of a century ago—I had not yet lived with Proust long enough to realize that the connection might go a long way beyond mere coincidence, or the fact that the two men wrote in the same language. As the years went by, however, the way Proust's mind worked became a more open book—his book, always, but less puzzling, if even more daunting. Proust the great writer stood more and more revealed as Proust the great critic. He was a great critic because he responded to all the arts at the level of their creation. He could not see a painting, hear a piece of music or read a stretch of prose without joining in with the painter, the composer or the writer. It was always as if he had been there, collaborating.
He had been there even with the despised Sainte-Beuve. In Sainte-Beuve's prose, the vehicle for opinions Proust found fatuous, he had found something profound that he could use, as he found something he could use in everyone to whom he paid attention, even if all they did was make cakes. With Sainte-Beuve I think it was the additive measure: the way the paragraph steadily unfolds an argument. In Sainte-Beuve's weekly grind of journeyman judgement, most of the arguments did not reach very distinguished conclusions. He said himself that he praised the dullards because "for me it is truly an affair of equity." A pretty damning confession.
But a judge's opinion can be wrong and still have distinction in the way it incorporates observations about life. The distinguishing mark of Sainte-Beuve's opinions was the confidence of generalization he could put into them. In that, the young Proust saw a possibility. He would not have seen it in this letter, which he could not have read: but the letter—and this is why I seized on it—is a distillation of Sainte-Beuve's characteristic manner, which Proust might have abominated but could not avoid, because it was part of the landscape. Somewhere in Sainte-Beuve's steady outpourings that chugged away reliably like _les égouts_ beneath the streets, Proust saw a way forward for himself. Later on he might have forgotten where he saw it. He was not a mean man and would not have belittled Sainte-Beuve just to discredit the source of a debt. It is a diverting mind game to imagine how Sainte-Beuve would have reviewed the complete (more accurately, the never-completed) _À la recherche du temps perdu_. He probably would have missed its significance. But he might well have spotted the rhythm of his own prose, transformed in the taking over and put to a more ambitious use, yet undeniably, in his opinion, pinched.
Great writers get away with absorbing the discoveries of lesser writers. If the great writer is great enough—T. S. Eliot, for example—he can even get away with saying outright that he steals them. The person stolen from is seldom heard to complain, being already dead; but sometimes he is almost the star's contemporary, and on a few occasions there is no almost about it. Robert Graves went through an embarrassing phase of being hopping mad about how W. H. Auden had helped himself to the cadences of Laura Riding. Graves, who had the misfortune to be Riding's husband, was thought to be slightly potty on the subject, but it is quite possible that Auden had seen her verses, absorbed some of her rhythmic quirks, and incorporated them into his upcoming work. Only one critic ever blew the whistle on Hugh Mac-Diarmid's flagrant thefts from E. E. Cummings: the Scottish critics thought their man had _droit de seigneur_ , and hardly anybody else cared. MacDiarmid was probably speaking the truth when he said he never consciously stole from anyone. He could steal hundreds of lines without batting an eyelid. Only the psychopathic plagiarist counts on getting caught. Most plagiarists are just submitting themselves to influence. It isn't even necessary for the raptor to lift a finished idea: a mere suggestion can be enough. Among my acquaintances, there are at least two novelists who will nick any good phrase they hear in conversation, and at least one who knows he is doing it. His justification, as far as I can make out, is that he would have thought of it eventually anyway. He is probably right. Proust would have ended up writing like Proust even if he had never read Sainte-Beuve. But without reading Sainte-Beuve, Proust would have been a bit slower to realize the way that Proust was meant to sound.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
José Saramago (b. 1922) is a Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize, whereas Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese writer who didn't. Since Pessoa was without question the outstanding literary figure in his language, the anomaly tells you all you need to know about the true value of the prize: but Saramago is not without an importance of his own. His novels present the kind of straightforward allegorical provocations that journalists enjoy treating as problems. In _The Stone Raft_ , Portugal breaks off and puts out to sea, thereby demonstrating its isolation: in _The Gospel According to Jesus Christ_ , the Jesus story is rewritten to give him a sex life, thereby anticipating Martin Scorsese in the challenge to standard religious sensibilities; and in _Blindness_ almost nobody can see what life is really like, thereby supporting the notion that bourgeois society demands blind obedience. The rehashed gospel did most to set a Catholic country by the ear, but the book about mental myopia was really the more outrageous statement in a country waking up from military dictatorship, because Saramago was still proposing what he had always proposed: that liberal democracy wouldn't be democratic enough, and only communism could give life its full value. This latter conviction on his part should be kept in mind when reading his notebooks. Written in his idyllic retirement on the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries, the _Cadernos_ give us a beguiling account of how a literary giant handles his life. But the enchantment ought to carry a health warning. Saramago joined the Communist Party in 1969. The Party had been banned under the military dictatorship, which no doubt seemed a good reason for joining it once the regime had melted away, but to join up in the year after the Soviet Union had stamped on Dubcek took a brass neck on Saramago's part. There is no reason to think, however, that Saramago has ever especially admired the coercion exercised by all Communist regimes, without exception, against the common people they claim to champion. He just seems never to have heard of it. What he has heard of is the inadequacy of democracy. His Nobel Prize in 1998 might have been awarded for his proven inability to advance his position by so much as a nuance. In _Le Monde Diplomatique_ for August 2004 he published an article pointing out that no ruling party elected by the people ever truly represents them. The possibility that an unelected ruling party would represent them even less he left unexamined. "I am not against parties (I am a militant member of a political party). . . ." Yes, but that party is against parties, isn't it? One could go on: almost everything he so confidently states to be true would be thought to need less absurdly guileless language even by those who share his views. Politically, Saramago is a writer whose fluent readiness to explain the world is unimpeded by the embarrassing fact that he has somehow managed never to hear the real news. A functioning democracy represents the people mainly by ensuring that no one group can maintain its power over them without being subject to displacement at their whim. Saramago's impressive reluctance to consider this principle is perhaps evidence that a military dictatorship is a bad place in which to get an education in the politics of either wing, but there are plenty of Portuguese intellectuals among Saramago's contemporaries who would say that the native land of Pessoa didn't cease producing intelligent people just because the thugs were in charge. With Saramago, as with so many other writers and intellectuals of his stamp, we should be careful about attributing a deep seriousness to inflexible error. To be reasonable is not to be frivolous: it's the very opposite. Saramago the Nobel laureate, however, deserves credit for making sure, especially in his highly readable notebooks, that the reader never loses sight of the turbulence where culture and politics meet.
I am a Eurosceptic who learned his scepticism from a professor called Europe.
—JOSÉ SARAMAGO, _C UADERNOS DE LANZAROTE_ (1993–1995), P. 486
AT THE TIME he wrote this, Saramago was a distinguished old man snugly busy with his notebooks ( _cadernos_ in Portuguese, _cuadernos_ in Spanish) on Lanzarote, his volcanic island in the Canaries. He was only a few years short of winning the Nobel Prize in literature for Portugal. No doubt it was Portugal's turn: by the same standard, Fernando Pessoa should have won it six times, once for each of his multiple personalities. But some of us who enjoy Saramago's expository prose found it hard to suppress a snort of derision at the general agreement by the international culture-page press that the prize committee, in paying its respects to literature, was justified in tacitly conceding that his political stance might have had something to it. It was a false equation: Saramago is a charming diarist, but his political stance has nothing to it beyond a formidable inbuilt capacity to gloss over its own consequences. Europe might have taught him Euroscepticism. There was a whole ruined world that should have taught him to be sceptical about communism. He never got the point. As a diehard believer who had refused to give up his faith even in the face of limitless evidence that it was a pack of lies whose first victims were the people it claimed to benefit, Saramago was reminiscent of Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén: he had to be taken seriously because there was no other way to take him.
Beyond the ludicrous, the scale of the preposterous starts coming back in the other direction, so that we return to the point where a mind can be granted a kind of dignity for its persistence in folly. (This was the defence that was often made for the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who joined the Communist Party _after_ the repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, at the precise moment when everyone else was leaving: you can't deny that he stuck to his principles.) Neruda and Guillén can both be given points for sticking with communism if you concede that democracy might never be capable of bringing justice to Latin America: and there will probably continue to be dark moments when we want to concede that. But as in the case of Africa, these are moments of despair on our part, and by succumbing to them we grossly patronize the people on the spot, for whom a drastic solution will be no relief at all for their suffering, and will almost certainly intensify it. Similarly, Saramago's long intransigence was a measure of the fix Portugal had got itself into with its tenaciously self-renewing tradition of salon fascism, a tradition that was by no means extinguished by the retirement of Salazar in 1968. When democracy finally arrived in 1974, Saramago didn't trust it.
Saramago had good reason to suspect that justice would never come by reasonable means. But when it finally showed signs of doing so, he did nothing in his discursive writings to justify his position in the only way it could have been justified. He could have said that without the critique mounted from people like him who had been driven by exasperation to the far left, the far right would never have been eroded in its confidence. It would have been partly true. But it was wholly untrue to go on claiming that the far left offered an alternative in itself. The price of sticking to such a proposition was to restrict his frame of reference to the size of his own study. There was a world elsewhere in which the common people, all around the planet, had been massacred by the million over the course of decades, and all in the name of the cause he remained proud to represent. None of that taught him anything. It couldn't because he didn't want it to. Europe taught him Euroscepticism because he did want it to: because he thought that the idea of a united Europe was a stratagem for capitalist hegemony. But the people who hatched the idea had more creative aims in mind than that. They wanted an end to violent conflict. The people who hatched the ideas at the base of Saramago's declared faith never wanted anything of the kind. For any deliberately withdrawn writer who would like to be encouraged in his isolation, Saramago's journals make pleasant reading, but if you compare them to the journals of, say, Gombrowicz, the difference comes howling out of the page. When Gombrowicz ignores the world, he knows what the world is. Saramago doesn't want to know. It wouldn't matter if he were just a creative writer. But he wants to be taken as a political philosopher. It is a pose about which we are entitled to be sceptical, having learned our scepticism from a professor called history.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Radiating contempt for its bourgeois liberal conformity, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) looms in the corner of this book like a genius with the evil eye. For the book's author, Sartre is a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter. No doubt this is a disproportionate reaction. Sartre, after all, never actually killed anybody. But he excused many who did, and most of those never actually killed anybody either: they just gave orders for their subordinates to do so. There is a moral question there, of the type with which Sartre was well equipped to deal, had he chosen to do so. He was a brilliant man: the first thing to say about him, although unfortunately not the last. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 he called, in his capacity as a Resistance fighter, for punishment to be vented on those among his fellow literati who had collaborated with the Nazis. The question of how much Resistance fighting he had actually done did not impede his post-war climb to prominence. As philosopher, novelist, playwright, social commentator and political analyst, Sartre was the pre-eminent French left-wing intellectual of the Fourth Republic and beyond, reigning supreme in the Left Bank cafés with Simone de Beauvoir the queen at his side. The pair made intellectual distinction into a media story: the celebrity enjoyed now by a glamour-boy philosopher such as Bernard-Henri Lévy has its precedent in that post-war connection between serious thought and media dazzle, a Parisian microclimate which helped to give France a sense of luxury at a time when food and fuel were still in short supply. After Camus died prematurely in a car crash, Sartre's true rival, Raymond Aron, was a long time in attracting the allegiance of the independent left, and in the meanwhile Sartre's _gauchiste_ vision was the style setter of French political thought, founding an orthodoxy that still saturates French intellectual life today, and, to a certain extent, continues to set a standard of _engagement_ (the word, especially when detached from any real connotation, looks better in the orginal) for intellectual life all over the world. A key principle in this vision is that the Communist regimes, no matter how illiberal, had serious altruistic intentions in comparison with the irredeemably self-serving capitalist West. (Acadmics in the capitalist West greeted this brainwave with awed approval, failing to note that their society could hardly be self-interested if it allowed them to do so—unless, that is, freedom of expression is a sly trick played by capitalism to convince the gullible that they are at liberty.) When Sartre broke with the Communists, he retained respect for their putatively benevolent social intentions, and was ready to say something exculpatory even if what he was exculpating was the Gulag network, whose existence, after he finally ceased to deny it, he never condemned as a central product of a totalitarian system, but only regretted as an incidental blemish. This manoeuvre, implying a powerful ability to deny the import of a fact even after he had acknowledged it, was hard to distinguish from duplicity.
Sceptics might say that a knack for making duplicity look profound was inherent in Sartre's style of argument. Students who tackle his creative prose in the novel sequence _The Road to Freedom_ or the play _Kean_ (his most convincing illustration of existentialism as a living philosophy) will find clear moments of narrative, but all clarity evaporates when it comes to the discursive prose of his avowedly philosophical works. It should be said in fairnesss that even the English philosopher Roger Scruton, otherwise a severe critic of Sartre, finds Sartre's keystone work _L'Être et le néant_ ( _Being and Nothingness_ ) a substantial work; and Jean-François Revel, who took Sartre's political philosophy apart brick by brick, still admired him as a philosopher who earned his own credentials, without depending on the university system for his prestige. But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre's first and most famous treatise shows all the signs not just of his later mummery, but of the mummery of other pundits who came to later fame. Foucault, Derrida and the like shouldn't have needed scientific debunking to prove them fraudulent: the pseudo-scientific vacuity of their argufying was sufficiently evident from the wilful obfuscation of their stylistic hoopla: and the same could have been said of their progenitor. Where Sartre got it from is a mystery begging to be explained. It could have had something to do with his pre-war period in Berlin, and especially with the influence of his admired Heidegger. In Sartre's style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.
But the best explanation might have more to do with his personality. Perhaps he was over-compensating. It would be frivolous to suggest that Sartre's bad eye was a factor determining personality, like Goebbels's bad foot; and anyway, Sartre's physical ugliness in no way impeded his startling success with women. It might be possible, however, that he was compensating for a mental condition that he knew to be crippling. He might have known that he was debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men did, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive force than merely to see the world as it was. This perversity—and he was perverse whether he realized it or not—made him the most conspicuous single example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization. More so than Ezra Pound, who was too crazy even for the Fascists; more so even than Brecht, a straight-out cynic who kept his money in Switzerland. Sartre was never corrupt in that way. Like Robespierre, he had an awful purity. Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize. He was living proof that the devil's advocate can be idealistic and even self-sacrificing. Minus his virtues, he would be much easier to dismiss. With them, he presents us with our most worrying reminder that the problem of amoral intelligence is not confined to the sciences. It can happen to culture too, which suggests that on some level being a humanist means not being like Sartre. His admirers might say that we are in no danger of that. But usually, when they admire him that much, they make his sort of noise. The tip-off is the sentence that spurns the earth because it fears a puncture.
The Cogito never delivers anything except what we ask it to deliver. Descartes never interrogated it concerning its functional aspect: "I doubt, I think," and by having wanted to proceed without a guiding thread from this functional aspect to its existential dialectic, he fell into the substantialist error. Husserl, instructed by this error, remained fearfully on the plain of functional description. By that fact, he never superseded the pure description of appearance as such; he remained fixed on the Cogito; he merits being called, despite his denials, a phenomenist rather than a phenomenologue; and his phenomenism borders at all times on Kantian idealism. Heidegger, wanting to avoid the phenomenism of description that leads to the megatic and antidialectic isolation of essence, directly tackles the existential analytic without passing through the Cogito. . . .
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, _L'Ê TRE ET LE NÉANT_, QUOTED BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL IN _P OURQUOI DES PHILOSOPHES_, PP. 69–70
BUT ENOUGH, AND more than enough. Language which makes such a show of saying everything at once is usually concealing something important, and in Sartre's case, Revel knew exactly what it was. Revel could have hung Sartre out to dry, had he wished. Revel had the credentials and the information with which to expose Sartre's imposture as a Resistance hero. Sartre's nauseating theatricality in that regard (he didn't mind implicating de Beauvoir in the charade either: for once they were a couple) was finally laid bare in 1991 by Gilbert Joseph in his blood-curdling book _Une si douce occupation_. But it could have been done years before, by people who were on the scene and knew the truth: people like Revel.
Revel contented himself with pointing out what ought to have been self-evident: that anyone who could perpetrate a passage of balderdash like this had done a pretty thorough job of detaching philosophy from wisdom—and wisdom, according to Revel, was the only thing that philosophy could now concern itself with, and had been since the rise of the sciences cancelled the last possibility of philosophy being a science to itself. In France, where the language offers no automatic defence mechanism against the flummery of scientism, this argument needed plenty of putting until quite recent times. Finally it took a pair of scientists, writing in French but with a thorough background in American scepticism, to produce the book that blew the whistle on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and the other artistes in the flouncing kick-line of the post-modern intellectual cabaret. But the two sceptical critics, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, did not extend their catcalling to management level. Their justly praised but not really very revolutionary book _Impostures intellectuelles_ (1997) should not have come as such a bombshell. It did so because critics well qualified to assess the health of French intellectual life had been pussyfooting for decades, uncomfortably aware that the infection of pseudo-scientific casuistry was not peripheral to the main fields of humanist speculation, but central: exalted balderdash was their common property. Revel knew all too well that Sartre was peddling a system for betting on the horses. But the interesting question was how a serious customer like Sartre got himself into such a comical fix, and that was the question that Revel couldn't bring himself to tackle.
Surely part of the answer is that Sartre couldn't do for himself as an analytical thinker what he was bound to do for himself as a creative artist—live out his bad faith. Sartre is high on the list of the writer-philosophers who were more writer than philosopher. Montaigne, Pascal, Lessing, Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche—it is exalted company, but Sartre earns his place as a stylist who could make the language speak. The actor lucky enough to take the title role in Sartre's play _Kean_ (in the original production it was the mighty Pierre Brasseur, he who was Frédéric Lemaitre in the Occupation's escapist masterwork, the film _Les Enfants du Paradis_ ) gets better things to say about existentialism than are ever said in Sartre's formal writings on the subject. In its later life, Sartre's play _Huis clos_ is too much praised for having been an act of political daring when it was written. Its original production was officially allowed by the German Occupation authorities, some of whom came to see it. They allowed it because they knew its appeal to liberty was camped in the air, and they came to see it because they knew they were in safe company. The moral problems with which the play's supposedly trapped personages elegantly wrestle are woefully abstract compared with those which were currently drenching even the proclaimed fascist sympathizers among French intellectuals in cold sweat every night. (Sartre might really have had something if he had set his play in the _wagon-lit_ that took the minor writers Jacques Chardonne and Marcel Jouhandeau on their 1941 trip to Germany, or if he had set it in the swastika-decorated salon of the Vienna hotel where they were joined not only by the French collaborators Drieu la Rochelle and Robert Brasillach but by the Nazi hierarch Baldur von Schirach in full dress uniform.) As for the moral problems waiting to be faced by French intellectuals who fancied that they were resisting tyranny by assenting to its demands with sufficient reluctance, those had not yet arisen in perceptible form, and in the conspicuous cases of Sartre and Beauvoir they were never to do so. _Huis clos_ is a play absolutely not about its time—a time when the case for humanity was being heard not behind closed doors but with the doors wide open, so that everyone could see, but only at the price of weeping tears bitter with the salt of shame. It is, however, a play _of_ its time, and perhaps most flagrantly so because of what it ignores. In other words, the inner turmoil gets into the action somehow. Why else would these etiolated personalities be pretending ordinary life is hell, unless somewhere, in the real life outside, real personalities were encountering a hell without pretence? What could not be said in the street was there in the theatre in the resounding form of what could not be said on stage. As a writer, in short, Sartre was unable to escape history, because his use of language could not keep it out.
As a philosopher, to escape history was Sartre's chief concern. There was almost no salient truth about the Occupation period that he was able to analyse directly at the moment when it might have mattered. When it was safe to do so, he nerved himself to say that anti-Semitism was a bad thing. _Réflexions sur la question juive_ even contains a good epigram: armed with anti-Semitism, he said, even an idiot can be a member of an elite. Though the trains had already left from Drancy—by the time he wrote the pamphlet, the Nazis were gone as well—at least his opinion was published. He slammed the stable door. But he never made a beginning on the question of how the writers and intellectuals who continued with their careers during the Occupation could do so only at the cost—precisely calculated by the Propaganda Abteilung—of tacitly conniving at Nazi policies, all of which radiated from one central policy, which was the extermination of the Jews. No moral issue was ever more inescapably real; even the cost of ignoring it was directly measurable in lost lives; there could be no philosophical discussion of any subject on which _that_ subject did not intrude. If Sartre wanted to avoid examining his own behaviour—and clearly he did—he would need to develop a manner of writing philosophy in which he could sound as if he was talking about everything while saying nothing. To the lasting bamboozlement of the civilized world, he succeeded, at least on the level of professional prestige. Working by a sure instinct for bogus language, a non-philosopher like George Orwell could call Sartre's political writings a heap of beans, but there were few professional thinkers anywhere who found it advisable to dismiss Sartre's air of intelligence: there was too great a risk of being called unintelligent themselves. _Effectivement_ —to reemploy a French word that was worked to death at the time—Sartre was called profound because he sounded as if he was either that or nothing, and few cared to say that they thought him nothing.
How did he work the trick? There was a hidden door. From the writer committed to transparency it might go against the grain to say so, but there is such a thing as an obscure language that contains meaning, and there is also such a thing as a meaning too subtle to be clearly expressed. Karl Popper made a heavy commitment to what he called "ordinary language philosophy." But in _Unended Quest_ (subtitled "an intellectual biography") he registered his telling, last-ditch concessions that ordinary language is conservative; that "in matters of the _intellect_ (as opposed, perhaps, to art, or to politics) nothing is less creative and more commonplace than conservatism"; and that although "common sense" is often right, "things get really interesting just when it is wrong" (p. 125: the italics are his). Because Popper is the doorman, we can believe that there really must be a door, and that it is a very large one to be left open. The legitimate inference seems to be that an expository language pushing deep into originality might not necessarily sound readily intelligible; with the niggling corollary that a language which does not sound readily intelligible might conceivably be exploratory.
Revel, heartening in his impatience with Sartre's ponderous folderol, usefully records Kierkegaard's threat to Hegel: that he would send to him a young man who was in search of advice. Kierkegaard's menacing insinuation was that Hegel would have to either get down to brass tacks or be responsible for the young man's bewilderment. Revel also, and even more usefully, suggests that we should make the same threat to Heidegger. One says "even more usefully" because although there is something to be said against the belief that Hegel's obscurity is never meaningful, there is nothing to be said against the belief that Heideggers's obscurity is always meaningless. Hegel was trying to get something awkward out into the open. Heidegger was straining every nerve of the German language to do exactly the opposite. More than half a century later, the paradox has still not finished unravelling: it was Heidegger's high-flown philosophical flapdoodle that lent credibility to Sartre's. It was a paradox because Heidegger was an even more blatant case than Sartre of a speculative mind that could not grant itself freedom to speculate in the one area where it was fully qualified to deal with the concrete facts—its own compromises with reality. But merely to call Heidegger a "more blatant case" shows what we are up against. The case is still not clear, and in the years when Sartre and Heidegger were in a supposedly fruitful intellectual symbiosis, it was still not even a case: Heidegger's involvement with the Nazis was thought of as a flirtation. The means scarcely existed for anyone—philosopher, philologist, literary critic, journalist or clinical psychologist—to point out the truth which has since become steadily more obvious, even if it does not appear axiomatic yet: that these two men, Heidegger and Sartre, were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from the facts. Will it ever be realized that they were a vaudeville act? Probably not. Even George Steiner, who can scarcely be accused of insensitivity to the historical background, persists in talking about the pair of them as if they were Goethe and Schiller. Those of us who think they were Abbott and Costello had better reconcile ourselves to making no converts.
There are plenty of philosophical works that writers should read, starting with the Platonic dialogues if not before. Life being short, however, and full of things that an artist should know, there is only so much time to read books _about_ philosophy. Bertrand Russell wrote a great one—his _History of Western Philosophy_ —and there are many more, some of them very seductive: Bryan Magee's handbook about Popper is an introduction much more entertaining than the subject it introduces. But _caveat lector_ : life is waiting, and to read about someone who writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic. In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality.
Sartre hid. Of course he did; and if _he_ did, anybody can, including us; although I think that if we hide in lies, the lies should not be blasphemous. Sartre blasphemed when he took upon himself, and kept for the rest of his life, battle honours that properly belonged to people who ran risks he never ran, and who died in his stead. All his other weaknesses can be comprehended, and easily pardoned if not dismissed: most of us would have shown the same frail spirit. Many of the traumatized French soldiers who were allowed to go home from German POW camps pretended they escaped: it sounded less feeble. To get a play put on, Sartre bent his knee to the Occupation authorities. In one of Beauvoir's novels, a character otherwise obviously based on Camus is portrayed as doing the same, whereas the character based on Sartre is braver than a lion. Sartre was genuine (conveniently genuine) in granting Beauvoir her individuality, so he can perhaps be excused for not feeling responsible for her: but on that point an apology to Camus might not have come amiss. To question himself, however, was not in Sartre's nature. For a man whose Resistance group had done nothing but meet, he was a haughty inquisitor during _l'Épuration_. Memories of the French Revolution were not enough to tell him that there might be something wrong with the spectacle of a philosopher sitting on a tribunal instead of standing in front of it.
But many a mouse came out roaring during _l'Épuration_ : it was what that performance was for, a fact de Gaulle recognized by closing it down as soon as possible. Sartre should have called it a day after that. Camus did: decently aware that his resistance had not amounted to much (though he took many more risks than Sartre), he was out of the hero business long before his death. But Sartre could never let it go. He pretended that he had been brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre, the philosopher, the man of truth, lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense. Revel valuably noticed how modern philosophy denies from the start that "the level of the essayist and the critic" should be its departure point. He must also have noticed that in Sartre's case it couldn't be, because Sartre, as an essayist and critic, was almost exclusively concerned in concealing the truth instead of revealing it. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in _The Gulag Archipelago_ , Sartre on his trip to Moscow was at one point standing only a few feet away from the living refutation of all his mendacity on the subject of the Soviet Union: a black Maria full of innocent prisoners. If the back door had accidentally swung open, he would probably have said the people inside were criminals, or actors—anything except what everyone in Russia knew they were. Nobody serious in the ex–Iron Curtain countries ever thought Sartre the Philosopher much better than a solemn buffoon. But in his homeland Sartre's national prestige was too enormous for anyone to think of undermining it completely. Mockery was permitted, but only within the limits of throwing eggs at the Arc de Triomphe.
Not even Revel, by far the most penetrating critic of Sartre's bombastic philosophical style, could quite bring himself to say that it was a mechanism devised not only to ape meaning while avoiding it, but by avoiding it to conceal it. As Egon Friedell noted, the true philosopher is close to the artist, except he has only himself for a character; so that any deeply felt philosophy is an autobiographical novel. The converse holds: Sartre's autobiography was the last thing he wanted us to know, and so his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose.
ERIK SATIE
Erik-Alfred-Leslie Satie (1866–1925) was the eternal figure of the brilliant young French composer in rebellion against everything at once: the social order, bourgeois gentility, even music itself. Wagner had opened the way for Debussy, but for Satie Wagner was an oppressor, simply because he had become accepted. Satie successfully made it his mission to save Debussy from Wagner's influence. With his goatee, pince-nez worn askew, and pumiced fingers—he had a Howard Hughes–like obsession about clean hands—Satie was the kind of eccentric who unites normal men by making them feel protective. Debussy and Ravel, never generous to each other, were both generous to him. Whatever was orthodox, Satie hated: his ballets were not like ballets, his lyric dramas were not dramatic, his chamber pieces were designed to make the chamber uncomfortable. Dropping out from the Paris Conservatoire after a single term, he started his career as a piano player in the cabarets of Montmartre, but as a composer he soon lost any wish to appeal to a wider audience. On the contrary, his aim was to trim the audience down to a select few, and perhaps to zero, by making his programme notes and general presentation as off-putting as possible. When he published his first set of piano pieces he called it opus 62. After living in poverty he went back to school at the Schola Cantorum, but took care to hide the seriousness of his subsequent compositions with suitably demented titles: _Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear_ was typical. Some of his fellow composers were not fooled: Darius Milhaud and the rest of Les Six all kept tabs on what he was up to, the impressionism of his _Sarabandes and Gymnopédies_ anticipated Debussy and Ravel, and his determination to get the emphasis away from harmonic lushness and back on to a spare melodic line went on influencing music in France after his death. Today's admirers of advanced music who find even John Cage an historical figure, and think that there must be unexplored paths of development beyond his pieces for "prepared" pianos, deliberate passages of silence, etc., might care to study Satie's brief but frenziedly original career, in which they will find everything they could desire except electronic effects. Satie was too early for those, although he was in time for the telephone, which he incorporated into the orchestra for _Parade_ , the 1917 Diaghilev ballet that unleashed Satie, Cocteau and Picasso on the public all at once, setting standards of innovation that have been hankered after in vain ever since: to get an effect like that, you don't just need all those people, you need the war they were ignoring. In the score of _Parade_ , Satie's instrumentation was competing with the western front. Finally, however, Satie's lyrical talent was victorious over every nonsensical idea that he could throw at it. A quarter of a century after his death, his piano pieces were rediscovered, joined the standard repertory, and became so popular—really popular, Chopin popular, Rachmaninoff popular—that they might have been mistaken, by him, for the kind of sonic wallpaper he so despised. Satie would have had something to say about that: his killing wit never failed him, especially at inappropriate moments. Students of Dada from Tristan Tzara through to Yoko Ono sometimes yearn for jokes with genuine laughs. Satie's jokes were really funny, probably because he was really gifted. The grand gesture of throwing it all away depends for its effect on having something to throw.
Ravel refuses the Legion d'Honneur but all his music accepts it.
—ERIK SATIE, QUOTED BY ROLLO MYERS, _E RIK SATIE_
AND RAVEL WAS one of his friends. At the height of his productive period that stretched from the teens of the twentieth century until the early 1920s, Erik Satie would throw his completed compositions behind the piano, either trusting the important ones to emerge from the mulch by themselves, or just not caring. The composer important enough to influence both Ravel and Debussy had no regard for his own dignity. He was ready to insult even himself. In our time, Barry Humphries is a Satie figure, but one who is glad to incorporate the conventional life even while making war against it: one of the secrets of his creative longevity. Satie incorporated the war. Self-destruction was the surest sign of his rebellion. Among the tanning factories and market gardens of Arcueil, Satie looked up to no-one except the phantom Madonna he called _Notre-dame Bassesse_ : Our Lady Lowness. Like Baron Corvo (real name: Frederick Rolfe), Satie would sign his name as a bishop, but just for the gag. Unlike Baron Corvo he had no hankerings to be Pope. All the facts are in Myers's book, but many of them—according to Robert Orledge, our best qualified scholar of that effervescent period in French music—were lifted with insufficient acknowledgement from an earlier book of the same title by Pierre-Daniel Templier. Satie would probably have approved of the misappropriation. In every department except his compositions, even in their performance, he was out to sow the seeds of anarchy.
Lydia Sokolova in her memoir of the Russian ballet records the meeting of Satie and Cocteau for _Parade_ : the conjunction of two hierarchs in the minor but vital French tradition of taking frivolity with uncompromising seriousness. For Satie, however, there was no hierarchy: his superiority was unassailable. "Those who are unable to understand are required by me to adopt an attitude of complete submission and inferiority." He said it before the premiere of _Socrate_ , and the "by me" tells you everything. This confidence in the importance of his mereness—the melody unadorned, stripped even of harmony—remains the most shocking thing about him, though the confidence was justified. Today his music is a case of once heard, never forgotten. But he was determined to be forgotten first, and succeeded. His written directions to the performance of his pieces ("Play like a nightingale with toothache") were designed to help them go out of date. He knew that nothing takes on verdigris faster than a determined novelty. By a trick of coincidence—surely it was not a planned echo—Ring Lardner exactly reproduced the cracked tone of Satie's surreal annotations in the stage directions of his, Lardner's, little plays: "The curtain descends for seven days to denote the passing of a week." In that regard Satie, like Lardner in the same mood, was out to make nothing but mischief. Edmund Wilson hated it when Lardner called a book of short stories _How to Write Short Stories_. Why put up barriers of nonsense? In Satie's case, it was probably a dread of having so transparent a secret penetrated by the solemn. Nobody unqualified to open the casket should clap eyes on its contents of water-drop jewellery. Here the precursor of Dada outflanked the whole movement, because the Dadaists had no secret: the protection was all there was. Satie's defences marked the route to treasure. No writer who has heard and loved Satie's piano pieces (they came back in a big way only in the early 1960s) will be proof against the urge to strip from prose everything except its melody, as if, in the necessary interplay of word and thought, there could be a purely lyrical essence. There can't. But in music Satie made a vivid reality out of the hopeless ideal of a central, primal thread. He makes babies of us, except if we are distracted by his words, in which case we do not qualify.
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER
Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was the giant of literary Vienna in its most fruitful era. A practising physician before he turned professional writer, he brought a view steeped in the harsh realism of the consulting room and the surgery to his stories, novels and plays. The most conspicuous, and most enduringly controversial, element in this clinical realism was his exploration of the erotic. As a physician he knew a lot about it at second hand. At first hand, he was an energetic young man physically attractive to women of all classes. The addition of fame to his natural advantages made him hard to resist, and one of the commendable things about his private life is that he somehow managed to forge a moral sense out of limitless opportunity. It was the plays that made him famous: as a man of the theatre he ruled the city. Though he is still respected internationally as a dramatist, the plays remain notoriously difficult to capture in English, even though playwrights as accomplished as Tom Stoppard have tried. (Some of the plots from his plays turn up constantly in the movies.) Schnitzler is probably most easily approached through his stories, but one of his full-length novels, _Der Weg ins Freie_ (often translated as _The Road to Freedom, although The Path into the Clear_ is less likely to get him mixed up with Sartre), should not be ignored by anyone studying the relationship of culture and politics at a key place in a crucial time: none of his writing, in any genre, was more penetrating about the Jewish identity crisis in Austria. A Jew himself, Schnitzler was not blinded by his own huge success to the pervasive nature of anti-Semitism in Viennese polite society: his play _Professor Bernhardi_ dealt with that very subject. But the glittering theatregoers sat still to watch the play. Schnitzler was quick to notice, however, that he had another bunch of overdressed spectators who were less disposed to sit still while their prejudices were examined. The Nazis, vocally active against Jewish cultural Bolshevism long before they took power in Germany, found it easy to calumniate Schnitzler as a cosmopolitan pornographer. Schnitzler was much quicker than Freud to spot that the Nazis would bring everything in Viennese civilization to an end. There is a lingering misapprehension about Schnitzler: because his memoirs of youth are so unflinchingly realistic, he is thought to have been irredeemably coarse. But his realism, even about previously unmentionable matters, was made possible by sensitivity, not by obtuseness. He had a lyrical awareness that penetrated everywhere, even into the truly sick minds of those who called his honesty an illness, and wanted to kill him for it.
There are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not as long as they might fondly imagine.
—ARTHUR SCHNITZLER, _B UCH DER SPRUCHE UND BEDENKEN_, P. 78
WHEN RAYMOND ARON, in _Le Spectateur engagé_ , said it was a mistake to underestimate the role of obtuseness in human affairs, he was merely making a useful statement. These lines from Schnitzler amount to a true aphorism, and all his warnings against the aphorism as a literary form duly apply. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.) But Schnitzler's own aphorisms are guarded and enriched by his lifelong distrust of the merely paradoxical. If they were not, they would be more popular, like Wilde's. Schnitzler was really out to get at the truth, and this bold linking of cleverness and stupidity is typical of how bravely truthful he could be.
Is stupidity a mere absence of mind, or has it a mind of its own? If the second thing is true, then stupidity is a force in itself. But it would be a hard force to study, because it always seems to be mixed up with something else: cleverness, for example. In the field of geopolitics, Hitler provided at least one glaring case of what seems, at first glance, to be stupidity in its pure state. After the launching, in June 1941, of Operation Barbarossa, he terrorized millions of people in the Soviet Union who had already been terrorized for years by their own government, and who would willingly have smoothed the path for his armies and administration if he had behaved with even the bare minimum of benevolence. A light hand would have been in his interests as a conqueror; but the heavy, murderous hand was the only one he would contemplate. It was one of the many points at which he guaranteed the loss of his own war. But there's the hint: the many points can all be traced back to the beginning, and their root found in his irrational obsession with racial hygiene. For him, by his nature, mass extermination was an end, to which the creation of a Greater Germany was only a means. His opening anti-Semitic campaigns after the _Machtergreifung_ in January 1933 subtracted the Jewish effort from the German physical sciences—a self-inflicted handicap which would have ensured that he could never have been victorious in the long run. Even that basic point, however, although hard to argue with in retrospect, needs qualification. Though Germany's pure science was crippled, applied science and technology still got an awfully long way under the Nazis, and it is an act of retroactive trust to suppose that Heisenberg and the other Aryan physicists would never have been able to build an atomic bomb if they had been given time, although they would not have been able to deliver it before the Allies did, because Germany's long-distance bombing capacity had not kept pace. Hitler's Germany had all the potential for world domination. Leaving aside the question of whether world domination is a sane aim—we usually don't call Alexander crazy—Hitler need not necessarily have pursued it in an insane manner. It is just our dubious luck that he did. It was his principles that dished him. If he could have sacrificed them to expediency, he might have won.
Within the parameters of his apoplectic _Weltanschauung_ , Hitler could be ingenious and even brilliant. His ideology depended on extermination, but some kind of ideology it undoubtedly was, and although, as Raymond Aron said many times, no ideology can be realistic, that does not necessarily mean that an ideologist need be stupid in all areas. Hitler's abiding fault, indeed, lay in his cleverness. Demonstrably clever in the machinations of mass politics, he was encouraged by his own success to embrace the delusion that he was omniscient in any field of which he possessed knowledge. Far from being ignorant of what a Russian campaign had done to Napoleon, Hitler had made a study of the subject, and had seen merit in the general agreement among historians that Napoleon should not have occupied Moscow. Hitler also knew enough about Germany's requirements for raw materials to decide that the oil fields in the Caucasus were a more important target. His reasoning was clever on the level of grand strategy. But on the level of military strategy it ignored a fact which had had no relevance in Napoleon's time, but was now crucial: Moscow was the Soviet Union's communications centre. If Hitler had concentrated his forces and gone all out for Moscow in the autumn of 1941, he could have had all the oil and minerals he wanted not long after. But he was too smart: or, if you like, too stupid, except that it strains the meaning of the word.
Schnitzler's point about one of the flights from responsibility being a flight into stupidity looks clearer cut when we move from Hitler to Stalin. Admirers of Stalin always liked to think that he was never stupid. There was some evidence to back up their faith. Long before the final accounts came in, it should have been obvious that Stalin's rule was self-defeating for socialism. But if we can grant that he had nothing like socialism in mind, and thought only of an exercise in pure power, the regime he perfected looks like a work of genius. So acute an observer as Isaiah Berlin gave him credit for a master plan behind his succession of purges. Aleksandr Zinoviev, in his _The Reality of Communism_ , overstated the later Soviet regime's coherence—a coherence inherited from Stalin—only in suggesting that it could incorporate, while still remaining stable, all recalcitrant phenomena up to and including dissidence. (If Zinoviev had really believed that, of course, he would not have written his dissident books; but he felt it, and wrote them from deep pessimism.) While Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, however, his one and only creation, the Party apparat, showed few faults as a mechanism for preserving a single aim: that he should rule. He even seemed to have heeded Seneca's warning that you can kill as many people as you like but your successor will be among those who survive. Stalin acted as if he intended nobody to survive.
Mao Zedong acted the same way. It can be called stupidity only if you think such behavour threatens the state. But it didn't threaten _his_ state. On that measure, Ho Chi Minh showed Pol Pot the way, and Pol Pot was the stupid one because he failed to pay heed. Ho's delayed and selective ruthlessness against his bourgeoisie—actual, potential, or notional—weakened his economy but preserved him in power. Pol Pot's instantaneous wholesale massacre of anyone who could read and write destroyed the state he had created before he had a chance to rule it. Attacking with a chainsaw the branch he sat on, he was a figure from a diabolical cartoon. But few of the longer-lasting Communist despots were so dense. Ceaus escu was a maniac, but so is an ordinary serial killer; an ordinary serial killer doesn't run a state. It could be said that Castro is the cleverest person in Cuba because anyone cleverer swam to Miami, but it's a joke. Castro is not stupid and it is most unlikely that the material decay of his country has surprised him. He simply preferred personal rule to national prosperity, and stifled the second in order to reinforce the first. As Lenin proved, you can't have a socialist economy without the occasional NEP (a New Economic Policy that allows a measure of free enterprise); you can't continue as a socialist dictator without the dexterity to dismantle the NEP as soon as it becomes productive; and to balance the resultant hope against the inevitable deprivation is the secret of success. Maintaining yourself in power is the only thing you succeed at, but the time soon comes when the balancing act becomes your _raison d'être_. Castro had the knack, and remained in power while his beard grew grey.
If the United States had been able to find a way of burdening Castro's early socialist aspirations with help, the Communist regime in Cuba might never have formed in the first place. But America had committed itself to a foreign policy which viewed any hint of socialism as an invitation to communism. The policy was stupid, but here again it was not necessarily the product of stupid men: the East Coast foreign policy elite constituted the cleverest collection of political brains in America. Otherwise known as the Wise Men, after World War II they gave an unwise policy its initial impetus because there was no other way of getting a genuinely beneficial measure—the Marshall Plan—through Congress. They needed a Red scare as an appeal to the masses: always an uncomfortable position for any intellectual elite to be in. Appeals to the masses are better managed by big business.
Schnitzler's flight into stupidity might look like the only explanation for the sort of newspapers, magazines, television programmes and movies that make us ashamed to be living in the West. At first blush, the mass media seem to offer the ideal chance of examining stupidity in isolation. But once again the trick is not easily worked. There is a possibility, amounting to a probability when the really big money is involved, that the stupidity is being manufactured by clever people whose commercial motives put their taste, scope and integrity into abeyance. This non-anomaly becomes most obvious in the case of Hollywood's blockbuster movies, where the long haul of creative intelligence takes a spiral route towards the big haul at the box office. Every onlooker who fancies his powers of discrimination has a wonderful time when a blockbuster flops on the opening weekend. But the blockbuster that we actually have a wonderful time watching is a more equivocal case. _Where Eagles Dare_ has always been my favourite example: since the day I first saw it, I have taken a sour delight in rebutting pundits who so blithely assume that the obtuseness on screen merely reflects the stunted mentalities behind the camera, and I go on seeing its every rerun on television in order to reinforce my stock of telling detail—and, all right, in order to have a wonderful time. There is something precious about the intellectual squalor of _Where Eagles Dare_ : it is a swamp with a surface of green pulp squeezed from emeralds. You can't get the same charge from Delta Force movies, or from the adventures of Jean-Claude Van Damme in the brainless universe where men with guns are helpless against a man fighting with his feet. _Where Eagles Dare_ is the apex of a form: it shows that there is somewhere to go beyond _The Guns of Navarone_ , a numbskull stratosphere in which not even _The Wild Geese_ could fly. _Where eagles dare_ , the sense of the ridiculous winks out to a dot, and the vision is filled with the vaulting pretensions of latterday schoolmen who believe, if only _ad hoc_ and _pro tem_ , that cinematic sense can exist _in vacuo_ : detached, that is, from any other sense; a voluntary brain-death. The whole complex phenomenon is epitomized by Richard Burton's hairstyle.
Schnitzler, let us remember, said that the flight into stupidity is a flight away from responsibility. But soaring beyond any human absurdity that even Schnitzler could imagine, Richard Burton's hairstyle in _Where Eagles Dare_ is a flight into stupidity and away from the barber. Burton plays a British agent who is possibly also a German agent, although we can be fairly sure that he will turn out to be a British agent in the end, because Richard Burton's agent would never agree to a deal by which his client was shot at dawn. Burton the almost certainly British agent is sent, with Clint Eastwood and other agents—some of whom actually do turn out to be German agents—on a mission to a castle deep behind German lines, there to rescue, or possibly confirm the credibility of, or perhaps betray the real identity of, an actor pretending to be an American general in possession of the Plans for a Second Front. The actor playing the actor need not detain us, and considering how he acts it is a wonder that the Germans have detained him. (There is a lot more to wonder at about the behaviour of the Germans, but we'll get to that later.) The actors who matter are Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood. Clint, already a top box office draw at the time, has been cast as the simple, straight-talking American assassin who helps the fiendishly ingenious British spy: it's the same relationship as Felix Leiter to James Bond, but beefed up to equal status to meet the requirements of the American marquee. Apart from saying "hello" so as to make Germans turn around before he shoots them with his silenced pistol—if he had merely mouthed "hello" before shooting them in the back, it would have been a different kind of movie, i.e., a realistic one—Clint's character has nothing anachronistic about him except his cataleptic taciturnity, which we are glad to recognize as a minimally equipped actor's career-long habit of overdoing the understatement. Burton's own style of acting is equally dissonant with the time, but in the opposite direction: he always overdid the overstatement, and from the beginning to the end of his career on screen he looked exactly like a stage actor projecting to the upper circle, except when a director with animal-training skills (Martin Ritt in _The Spy Who Came in from the Cold_ , to take one of the few examples) either whipped him into submission or else slipped a sedative into his morning triple. Burton always moved his lips so much when he enunciated that they would stick out past the end of his nose, and there are episodes in _Where Eagles Dare_ in which they practically leave the frame, as if yet another triple were waiting out there, begging to be imbibed.
It isn't the stuff he does with his face, however, that makes Burton look out of place in this castellated anteroom of World War II. It's the stuff on top of his head. It's his hair _style_. It was probably still all his own hair at that stage, but it's a hairstyle: an item, that is, which not even women found it easy to obtain during World War II, and which for men was unknown. (In the movie, Mary Ure has obviously taken a hairstylist into action with her, but we never see him: although if he had wandered into shot holding a crimping iron he would have looked no more futuristic than her miraculously smooth coiffure, shining with a blonde lustre that Eva Braun, even with her connections, could only dream of.) The high command of the Romanian army did indeed issue an order that no officer below the rank of major should wear makeup, but the British army and the German army both made a policy of short back and sides for all ranks, and the German army was particularly close-cropped. Yet Burton, intending to be accepted as a German officer in order to penetrate the enemy redoubt, has gone into action sporting a pageboy hairstyle so fulsome that it spills abundant curls and waves below the back of his collar. Burton had a big head anyway. I interviewed him once, and found out why he always looked so stocky on screen: it was because his upper works were so broad you had to lean sideways to see past him. Even if close-shorn he would have had to wear a cap rare for its size in the whole of the Wehrmacht. But with his hairstyle added to his massive cranium, his cap has to be big enough for a buffalo, and it still does nothing to disguise—does a lot, indeed, to emphasize—the anomalous abundance of hair protruding at the back. On several occasions in the movie he has to pass a German checkpoint, and you can only deduce that the garrison has been recruited from an institute for the blind. Later in the war, when the regular German forces were in a state of collapse, _Volkssturm_ units were organized from the old, the adolescent, the lame and the sick, but I can't remember that very many sightless people were issued with a _Panzerfaust_ and asked to shoot in the direction of the noise kicked up by Allied tanks. Here at the castle there is no discrimination against the optically handicapped.
Whether as a single, double or triple agent ("Triple, please," you can imagine him saying) the Burton character would have been barely free of his parachute harness before being placed under arrest. He would have been locked up on the basis of his appearance alone. Every other anachronism is explicable, within the screenplay's purely cinematic parameters. In the Geman pub below the castle, Burton, Eastwood and the other agents—the others are notable chiefly for their expendability—talk very loudly in English. Yes, English is their chosen language when they discuss their plans about fooling the Germans, and they do not lower their voices when members of the garrison pass by closely behind them. It could be said, however, that a convention is being observed here, and that our agents are really speaking German. (It could also be said that if they _were_ speaking German, the closely attendant Germans would be even more likely to notice that plans to fool them were being loudly discussed, but let that pass.) There is also the consideration that English seems to be the adopted language of every German in the area. Similarly it could be put down to an equally hallowed cinematic convention when the German commandant arrives in the castle courtyard by helicopter. There were no operational helicopters in World War II, but there were no operational cannon in ancient Rome either, and Shakespeare still put a few in. Shakespeare pioneered Hollywood's flexible attitude to temporal authenticity, as any Hollywood mogul with a tertiary education will be glad to tell you. For every howler in the movie there is a good justification, the principal one being that the people who made the movie must have known it was a howler, but correctly judged that nobody they cared about would notice. In the majority of big-budget war films since World War II, and in all the small budget ones, the enemy has always fired a special kind of bullet that goes around, instead of through, the actors on our side, occasionally penetrating only at the shoulder or in a sexually neutral section of the upper thigh. In _Sands of Iwo Jima_ John Wayne finally got killed by a Japanese bullet while he was sitting down, but only after the Japanese machine-gunners had vainly fired thousands of bullets at him when he was running very slowly. In _Where Eagles Dare_ , whole German machine-gun nests equipped with multiple examples of the lethal MG42 (rate of fire: 1200 rounds per minute) are unable to graze Richard Burton's hairstyle. Big enough for a slowly moving cow to graze it, for cinematic reasons it is impervious to speeding lead. But there are precedents for that. There is no precedent for the hairstyle _per se_.
This is where the pundit clinches his seemingly open-and-shut case for Schnitzler's flight into stupidity as the principal motivation of the film's creators, or perpetrators. He might concede that some of the perps are technically clever, but in that case he will insist that there is still a collective perp: the system itself. And he will be right, but not as right as he thinks. He has overlooked the factor of star power, which is what made him see the movie in the first place. Letting Burton keep his everyday hairstyle was the studio's only chance of getting him into this sector of World War II. (He kept a bit less of his thatch for his cameo appearance in _The Longest Day_ , but it still wasn't buoyant enough to get him arrested by his own side, let alone by the enemy.) And Burton wasn't being stupid either. He had realized that the point was not to look like a British agent plausibly pretending to be a German officer: the point was to look like Richard Burton. The reality of star power depends on exactly that. Malleability is for actors. For screen stars, recognizability is what matters. Much later, and in a better movie, Robert Redford proved it all over again by declining at the last moment to adopt an English accent when he played Denys Finch Hatton in _Out of Africa_. He was right. _Out of Africa_ was a serious venture, but it was still a blockbuster, and it needed Redford as a draw on the marquee, not as a paragon of authenticity on the screen. Redford was content to leave all that to Meryl Streep and Klaus Maria Brandauer. He wasn't just content, he insisted. And it was by making such demands that he became Robert Redford. If we doubt the value of that, we should remember that he would never have been in a position to set up the Sundance Festival, and thus alter the whole course of independent and intelligent film-making in America, if he hadn't been Robert Redford in the first instance. He is a very clever man, and so, between drinks, was Burton, who could recite English poetry by the mile. Burton was clever enough to intuit a deeply awkward truth, and incorporate it in the hairstyle he carried into action in one of the most lucrative movies he ever made. To one side of the world's great events, there is the interpretation of them. To one side of the interpretation, there is entertainment. And to one side of entertainment, there is absurdity. But if the absurdity is correctly judged, it will be found entertaining, even by those who are well aware of the real importance of the events being travestied. There can be a willing, mass participation in the flight into stupidity, because there can always be an agreed moment when the flight away from responsibility becomes irresistible. To pick that moment takes a kind of talent. It might be a spoiled talent, but mediocrity will never make it.
In all those big, bad movies that ought to have been better (I don't mean the big, bad movies that couldn't be worse, like _The Avengers or Pearl Harbor_ ) the stupidity is institutionalized, and you can take it for granted that if they make a big score on the opening weekend, almost everyone concerned is very clever indeed, and often dauntingly cultivated. But these masterminds are smart and suave enough to know that their target audience for the opening weekend is neither of those things. The masterminds are after the young, who know nothing. It is usually a mistake to overestimate their degree of dumbness—the movie has to make some kind of sense—but to overestimate their ignorance is impossible. The disparity of intellect between the manufacturers and the consumers would be frightening if the manufacturers were not at the consumers' mercy, instead of vice versa. Hence the tendency of Californian film moguls to revel in their own superiority: they have nowhere else to hide from the consequences of a mistake. Their flight is not into stupidity, but into sophistication. In the British cinema you can meet plenty of people who know something about Frank Lloyd Wright, but only in Los Angeles can you meet a movie executive who lives in a house that Frank Lloyd Wright built, and who devotes time, taste and knowledge to restoring it. His name is Joel Silver, and he is the same man who, in _Die Hard_ , sent Bruce Willis hurtling barefooted through a plate-glass window to settle the hash of two dozen combat-trained terrorists instead of slicing himself to hamburger. Luckily the guns of the terrorists were loaded with the standard magic bullets rigged to swerve around any actor on our side with star billing, and nobody virtuous got killed except a Japanese executive, possibly as a payback for Iwo Jima.
These functional anomalies of the mass media teach us to look out for whether the rules of the game induce clever people, in other fields as well, to behave in stupid ways. In the year when Senator John Kerry challenged President George W. Bush, the question of why Bush pretended to be able to speak English was never as interesting as the question of why Kerry pretended not to be able to speak French. In the United States, the free democracy whose electoral system most nearly approximates a free market, an historical consensus of extremely clever operatives has decreed that a candidate should not only keep things simple, but seem simple himself. Cultural memory is difficult: too much detail. Cultural amnesia is easier. Eventually there will be nobody alive who knows for certain that there was never such a thing in World War II as Richard Burton's hairstyle in _Where Eagles Dare_ , so why don't we forget it straight away? President Bush's speechwriters encourage him to forget that World War II even existed before Pearl Harbor was attacked. Not even he could not know that: but it is deemed expedient that he should seem not to. How these decisions about utilitarian ignorance are taken is a study in itself. But it is the very study that intellectuals as a class are least equipped to make. For past catastrophes, dull intellectuals try to blame a dumb individual: hence the notion that all the soldiers in the trenches of World War I were murdered by Field Marshal Douglas Haig. Slightly smarter intellectuals try to blame a dumb collectivity: hence the notion that the escalation in Vietnam was the work of the CIA. (In fact, the CIA warned JFK not to commit troops on the ground: he ignored the warning.) Clever intellectuals can analyse a complex event, but tend to attribute a simple motive: hence the notion that the Cold War and the arms race were American inventions designed to stifle the socialist aspirations of liberated Europe. It takes a very smart intellectual, however, to accept that those vast, costly and even criminal stupidities were brought about by people no less bright than he. Clever contemporary thinkers who proceed on the assumption that their predecessors were stupid are apt to write the superior nonsense that works mischief. It is a consideration that Schnitzler left out of his aphorism: there is indeed a flight from responsibility into stupidity, but the flight from responsibility into cleverness can be equally destructive.
"But what if," said Leo, "the execution fires should be lit again?"
"In that case," said Heinrich, "I solemnly promise I will come straight to you."
"Oh," George objected, "those times will never return."
—ARTHUR SCHNITZLER, _D ER WEG INS FREIE_
On some unspecified day around the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the three Jewish boys have been lolling on a well-appointed hillside. They have been conducting a long, lazy argument about whether to dream of Palestine is really an appropriate response to the petty, everyday anti-Semitic snobbery of Vienna. After all, none of them is religious. But the argument gets quite heated, and they break the tension with this joking exchange. Looking back across eight decades, we can see it as one of the most prophetic moments in modern literature. But it should also remind us of the dangers of historicism: hindsight is not a view of the world, it is an indulgence of the self. It puts us in control of history, whereas the first thing we should realize about history is that we are not in control of it: not by looking backward, and still less by looking forward. Only one of the three young characters believes that assimilation is a dangerous illusion, and even if all three of them did, they would still be characters: they would not be Schnitzler. If Schnitzler himself had really thought that the future was cut and dried, he would never have written another line. But the idea of a possible disaster is undoubtedly being floated, and it comes from the author's heart. Schnitzler understood Theodor Herzl's views about the _ignis fatuus_ of Jewish assimilation. He himself was about as assimilated as someone of Jewish background could well be. Even after World War I, with the old empire broken up, Schnitzler's prestige in Vienna's cultural life was on the scale that Mahler's had been when Franz Joseph still ruled. At the Burgtheater Schnitzler, the unchallenged master playwright, was accustomed to multiple curtain calls for every successful first night: sometimes he seemed to be on stage almost as long as the actors.
But he also knew what it meant to feel insecure even in his eminence. Some of his best plays have that for a subject. _Professor Bernhardi_ is a play about a man of Schnitzler's prestige finding out how little his prestige avails him against the perennial hatreds. Schnitzler never betrayed the same sort of nervousness as, say, Jakob Wassermann, a novelist who despaired of a social acceptance to match his big sales. Schnitzler took his popularity as a sign of approval. But he knew that the contempt was always there, a tincture in the culture. For two reasons, he was particularly stung by the essayist Alfred Polgar's critical notices. One reason was that Polgar wrote so well: limiting judgements hurt most when they come from a writer of talent. The other reason was the one that barely shows up even in Schnitizler's private correspondence, but it is detectable between the lines. Polgar was a Jew, and should, Schnitzler felt, have found less hostile language for his belittling judgements. Franz Werfel had a right to feel the same way about Karl Kraus. In the first year of the twenty-first century, the eminent art historian E. H. Gombrich, nearing the end of long life, protested against the misguided consensus of commentary which seemed to assume that there had ever been such a self-conscious body as The Jews before Hitler so portentously invented it. Solidarity had to be imposed, and was never really felt even then. Among the prosperous, fully assimilated Jews of the professional classes who found themselves bewilderingly subject to Nazi proscription, there were plenty who went to their doom still convinced that the whole thing would never have happened if not for the resentment aroused by the influx of all those strangely dressed and unsociable _Ostjuden_ refugees from the accursed east. But you can still see why a prominent Jewish artist who was cut down to size by a Jewish critic should feel betrayed: things were tough enough without being done down by your own people. Things were even tougher if, as an assimilated Jew, you had rejected the idea of there being such a thing as your own people. Like so many stars who have been told too often and too glibly that they embody the hopes of a race, Schnitzler wanted to be an individual, not a representative. The anguish aroused by your own principles is hard to take.
If Schnitzler, who was lucky enough to die of natural causes when Hitler was not yet in power, had lived long enough to see Nazism begin to make actual the atavistic threat that his characters laughed off, what would he have thought? Luckily, such speculations are useless, because they make an inadmissible presumption about the continuity of personal psychology. Schnitzler was an unusually perceptive man, but his perceptive powers might have withered with further age, or even rejected the evidence of his senses. Karl Kraus lived long enough to say that he had nothing to say about Hitler. The implication was that Hitler's unspeakable awfulness had been beyond the scope of even Kraus's satirical view. The truth was that Kraus, largely because he thought the institutionalized Viennese anti-Semitism of the late 1890s was as nasty as things could get, hadn't seen Hitler coming, and his blindness was at least partly wilful. Later on, the gifted satirist Kurt Tucholsky, desperate in exile, doubted if his persistent mockery of the Weimar Republic had ever been wise. Kraus had come too far to have the same doubts about his own activities in post–World War I Austria. He was too tired to adapt his forces to the new challenge. The same thing might have happened to Schnitzler. By the time of his death in 1931, Schnitzler had heard Nazi voices in full cry: they found the Jew plutocrat and erotomaniac Schnitzler a tempting stimulus for their own literary efforts. Some of the stuff written about him is too horrible to quote.
But he didn't make a subject of it. That these voices in the alley would ever take power was hard to imagine even for him. He had been through all that back at the turn of the century. (My copy of _Der Weg ins Freie_ is dated 1922, but he was working on the manuscript in 1903.) He had poured into a great novel all his reflections on Jewish identity, on assimilation, on its impossibility in less than a thousand years, on how everyone affected would have to find his own path into the clear. Since then, he had found his: through achievement, success, fame, the rich emotional rewards of his private life. If he encountered anti-Semitism in grand drawing-rooms, there were few grand drawing-rooms he could not enter. It was hard to imagine that all those subtle, stylishly insidious old parlour prejudices would gain an entirely different order of force when restated by maniacs. In Freud's last diary we can see that even the great student of the primitive subconscious was slow to acknowledge the scope of the Nazi challenge to civilization. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler—they were all at the apex of Viennese cultural intelligence. But for all three of them, there was no Jewish Question in the Hitlerite sense. The question they had dealt with had been about anti-Semitism as a stain on a living culture. The new anti-Semitism _à la_ Hitler was a culture all by itself: a culture of death. Theodor Herzl had prophesied its advent, but on the evidence of what had always happened in the east. To accept that the same order of destruction might be possible in the civilized west, a prophet was what you had to be, with the prophet's vulnerability to suggestions by reasonable people that he might be mad. Prophecy and creative intuition might have something in common: they both depend on a consideration of possibilities that does not censor itself in advance. Schnitzler's richness as a writer depended on his capacity not to censor the reports from his own instincts: in writing about desire, he established a tradition that comes all the way down to Philip Roth, who owes more to Schnitzler than he does to Kafka, because it was Schnitzler who opened up the subject of how desire can saturate the imagination. (One of Roth's most memorable book titles, _The Professor of Desire_ , fits Schnitzler exactly.)
Similarly, Schnitzler did not censor his insecurity. In all aspects of his adult life he made himself the complete figure of bourgeous solidity: he was practically part of the Ringstrasse, the great circuit of buildings in central Vienna that really amounted to a theatre whose sets, as it were, were set in stone. But he maintained access to his unease. He had grown up and flourished in the tolerance of the old _k.u.k_ society. But it was the tolerance that bothered him. Tolerance could be withdrawn. If one of the boys on the hillside—it is Leo who sees deepest—points out to the others that the age-old hostility runs deeper than they think, he is certainly expressing the author's unsleeping doubt, if not his overmastering conviction. The whole allure of Schnitzler's extensive range of work depends, like human beauty, on the ineluctable reality of evanescence. Read in the original, his plays rank him with Ibsen and Chekhov, but most particularly with Chekhov, and not just because Schnitzler, too, was a doctor by his first calling. The dynamic in Ibsen is of chickens coming home to roost. In Chekhov it is of the falling leaves. Schnitzler's short stories, sketches and novellas rank him with Chekhov again, although _Leutnant Gustl_ makes you think also of Joyce, because it exhausted the possibilities of the interior monologue before Joyce had even begun to explore them. Schnitzler's paragraph-sized aphorisms are philosophical essays in themselves. And if he had written nothing else, _Der Weg ins Freie_ would make him one of the novelists of modern Europe. In my shelves, the thin-paper volumes of Schnitzler's complete works form one of those points in space where gravity increases to draw light in so that it can't get out: get near and you will go in with it.
But the illumination in there is phosphorescent. Schnitzler knew that he was writing about a social order in decay. He never gave up on the world—he thought that civilization, no matter how it transformed itself, would continue—but he did say a clear goodbye to the social order into which he had been born. He described it in such loving detail that we are tempted to think of his emotional imperative as nostalgic. But it wasn't. He was a realist. The wonderfully named American critic Joseph Wood Krutch said about Cervantes that only a romantic can be realistic enough, and there is something in what he said. Schnitzler's romanticism, however, was not a self-serving overlay but part of his perception of the world, which for him, because he was an attractive man lucky in love, was always full of sexual adventure even into his old age. From that aspect, he was a small boy in a sweet shop. But he had no illusions about the sweet shop's proprietors. He didn't let the strength of his personal satisfactions blind him to the general fragility of the world in which he enjoyed them. There lies the main difference between Schnitzler's Belle Époque and Joseph Roth's. Schnitzler was there, and told the truth. The compulsive liar Roth looked back on it, nostalgic for its lost coherence. Roth's _Radetzkymarsch_ is a great novel. You don't have to know much about the Austro-Hungarian Empire to see that. The more you do know, however, the more you see that _Radetzkymarsch_ is a beautiful dream. Schnitzler is the man to show you the reality—the one and only path into the clear.
No spectre assails us in more varied disguises than loneliness, and one of its most impenetrable masks is called love.
—ARTHUR SCHNITZLER, _B UCH DER SPRUCHE UND BEDENKEN_, P. 117
In 1927, in Vienna, the Phaidon Press, as one of its first publications, brought out a little linen-bound collection by Arthur Schnitzler whose title can be translated as Book of Sayings and Thoughts. I found my copy, in a house full of books sold by the children of refugees, on Staten Island in 1983 and have been reading it ever since. No taller than the length of my hand or wider than the palm, it can be carried easily in a jacket pocket. I think it is one of the great books of the modern world. In not many more than two hundred small pages of Bodoni bold print, it contains the summation of a lifetime's introspection by a man who travelled into his own psychology with the same bravery that men later showed when they travelled into space. The difference is that everything he found was alive. You could call the book's paragraphs aphorisms—he sometimes used the same term himself—but I prefer to call them essays, bearing in mind that Montaigne called it an _essai_ when he tried to draw conclusions from the endless titration of his experience and his reading. Schnitzler had lived everything he wrote down: the longer ago he had lived it, the more he had thought about it, so the book often gives the impression of light at great depth, with colours leaping to surprised life, as if they were not used to being on show. (When Jacques Cousteau first took powerful sources of light down to shelves of coral that had never been illuminated before, he asked: what is all this colour doing down here?) Some of the most disturbing essays are about love, which for Schnitzler always started with physical love, even when he was getting on in years and had become a bit less capable. When he was young he must have been capable indeed; and even, by his own account, indiscriminately predatory. But in the long run, multiplicity of experience didn't coarsen his perceptions. It refined them, often against his will. There is no element of consolation in this single-sentence essay about love and loneliness. But there is no despair either. Quite apart from the surrounding anti-Semitism that aroused his constant fury, there was a lot about Viennese life that drove Schnitzler to recrimination—he took a bad review no better than any other playwright—but he never quarrelled with love just because it left him lonely. He counted himself lucky to find it at all: surely the sane attitude.
Was he right about the impenetrable mask? Wrong at the start, and right in the end: because love, unlike loneliness, is more of a process than a permanent condition. In the German, the "most impenetrable masks" are _undurchschaubarsten Masken_ —the masks you can't see through. (We might note at this point that "loneliness" is feminine: arbitrary genders really are arbitrary, but in this case it's a nice coincidence.) When love comes, there is no mask: or shouldn't be. There is nothing to see through, because you are not lonely. There really is another person sharing your life. But later on a different truth—one you are familiar with, but hoped to have seen the last of—comes shining through. Unlike light in space, it needs a medium to do so, and the medium is the mask itself, seen in retrospect. You are lonely again. You were really lonely all along. You have deceived yourself.
It would have been a desolating view if Schnitzler had been quite sure of it. But if he had been quite sure of it he would not have gone on worrying at it. On the same great page—great books have great pages, and in this book page 117 is one of the greatest—he tries again. "That we feel bound by a steady longing for freedom, and that we also seek to bind someone else, without being convinced that such a thing is within our rights—that is what makes any loving relationship so problematic." The question here is about possessiveness, and the first thing to see is that there would be no possessiveness if there were nothing real to possess. So this is not loneliness concealed by an impenetrable mask. This is the other person, whom you love enough to be worried about her rights. You are worried, that is, about someone who is not yourself. You want to be free, and assume that she does too: but you want her to be yours. You could want that with a whole heart if your heart were less sympathetic. There have been men in all times, and there are still men all over the world, who have no trouble in believing that their women belong to them. But those men are not educated. If Schnitzler's writings on the subject can be said to have a tendency, it is to say that love provides an education. What is problematic about the relationship is essentially what tells you it is one. It might not be an indissoluble bond, but as an insoluble problem it gives you the privilege of learning that freedom for yourself means nothing without freedom for others. When you love, the problem begins, and so does your real life.
Still on the same page, but at the top—I have taken the paragraphs in a different order here, to restore a sequence that he might have deliberately scrambled—he develops the theme of love and loneliness in a blood-chilling direction. "Each loving relationship has three stages," he says, uncharacteristically sounding rather like Hannah Arendt or W. H. Auden setting out a philosophical fruit-stall, "which succeed one another imperceptibly: the first in which you are happy with each other even when silent; the second in which you are silently bored with each other; and the third in which silence becomes a form that stands between the lovers like an evil enemy." This would be a less terrible thing for him to have said if it had no truth in it that we recognized. But most of us will acknowledge the familiar declension of a passion gone sour. Some passions, of course, ought to go sour, to make room for a fresh one that might even stay fresh. It should be said in a hurry that Schnitzler himself was nothing like Proust in this respect. Proust says, over and over in _À la recherche du temps perdu_ , that love always intensifies into jealousy: that it doesn't just convey within itself, but actually consists of, the seeds of its own destruction. For Proust things seem to have been like that in real life.
Schnitzler's real life was different. As far as one can deduce from Renate Wagner's exemplary biography _Arthur Schnitzler_ , he was never promiscuous in the usual sense of not caring who the woman was. Until a good way into his mature years, he seems to have been moved to end an affair early mainly out of fear that the woman might get the same idea first. Once he got used to the probability that he would not be betrayed, he formed enduring relationships. The memory of Olga Waissnix stayed dear to him after her untimely death. He might never have let go of his wife (the other Olga, born Olga Gussmann) if she had not insisted on her freedom so as to pursue her career as a singer unimpeded. She was a bit of a Zelda, as things turned out: she started her career too late, failed at it, and they had been too miserable together for him to want her back in the house. But they stayed close. His love for the young actress Vilma Lichtenstern was as enduring as it was intense: her death in a car crash left him devastated. Clara Pollaczek consoled him in his old age, although she might have been less loyal if she had known that the old man had yet another young lady tucked away in the wings. Though he did not enjoy telling lies, he was a master of tactical silence. But it would be a big mistake to suspect him of stunted feelings. His feelings were large, and very generous: if you compare him to a truly selfish Pantaloon like Bertrand Russell, the difference is decisive. Schnitzler was a verifiable believer in female liberty and fulfilment. He wanted his women to become themselves for their benefit, and not just for his.
Nevertheless he was an exponent of what the therapists of today would call a compartmentalized emotional life. The subversive element, however, was in how he drew creative energy from the compartments. He thought that men's minds worked that way and he did an impressive job of dramatizing his view, to the extent that Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud both thought him a master psychologist. But very few psychologists of today would agree, expecially if they were working as counsellors; and by the American measure, which demands a married couple, volubly happy for their whole lives, his idea of the silent enemy sounds like the Fiend incarnate. The American measure of the eternally happy couple requires two people with half a personality each. Schnitzler worked by the European measure, in which two complete individuals might or might not get on. Which of these measures we take for a paradigm could be a matter of choice. But Schnitzler, although he did not go so far as to insist that all men were like him, believed that there _was_ no choice. For him, the civil convention and the impulse in the soul were at odds, and out of the conflict he made his drama. Artistically, it was a decision beyond reproach: but the result was a body of art incomprehensible in America, which is the real reason he has never become world-famous. Ibsen, yes, and even Strindberg. In America, Strindberg can be Edward Albee's acknowledged ancestor: the two lovers in _Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf_? can tear each other apart right there on Broadway. They are, after all, a married couple, together forever, like a pair of turtle doves with brass knuckles. But only the novels of Philip Roth acknowledge a mental world in which Schnitzler might be a master, and Roth's heroes must concede the misery and confusion at being in the expensive, shameful grip of lust in action, as if they were Henry Miller's crapulent bohemians in better suits. Schnitzler conceded no such thing. He thought that the battle between imagination and fidelity was a fact of life. Even today, more than seventy years after his death, those who think he had a point must still reach up for his works as if to the top of the rack, where dangerous publications are shrink-wrapped in cellophane. The civilization whose pent desires he did so much to explore is still not ready for him.
SOPHIE SCHOLL
About Sophie Scholl (1921–1943) there are few facts to record, because she did not live long. In Munich in 1942, Sophie's brother Hans did his best to keep his sister out of the White Rose resistance group. Sophie, however, was very good at insisting. Apart from their father, the Scholl siblings ( _Geschwister_ is the useful German word) had few adult companions in their little group. It was a bunch of kids. Not surprisingly, there was not much resisting they could do. But to print and distribute handbills was daring enough, because there could be no doubt about the penalty if they were caught. Sophie could have been spared that penalty had she wished, but once again she insisted. The example set by the _Geschwister_ Scholl is of high importance in Germany and beyond, because as Aryans they were protesting against the fate of the Jews purely out of common humanity. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen made a serious mistake when he left them out of his book _Hitler's Willing Executioners_ : his thesis that the whole of the German non-Jewish population was devoted to "eliminationist" anti-Semitism was bound to look shaky if it deliberately ignored a group of young non-Jews who avowedly were not. There are several books about the White Rose. One of the best is an edition of the relevant documents by Sophie's sister Inge, _Die Weiβe Rose_ (new enlarged edition, 1993), which contains transcripts of the handbills, records of the Nazi court, memoirs from friends and acquaintances, and, on page 32, a photo of Sophie fit to break the heart. The Nazi decision to soft-pedal the publicity about the Scholl case paid off. In her excellent book of memoirs _Berliner Aufzeichnungen_ (Berlin Notes), Ursula von Kardoff reveals that hardly any of her bright young friends in Berlin, sceptical about the Nazis though they were, got to hear about the Scholls even a year later. Their fame was a post-war event, steadily growing until now, with, it is to be hoped, no end in sight. Could a nation that has never plumbed the same depths put so much value on such a story? In 2005 a movie about Sophie came out in Germany, called _Sophie Scholl: Die Letzten Tage_ (The Final Days). More than a million people went to see it. Whether a Hollywood movie will ever be made for a world audience is another question.
Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don't dare to express it.
—SOPHIE SCHOLL AT THE WHITE ROSE TRIAL IN MUNICH, QUOTED BY RICHARD HANSER IN _D EUTSCHLAND ZULIEBE_ (FOR THE SAKE OF GERMANY), P. 15
SHE DIDN'T STAND a chance anyway. The mere fact that the reliably fanatical Roland Freisler had been sent to preside over the court sealed her doom. But once again in her young life she was bearing witness, and to such effect that even the clinically insane Freisler was momentarily rendered speechless. When he got his breath back, he used it to remind her of his mission, which was to render her speechless permanently. Sophie Scholl was guillotined by the Nazis at Stadelheim prison in Munich on February 22, 1943, at five o'clock in the afternoon. She was twenty-one years old. In life she had been reserved with strangers but full of fun with those she loved. Without being especially pretty she had radiated a moral beauty that left even her Gestapo interrogators self-consciously shuffling their papers, for once in their benighted lives hoping that the job of killing someone might pass to someone else. If there can be any such thing as a perfect person beyond Jesus Christ and his immediate family, Sophie Scholl was it.
Sophie's brother Hans, the leader of the little resistance group that called itself the White Rose, was already pretty much of a paragon. The Scholl family weren't Jewish and Hans could have had a glittering career as a Nazi. He even looked the part: with a face whose measurements fitted the Aryan ideal to the millimetre, he was a page from the sketchbook of Arno Breker. Yet in spite of a standard Third Reich education, including membership in the Hitler Youth, Hans figured out for himself that the regime whose era he had been born into was an abomination. By the time he reached this dangerous conclusion, armed insurrection was out of the question. A few Wehrmacht officers were the only people with guns who didn't think that Hitler ruled by divine right. Any effective opposition was going to have to come from them. The only means of resistance open to Hans and his like-minded fellow students was to hold secret meetings, write down their opinions and spread them surreptitiously around under the noses of innumerable snoops. There were a few adults in the White Rose, but mainly they were just a bunch of kids. They could never hope to do much more than circulate their skimpy pamphlets. Long before the end, Hans had guessed that even to do so little was bound to mean his death. He died with an unflinching fortitude that would have been exemplary if the Nazis had let anyone except his executioners watch. Plans by the Munich party office to have the young conspirators publicly hanged in the courtyard of their university had been scrapped on orders from Berlin, doubtless for fear that a show of courage might be catching. Philip II of Spain had once taken a similar decision when he heard from the Low Countries about heretics delivering defiant speeches from the stake. He issued orders that they should be drowned in secret. The brains in the Wilhelmstrasse were thinking along the same lines.
You would have thought to be as good as Hans Scholl was as good as you could get. He did what he did through no compulsion except an inner imperative, in the full knowledge that he would perish horribly if he were caught. Yet if moral integrity can be conceived of as a competition, Sophie left even Hans behind. Hans tried to keep her ignorant of what he was up to but when she found out she insisted on joining in. Throughout her interrogation, the Gestapo offered her a choice that they did not extend to her brother. They told her that if she recanted she would be allowed to live. She turned them down, and walked without a tremor to the blade. The chief executioner later testified that he had never seen anyone die so bravely as Sophie Scholl. Not a whimper of fear, not a sigh of regret for the beautiful life she might have led. She just glanced up at the steel, put her head down, and she was gone. Is that you? No, and it isn't me either.
She was probably a saint. Certainly she was noble in her behaviour beyond any standard that we, in normal life, would feel bound to attain or even comfortable to encounter. Yet the world would undoubtedly be a better place if Sophie Scholl were a household name like Anne Frank, another miraculous young woman from the same period. In addition to an image of how life can be affirmed by a helpless victim, we would have an image of how life can be affirmed by someone who didn't have to be a victim at all, but chose to be one because others were. At present, Sophie's story is not widely known outside the country of her birth: a big light to hide under a bushel. The recent movie about her has so far not, like _Downfall_ , resonated beyond Germany. A Hollywood movie about her life would make her world-famous, but until recently it was difficult to think of an actress who might be given the starring role. Then Natalie Portman came along. At this point I will seem to digress: but I hope to make a connection later on.
A lot of people must have sat there with their fingers frozen in the popcorn as they watched the then thirteen-year-old Natalie Portman in _Leon_ (known as The _Professional_ in the United States) and thought this girl isn't just good, she's _good_. Apart from the happy accident of her enchanting looks, what she emanated was something much more rare: natural moral stature. It could be said that a movie like _Leon_ had to get its natural moral stature from somewhere. But who cared, when the man with the flak emplacement under his raincoat was taking out the sleazeballs a bunch at a time? While Leon, the taciturn French terminator weirdly resident in New York (How did he score his green card? Did he marry Andie MacDowell?), wordlessly massacred swarms of heavies, the audience, including myself, chuckled its endorsement in the dark. In those days, undimmed by the shadow of recent events, apocalyptic body counts in the streets of New York were popular film fare. Yet I can remember being disturbed by, even a bit disappointed by, the fact that little Natalie Portman was there to complicate the story—the nice way of saying she spoiled the fun. Usually I enjoy movies about loner hit men using wit, guile and lovingly maintained ordnance to wipe out creepy people who deserve to die. Value free? _Tant pis_. I even enjoyed the original French version of _Nikita_ , which was just about as value free as the genre can get. In _Nikita_ , the hit person of the title didn't even know whether her targets deserved to be iced or not. She was just an instrument, a curvy part of her own gun. I still had a whale of a time.
I'm not even sure if movies like that are bad for me. Clearly my pleasure in them taps into the same current of fantasy by which, finding thieves in my apartment, I ensure that they do not leave alive. In reality, if I found thieves in my apartment they would probably leave with everything of value I possessed. But in my imagination I suddenly remember that old souvenir Japanese ceremonial sword stashed behind the partition between my bedroom and the _en suite_ bathroom. Having begged for permission with a craven mien superbly feigned, I slink off to take a leak and come back as Toshiro Mifune in _Sanjuro_ , scaring the daylights out of them before I even take a swing. What follows is a whirlwind multiplication of the strict Sharia penalty for theft. An idle reverie no doubt, yet without such fancies I would feel even more helpless about the way the world is going. Like all those young Chinese suit-wearing lower-echelon businessmen scattered through the world who dote on the omnipotence of some kick-boxing ham actor and thus brighten lives in which they are at the mercy of their own mobile telephones, we need these dreams to live, or we think we do. What was so bothersome about Natalie Portman's mere presence in _Leon_ was that it set another standard, one which is no dream at all. It's a reality; the reality of uncompromising goodness; the unreal reality we find it worrying to hear about, because it would be so hard to live with. Embodying sensitive decency in a role which asked her to be mad keen about guns and to bare her tiny midriff to the ambiguous gaze of a mature imported assassin with a bad shave, she certainly made the film more interesting than it might have been, but a touch of quease was hard to wish away. What's a girl like you doing in a joint like this?
She did it again—or at any rate she did it again for me—in _Beautiful Girls_ , a movie I knew nothing about when I first happened to switch it on during some long plane ride. I missed the opening titles and at first didn't realize that the perfect little dream girl was Natalie Portman again. It's a good film. I own a video of it nowadays, and I still find it hard to watch any of it without watching it all. But there can be no doubt that her scenes stand right out of the picture. In some respects they are designed to. For one thing, they're written that way. Everywhere else in the picture, everyone talks the standard, scabrous demotic of any movie about a gang of young American friends growing older, from _Diner_ through The _Big Chill_ to forever. _Beautiful Girls_ is an especially deep reservoir for that kind of talk. I love it: it always was the quality of the slang that made me envious of America. But Natalie Portman's character, Marty, talks another language entirely. Marty (when she tells Timothy Hutton her name, you have to be my age to think no, _you're_ not Marty—Ernest Borgnine is Marty) talks the mandarin dialect of a J. D. Salinger Wise Child. "I just happen to be the tallest girl in my class." Where have we heard that proud precocity before? Of course: it's the upper-crust young English girl in the title story of _For Esme with Love and Squalor_ , the one who heals the war-ravaged American soldier's soul with the benevolent rays of her crystal spirit.
Randall Jarrell had a phrase that exactly jibed with Salinger's diagnosis of the sick place in the American dream: "a sad heart at the supermarket." Salinger's pot of balm for the sad heart was the elevated chatter of the pre-teen, pre-sex alpha-nymph, unearthly in her potential understanding, limited only by her lack of experience, desperate to grow up. Faced with her bewitching purity, the damaged veteran, himself too holy for this world, has only two courses of action: to accept his karma with renewed humility or to blow his brains out. In "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," Seymour Glass chose the second path. Though there are cynics who think he did it from remorse after exposing his penis underwater to his angelic interlocutor, it seems far more likely that Salinger's version of the Dalai Lama offed himself because, after meeting the incarnated Godhead, he had nowhere else to go. The bananafish wasn't a euphemism, it was a mantra. Similarly with Marty: her upmarket vocal articulation while she mashes snow with her tiny gloves is a guarantee of her heavenly credentials. Her snowballs are pills to purge melancholy. She's a script-conference pitch dressed up as a pixie.
After meeting Marty, the sapped, self-doubting Will ("You've really got to chill, Will," trills Marty cutely) can at last face up to the life in which his dreams of being a great jazz piano player won't come true. He'll still be the saddest heart at the supermarket, but he'll be a good citizen. Marty's barely pubescent love for him, and the vision of her that he will take away, are his consolation prize, a wish fulfilment pure and simple. Or rather, not so pure and by no means simple: a bill of spiritual goods, a high-tab product marketable to every small-town dilettante who wants to convince himself that he has been sent into the world to suffer for his sensibility. But if that's the kind of vision we need in order to be better than we are, then Natalie Portman is the girl to embody it. The thoughtfulness of her screen presence—you practically hear those little wheels turning—can raise an average part to the mental level of the heroic. In the years to come she is doubtless destined to make many serious movies look profound and many that are shallow look serious. Her function, and perhaps her fate, will be to sanctify anything they hand her. At best (at _their_ best, because it will always be her best) she will turn a well-written role into a poetic epiphany, as in _Closer_. At worst she will breathe life into bathos, although not, we hope, into any more than three stipulated Star Wars prequels, of which the first, _Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace_ , wasted her gift with such casual indifference that I would not see the second if I were paid. Even in that tongue-tied clunker, as she visibly struggled with the unrewarding role of Amidala, Queen of Naboo, the Bad Hair Planet, she almost managed to humanize what looked like the central character in the first all-zombie production of _Turandot_.
In addition to her talent, Natalie Portman has another conspicuous qualification for playing Sophie Scholl. As far as one can tell from reading her print interviews, Natalie is leading a good life—an important requirement for pretending to be a good person. She has already played Anne Frank on Broadway. Better than a career move, her taking of the role was a testament to her fundamental seriousness, and to the unflashy professionalism of the people around her. The gifted girl seems to have sensible parents: there is no Culkin factor. As a college student, she emulates Brooke Shields and Jodie Foster in her admirable determination to have a life of the mind beyond the exiguous parameters of the entertainment industry. Apart from the mad hairstylists of Naboo, no professional freaks have so far succeeded in sidetracking her very far down their sinister alley. For too many of her magazine-cover photo shoots she has been caked with makeup, but probably her parents weren't to blame. Photographers can be persuasive. (Whatever Annie Leibovitz was thinking of when she rouged and lipsticked Natalie's defenceless face for _Vanity Fair_ , it reminded me of how Brooke Shields was dressed and lit by Louis Malle for _Pretty Baby_ , his justly neglected movie about a New Orleans whorehouse.) The frozen poses are against Natalie's nature. When she talks, you can hear her thirst for learning, as if that were her only passion. As our sad Babylon of a Western world goes, the kid is still a virgin.
Yes, if a Hollywood movie about Sophie Scholl gets made for the international market, it has to be with Natalie Portman. Myself, I kind of hope it never happens, and not because I distrust Hollywood _per se_. The place has come a long way since the era when it could guarantee to miss the point. In the bad old days, it wouldn't have been hard to imagine the first preview when the cards came in negative about how Sophie's story ends. ("We can't snuff the muffin. It's a reshoot, people.") But that couldn't happen now. At worst you would get the smoothest, most literate possible rearrangement of the recalcitrant historical facts, always in the name of pressing home the dramatic point. In reality, Sophie and the nice boy she loved—he was a fellow conspirator—never slept together. In the movie they would have to at least do a bit of heavy petting: you know, to show what she's going to miss by this crazy choice of hers? Pity we can't _call_ it _Sophie's Choice_ , but there it is. And we can't have her dying before the boys do, the way it actually happened. The prison officers took mercy on her and killed her first because they knew from experience that waiting was the worst part. Merciful Nazi prison officers? It's confusing, like those Gestapo heavies who don't even do any torturing because the kids spilled everything as soon as they were sure there was nobody still free out there that they had to protect. A lot of script points to iron out, but it can all be done with a clear conscience as long as the main point is left intact: the girl dies.
And that's where the dream movie falls apart, because if Natalie Portman plays the role, the girl won't die. Natalie will go on after the end of the movie with her career enhanced as a great actress, whereas Sophie Scholl's career as an obscure yet remarkable human being really did come to an end. The _Fallbeil_ (even its name sounds remorseless—the falling axe) hit her in the neck, and that was the end of her. Her lovely parable of a life went as far as that cold moment and no further. It's a fault inherent in the movies that they can't show such a thing. The performer takes over from the real person, and walks away. For just that reason, popular, star-led movies, no matter how good they are, are a bad way of teaching history, and you don't have to be an oaf to get impatient when they try to. Most of us, when sitting in the dark at the multiplex, would rather be entertained than instructed. Instruction is for the art house. If every tent-pole movie we saw gave us the full complexity of existence, we'd be living twice. My own ration for a movie like _Gods and Monsters, Lone Star or Breaking the Waves_ is about three a year. And it seems cruel to say so, but if Emily Watson, playing the central figure of _Breaking the Waves_ , had been more famous, we would have found the story easier to take, and thus harder to assess at its true high worth. The same would be true if Natalie Portman were to play Sophie Scholl. Simply because it would be she saying them, her lines of dialogue would get into the common interchange of civilized speech, and eventually into literature. But part of the sad truth about Sophie Scholl is that nobody remembers a thing she said, and in her last few minutes alive she said nothing at all. If she had said something, the man who bore witness to her bravery would have remembered it.
WOLF JOBST SIEDLER
Wolf Jobst Siedler (b. 1926) would be a fair choice for the title of Most Civilized Man in Post-War Germany. In 1943 both he and Ernst Jünger's son were sea cadets when they were caught making sceptical remarks about the future of the Nazi regime. At the personal intervention of Dönitz their lives were saved, but Siedler spent nine months locked up before he was drafted as a _Luftwaffenhilfer_ —a dogsbody in a flak battalion. After the war he studied sociology, philosophy and history at the Free University of Berlin before spending ten years as a literary journalist. He then rose to an influential position in publishing with the houses of Ullstein and Propylaen, before, in 1980, starting his own house. Siedler Verlag became such a successful property that the Bertelsmann conglomerate eventually bought it, but Siedler continued in place as the most high-toned publisher in Germany. His own writings helped his glossy image. There was a series of beautifully produced picture books about the foundations and fate of the architectural heritage. (The picture book with long, well-informed captions can be a delicious form in the right hands, which his were.) But his most valuable contribution has always been as an essayist. He wrote a whole series of essays emphasizing the cleverness of the Nazis in leaving the high bourgeoisie able to feel that nothing much had changed. Some of Siedler's critics on the left thought that he had underestimated the anti-Semitism of the cultivated class before the Nazis came to power, and overestimated its ignorance afterwards. But Siedler's immense learning and faultless taste—best sampled in his volume of selected essays _Behauptungen_ (Opinions)—gave his views weight. As the publisher of the historian Joachim Fest, Siedler can perhaps be held accountable for aiding and abetting Fest's effect of displacing the Holocaust as a central theme in Nazi history. When it comes to the case of Albert Speer, however, there is no "perhaps" about it. There can be no doubt that Siedler aided and abetted Speer's post-war campaign of self-rehabilitiation. As Speer's publisher, he attended on Speer as one civilized man attending on another, and Speer's pose as a man who never really knew what the Nazis were doing to the Jews was given extra plausibility by his being so welcome in Siedler's ambience. Siedler's credentials to play host look impressive. From his student years onward he was decorated with all the favours of post-war democratic German culture, right down to the signed presentation copies of Ernst Jünger's books and the fond letters from Thomas Mann. Persuading us that even the unthinkable can be finessed from the centre of our attention and normalized as a source of growth, his finely judged tone of voice gives comfort. But we should be cautious when we spot comfort creeping into the historic memory: if it climbs the wall like a stain, it could be a sign that the truth is being drowned.
As well as the most spooky and unsettling, the most misleading thing about this State was that on the very evening of the burning of the synagogues, an event which brought the Eastern Europe of the Middle Ages into the Germany of the twentieth century, everywhere in the cities of our country festively clad people went to operetta, theatres and symphony halls, and that, six hours after the deportation wagons left the station platforms of Berlin, the trains for the seaside left also.
—WOLF JOBST SIEDLER, _B EHAUPTUNGEN_, P. 72
MOST OF SIEDLER'S books have been published under his own class-act imprint. I have a collection of his lavishly illustrated and finely printed monographs about architecture in Berlin and the Mark Brandenburg, and about how that architecture was restored or further wrecked—usually the latter, wherever the Communists were in charge—after the war. On the left of the right, Siedler is a very civilized, quietly persuasive voice. One of his most seductive themes is the idea that the Nazis were the militant arm of bourgeois taste: that they never really radicalized a comfortable, well-stuffed patrimony, but instead co-opted it for their purposes. Care for the end phase of the bourgeois era, he says at one point, doesn't really contradict the law of tyranny: it expresses it. There is something in what he says. Though there was plenty of very bad, very kitsch Nazi plastic art—much more than Siedler can be bothered to contend with—there was never very much specifically Nazi literature, and it would probably have been swept aside if it had ever existed. As things were, Germany had no Vilfredo Pareto, Georges-Eugène Sorel, Charles Maurras or Giovanni Gentile. As an approved literary pet of the Nazi regime, the dud scribe Hans-Friedrich Blunck thought that an enthusiasm for Fascism might threaten a diversion of National Socialism in the direction of un-German intellectualism. Blunck was not alone among Nazi thinkers in finding Fascism dangerously novel and far too concerned with the brain.
The more cultivated among the Nazis proved their cultivation by knowing the traditional names: minus, of course, the names of Jews. When a production of a Mozart opera came to occupied Poland, the soundtrack of the newsreel celebrated the occasion thus: _Auch so, auf tanzenden fussen, kam Deutschland in diesen Land_. ("Even so, on dancing feet, Germany came to this land.") No mention of the Stukas and Panzers: it would have spoiled the mood. Siedler is unbeatable in his evocation of the regime's anti-modern, thatched tone. He practically makes you taste the cream cakes that were Hitler's fast food of choice. But Siedler's final effect is to overstate his case by underplaying the facts. Perhaps because he thinks that everybody else has already done it, he doesn't make enough of the enormous, raucous, radically perverted creativity represented by the Nazi system of Führer worship and mass murder. There was nothing normal, snug or unchallenging about the filth coming out of the radios and the loudspeakers. The instantly disgusting _Der Stürmer_ was on sale at street corners, not in cellophane packets on top shelves. By putting such an emphasis on the bourgeois normality of the Nazi period, Siedler retroactively creates an ambience in which an intelligent man might be lulled into thinking that things were not so abnormal after all. It was certainly the message that a man like Albert Speer wanted to hear. In 1973 at his villa in Berlin-Dahlem, Siedler, in his role as publisher, hosted a launch party for Joachim Fest's biography of Hitler. Speer was the guest of honour. Marcel Reich-Ranicki was invited without being told that Speer would be present. In _Mein Leben_ (p. 482) Reich-Ranicki records how Speer, to establish an atmosphere of chummy colloquy, gestured at Fest's black-bound 1,200-page book where it lay on a table and said: " _He_ would have been pleased." Reich-Ranicki went home, and his friendship with Siedler was never the same again.
Speer was also a social hit at his own launch parties, especially in London; and probably for the same reason: reassurance. His suavely barbered poise helped to persuade civilized people that on the Nazi question there might have been no clear choice. Perhaps we all would have fallen for it, especially if there were a few men in well-cut suits like him around. That was the lazy assumption that the post-war Speer counted on. But it was also the assumption that the Nazis counted on: none of the good, dependable things in life have changed, you can have your nationalist dream and eat your cream cakes too. Siedler has done us a service by bringing out the cosiness that the Nazis offered the middle class in return for its quiescence. He could have done more to bring out the Nazis' cleverness in offering the lower orders, set free to climb by the radical social programmes, a point of aspiration that would recompense them for any horrors they might have to endure or inflict: membership of the middle class. But what he scarcely brings out at all is that nobody with half a brain, whether the brain was bourgeois or plebeian, could have failed to notice for five minutes that the whole Nazi state was a raving madhouse.
MANÈS SPERBER
Manès Sperber (1903–1984) was psychologist, philosopher, epic novelist and fascinated eyewitness to both of the main twentieth-century European tidal waves, which collided right in front of his eyes. Like Sartre's _Road to Freedom_ novels, Sperber's fictional trilogy, _Like a Tear in the Ocean_ , can be read as a saga of the politically engaged conscience, but Sperber's enduring testimony as a writer is another trilogy, the set of autobiographical books that record his own story directly, without benefit—or anyway with less benefit—of imaginative reconstruction. Non-fiction in the truest sense, Sperber's autobiography makes a point of shirking nothing about the author's initial Communist convictions and the long and bitter business of disillusionment. Born in Galicia, Sperber first picked his political side in Vienna, and was an active Communist organizer when he moved to Berlin in 1927, by which time the Communists and Nazis were already fighting it out in the streets. Doubts about Stalin had set in even before he transferred to Paris, but they did not reach fever pitch until news came through of the Moscow trials. Even as late as 1939, however, Sperber was still writing articles in which he called Nazism an extension of capitalism: he developed that view to the point of explaining the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as proof that the two totalitarianisms had both become forms of "state capitalism" at root. A tenuous position, but by that time nobody was listening anyway, because events had outrun theories. Lucky enough to be granted domicile in Switzerland, Sperber emerged after the war as one of the most prominent analysts of a period he had been very lucky to get through unhurt by one or the other of the popular forces dedicated to destroying all notions of the liberal democracy which he himself never quite got around to taking seriously. The three books of autobiography, collectively called _All das Vergangene_ (usually translated as All Our Yesterdays), are _Die Wasserträger Gottes, Die vergebliche warnung and Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt_. They can be found in English translation, called, respectively, _God's Water-Carriers, The Unheeded Warning and Until My Eyes Are Closed with Shards_. In the original language, in paperback, they can be handily carried as pocket books. The complete work can be confidently recommended as a guide to the times. Above all it gives disturbing credibility to the view that so many serious young people of Sperber's age had no choice except to decide that democracy was doomed.
A bad conscience, an ineradicable feeling of responsibility for the crimes committed in the name of Germany, could be found only among men and women who had always been opponents of Nazism and had suffered from its rule. These, the guiltless, had overcome either late or never their shame for what had happened.
—MANÈS SPERBER, _B IS MAN MIR SCHERBEN AUF DIE AUGEN LEGT (UNTIL MY EYES ARE CLOSED WITH SHARDS)_, P. 260
THE QUICKEST WAY to praise the inexhaustibly unfolding wisdom of Manès Sperber's three-volume intellectual autobiography _All das Vergangene_ (All Our Yesterdays) would be to say that almost every moral judgement in it is as good as this. At this point he is talking about the Germans he was meeting in the French zone of occupation after World War II, where the German Communists were playing the same cynical game as in the American zone. (The game was "cynical" even if the anti-Communists said it was: one of the easiest points to forget when reading about European politics in the aftermath of World War II.) The German Communists, denying all vestige of their real allegiance, were masquerading as democrats in order to persuade the occupation authorities that the Social Democrats were the enemies of civil order. In the French zone the tactic succeeded to the extent that an Antifaschistichen Kampfbund (Anti-Fascist Battlegroup) was set up, whose cover remained unblown until 1948. (In the Russian zone there was no need for pussyfooting, and the Social Democrats could be sent straight to Buchenwald, which was kept open for business specifically to accommodate them.) Sperber was an adept at working out what was really going on because he had known the Communist Party from the inside. It was not until very late in the 1930s that he started making the break. There is a telling confessional passage early in _Bis man mir Scherben auf die Augen legt_ (a better translation would be Until They Put the Pennies on My Eyes) in which he lays bare, through bitter hindsight, the psychological mechanism that enabled him to predict in June 1934 how the massacre of the SA leadership in the "Röhm purge" would strengthen Hitler's position rather than weaken it. As a Communist, Sperber was obliged to debate the point with his comrades. As always, they were certain that the Nazis had overreached themselves and would shortly disappear from history.
Unusually blessed with realistic insight, Sperber guessed that such confidence was moonshine. But while doing his best to convince his comrades that the opposite was true, he never once brought forward the example that weighed on him and from which he shrank with a reflex of fear—namely, the way Stalin's elimination of the left social revolutionaries, the worker-opposition and the Trotskyists had bolstered his dominance. Sperber wrote his intellectual autobiography near the end of his life. The great psychologist was at last ready to ponder the mental subterfuge by which, long ago, he had failed to admit even to himself the significance of what he already knew. The news about the brutalities of Soviet rule had been reaching the socialist movements in Europe—and especially the Germans—since the 1920s. Sperber had known all about it. But he was not yet ready to think about it. The third volume of his fascinating experiment in self-examination is especially useful for showing us how intelligence can work to defeat itself for as long as any kind of grip is maintained on the wrong end of the stick. If he had been more dense, he might have found fewer mental tricks with which to go on convincing himself that his faith had never been misplaced.
Arthur Koestler's horrifying personal experience in Spain—loyalty to the independent left almost got him killed by the Stalinists—was a big influence on Sperber's eventual reappraisal of his own historic expectations. Before its publication in 1940, Koestler showed Sperber the manuscript of _Darkness at Noon_. Sperber was convinced by the book's central idea that a figure like the Old Bolshevik Bukharin could have made such absurd confessions at the 1938 show trials only out of duty to the Communist ideal. This notion remained popular among ex-Communists until the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, when Khrushchev convincingly pointed out what should always have been obvious: that the confessions had been obtained by torture. ("Beat, beat, beat!" shouted Khrushchev, who knew all about it, because he had actually done it.) Sperber analyses the process by which those who had held the illusions were so reluctant to be disillusioned completely. "Many years had still to go by after our break with so-called Marxism-Leninism before we were finally free from all illusions and from many picture-book imaginings [ _Bilderbuchvorstellungen_ ] that despite everything we almost unconsciously, and anyway without willing it, had held on to" (p. 172). One of the picture-book imaginings had been the consoling notion that a bloodstained old ideologue like Bukharin, with his perpetrator's knowledge of monstrosity on the grand scale, might have been some kind of idealist despite all. Even the hard-bitten Koestler—one of the first to realize, and to say, that communism was the god that failed—had cherished that pious wish at some level. The pious wish had helped to give _Darkness at Noon_ some of its complexity and force, but it was nonsense. The secret of the show trials was that there was no secret—they were an exercise in unlimited violence.
Another reason for Sperber's slowness to accept this might have been his temperament. For Sperber, "absolute negativity" was a horror ( _ein Greuel_ ), a death in life, a forecast of extinction (p. 185). In one of Sperber's novels, a Yugoslav partisan refuses to believe that cruelty is deeper than sympathy, or more real than love or even than the need for justice. Sperber was simply—or rather, not simply, but firmly—a lover of life: a pretty generous reaction when you consider the range and determination of the forces that were always conspiring to bring about his death. He escaped the scythe, but plenty of people he knew and loved did not, and he saw them go. No survivor's writing could be further than his from the cheap consolations of ordinary uplift. His tone is "positive," but the affirmation has been hard won. The strength comes from the admission and examination of weakness. Without aligning himself with the perpetrators—which would be another indulgence—he can plausibly suggest that most of them got into a life of crime because they were human, and were therefore unable, on the occasions when it mattered most, to face the truth even when it was staring them in the face. He can suggest that from his own self-knowledge, but only because he has the rare gift of being honest about how his mind once worked: often too slowly, and always far more wisely after the event than before. The only point he misses is the one still missed by reformed Communists all over the world. What about all those liberal democrats who never fell for the voodoo in the first place, and will their tormented shades ever be offered an apology for being called social fascists while they were alive?
When a woman asked me, at an evening meeting a few days later, how I could have presented an opinion that was so obviously contrary to likelihood, I defended my conviction aggressively. But I read in the eyes of this woman that she did not believe me, and I was so struck by it that I remember that evening, and that scene, exactly, even today.
—MANÈS SPERBER, _D IE VERGEBLICHE WARNUNG_ (THE UNHEEDED WARNING), P. 182
The evening meeting in 1931 took place a few days after Sperber had spoken publicly in a debate following the first Berlin screening of the Soviet film _The Way to Life_. The film, famous at the time, purported to show that the Soviet problem of homeless children (the _besprisorny_ ) was over, because they were all being re-educated in special schools to lead a useful life: they went into the school as wastrels and came out as scholars, heroes of labour, future leaders. Sperber was not long back from his first trip to Moscow, where, in a single square near his hotel, he had seen dozens of homeless children sleeping rough, with nothing but an asphalt-melting oven to keep them warm. At the time, Sperber managed to convince himself that these must be the last of the homeless children still on the loose, because it would have been easy for the government to sweep them out of sight. They were still there only because there were so few of them, and they would soon be sent to the special schools. (Sperber had been taken to see a special school, where he swallowed the assurance that it was only one of many: the old Potemkin village trick worked again.) A Russian psychologist at the psychological conference he had been attending tried to convince him that the government's promises on the subject had not been fulfilled, and that the same was true for every other promise in the first Five Year Plan. She could back up this argument with the evidence of her own life. As an academic of rank she had been allotted barely enough living space and nourishment to maintain a decent existence. Sperber rationalized all her objections, even though she was the woman on the spot. Even as early as 1931, he was well capable of seeing that the Soviet leadership was lying, especially about Stalin's benevolence. But he still thought that without the Party's leadership there could be no chance of rescuing Germany from the obscenities of unemployment and the coming collapse of capitalism. It bothered him that the Soviet Union seemed to be suffering from shortages and privations even worse than those haunting his homeland, but he wanted to believe the Soviet Union had a future, whereas Germany was dying in the grip of its past. So he understood the sardonic objections of his Russian friend without taking them in.
But this other woman, the one at the evening meeting in Berlin, shook him. He knew at the time that he already had his underlying doubts, but he had been able to keep them in balance against his need to believe in the Soviet mission. Her disapproving look was instrumental in the long process by which the balance tipped towards disbelief. The process took all of ten years, but this was where it started. A mind that knew it had been massaging the facts was altered towards facing the consequences. Sperber's trilogy is full of such moments, and their quietly dramatic presentation as turning points in a long road puts his masterpiece on a level with Bowlby's three-volume work _Attachment and Loss_ , except that Sperber's emphasis is on the mechanisms of political allegiance rather than of neurosis. Belief is made concrete as the memory of a woman's glance. Not long after I read this passage for the first time, I was watching one of the later episodes of _Band of Brothers_. The crucial moment of morally revealing behaviour involved a woman's glance. Deep in Bavaria on their way to Berchtesgaden, Easy Company of the 82nd Airborne is billeted in a small town. In a grand house, the American captain, an alcoholic in search of a drink, deliberately drops the framed photograph of a Wehrmacht officer so that the glass breaks. The Wehrmacht officer's well-born wife stares at him accusingly and he wordlessly admits his embarrassment. Next day, a company scout finds a slave labour camp nearby in the woods. In keeping with the facts, the scenes are horrific. (This much we owe Spielberg and his visual achievements in _Schindler's List_ and _Saving Private Ryan_ : whatever his Disneyland impulse towards last-ditch uplift, the look of the thing had never been so true to the facts before.) Again in keeping with the historical reality, the good burghers of the town are put to work dragging the ruined corpses to the burial pits. One of the appalled citizens put to work turns out to be the Wehrmacht officer's wife. The same captain sees her at her labours. He catches her eye, and this time it is she who registers shame before she looks away. Again there are no words, but everything is said, and it will all be remembered.
If I look carefully at my own memories, many of them centre on the humiliating moment when shabby behaviour was observed and correctly judged by someone else whose face I still recall exactly, and for no other reason. Other people tell me that the same is true for them. If there is such an automatic and unceasing system of moral accountancy in the mind, Sperber was one of its first scholarly explorers, although of course it had been explored in literature from the beginning. Shakespeare's ghosts are memories that haunt living minds. Tolstoy is full of such moments. When we read his biography, his egocentricity seems monstrous. But when we read _him_ , we see that his soul was examining its memories constantly, and assessing them all according to a moral test. When, in _War and Peace_ , Zherkovim makes a condescending joke about General Mack and is chewed out by Andrey, why is Zherkovim's humiliation so vividly presented? Almost certainly because it happened to Tolstoy himself. He was laying a ghost to rest. The conspicuous merit of Sperber's great work is that these admissions about the mind's embarrassments are not offset on to fictional characters, but are faced fair and square as personal experience. Writing in that vein, Sperber is like Freud transferred into the political dimension that Freud himself fought shy of by focusing his attention on character traits formed in infancy. Nobody can entirely supplant Freud: but he can certainly be supplemented, and Sperber triumphantly does. Sperber would probably have given the credit to Adler, but he would have been too generous: his honesty about his own mind was born in him, like a poetic gift.
That being said, we are entitled to point out a gaping hole in his analysis of the political forces contending in the last years of the Weimar Republic. He is good and honest about saying why he believed in communism against all the evidence that was coming out of the Soviet Union, and even in despite of the Comintern's incomprehensible instructions that that the Communists should join the Nazis in voting against the Social Democrats. But he doesn't say enough about the Social Democrats. There were always more people voting Social Democrat than voting Communist, right to the end. Why did not the Social Democrats see the Party as the only hope? Sperber doesn't tell us. One can only conclude that even while he was writing his monumental autobiography, at the end of his life, he still clung to the belief that the people who fell for neither of the political extremes weren't fully serious about politics. Such is the long-term effect of an ideological burden: when you finally put it down, you save your pride by attributing the real naivety to those who never took it up.
T
Tacitus
Margaret Thatcher
Henning von Tresckow
Leon Trotsky
Karl Tschuppik
TACITUS
Throughout this book, Tacitus (ca. a.d. 55–ca. 120) is the voice behind the voices. In Greece, Thucydides had already given the world a way of talking about democratic politics, but Tacitus gave the world a way of talking about the despotism and terror that so often succeed the collapse of a representative system—a familiar pattern in recent times. The tone of voice he found to deal with these matters has remained a paradigm for almost two thousand years. From Montesquieu through to Golo Mann, pre-modern and modern heroes in this book measured the fulfilment of their responsibilities against the grandeur of Tacitus, his powers of condensed expression. Born and raised under the Empire, Tacitus never saw the old Republic except as an ideal, although his first work praised his father-in-law, Agricola, as an exemplar of the lost virtues. The first career of Tacitus was as a pleader at the bar and as a praetor. But his formative experience, and the source of his secret as an analyst of the totalitarian mentality, was under the tyranny of Domitian: a reign of terror that gave him his retroactive insight into the age of Tiberius, which had happened before his time, but whose influence, he correctly assumed, had generated a lingering infection. When the relatively benevolent Nerva dispelled the climate of fear created by Domitian, Tacitus returned to public life as a consul, and was able to continue his career as an historian without threat of reprisal. After the useful _Germania_ , his third major work was the indispensable _Historiae_ , an analytical narrative covering the period from the accession of Galba in a.d. 68 to the death of Domitian. Only the first four and a fragment of the fifth of its twelve books survive, but the student should regard the _Histories_ as a necessary port of call, and as a reason, all on its own, for learning to read some Latin. For students acquiring Latin in adult life, the language is most easily approached through those historians who really wrote chronicles—Cornelius Nepos, Sallust, Suetonius and Livy—but with the _Histories_ of Tacitus you get the best reason for approaching it at all. There are innumerable translations but the original gives you his unrivalled powers of compression. (You can pick this up from a parallel text, always remembering that the purists, when they warn you off the Loeb Library, are giving you the exact reason you should hold it dear—it's a painless dictionary.) What Sainte-Beuve said of Montaigne—that his prose is like one continuous epigram—is even more true of Tacitus. His last capital work, _Annales_ ( _Annals_ ), is a still harder nut to crack: even experts in the ancient languages find it as difficult in the Latin as Thucydides is in the Greek. Tacitus's already elliptical style becomes so tightly wound that it seems impenetrable. But the narrative is a must. It concerns the Julian line from Tiberius through to Nero. Only about half of the original work survives, but what we have would still be essential reading if it contained nothing else except Tacitus's reflections on the reign of Tiberius, which was the single most startling ancient harbinger of twentieth-century state terror, just as Tacitus's account of it remains the single most penetrating analysis of what we now see as the morphology of limitless power. If, below, I presume to offer a critique of a great critic, it is only on a single point, and in the full knowledge that I would not even possess the viewpoint from which to attempt it if Tacitus had not first lived and written. This whole book of mine grew out of a single sentence of his: "They make a desert and they call it peace." More than fifty years ago I heard that line quoted by one of my schoolteachers, and I saw straight away that a written sentence could sound like a spoken one, but have much more in it.
But in Rome, the consuls, the Senate, the knights, rushed headlong into servitude.
—TACITUS, _A NNALS_, BOOK 22
ALONG WITH THUCYDIDES, Tacitus by his mere existence pushes us hard up against the central conundrum posed by the realistic political thinkers of the ancient world: if they were so like us, why weren't they more like us? Though his characteristic technical device was the pregnant statement rather than the extended argument, Tacitus showed powers of analysis that we are unable to take for granted even among political writers of our own time. _Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant_. They make a desert and they call it peace. As a four-word encapsulation of a counterproductive political policy and a campaign of euphemistic propaganda, it identifies each and condemns both. Not many writers now could match it for compression. (What makes the line even more impressive is that Tacitus gives it to a German leader speaking against Roman policy in general, not just against a specific abuse.) In the _Annals_ book 22, his picture of the Roman upper orders volunteering for subservience goes to the root of the Republican tradition's irretrievable collapse in the time of Tiberius.
You would think that a man who could see that could see anything. And indeed Tacitus saw the tragedy in every aspect of the old order's vulnerability: when virtue had been declared a crime, there was no refuge even in reticence. The more nobly behaved the family, the less chance it stood. Psychological torture had become a weapon in the emperor's hands more effective than military violence. Fathers had to choose between giving up their daughters to concubinage or condemning the whole family to death. Tacitus was so alive to all this that he had to develop a new kind of prose to contain his despair: the prose of the crucible.
Yet he could never see anything wrong with the legal precept by which a slave's testimony could be taken only under torture. It would have been too much to expect that he might have seen something wrong with the institution of slavery itself. But he might have seen something wrong with torture. Rome, after all, was not Greece. In Athens, both Aristotle and Demosthenes had regarded torture as the surest means of getting evidence. But they were only Greeks. _Autres temps, autres mœurs_ , and Rome prided itself on being a step forward. In Rome, even Cicero—by every measure a lesser mind than Tacitus, and certainly the greater opportunist—managed to figure out that torture had something wrong with it. By this important parameter, then, Cicero, and not Tacitus, became the precursor of Montaigne, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Manzoni, who all condemned torture, and of the less famous but far more efficacious Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria, the reforming jurist who not only wrote against it but actually managed to introduce the practical measures that cleared it out of Tuscany in 1786. Cicero the infinitely malleable advocate had the right idea. Tacitus, the man of steel, didn't. It seems never to have crossed his mind. By mere intuition, with no means of observation, Nicholas of Cusa guessed right about the movement of the planets, Lucretius guessed right about atoms, and Heraclitus guessed that the whole of existence was an endless flux. Tacitus, whose opportunites to observe were ample, never guessed right about the morality of putting slaves to the torture. He heard the screams, and must have been revolted. He just never worked out what his revulsion meant.
But we should avert our gaze from the spectre of what Tacitus never did, and fix it on the reality of what he could do, because without the reality we never would have seen the spectre. Tacitus did not invent the cruelties of his age, though such is the force of his prose that he inevitably seems to have done: he invented the pity for them. Somehow, as if a tunnel had opened through time, our feelings go back to join his voice. In the _Annals_ , the young daughter of Sejanus is taken away to be killed. "What have I done?" Tacitus has her say. "Where are you taking me? I won't do it again." We have heard that voice before, but it was later: it was only yesterday, in the Ukraine, at one of the Dubno shooting pits, on October 5, 1942. All the victims were naked. The German engineer Hermann Graebe recalled one moment particularly. "I still clearly remember a dark-haired, slim girl who pointed to herself as she passed close to me and said, 'Twenty-three.'" It is the same horrific event, dramatized with the same helpless voice, and just as we can't admire it as an artefact in the modern instance, because it is too real, we should not admire it in the ancient instance either, because it was real then. If it had not been for Hermann Graebe, we would not have heard the girl at Dubno speak; and we would not have heard Sejanus's daughter speak if it had not been for Tacitus.
It is quite possible that Sejanus's daughter said nothing, and that Tacitus made up what she said, as all the Roman historians made up the speeches of their emperors and generals. But the emotion he registered, both hers and his, was a true one, and puts us beyond aesthetics. Great writing is not just writing. As we can see in the troubling case of Ernst Jünger, even the most gifted writer can hide from reality in his art, and it might well be true that the more gifted he is, the more he is tempted to do so. Jünger, in his notebooks before July 20, 1944, had already said enough about Hitler to get himself executed if the Gestapo had seized them. We can see from his notations that he had been told everything that mattered about the Final Solution. But he couldn't address the dreadful reality in his writing. After the failure of the attempt on Hitler's life, while people Jünger knew well were being tortured and strangled for their complicity, he turned his full attention to Monet's country studio at Giverny, and gave one of the best ever literary descriptions of the cycle of paintings we call the _Waterlilies_. After visiting the Groult Collection in the Avenue Foch, he voiced his sensitive concern about the holes in the roof caused by flak splinters. The holes might let in the rain, to damage the treasure house of Fragonards, Turners and Watteaus. You can hear his full concern about a threatened civilization. But the threat to civilization had already gone far beyond that, and he had declined to deal with it, as if it was beneath his art.
It wasn't beneath his art; it was beyond his art; and Tacitus is there to prove it. We know now, in retrospect, that even worse things happened in the time of Tacitus than he could realize. But he did face up to the worst thing he knew. Though it took the whole of his art to write it down, his art was not the first thing on his mind: the first thing on his mind was to register the intractable fact of an innocent, unjust death. He could not make the girl immortal. When we say that she has never ceased to speak, we speak metaphorically. She died. In fact, as he tells us, it was even worse. Because virgins were safe from the executioner, she was raped first, so that no laws would be broken. The Nazi execution squads in the east were obeying the law too. The paradox had already been identified by Tacitus, and traced to its origin, in the mind of a tyrant. Great writing collapses time by freeing us from illusions, one of which is that the aesthetic impulse can be a law unto itself. An advantage of being able to write criticism in the wonderfully copious English language is that we are not stuck with an inappropriate word to register the impact of art at its height. Hearing the voice of Sejanus's daughter, we are not obliged to say, "That's beautiful." In Italian, even the mighty Croce could only have used the word _bello_. Croce painted himself into a corner with an aesthetic vocabulary that he inherited but fatally neglected to expand. The warning is clear. An aesthetic vocabulary is only part of what we need. Criticism needs a complete vocabulary, or else the rare art that responds to the whole of reality will leave us helpless; and far from being able to appreciate Tacitus, we won't even be able to appreciate Hermann Graebe.
MARGARET THATCHER
Margaret Hilda Thatcher (b. 1925) read chemistry at Oxford but went into politics, a field in which she succeeded to the point of becoming prime minister of Great Britain. Her ascent to this post was a crisis for Britain's ideological feminists, who could no longer maintain that there was a glass ceiling to rank attainable by women. (Some of them said she was not really a woman at all, but a view which had had little plausibility when applied to Elizabeth I had none whatsoever when applied to someone with a husband and children.) Though very few of those males in attendance upon her ever managed to complete a sentence without being interrupted, it was not true that nobody could get her ear. Some of those who did were intellectuals. This fact could be disturbing if you were an intellectual of another persuasion. "There is no such thing as society," a statement of hers which was held up by her enemies as an example of her callousness, was in fact a summary of a recognized philosophy of individual responsibility. It could well have been planted in her ear by one of her closest advisers, Sir Keith Joseph. But it was undoubtedly her fault not to realize how it would sound if released as a sound bite. She let such gaffes happen only because she almost entirely lacked tact. Her rule was unchallenged for just so long as, and no longer than, that lack was thought to be a virtue. But her lack of verbal guile made her praise, when she gave it, doubly flattering. Once, in her presence at a soirée in No. 10 Downing Street, I managed to complete the thought that the great advantage of the British constitution, vis-à-vis the American constitution, was that it had never been written down. She was so emphatic in endorsing what I said that for a while I thought the idea was mine. In 1990 she was forced out of the leadership of her party by Sir Geoffrey Howe. Having grown far too confident of her own infallibility, she had been ruling without a cabinet, and with typical lack of diplomacy had assumed that those cabinet members whose opinions she had brushed aside would not mind. But they did, and that was the end of her reign: although she stuck around close enough and long enough to make life miserable for several luckless males who later got the job of leading the Conservative party, usually to defeat.
Solzhenitskin.
—MARGARET THATCHER, IN A CONSERVATIVE PARTY POLITICAL BROADCAST, APRIL 1978
SHE MUST HAVE got Solzhenitsyn mixed up with Rumpelstiltskin, and the result was a composite character of a kind unseen since that unjustly forgotten 1950s Hollywood musical _The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T_., whose fans will remember two roller-skating old men joined by the one beard. Most things that Prime Minster Thatcher is remembered for saying were not said very memorably. They are remembered because she said them. One of the Conservative party's tame writers, probably Robin Douglas-Home, later handed her the catchphrase "The lady's not for turning," which she delivered to the waiting television cameras with typical over-emphasis. She might or might not have realized that the line was a variation of Christopher Fry's ringing title _The Lady's Not for Burning_. Probably not: on her own proud insistence, her literary tastes ran mainly to the novels of Frederick Forsyth, read more than once so that she could savour their vigorous prose. A quasi-biblical phrase "Let us rejoice at this news"—she delivered it to the surrounding press at a key moment in the Falklands war—probably came to her from memories of the Book of Common Prayer. But this single word, "Solzhenitskin," was a truly original coinage, so startling and resonant that I have employed it ever since, and think of it every time I see her picture. As she charges forward into her bustling, interfering dotage, an old party still haunting her old party, she has even become, in her appearance, a fitting companion for Solzhenitskin—whose Russian component, Solzhenitsyn, also lived to see the day when his intransigence began to erode his legend. In my mind's eye I can see the helpless Solzhenitskin with this untiring crone yammering in his ear, telling him what he already knows, interrupting him in mid-sentence even as he struggles to agree. When I was in the press party that trailed her through China in 1982, I never heard a man in her company get six words out in succession, except perhaps for Zhao Ziyang, and even with him it was only because she had to wait for the translation. So she had to interrupt the translator.
It would be a mistake to think that Thatcher got her basic ideas from her entourage. The same assumption is made about Tony Blair today, and it is equally untrue. What Thatcher got from her attendant spirits, when she was wise, was mainly her vocabulary. Somebody must have told her that the works of the Russian dissident Solzhenitsyn provided powerful backing for her dislike of collectivism, so Solzhenitsyn would be a good name to bring in. She tried, and invented Solzhenitskin. (The fact that whoever was in charge of the Tory party political broadcast could not bring himself to correct her pronunciation is a sign of either his ignorance or the blue funk she induced in her support group even at that early stage.) Admittedly, the Russian sage's real name is hard to handle without practice. Solzhenitsyn probably had the same sort of trouble when he tried to say "Thatcher." It was remarkable, however, that when the prime minister mentioned Solzhenitskin on television, it did not get a laugh. Normally all too ready to pounce on any slip she might make, the liberal press held back on that one: perhaps they didn't realize she had made a mistake. The liberal press at the time was already showing signs of a contracting frame of reference. When the Duke of Edinburgh mentioned that he had been reading Leszek Kolakowski, his mere citation of the Polish philosopher's name was regarded by the _Private Eye_ school of political commentators as conclusive evidence of pretentiousness. Obviously they found Kolakowski's name funny in itself, because it sounded so foreign. Equally obviously, they had no idea who Kolakowski was; that the critique of Marxism in his monumental three-volume _Main Currents of Marxism_ was a standard item for anyone working in the field: and that its pertinence had long before spread his name to most readers who read seriously about politics at all. Viewed from Pseuds Corner, anyone who refers to a big book by a foreign author must be a fake. (One of the signs of the marvellous self-confidence that has always reigned in the _Private Eye_ prefects' room is the unquestioned assumption that someone like the Duke of Edinburgh might be trying to impress _them_.) The view is limited, but has the large advantage of being easily expressed. All it takes is the written equivalent of an impatient snort and a wrinkled nose. Strangely enough, however, "Solzhenitskin" was greeted with a respectful silence. In my television column for the _Observer_ , I was the only journalist of any kind who welcomed his advent, and I have to confess that I myself got Rumplestiltskin mixed up with Rip van Winkle, and ran around making cheap cracks about Thatcher's having suggested that Solzhenitsyn had been asleep for a hundred years.
In the long run, Thatcher's mistake, whose consequences we have all inherited, was to listen to her intellectuals not only on the level of slogans and smart remarks but on the level of their convictions. Her own fundamental notions would have seen her through. Her electoral base, for example, expanded into the working class as a natural result of her inbred conviction that people would look after council houses better if they were given the chance to buy them. With her widely admired passion for good housekeeping, she could have opened Britain to the free market without dismantling its civilized institutions, and so won kudos all round. The institutions had their representatives in her cabinet, but it turned out that they might as well have been speaking from the Moon. Her free market ideologists, on the other hand, could approach her in private, where they had access to her ear as her cabinet colleagues never did. The free marketeers convinced her that some of the institutions were a hobble for commerce. By herself, she would never have thought of removing the quality requirements for the Independent Television franchise bids. When she did, the predictable result was a stampede of the big money to secure the franchises through pre-emptive cost cutting, and a plunge down market once the franchises had been secured. The BBC, eager to placate the government, and afraid that it could not justify the television licence fee unless it kept its audience share, duly followed ITV in its swallow dive off the cliff. The long-term result was a ruined broadcasting system. By the time Mrs. Thatcher was remaking the state, Solzhenitsyn was preaching spiritual renewal: to the _disappointment_ of his liberal admirers, he no longer seemed to believe that the West's free institutions were very much preferable to the Eastern authoritarianism he had helped to dismantle. But if the young Solzhenitsyn had been present, and could have got a word in edgeways, he might have told Mrs. Thatcher that the opinions of intellectuals might be an adjunct to sound government but are no substitute for it. The Russian Revolution was prepared by theorists who were able to persuade themselves, in a period of chaos, that their theories would be put into action. But the only political theories worthy of the name are descriptive, not prescriptive. If prescriptive theories have plausible hopes of filling a gap left by a decayed or undeveloped institution, the game is already lost.
She should have trusted her instincts and shut out the smart voices, which—as often happens when they at last get a hearing—turned out to be not smart enough. Her best instinct was to stick to a simple course of action once it had been chosen. That instinct became her enemy, and the enemy of the country, on those occasions when a simple course of action was not appropriate. In domestic policy it hardly ever is. But her instinct paid off in foreign policy, with far-reaching results. When she chose not to be faced down by the Argentinian junta, she followed through with the necessary consequence: war. There were yells of protest from the far left, which would have preferred to give a green light to the Argentinian fascists rather than resort to gunboat diplomacy. The far left preferred love-boat diplomacy: an interesting reprise of the Labour party's position in the late thirties, when the menace of Hitler was admitted but the menace of rearmament seemed greater. Over the Falklands, the parliamentary Labour party had no choice but to go with her—nobody pranced for war like the Labour party's leader, Michael Foot—but the first disaster would have put her on the block. There wasn't one; the British carried the day; and the junta fell as a direct result.
There was another long-term effect of her courage which is seldom considered. Later in the same year, 1982, she went to Beijing to face the Chinese leaders in the matter of the upcoming Hong Kong handover. Typically, the bonzes of Beijing announced their conclusions before the talks: Hong Kong would become part of China. But she had never thought any other result was possible. What was really in the balance was what would happen to Hong Kong _after_ it became part of China. The Chinese might have reduced it to the condition of Tibet. They didn't do so, and have still not done so. It seems fair to conclude that Mrs. Thatcher obviated the possibility by her prestige. She had won in the Falklands, and had done so partly because of the firmness of Britain's alliance with the United States. (An important factor, in that regard, was undoubtedly the diplomatic effort of the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson.) Thus she was able to suggest to the Chinese leaders that the consequences of extinguishing Hong Kong's freedoms might be drastic. She probably didn't have to suggest it out loud: she had a way of glaring at the right moment that went through the language barrier like a bullet through butter. With the Americans behind her, Mrs. Thatcher was presenting the Chinese leaders with the possibility of atomic war. The freedoms of the Hong Kong citizens were not up to much, but they were better than nothing, and the colony's last governor, Chris Patten, in the final few years before the handover, did a lot to reinforce them. Beijing vilified him for his pains, even going so far as to call him a tango dancer: but such withering invective left him unshaken. He kept on reminding Beijing that the citizens of Hong Kong had rights and that the rights were inviolate. He did what the Foreign Office had never done. So did Mrs. Thatcher. Beijing sent in the soldiers but they never fired a shot. Nobody was arrested. The Trojan War did not take place. Since that blessedly uneventful day, a flourishing Hong Kong's influence on mainland China has already been huge. If the eventual consequence is an irreversible erosion of China's monolithic state, the transformation will have to be traced back to the same extraordinary year, 1982, in which the Red Army's tanks did not come to Poland. What didn't happen in Warsaw eventually influenced everything that did happen in Europe until the fall of the Berlin Wall. It could well be that what didn't happen in Hong Kong started the same sort of process in the Far East. It was the year that Thatcher flew to China to be faced with a fait accompli, but in fact accomplished everything by dictating what would not be allowed to occur. She couldn't pronounce "Solzhenitsyn," but in most other respects she knew how to say what she meant.
HENNING VON TRESCKOW
Henning von Tresckow (1901–1945) was the heart, the soul and the brain of the July 20, 1944, plot against Hitler's life. After the plot failed, Claus von Stauffenberg, who delivered the bomb to Hitler's forward headquarters, was the name popularly associated with the attempt; but really Henning, the mastermind in the background, was the man who mattered. Nor had he always been in the background. In March 1943 he personally got a bomb on Hitler's plane. The bomb should have gone off. Had it done so, Henning would have changed history. Superfically, he had all the characteristics of the ideal hero. On the revisionist left to this day, efforts continue to denigrate the July plotters as aristocratic right-wing romantics who wanted the war against the Soviet Union to continue, with better leadership than the Nazis could provide. With regard to how the Nazis are viewed in retrospect, the contest between the old aristocracy and the far left is a perennial stand-off, mainly because both sides were guilty, and therefore each had a permanent interest in passing the buck to the other. Hitler would scarcely have risen to power if the Weimar Republic had not been sabotaged by the aristocracy. On the other hand the Communists sabotaged it as well, and in the crucial period between the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939 and the launching of Operation Barbarossa in 1941 they gave Hitler aid and comfort by denouncing any attempts to resist him as "imperialist." The July plotters undoubtedly had questionable credentials as democrats. But a full twenty among them, when interrogated by the Gestapo after the plot failed, insisted that they had been motivated by revulsion at what happened to the Jews. Henning, had he lived, would have said the same. There can be no doubt that he despised the Nazis. There can, however, be a doubt about his views on the German army and its career of conquest. Like most of the career officers he enjoyed the idea of the army becoming strong again. Because only Hitler could make it so, Henning was in a dilemma. He finally resolved it by turning against Hitler. Henning's key role in the conspiracy depended on his ability to persuade senior officers that they should do the same, so that there would be some hope of taking Germany back from the grip of the SS after a successful attempt. He probably knew, before the critical day, that not enough of the senior officers had been persuaded. He then said the thing that mattered: the attempt should go ahead, at whatever cost. In other words, he was proposing a religious sacrifice. If modern Germany, as a liberal democracy, now recognizes the word "July" in that sacrificial spirit, it has a lot to do with Henning von Tresckow.
Now the whole world will fall upon us and mock us. But I remain, as before, firmly convinced that we did the right thing. I regard Hitler not only as the arch-enemy of Germany, but as the arch-enemy of the world. If, a few hours from now, I stand before the judgement seat of God, and am asked for a reckoning of what I did or failed to do, I believe with a good conscience that I can represent myself by what I have done in the battle against Hitler.
—HENNING VON TRESCKOW, AS QUOTED BY BODO SCHEURIG, _H ENNING VON TRESCKOW: EIN PREUSSE GEGEN HITLER_, P. 217
HENNING VON TRESCKOW said this to his fellow conspirator Fabian von Schlabrendorff at 2nd Army staff headquarters in Ostrów, northeast of Warsaw, in the early morning of July 21, 1944, the day after the plot failed against Hitler's life. Or anyway, Schlabrendorff said that Henning said all this: all this and more. It really doesn't matter, because it was undoubtedly what Henning thought. Before the attempt, he had said that it should go ahead _coûte que coûte_ —no matter what the cost. After it failed, he made immediate plans to kill himself, because he knew too much and might, under torture, give everyone away. At one stage I was so struck with Henning's heroism that I thought of writing an opera libretto about him. The piece would have been written as a long flashback from the moment of his death, which Henning accomplished by walking into the forest and blowing himself up with a grenade. He was trying to make it look like a battle incident, in the hope that the Gestapo would be fooled into thinking he had not been a conspirator, and so lay off his family. It hardly needs saying that the stratagem didn't work, but Henning should not be seen as a blunderer on that account. Many of the conspirators were blunderers, but he wasn't. He knew that the coup d'état scheduled to follow the July attempt was so sketchily organized that it would probably come apart even if Hitler was killed, but he thought the attempt should go ahead because the sacrifice would mean something in itself.
He had a right to say so. Of all the long-term conspirators, he had come closest to killing Hitler on a previous occasion. On March 13, 1943, only a month after the Stalingrad defeat, Henning got a bomb on the four-engined Focke-Wulf Condor carrying Hitler back from Smolensk to Rastenburg in East Prussia. The only reason the bomb did not go off was that the Czech-made fuse was of a type sensitive to temperature. It froze at altitude. If the bomb had gone off, the modern history of Europe might have been quite different. Henning had been only a millimetre away from eliminating the arch-enemy. It might have been better if Henning had been in direct charge of all the attempts. Unfortunately he was also the ideal man for arranging the attendant coup: a necessary effort that involved a huge expenditure of time even when it got results. Most of the time it didn't. One of the lost dialogues of the war was the conversation he had with General Erich von Manstein—the embodiment of the old, pre-Nazi army—in February 1943. Henning paid what was ostensibly a staff visit to von Manstein's headquarters at Saporoshje in Russia. From Alexander Stahlberg's book _Die verdammte Pflicht_ we know that Henning and von Manstein were together for at least half an hour. What was said? Whatever it was, the canny von Manstein would not bet. Henning kept on plugging away at the senior officers. He had been plugging away at them since the launch of Operation Barbarossa, and had been winning the allegiance of the junior officers since well before that. After July 20, 1944, it was frequently said that the young officers had found reason to rebel only after the reverse at Stalingrad in late 1942 and early 1943. But Henning was already organizing his network of young rebel officers while Barbarossa was being planned in early 1941. Before the starting whistle blew in June of that year, he had recruited Schlabrendorff, Rudolf Freiherr von Gersdorff, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff, Hans Graf von Hardenberg and Berndt von Kleist. Most of the names were from the _Almanach de Gotha_ , and some of them had a romantic notion of making peace in the west so that the more dangerous enemy could be fought in the east: but on the eve of the invasion of Russia they were all capable of realizing that the most dangerous enemy was a single German.
For an opera libretto, Henning's conversations with the young officers would provide tempting opportunities for duets, trios, quartets and so on, with the additional attraction that everyone was in Wehrmacht uniform, with no SS insignia in sight: a stage full of fresh-faced idealism. If a certain element of fresh-faced naivety is hard to ignore, it should be remembered that these really were the flower of their generation, and even the most dense among them had realized that something had gone seriously wrong with Germany's historic mission. There were thousands of young officers who got all the way through the war—or anyway all the way to an early death—without realizing that the Jewish business was at the very least a mistake. Henning's conspirators knew better, even when they still believed that _Grossdeutschland_ , conveniently rid of Hitler, might somehow be allowed to fight on beside the western allies in the battle to save civilization against the threat from the east. After July 20, 1944, the Gestapo included several of the young aristocratic officers on their list of conspirators who had confessed to having rebelled because of Nazi policies towards the Jews. Henning chose his soldiers well. The question of why there were so few like them is largely answered by the fact that there were so few like him. The aristocracy was a network that had been there before the Nazis arrived. The aristocrats had a language they could share in private. They knew how to talk freely to one another. But anyone who wanted to get them organized had to trust them not to talk out of turn. Once there were more than a few involved, the contact man was living on borrowed time. In other words, a hero was required, and that cut the field right down: cut it down, in effect, to Henning von Tresckow.
Unfortunately for the librettist, there is a problem with Henning himself. In the first winter of the Russia campaign, it became apparent that if there were no quick victory the German troops, stuck in place, would freeze. They had no warm clothing. Behind barbed wire, hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners still had their felt boots and overcoats. It was decided—in clear defiance even of German military law, let alone of the Geneva Convention—that the Russian prisoners should be deprived of their warm clothing so that it could be given to the German troops. In their book _Der Krieg der Generale_ , Carl Dirks and Karl-Heinz Janssen show that one of the men who endorsed this sinister initiative was none other than Henning von Tresckow. Stealing the warm clothes must have seemed like common sense at the time. But it was common sense only in the context of the world that Hitler had created, and that was the very world that Henning had set himself against. Faced with this awkward information, one must struggle to remember that Henning had a long-term aim, which would have been impossible to achieve had he been removed from his staff post—and if he had refused to sign the order, he would probably have been removed straight away. Henning's stature as a hero just about survives the struggle. But the opera becomes a casualty. A baritone aria on the theme of "Let the Russians freeze first" would make a mess of Act One.
LEON TROTSKY
After being murdered at Stalin's orders, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky (1879–1940), lived on for decades as the unassailable hero of aesthetically minded progressives who wished to persuade themselves that there could be a vegetarian version of communism. Trotsky could write, orate, loved women, and presented enough of a threat to the established Soviet power structure (admittedly showing signs of rigidity by then) that it should want to track him down to his hiding place in Mexico and rub him out. It followed, or seemed to follow, that Trotsky must have embodied a more human version of the historic force that sacrificed innocent people to egalitarian principle: a version that would sacrifice fewer of them, in a nicer way. Alas, it followed only if the facts were left out. It was true that Trotsky, in those romantic early days in Paris, was a more attractive adornment to the café than Lenin. In the Rotonde, where Modigliani settled his bill with drawings and paintings when he lost at craps, Lenin could at least defend "socialist realism" against Vlaminck, whereas Trotsky couldn't even get a job as an artist's model (too small). But the Russian Civil War that turned Trotsky into one of the century's most effective amateur generals also unleashed his capacities as a mass murderer. The sailors at Kronstadt, proclaiming their right to opinions of their own about the Revolution, were massacred on his order. In the vast crime called the collectivization of agriculture, Trotsky's only criticism of Stalin was that the campaign should have been planned more like a battle. The only thing true about Trotsky's legend as some kind of lyrical humanist was that he was indeed unrealistic enough to think that the secretarial duties could safely be left to Stalin. His intolerance of being bored undid him. But his ideas of excitement went rather beyond making love to Frida Kahlo, and at this distance there are no excuses left for students who find him inspiring. Trotsky's idea of permanent revolution will always be attractive to the kind of romantic who believes that he is being oppressed by global capitalism when he maxes out his credit card. But the idea was already a dead loss before Trotsky was driven into exile in 1929. He lost the struggle against Stalin not because he was less ruthless, but because he was less wily.
Under a totalitarian regime it is the apparatus that implements the dictatorship. But if my hirelings are occupying all the key posts in the apparatus, how is it that Stalin is in the Kremlin and I am in exile?
—LEON TROTSKY, QUOTED BY DMITRI VOLKOGONOV IN _S TALIN_, P. 303
TROTSKY WAS GOOD at sarcasm. His journalism written in Mexican exile would have been enough reason on its own for Stalin to nominate him as a target. Pro-Soviet credulity among Western intellectuals was usually proof against logic, but Trotsky had rhetoric: a more penetrating weapon. If Stalin's emissary had not managed to smash Trotsky's head in, there might have been more such jokes to make the Moscow show trials sound less convincing. From that viewpoint, Trotsky's murder was not only horrifying, it was untimely. Treachery made it possible, and the subject is still surrounded with a miasma of bad faith. Pablo Neruda was instrumental in smoothing the assassin's path but never wrote a poem on the subject: something to remember when reading the thousands of ecstatic love poems he did write. They are full of wine and roses but no ice axe is ever mentioned. Admirers of Neruda don't seem to mind. The same capacity for tacit endorsement is shown by Trotsky's admirers, who even today persist in seeing him as some sort of liberal democrat; or, if not as that, then as a true champion of the working class; or anyway, and at the very worst, as one of those large-hearted Old Bolsheviks who might have made the Soviet Union some kind of successfully egalitarian society had they prevailed. But when it became clear that the campaign for the collectivization of agriculture would involve a massacre of the peasantry, Trotsky's only objection was that the campaign was not sufficiently "militarized." He meant that the peasants weren't being massacred fast enough.
Trotsky had previously shown the same enthusiastic spirit when leading the attack on the rebellious sailors of Kronstadt, and Orlando Figes's book _A People's Tragedy_ proves all too thoroughly that Trotsky's talent for mass murder was already well developed during the Civil War. We can dignify his ruthlessness with the name of realism if we like, but the question abides of just how realistic his ruthlessness would have been if he had won a power struggle against Stalin and stayed on to rule the Soviet Union. As things turned out, there never was a power struggle. Trotsky wasn't interested in the hard, secretarial grind of running the show: leave that to Stalin. But—an important but—Trotsky yielded no points to Stalin in the matter of dealing with anybody who dared to contradict. It was a trick they both inherited from Lenin. Golo Mann said it went back all the way to Marx. Croce quoted Mazzini's observation that Marx had more anger in his heart than love, and that his whole temperament was geared to domination. We can still see it today, even when totalitarianism is no longer a thing for states, but only for religious fanatics. It is the trick of meeting contradiction by silencing whoever offers it. Trotsky's undoubted fluency as a polemical journalist does not mean that he wouldn't rather have had a gun in his hand. The humanist makes a big mistake in supposing that a literary talent automatically ameliorates the aggressive instinct. Osama bin Laden has several of Trotsky's characteristics. According to students of Arabic, he commands his native language with vibrant fluency, giving a thrilling sense of its historic depth; he can lead a simple life and make it look enviably stylish, as if asceticism were a luxury; and above all, he can inspire the young to dedicate their lives to an ideal. If the ideals of the caliphate tend to become more elusive on close examination, so did the ideals of communism: but they needed to be incarnated for that very reason. Trotsky lived on after Stalin, and to some extent is still alive today, not because young people want the world he wanted: a phantasm that not even he could define. What they want is to be him.
KARL TSCHUPPIK
Karl Tschuppik (1876–1937) was an historian whose major books were famous in post–World War I Vienna, along with his personal charm and a particularly sardonic version of Jewish coffee-house wit. His biographies of Franz Joseph and Maria Theresa attracted attention beyond the country ( _Franz Joseph I: The Downfall of an Empire_ appeared in America in 1930) and there was also a biography of Ludendorff that examined the role of German militarism in leading the Austro-Hungarian Empire to its collapse. Along with his prestige as a scholar, however, Tschuppik exemplified the dubious gifts of his friend Peter Altenberg at living from hand to mouth. A Café Herrenhof habitué by daylight, Tschuppik managed, like the journalist Anton Kuh, to secure a night-time billet in the luxurious Hotel Bristol, but whereas Kuh paid little, Tschuppik paid almost nothing. The manager regarded it as an honour to have him on the premises. In partial recompense, Tschuppik would conduct long philosophical dialogues with the doorman. Erika and Klaus Mann, who mentioned Tschuppik (too briefly, alas) in their indispensable memoir of the emigration _Escape to Life_ , said that they loved to visit him when they were in the city. As a man of the left, Tschuppik assumed that the erosion of democracy in Austria after 1932 could only be the prelude to Nazism, and warned that his country would soon "again wade through rivers of blood." He was lucky enough to die a year before the _Anschluβ_ : lucky because, like Kuh, he had been an early analyst of Hitler's oratorical style, and the Nazis had a long memory for that branch of literary criticism. His admirer Joseph Roth said, "Our friend Tschuppik chose the right time to die. . . . When he did, it was clear to me that everything was lost."
It is written with love and criticism.
—KARL TSCHUPPIK, FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO HIS _F RANZ JOSEPH: DER UNTERGANG EINES REICHES_
LARGELY FORGOTTEN NOW, like its author, Karl Tschuppik's book about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is beautiful even to look at. I read it in the library of Castolovice, the Sternberg castle in Bohemia, and there I had to leave it, because the books still belong to the state. It would have been a discourtesy to my hostess if I had asked to borrow it. The request would have put her in the position of allowing a national treasure to leave the country. Besides, the lovely setting of the old library was where the book belonged. Bound in brushed yellow linen, clearly printed on good paper, it was a product of Avalun Verlag, one of the publishing houses that once flourished in Hellerau bei Dresden. In my own library, some of my most cherished books were printed in Dresden at that same time: the twenties were a great period for fine printing of popular books. Wolfgang Jess Verlag turned out a full set of thin-paper volumes devoted to the nineteenth century scholar of the Renaissance Ferdinand Gregorovius—a set that I managed to reassemble after breathless discoveries in second-hand bookshops all over the world. At Castolovice the Tschuppik book stopped my breath in the same way. It brought back Dresden as if the bombs had imploded and gone back into the sky. It was the reintegration of two successive lost eras: the post–World War I efflorescence of German-speaking pre-Nazi culture, and, before that, the old Austro-Hungarian Empire whose last glories it examined _mit Liebe und Kritik_ —with love and criticism.
Though Tschuppik was a committed democrat and no pushover for the erstwhile social order, his love for the old _k.u.k_ society saturates the book. It reminds you less of Schnitzler, who guessed that the phosphorescence meant decay, than of Joseph Roth, whose nostalgia was incurable. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was, after all, not quite an empire like the others. It had conquered no foreign territories. It integrated several Central European countries without subjugating their populations. Ethnic minorities had reason to be grateful for its rule. Many of their intellectuals had the good sense to be grateful at the time, and Tschuppik, looking back on what had been a modus vivendi if not a grand harmony, was well justified in expressing a passion deeper than mere affection. But his criticism is equally all-pervasive. Tschuppik doesn't gloss over how different things would have had to be for the outcome to be otherwise. To begin with, there would have had to have been no great war. A war was bound to bring the empire down, yet Franz Joseph's deluded army of adminstrators walked straight into it. Their one excuse is that they walked in their sleep. Graf Stefan Titza was the only hero in the cabinet. He alone warned against what a war would do. When the day was upon them, however, even he came round. _Va banque_ : the brave cry of the already bankrupt.
On the same weekend, in the same library, I worked through the two imposing volumes of Metternich's _Denkwürdigkeiten_ (Things Worth Thinking About), published in Munich in 1921, more than sixty years after the master diplomat's death. Once again the modern typeface had the scrupulous clarity that marked the era. (It was not until 1933 that the fussy old black-letter typefaces returned, as part of the general cultural throwback by which the Nazis presumed to give the very look of thought an air of the Gothic: and even then they returned only to Germany. The Austrians kept their modern typefaces until the last day.) Metternich's prose is as neat as the type in which it is set. If Henry Kissinger, who has always seemed to like the idea of being styled our modern Metternich, could express himself like his role model he would be better equipped to defend his actions. For any liberal democrat, Metternich's own actions still need plenty of defending, but there was nothing wrong with his prose style. Metternich tied his powers of decision to his clarity of language. Here is a passage I translated into my notebook:
I have always thought that the most important business for a statesman is the care with which he keeps a strict eye on the difference between things which he builds within himself and things imposed on him by the spirit of party during the course of time, and to keep them just as strictly separated. The most fruitful means for carrying out this business lies in the care to fix words to the things they are called on to signify, and hold them fast (vol. 2, p. 466).
But that doesn't get the vigour of his rhythm. He was an old man, but his prose was a stripling. Wittgenstein recommended the poetry of Mörike, in which, he said, the word does not exceed the thing. Metternich had reached the same conclusion long before. Some of his other conclusions, however, were not just conservative, they were reactionary, and therefore inadequate to facts he already knew. Try this:
If the name of God, and the powers instituted by His divine decisions, are dragged into the mud, then the Revolution is already prepared. In the castles of the King, in the salons and boudoirs of certain cities, the Revolution had already happened while the mass of the people were still getting ready for it (vol. 2, p. 71).
He switches from the present tense to the past because he is switching from the general case to the particular instance: the French Revolution. The particular instance is the part that he brings alive, with a touch for rhythm that any translation is bound to miss: ". . . _war die Revolution schon vorbei, während sie bei der Masse des Volkes erst vorbereitet würde_." It is always dangerous to praise sonic effects in a language not one's own: they might be cruder than one thinks. But surely _vorbei_ and vorbereitet are deliberately linked in order to help the second part of the sentence launch itself from the first. A clear idea is expressed with verve. But the idea was wrong, or at least not exhaustively right. England's George III and his government, for example, were godly institutions; they were dragged in the mud with great thoroughness, not least by the pitiless caricatures of Gillray; and there was no revolution. (To make certain that there wouldn't be, in the next reign potential subversives were sent to Botany Bay, on the assumption that they and their progeny would never be heard from again.) Further back, the palace of Louis XIV was haunted by irreverent wit that felt no need to whisper: everyone knew that Louis abandoned a successful campaign in the Low Countries because Madame de Maintenon had burst into tears, and nobody forbore to say so. There was no revolution: not then. The revolution had indeed to be prepared, but it was prepared among the people, or anyway outside the palace. Lafayette was turned from duty by what he met in the streets, not by what he had heard in the corridors of Versailles or the Tuileries. Metternich had good cause to fear revolution: he had spent his life dealing with its consequences. But irreverent remarks had not been the cause of it, and he must have known that to be true. He just didn't like wit. There is a marvellous passage in which he tips his hand. To quote it is to quote a quotation, because he put the thought together from his reading.
Talleyrand rightly says: " _L'esprit sert à tout et ne mène à rien_." For Madame de Staël, her fame was a kind of power. The longer I live, the more I treat that power with mistrust (vol. 2, p. 166).
For the French, _l'esprit_ is a wide-ranging term, but wit is at the core of it. Talleyrand is probably saying that verbal brilliance can be applied to anything but leads to nothing. It was the right proposition for Metternich to agree with: the man of concrete decisions had heard too much talk. But his contempt for Madame de Staël is a giveaway. She had an insight into power, having seen the frailties of the men who wielded it. On the day that Napoleon sent her into exile across Lake Geneva, she told her journal the lasting truth about her persecutor. She said that Napoleon possessed such an all-embracing talent that there was nothing he could not do, except understand the behaviour of a man of honour. Today she would have said woman of honour, but the most famous of all the first feminists—the first Germaine—was restricted by her inherited language. She was not, however, restricted in her thoughts, and Metternich was mistrustful of exactly that. She incarnated the only permanent revolution that counts: that of the critical intellect. Even today, her example can lead men of order to huff and puff. Vladimir Nabokov, in his long, detailed and half-crazed commentary on _Eugene Onegin_ , dismissed her with a wave of his fastidious patrician hand. He forgot to say that Pushkin himself thought the world of her. But Pushkin was tuned to the feminine. He could see the strutting hypocrisy on the bastions of the state.
Metternich, who dismantled and reassembled kingdoms according to his personal judgement, called the state a divine expression: about as far as hypocrisy can go. Yet nobody now could surface from Metternich's book of reflections without a sense of loss. Those were the days; when men who could do things like that could write like this. You could see why such books were printed to be cherished in the years after World War I. Their publishers and editors were putting a world back together, in the hope that the new world would be something like it. Their publishers and editors thought that love and criticism would be enough. But the storm came. Not many of the books slept through it. They were strewn to the winds along with their owners, or were burned in the libraries their owners left behind. The library at Castolovice was lucky: the vandals passed it by. The family defied the Nazis but its castles were spared. When the Communists took everything, the family scattered to the outside world. Castolovice was turned into a factory for repairing refrigerators. Thought to be useful, the roofs were repaired too, after a fashion: so the acid rain of the red East did not get in, and nothing attacked the books except the dust of bad cement.
After the Velvet Revolution—which was less a revolution than a restoration of the old republic—one of the many commendable impulses of Vaclav Havel's civic order was to restore faith with the cultural heritage. Dispersed all over the world, some of the historic families were invited back to rebuild their castles, tend their estates, and thus, by offering employment, regenerate the villages which had grown up around their lands in the past. On a Machiavellian view, it was a neat way of getting the aristocrats to put their hard currency into the economy, if they had any. Some didn't: the patriarch of the Kinski family is back in his castle, but it will remain a ruin, because he spent the lost years not abroad but in the mines, paying the long price for never having fled. The plan has been only a partial success. It costs more than money to put a culture back together: it takes dedication and patience, because the old craft skills have all disappeared. Castolovice is one of the few success stories. The castle and the lands thrive, employing people for miles around. It was early spring when I was reading Metternich. The deer in the fields had dropped their horns, the imported emus were sitting on their eggs, and the castle was getting ready for the tourist season.
On a fine day in summer, it is not unknown for more than a thousand people to turn up. Most of the visitors are from the Czech Republic. They come to see what life was like a hundred years ago, under the old emperor: the era in which the future republicans grew up, nourishing their democratic dreams with the rich traditions that lay around them. The books I had been reading dated from the time of Masaryk and Benes , whose own books were produced to the same standard. While a guest of honour at the Olomouc Festival of Documentary Film in 2001, I searched the second-hand bookshops and found a two-volume set of Masaryk's writings dated 1925, and matched it with a two-volume set of Benes dated 1927. Each set carried the word _Revoluce_ in its title, but of course it was not a revolution at all. Revolutions trample the past. The republic of Masaryk and Benes grew out of the past organically, bringing the established cultural wealth along with it. You can see it in the look of their books: the proportion of the printing, the lustre of the linen bindings. When I got the four volumes back to London, I laid them out on my library coffee table and drank their appearance in. I opened them and caressed the thick, good paper that will never grow brittle. I did everything but read them. I can't read Czech: not yet, anyway. I am told that once you master the alphabet it is not as hard as Russian. It is certainly easier than Polish to pronounce. The prose of Benes is famously unreadable but I would like to be able to judge that for myself, and Masaryk was such a man as few countries are given for a spiritual father: I would like to relish what he wrote in the way he wrote it. If I had the knack of Timothy Garton-Ash, I would be reading it by now. Those of us with more pedestrian powers of assimilation have to find the time, and at my age I am feeling a bit short of time altogether. But the books will go into my shelves anyway, where one day, if my library stays together, someone like me might come along and take them down—I hope without having to brush them free of cement dust, or whatever residue might characterize the next barbaric age.
U
Dubravka Ugresic
Miguel de Unamuno
Pedro Henriquez Ureña
DUBRAVKA UGRESIC
Dubravka Ugresic (b. 1949) might have been put on Earth for the specific purpose of reminding us that there is never anything simple about the Balkans. She was born in Croatia into a family of mixed ethnic origin, with a Bulgarian mother. She spent time at Zagreb's forbiddingly entitled Institute for the Theory of Literature. A graduate of Moscow State University, she did academic work on the Russian avant-garde. In 1993 she left Croatia, staying first in Holland and Berlin before taking up a succession of posts in American universities, among them Wesleyan and UCLA. Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a writer's writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb. One of them has, at least in English translation, the best title of the twentieth century's twilight years: _The Museum of Unconditional Surrender_. Her journalism, which I have read with respect, despair and delight, is essentially a refusal to surrender to the historically determined chaos of the area where she was born and grew up. As brave as Oriana Fallaci ever was but less burdened by ideology (so far she has not stuck herself with any large theories that she might need to repudiate, except possibly for the Theory of Literature), Ugresic is unbeatable at explaining the inexplicable entanglements of Balkan cultural traditions, particularly as they relate to the hellish position of women.
One hot summer's day I stopped in the New York subway hypnotized by what I saw. A middle-aged couple was dancing an Argentinian tango, describing around them an invisible circle in which only the two of them existed, the man and the woman, and a dusty cassette player on the ground beside them. The man and the woman were neither ugly nor beautiful, neither young nor old. They were dressed in black, their clothes were tidy but worn, the man's black trousers shone with a greasy sheen. They danced seriously, modestly, without emotion, without superfluous movements, with no desire to please. The crowd around them was becoming steadily larger.
—DUBRAVKA UGRESIC, _T HE CULTURE OF LIES_, P. 131
THIS IS WHAT the tango can give you: an atoll of bliss in a sea of turmoil. Just to watch it, let alone dance it, is a holiday from the accidental, and a free pass into the realm where the inevitable, for once, looks good. The dance is beautiful all by itself: the dancers don't have to be, and in this passage they obviously aren't. Ugresic goes on to ask rhetorically why a couple of tango dancers can make hard-bitten New Yorkers, who would otherwise hurry past, stop to watch and miss their trains. She deduced that they were being taken out of themselves. It was true for her. Like the moment it describes, the passage is an interlude made doubly sweet by what the rest of life is like. Her book is a cautionary tale for anyone who might think he can guess something about the Balkans without having been there. _The Culture of Lies_ is really a collection of observations, many of them focused on the official abuse of language: the ghost in the background is Karl Kraus. What Kraus did for Austria and Germany in the pre-Nazi period, Ugresic does for Croatia in the Tudjman period, with the Bosnia of Milosevic looming in the wings; and she does it at least as well. Whereas Kraus's real measures of normality lay in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose last phase he lived through and never forgot, Ugresic's, unlikely though it may seem, lay in the vanished Yugoslavia of Tito. For her, Yugoslavia lingers in the mind and heart as the dreamed reality, whereas Croatia is the living nightmare. Tito's iron hand at least kept the ethnic minorities from each other's throats. The new iron hands want something else, and throats are their first target. Their second target, however, is the one that fascinates her, for reasons that become steadily more obvious. Whatever faction a man represents, the uninvited penetration of a woman seems to be his main reassurance of personal power. Beside and scarcely below the threat of murder, rape becomes a part of a woman's life expectancy. It is hard to think of another book in which a climate of casual violence incubates such a lucid concern for women's rights. Nadezhda Mandelstam's two books of memoirs add up to the great twentieth-century record of everyday frightfulness, but Nadezhda wasn't thinking about women's rights. She probably found Alexandra Kollontai absurd. Kollontai campaigned for women's rights to be granted by a state dedicated to the principle that nobody of either sex had any rights at all. Nadezhda would have been glad to have the old repressions back, and male chauvinism along with them.
But Ugresic is in a different place, a different time, and a different frame of mind. She knows what has come true for women in the West, and is ready to blame the whole mess in her country exclusively on the strutting male. She calls him Yugo-man and sometimes the Yugomaniac. She makes a very convincing job of it. Whether Serb, Croat, Slav, Muslim, Bosnian this or Herzogovinian that, all the men in the book carry on like wild animals whenever they see a skirt. She doesn't make enough of one of the saddest facts of all, perhaps because it didn't fully emerge until much later: Muslim women who had been gang-raped by Serbian men were scared to tell the Muslim men, lest they be punished for having submitted to dishonour. Apart from that, however, her readiness to distribute her scorn evenly makes her the writer she is, and surely she is one of the most interesting to come out of Eastern Europe in modern times. (Ugresic attended the trial of Milosevic, and I can hardly wait to see what she writes about it.) She comes from one of what Kundera memorably called the Kidnapped Countries, and she has given it its voice, which is the voice of a woman. The woman carries plastic bags full of the bad food and the thin supplies she has queued for by the hour while the men sit around in the square scratching their crotches and dreaming up their next war. In the course of their dimwitted conversations, the men refer to any given woman as a cunt. The twin functions of the cunt are to put dinner on the table and lie down when required. Most male readers will find this an uncomfortable prospect, as they are meant to. Multicultural ideologists, if there are any left, will find it even less comfortable than that. According to Ugresic, multiculturalism in rich countries abets ethnic cleansing in the poor ones. Try this:
Proudly waving its own unification, Europe supported disintegration in foreign territory. Emphasizing the principles of multiculturality in its own territory, it abetted ethnic cleansing elsewhere. Swearing by European norms of honour, it negotiated with democratically elected war criminals. Fiercely defending the rights of minorities, it omitted to notice the disappearance of the most numerous Yugoslav minority, the population of a national, "nationally undetermined" people, or the disappearance of minorities altogether.
Residents of Britain will find such passages particularly embarrassing. It was British foreign policy, as propounded by men who thought they were acting for the best, that kept America from dropping its bombs on Slobodan Milosevic until it was almost too late to save anyone. The idea was to leave the area alone while things worked themselves out. (Long before, with regard to Biafra, Harold Wilson's government had pursued the same policy, and with the same results.) From those helpless civilians who were left alone while things were working themselves out, and who somehow managed to survive the experience, anger is the least we can expect. Ugresic's tone can be taken as a commendably moderate expression of the opinions she must have held while searching the sky in vain for the NATO aircraft that are held to be the worst thing in the world by those who have no idea how bad the world can get. If that's the way she wrote it, that's the way it probably felt, at the very least. No wonder then, if, on a brief holiday in New York, she found the tango dancers a holiday from history. If the Twin Towers had been hit at that very moment, it would have been no surprise to her. It would have been just a bigger version of the routine gang rape, or of a woman taking a hit from a sniper and falling on her plastic bags.
MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) was a Basque, born in Bilbao. From 1891 he was professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, but his writings and influence extended far beyond the academic world. In 1897 he had a spiritual crisis in which he lost his faith: the most important personal event in his life. From then on, every idea was a new struggle, which he dramatized in his prose, on the principle that his mind was the main character in a drama. With a twenty-year head start on Ortega, Unamuno pre-empted the title of the most style-setting philosopher of modern Spain, although Unamuno's philosophy was avowedly anchored in a literary context, whereas Ortega prided himself on an apparently broader scope. But Unamuno's more diffident range gave him a sharper focus. (And his humility gave him a deeper realism: the son of a baker, Unamuno would never have been capable of Ortega's contempt for the masses.) Unamuno's sensitivity to what was vital in literature not only allowed him to redirect the traditional evaluation of the literary heritage of the Spanish mainland, it allowed him to detect that it was about to be re-energized by what was happening in the Americas, the key factor in the thrilling story of how the Spanish world, in the twentieth century, came back from the dead. That was the vital analytical breakthrough, which we can now see should be counted as political as well as cultural, because the literary confidence in Latin America was the vehicle, for the countries below the Rio Grande, of a workable nationalism, a connection which the philologist Pedro Henriquez Ureña, one of the men on the spot, was able to establish from direct participation. Unamuno had enough to deal with in the mother country. Of Republican sympathies, he was exiled in 1924 to the island of Fuerteventura. After the founding of the Republic he returned in triumph to Salamanca. His mental independence, however, was incurable. He was soon at odds with the Socialist regime, whose doctrinaire aims and methods, he thought, confused the issue of a nationalist struggle; and he loathed the idea of foreign interference in Spain's affairs. Since the two biggest totalitarian powers on Earth, at the instigation of the infinitely cynical Franco, were both intent on interfering in Spain with no thought at all to the country's interests, he was thus in the position of being a witness to a tragedy. Luckily, in December 1936, he died before he could see the worst of it. But he might already have heard the worst. His death from a heart attack was brought on by a confrontation with a fascist general who drove the old professor out of his beloved university at gunpoint. The physical insult might have been bearable but the rhetoric wasn't. "Death to intelligence!" screamed the general. "And long live Death!" The general was living proof that his two propositions were valid; especially the first one.
Rather than reading a book in order to criticize it, I would rather criticize it because I have read it, thus paying attention to the subtle yet profound distinction Schopenhauer made between those who think in order to write and those who write because they have thought.
—MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO, _E NSAYOS_, VOL. 2, P. 1013
ANYONE WHO HAD ever done any book reviewing will recognize the importance of the distinction Unamuno is making here. For a young writer, being asked to review books is an exciting business. Unless he is an unusually dedicated novelist with a well-organized budget—including, for preference, private means—he will find time to review a book when asked. He will also find that the time can be a dead loss: the book wasn't worth the effort. He might write a funny piece saying so, and the funny piece might lead him into a useful sideline: but even if for the best, his career will already be distorted. Further down the line, the man of letters who draws his principal income from book reviewing will find himself wasting his main asset. His main asset is to be well read, but if he spends too much time reading secondary books only for the sake of reviewing them, he will be adding little to his initial stock of useful erudition. Worse, he will be adding much that is useless. The activity dilutes itself automatically. In any literary editor's stable of regular contributors, the man who can be counted on for a thousand words by Friday about absolutely anything is always the most pitiable figure. The deadly combination of facility and impecuniosity did him in. In the 1930s, in _Enemies of Promise_ , Cyril Connolly had already codified the dangers lurking in Grub Street for the too biddable bookman.
As often occurs, the worst case defines the ideal. Anyone faced with the deadly task of first reading, then writing about, a book he would not ordinarily have read in the first place, is brutally reminded of what he was really born to do: read books that can be felt, from page to page, to do nothing for his wallet but everything for the spirit. (At a publishing house, the best editor is always the one who physically suffers at the thought of how his daily labours are ruining his capacity to read for pleasure.) A good sign is the constantly welling urge to underline, to make notes in the margin, or to sketch a commentary in the endpapers. In the book you are reading now, almost any book mentioned has passed that test. Unamuno's pages cry out to be defaced. One hesitates, because his books are usually very pretty physically. Invariably published by Aguillar, his early collected editions on thin paper are hard to find now. I found most of mine in two very different Spanish cities: in Madrid, where they cost a bomb in the specialist bookshops, and in Havana, where they can be found on the open-air stalls in the bookshop square. In Havana they cost little but are seldom in good shape. Buying two sets of the essay volumes, one set in each city, I was well equipped to make marks in the damaged volumes and keep the pristine ones for the bookcase. Mine were by no means the first marks Unamuno's margins had ever received. At his potent best he could put the aphorisms one after the other like the wagons of an American freight train stretching from one prairie railhead to the next.
Unamuno first ambushed me in Mexico City. I had a date with Carlos Fuentes to do an interview. Turning up at his beautiful house, for a while I was alone with his books. The whole of the Spanish literary world was there on the shelves and lying around piled on tables. My eye went straight to an open volume of Unamuno, from which, I guessed, Fuentes was currently reading, because there was a pen beside it on the table. I couldn't resist taking a peek at what he had underlined, although it felt like snooping. He caught me at it. Slightly embarrassed, I said that he had underlined a lot. He flicked through the book: there seemed to be at least one underlined passage on every page. He said that when reading Unamuno it was rare when he didn't underline an argument at the point where it was drawn to a conclusion. "Very great Spanish writer. Very great writer _in Spanish_. Because he was one of the writers who began to give us our sense of the Spanish world. The essay as an art form. Unamuno."
I think his mention of the hero's name might have been a gentle corrective to my pronunciation of it, which had been a bit hesitant. (The third syllable should be stressed, but for an English speaker the attraction of the word "unanimous" tends to drag the stress back to the second.) My pronunciation must have been good enough, though, for Fuentes to deduce that I had at least made a beginning on reading his native language. Thus began the kind of conversation that you could have before or after a TV interview but not during it. Nowadays, when I have transferred most of my television interviewing activities to the Internet, those are the conversations that I seek rather than avoid, but in the circumstances it would have been inconceivable to tape a conversation about Rubén Darío, Ortega, Octavio Paz and Unamuno. It would have been inconceivable because it would have been self-defeating. Carlos Fuentes had only one reason for going on television with me in a "Postcard" programme, and the reason was good: he did it to talk simple sense on an elementary subject, the status of his country. There would be a mass English-speaking audience listening: millions of people who would never hear of Unamuno.
But the television programme wouldn't have happened if there had not been a democratic world, and that was where Unamuno came in. Voices like his had helped to restore the Spanish empire to civilization. Unamuno's message to a moribund Spain was that Spanish culture was alive in the Americas and would eventually come home. His essays had been worth writing in themselves—there were no utilitarian tests they had to pass, and none they could have passed in the long run if they had been written to short-term utilitarian requirements. But one of their uses had been to stay good. They had provided a measure of intelligence that could be referred to in times of confusion. By his own example, he had proved that Spanish is one of the languages of the modern world. Hence the special pleasure of finding his books in the sunlit marketplace of old Havana. With their gold-stamped spines flaked and crumbling and their onion-skin paper crinkled by the plaster-curdling humidity, they were still too expensive for the few book-lovers left among the local population. Spanish-reading tourists like myself do most of the buying, and I suppose that in the course of time almost every Aguillar edition that has ever gone into the marketplace has been taken back to Spain, where it was first printed. But some of the people who had first read the books were probably still alive somewhere. Perhaps a few of them were still in Cuba: not every bibliophile had taken to the rafts. Almost all of them had underlined something. Underlining means the determination to remember. The determination usually fades faster than the marks of the pen or even of the pencil, but the intention was good. All the readers had participated with the writer in the tradition of tolerant, receptive sense he had helped to found: a tradition which had made the critical essay part of the wealth of the modern Spanish language—the true and worthwhile residue of the Spanish empire, as the English language is of the British.
The eternal, not the modern, is what I love: the modern will be antiquated and grotesque in ten years, when the fashion passes.
—MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO, _E NSAYOS_, VOL. 2, P. 1167
Unamuno, like Croce, was a critical writer with an instinctive grasp of how the sublimities of the arts he loved were rooted in the mundane. In his time, the febrile Spanish literature of the mainland, as opposed to the burgeoning Spanish-language literature of the Americas, suffered badly from the aestheticist belief that a high calling required a high treatment of (the fatal step) a high subject. In a magnificent linked series of critical essays, he laid out an aesthetic principle that would counter the final mutation of that belief into _modernismo_ —which was merely the latest version of the assumption that the right elevated artistic attitude would bring automatic results.
The quoted passage makes more sense when we trace what he meant by _eternismo_ , the eternal. He didn't mean an appeal to transcendental values: he meant attention to the profane reality that is always there. On the same page (once again a great book has a great page) he wrote that the universal is in the guts of the local and circumscribed, and that the eternal is in the guts of the temporal and evanescent. _Entranos_ could be more decently translated as "entrails" or "bowels," but I think he meant to be arrestingly earthy. (Memo to myself and younger readers: all guesses about tone in a foreign language should be checked with someone who speaks it for a living.) Two pages later, he glossed _universalidad_. "Universality, yes: but the rich universality of integration, brewed from the concourse and shock of differences." Or to put it another way: not the universality of abstract ambition.
Unamuno took his concern with concrete reality all the way to the basement, in the artist's personality. He didn't think it could be left behind any more than a bird could spurn the air. What Unamuno says—more than a thousand pages into the same rich volume—can be borne in mind when we remember Eliot talking about the artist's striving after an ideal state of impersonality. Unamuno had already said that there could be no choice involved. A true artist, he wrote, puts in his personality even when he most wants to conceal it. Unamuno said that with Flaubert you can see his personality even in his last novel, _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ , which is all about clichés and pedantry. Unamuno meant that Flaubert, uniquely alert to language, could not create the character of a pedant without incorporating into the character the pedant within himself. The best writers contain within their souls all the characters they will ever create on the page; and those characters have always been there, throughout history; so the writer, no matter how modern he thinks he is, deals always and only in eternity.
PEDRO HENRIQUEZ UREÑA
Pedro Henriquez Ureña (1884–1946) was the philologist who taught a generation of Latin American cultural figures that they weren't living in a backwater after all, but that they were actually—and precisely because of their historical position—at the forefront of the revival of civilization in the Spanish world. In other words, he told them that the small time was over and they were on to something big. His intellectual position was developed throughout his lifetime, but it depended on a proud confidence that he must have inherited. Born and raised in Santo Domingo, he moved to Cuba to write _Ensayos Criticos_ (1906), his first book of critical essays. From the very start he was out to proclaim the essential oneness of the apparently fragmentary Latin American cultural achievement. He was doing so at a time when, apart from such a visionary poet as Rubén Darío in Nicaragua, no critical writers had been thinking that way in Latin America, or even in Spain: the only scholars of Latin American literature were English or German. He spent seven years in Mexico, where he pioneered a way of writing about the indigenous heritage and the Spanish heritage as simultaneous continuities: an emphasis that would be picked up half a century later by such writers as Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes. In 1915 Ureña went to New York, then to Washington, and then taught at the University of Minnesota until 1921: a period spent among the _norteamericanos_ which increased his international prestige and therefore his influence in Latin America. During that period he spent time in Madrid, in fruitful conversation with the scholarly giant Alfonso Reyes and the philologist Menéndez Pidal, the man who invented the phrase "the spontaneous yearning after the totality of knowledge." Knowledge ruled Ureña's life but he couldn't keep politics out, especially after the United States invaded the Dominican Republic in 1916. Although he eventually tended towards socialism, his political position mainly became apparent in his teachings about literature, in which his guiding principle was that the colonial history, properly interpreted, could be taken as a strength, not a weakness: there was such a thing as "spiritual nationalism" which arose spontaneously from a complex historic memory and could be cherished with a whole heart.
A single sentence by Ureña can be taken as the epigraph for the whole history of the burgeoning of Latin American literature in the twentieth century: " _Todo aislamiento es ilusorio_ " (All isolation is illusory). Ureña pointed out that even the culture of the ancient Greeks had not grown in splendid isolation, but on a basis of nourishment imported from other places. A generation of writers were inspired by Ureña's ability to reinterpret a history of failure and frustrated nationalism as a positive development. Not that his positive attitude was merely euphoric. He also warned them not to accept any patronizing foreign approval of their "exuberance." Most of the exuberance, he warned, was mere verbosity, the sure sign of a sparse culture. His own prose was a model of vigour made stronger by not being given its head. But beyond his key place in the story of Latin America's rise to prominence in the modern Spanish world, there is an important message for the entire world in his insistence that literacy was basic to all hopes of political maturity. His essays about the importance of teaching literature in the schools are classic statements of a true position from which liberal democracy will always be tempted to stray through its egalitiarian impulse towards making school easy. Ureña thought school should be demanding, but he had a convincing way of saying that the difficult could be delightful. Some of his best essays on the subject can be found in the two files under his complete name on the second page of his Google entry, one of which has an excellent summary of his career by the scholar Laura Febres.
After 1924 the constantly travelling Ureña came to rest in Argentina, first in La Plata and later in Buenos Aires, where he taught, among others, Ernesto Sabato: a fascinating example of the productive relationship between academic teacher and creative writer. Ureña died in Buenos Aires in 1946. In the Dominican Republic there is a university named after him but really his influence lives on in every good school south of the Rio Grande.
Great art begins where grammar ends.
—PEDRO HENRIQUEZ UREÑA, QUOTED BY ERNESTO SABATO IN _A NTES DEL FIN_
IN ARGENTINA JUST after World War II, Pedro Henriquez Ureña was a respected teacher of philology and Ernesto Sabato was one of his pupils. Later on, Sabato would become one of the most illustrious literary figures in Latin America's growing cultural dominance of the Spanish-speaking world. But even at the time, the pupil needed no telling that the above statement was true. In Spanish it is easier to give the idea its proper chronology: " _Donde termina la gramatica empieza el gran arte_." It is always encouraging to hear what you know by instinct resoundingly formulated by an authoritative figure, so that you can draw upon the memory for a lifetime. Certainly Ureña's maxim is true for literature, and by extension for all the other arts: a thorough technical competence is the climbing frame for inspiration. Inspiration might never come, of course—there are plenty of well-schooled mediocrities in every field—but if it comes to the unprepared the result is a breech birth at best. The apparent exceptions are not really exceptions. If Moussorgsky had known more about orchestration there would have been no need of Rimsky-Korsakov's improvements, but Moussorgsky still knew enough to write down what he heard in his head, and to modify it meaningfully on the paper. The Douanier Rousseau got enough technique from somewhere to make his jungle shine in the moonlight, and the ruinous results of Renoir's belated thirst for schooling—his _manière aigre_ —merely prove that if he had studied in the first place it would have been a good thing. Just because Picasso sailed through art school doesn't mean that anybody else can sail past it.
Isadora Duncan's spontaneous dancing influenced the ballet. She herself could dance ballet only to the extent that she was able to absorb some of its disciplines by mimicry. (Tamara Karsavina, in her marvellous memoir _Theatre Street_ , recorded her admiration for Duncan but insisted that while real ballerinas might have profited from copying Isadora, Isadora could not possibly have copied them.) Although there is always an argument for vigorous primitivism against academic torpor, the argument is not very good, because the torpor is not really competent either: it has merely acquired one set of essentials while missing out on another. The trick is to see the art latent in the grammar, and to realize what the grammar can release when it is mastered: expression. In Franz Werfel's bleak novel _Verdi_ there is an even bleaker sub-plot in which the ageing Verdi, nerving himself to confront Wagner in Venice, meets instead an impoverished, tubercular young composer who rudely proclaims that he has discovered the next thing: a music beyond music, an expression without laws. Rendered arid by the force of Wagner's example, unable to get started on his opera of _King Lear_ , Verdi for once feels humble enough to give an ambitious upstart a hearing. For the sake of the young composer's suffering wife and son, Verdi hopes that he will hear something wonderful. But the young composer, flailing at the piano, merely proves that he knows nothing about music: all he has is the desire, a consuming passion that kills him along with his disease.
There is a consoling mythology, constantly being added to, which would have us believe that genius operates beyond donkey work. Thus we are told reassuringly that Einstein was no better at arithmetic than we are; that Mozart gaily broke the rules of composition while jotting down a stream of black dots without even looking; and that Shakespeare didn't care about grammar. Superficially, there are facts to lend substance to these illusions. But illusions they remain. There is always some autistic child in India who can speak in prime numbers, but that doesn't mean that Einstein couldn't add up; Mozart would not have been able to break the rules in an interesting way unless he was able to keep them if required; and Shakespeare, far from being careless about grammar, could depart from it in any direction only because he had first mastered it as a structure. Moreover, unless we ourselves know quite a lot about how grammar works, there will be severe limits on our capacity to understand what he wrote, especially when he seems to be at his most untrammelled. Take a single line from _Henry V_ :
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
Here is a whole story in eleven syllables, but unless we grasp how an extremely compressed sentence can be put together, we won't get the story out; and if Shakespeare had not grasped it, he would not have been able to put the story in. Though they might look like it at first glance, "ill" and "white" are not a pair of adjectives. "Ill" is an adverb, modifying the verb "become." If this is not realized, the meaning is reversed. If Shakespeare hadn't realized the fundamental difference between an adjective and an adverb, he couldn't have written the sentence. A good actor will help him make the point, by emphasizing "ill" so that its effect carries over to "become." But it is quite easy to imagine a bad actor missing the point, and conveying the impression that ill white hairs make a fool and jester look good, or, even worse—two errors for one—allowing it to be thought that ill white hairs have _turned into_ a fool and jester. This latter kind of misapprehension has become especially likely in recent times. There are now a whole generation who have never been required to understand the verb "become" in any other sense than the one for which I employed it in the preceding sentence: in a previous generation they might have heard a fragment of popular song ("Moonlight becomes you") and realized that there was another sense. But granted the slim possibility that a school pupil of today might encounter Shakespeare's line and be asked to explain it, there would be no reproof for construing a meaning that the writer did not intend. More likely would be praise for a valid response: valid for the reader. The school of permissive reading, which is the natural child of the school of permissive writing, would like us to believe that such misapprehensions are creative in themselves: we are extracting from the text even greater riches than its author planned.
One of the reasons I have found the theatre almost uninhabitable is that even the best actors are allowed to miss such points all the time, and especially if the text is by Shakespeare. There are few recent actors who can speak like Gielgud, but that was inevitable: what grates is that there are almost none who can think like him. (Peter O'toole, Antony Sher, Ian McKellen, Simon Callow and Kenneth Branagh all stand out because they can read well enough to write.) When the National Theatre was finally transferred from the Old Vic to its hardened missile silo on the South Bank, one of the opening attractions in the Olivier Theatre was Peter Hall's production of _Hamlet_ , starring Albert Finney. As the actors squeaked around the thrust stage in army surplus boots, I did my best to concede that it might be a legitimate production point: Elsinore might have looked more like a territorial army drill hall than a castle, and no doubt there was some pretty anachronistic footwear at the Globe. But Finney's line readings made you long for Sergeant Death to bellow in his ear and tell him to get a haircut. "The funeral-baked meats," droned Hamlet, "did _coldly_ furnish forth the marriage tables." The false emphasis made "coldly" a mere adverb modifying "furnish." According to Shakespeare, "coldly" is doing service for a whole clause: "when they were cold." He might have been wise to put a comma on either side of the word, in order to tell the actors and producers of the benightedly enlightened future that something precise was meant. Properly isolated, the word tells us that the funeral was followed so closely by the marriage ("hard upon" as Horatio puts it) that the hot meat of the first event was eaten cold at the second: desecration as household economics. Hammered, the word tells us nothing except that the actor won't listen to advice, or that the director, with his thoughts on the décor, is too preoccupied to give it. (More charitably, one should allow for the likelihood that Peter Hall, a keen student of clear speech, told Finney the right way to say the line, but that Finney forgot.)
The notion that there is something spontaneous about an actor who tramples Shakespeare's grammar and syntax could have arisen only from the assumption that Shakespeare himself thought them peripheral to expression. There could be no greater mistake. An individual style can emerge only from firmly grasped universal principles, even if great writers themselves sometimes try to convince us of the opposite. Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality. But he would never have countenanced the suggestion that there could be any originality without a preliminary grammar. The only question is about the best way of acquiring it: by prescription or by example? Shakespeare probably learned it at school. Stratford Grammar School certainly taught him the parts of speech: we know that from the way he makes Jack Cade threaten death to anyone who claims to know the difference between a verb and a noun. But Shakespeare might equally have learned it from his regular reading of the current English translations of Plutarch and Montaigne, although he would have needed an unusual capacity to transform passive into active knowledge. In the light of what else he could do, there is no reason not to grant him that, but a more likely explanation is that he mastered the rudiments in the classroom and then rapidly built on them through what he read: internal evidence from the plays and poems suggests a working knowledge of at least three languages.
Writers don't read just for the story: they read for the way the story is written, and the way the sentences are put together is the information that sticks. It helps, however, to have been taught in the first place what a sentence is: something that conveys information only by the rules it keeps. Grammar is a mechanism for meaning one thing at a time. Without it, you can't even manage to be deliberately ambiguous, although to be ambiguous by accident is a result all too easily attained.
V
Paul Valéry
Mario Vargas Llosa
PAUL VALÉRY
Ambroise-Paul Valéry (1871–1945) presents many parallels with T. S. Eliot, especially in the proportions of his output. As with Eliot, there is comparatively little work in verse, but it is all of the very highest quality. Again as with Eliot, there is a large amount of ancillary prose, much of it ranking high among the critical work being done at the time. Where Valéry departs sharply from Eliot is in the amount of prose that never saw the light. From 1894 onward, Valéry kept a notebook, and by the time of his death there were 287 volumes of it. Even in French it has been published only in facsimile. Such semi-secret activity was typical of him. By the age of twenty he was already recognized as a promising poet but he repudiated the ambition and stayed almost silent for a full two decades. He was forty when he was persuaded to publish his early poems, a task he undertook only on the understanding that he would add a new, prefatory poem. This took him five years to write. Published separately in 1917, _La Jeune Parque_ , together with a succeeding slim volume _Charmes_ , worked to establish him as the most prominent French poet of his time. The highlight poem of _Charmes_ , called " _Le Cimetière marin_ ," is recognized by French-reading poets all over the world as the untranslatable modern miracle of their craft. (It should be said that the Irish poet Derek Mahon has made a stunningly good shot at rendering its music into English.) Even without publishing the notebooks, Valéry still had a full eighteen volumes of prose to give the world, and scattered among them are some of the best essays written in his time. With solid mathematical training to back up his humanist erudition, he could take almost anything for a subject, but he was especially good at wrting about the arts: the essay on Leonardo, and the little book on Degas, are models of the genre. Malcolm Cowley translated some of his best early essays in 1926, and retranslated those, as well as translating some later ones, in 1958. Valéry was one of those rare poets who could write appreciative technical criticism. Kingsley Amis, an excellent technical critic with an unfoolable ear for diction, was at his best when proving that his subject poet was overrated. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were at their best when praising each other. Ezra Pound could be informative about Browning's language but not without persuading you that his own was demented. Valéry kept a perfect sanity on that subject as on any other. The homage paid to Valéry by other writers is only fitting, because nobody could quite equal him at writing about the arts out of deep and unenvious love. He knew his notebooks were a doomed venture ("There sleeps the labour of my best years") but he also knew that the doomed venture helped to discipline his unequalled powers of exposition. Thankfully he was too old for the Occupation to catch him in any seriously compromising position, although he might have done better not to publish even once in the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ under the editorship of Drieu la Rochelle. If there is an objection to be made to him, it is a milder version of the objection we make to Rilke: that the dedication to art verges on preciosity. Valéry, however, gives a better sense than Rilke of other artists than himself being fully alive. There was a generosity to him which his nation returned in kind, as if his capacity for appreciation were in itself a national treasure. General de Gaulle came to his funeral.
Sometimes something wants to be said, sometimes a way of saying wants to be used.
—PAUL VALÉRY, _P OÉSIE ET PENSÉE ABSTRAITE, FROM MODERN FRENCH POETS ON POETRY_, P. 216
THE SECOND PART of this statement is the striking one. It makes explicit a trade secret that most poets would prefer were kept under wraps. The English editor and anthologist Geoffrey Grigson once said, with typical acerbity, that he didn't like "notebook poets," and that he could always tell when a poet had been writing down phrases and saving them up for future use. Though it reminds you of Malcolm Muggeridge's proclaimed ability to tell which women were on the pill by the lack of light in their eyes, Grigson's complaint is a good polemical point, but its epistemology is questionable: if the job was well done, how could he tell? In my own experience, a phrase will wait decades for a poem to form around it. Larkin kept one of his most beautiful ideas ("dead leaves desert in thousands") for thirty years and never completed a poem into which it would fit: strong evidence, if negative, of how his mind worked. He found ways of saying things and the ways led to poems. For all good poets, something like that process happens. It is probably a stroke of luck, however, that the process is becoming harder to study. When poets still had worksheets, a scholar could presume to trace the course of the seed phrase to the full blooms. I can't believe that any poet, no matter how dedicated a techno nerd, could compose entirely on a machine, but it is a fact that there will be fewer worksheets to study in the future: most of the _pentimenti_ will be deleted into cyber limbo.
One benefit of this will be that scholars will jump to fewer conclusions. A poem's binding energy can be supplied by its last retouchings. Australia's first great modern poet, Kenneth Slessor, would carry his next-to-final draft of a poem with him for weeks on end—a draft in which all the alternatives for words on which he had not decided appeared above and below it, like a club sandwich. Luckily no scholar ever got his hands on one of these documents, or whole speculative books would have been written on why and how he made his choices. In reality, the final choices are infinite and begin at the beginning. Sometimes the phrase that started it all is struck out at the finish, having done its work in a way that is beyond examination even by the creator. Gianfranco Contini loved the study of variants, but he was a qualified philologist, and his critical conclusions would be pale without their scientific content. Croce was probably overstating the case when he called variants _carteffaci_ (waste paper), but he had a point. The critic does well to speculate about how a poet might have an idea and look for a way to say it. But the critic is on shaky ground when he intrudes on the real mystery, which happens when the poet thinks of a way of saying something and starts looking for a larger meaning to which it might contribute. There is nothing mysterious about the order of events: nobody is amazed that a composer thinks of a fragment of a melody, or of a harmony, before he thinks of a structure, and it would not be stunning if we were somehow to be told that Michelangelo had the idea of God touching Adam's fingertip long before Julius II had the idea of repainting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But there is a mystery, and an insoluble one, to how the smaller unit of inspiration sets off in search of the larger one that will incorporate it. Artists spend a lot of time waiting for that to happen: while they wait they must trust to luck; and it is no wonder that some of them get very nervous, and fall into bad habits. Until now, what the nervous poet did in his notebook—changing a word, changing it back again—was available to the scholar. In the cyber age there will be no such archives of first and second thoughts, unless, as some strangely confident techno freaks assure us, nothing ever _really_ gets deleted, and it is all still there somewhere. In which case, Valéry's idea will never cease to be a departure point for speculation.
With the artist, it happens—this is in the most favourable case—that his internal urge to produce gives him, all at once and without a break between them, the impulse, the immediate exterior aim and the technical means to reach it. Thus there is established, in general, a regime of execution. . . .
—PAUL VALÉRY, _I NTRODUCTION À LA POÉTIQUE_, P. 58
But trying to translate this is hopeless: _un régime d'exécution_ sounds like a firing squad, when what he means is a climate of possibility, a feeling on the artist's part that he knows what he wants to do and is already getting it done, simply by letting the general shape or tone of the project form unbidden in his head. I have heard poets call it "being inside the poem" and some of them even claim, plausibly, that it alters their rate of breathing. It can certainly alter their rate of smoking. In my own case, for what the news is worth, when a poem is completing itself—when the new ship on the slipway is fitting itself out, when every part insists on relating itself to every other part, and when nothing must be allowed to interrupt—I actually feel as if I am suffering from sunburn. The virtue of Valéry's brief treatise is that it makes you feel less absurd for having been so caught up. He gets at the soul of the subject through the body of the poet. He must be talking about the body because he is not talking about the conscious mind. " _Tout ce que nous pouvons définir se distingue aussitôt de l'esprit producteur et s'y oppose_." (Anything we can define distinguishes itself instantly from the productive spirit and is opposed; p. 39.) In other words, the artist gets into a clever but clueless state where no amount of science can meet the case.
My copy of the little book _Introduction à la poétique_ —a flat, floppy and not very glorious-looking glorified pamphlet by Gallimard—is from the tenth edition, published in 1938, on the eve of the nightmare. I bought it in Cambridge in 1967. It was one of the first books in French I ever read to the end. It helped that the text was very short. But even as I stumbled through with the dictionary ever present, I could tell that I was on to something. I underlined things, put stars in the margin, added knowing comments about the provenance of Valéry's ideas ("Croce was here!"). It was a book I loved, and I love it still. The author of one of the great modern poems, " _Le Cimetière marin_ "—its play of tones is the nearest thing to a Degas pastel wired for sound—Valéry had generously given the succeeding generations the most valuable kind of encouragement, by saying that he had no real idea of how he did it. Better than that, he said that having no real idea of how to do it was the only way to do it. (In our own time, Tom Stoppard has said that the trouble with bad art is that the artist knows exactly what he's doing.) "One conceives, for example," Valéry says on page 27, "that a poet might legitimately fear altering his original virtues—his immediate power of composition—if he were to analyse them." It was a rationale for the irrational. He didn't mean that just getting yourself into a vague state would produce a poem, in the same way that, in the Impressionist era, untalented painters thought that if they let their eyes go out of focus and painted what they saw, they would produce Impressionist paintings. But he did mean that the state of being creative would always feel beyond analysis. After that, I learned to trust in my sunburn, and took its absence as a sign that the poem was not yet finished after all, no matter how long I had worked on it.
Valéry's famous assertion that a poem is never finished, only abandoned, is one I do not believe. Try and think of a way in which Shakespeare's sonnet "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame" is not finished. Valéry could talk precious nonsense. He was a bit of a dandy, and sometimes he got his pouncet-box too close to his nose, so that the aperçu came out as a refined sneeze. But on the whole he had the rare gift of talking concrete sense about the most complicated thing people do, and talking it as an insider. Later on his gift was born again, in Philip Larkin, whose critical writings are based on the insistence that true poems must come from instinct, even if the conscious mind is fully engaged on their way to realization. Larkin knew from introspection that a poem came of its own volition. Sometimes its will failed, whereupon he left it. To our loss, he never recorded his physical sensations when the fit of composition was on him. One guesses that the urge manifested itself as a tremendous determination not to do anything else: the best explanation for the circumscription of his pleasures.
Baudelaire, seeing Victor Hugo taking a walk along the boulevard, correctly deduced from Hugo's rhythmic gait that he was polishing alexandrines in his head. From all the testimony we have been given by the poets about themselves and about each other, the common theme which emerges is that everything else must be laid aside in the last phase, when the thing is integrating itself. This could be the reason women's poetry is on the whole a comparatively recent event in history. It used to be very hard for women to lay everything else aside. Unlike men, women were not allowed to be hard to live with. Poets have traditionally been hard to live with, and the tradition will probably continue. At the very moment when a poet is working hardest in his head, he looks exactly as if he isn't working at all. On the face of it, it's the ideal moment for asking him to do something useful. The answer is unlikely to be diplomatic, and probably wasn't even from such a smooth operator as Valéry.
MARIO VARGAS LLOSA
Mario Vargas Llosa (b. 1936) is the Latin American writer who best exemplified the course of the relationship between literature and politics in late-twentieth-century Latin America. Raised mainly in Peru, he graduated in Madrid before embarking on a dazzling literary career that took him to many European and American cities and universities, a path as a wandering scholar that he has continued to follow all his life. It was only in 1975 that he spent his first long period as an adult in Peru, when the military dictatorship that had begun in 1968 was still five years from its conclusion. The pattern of his life was to see Latin America's problems from close up and then reflect on them while he was abroad. The international network of hospitable universities was his second country. Of comparably influential writers—Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez (Vargas Llosa wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on García Márquez)—none, not even the suave Fuentes, was to so glamorously exemplify the new role of the boom-time Latin American writer as world citizen and acknowledged legislator of mankind. Only Octavio Paz can really be talked of in the same breath. All Vargas Llosa's novels are considerable but the cigar for sheer attractiveness must go to his fifth, _Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter_ : one of the best books about bright adolescence in any language, it is up there with _The Catcher in the Rye_ , Alain-Fournier's _Le Grande Meaulnes_ and Franz Werfel's _Die Abituriententag_.
Some of Vargas Llosa's admirers might say that attractiveness isn't the real point of his novels, and that they do best when facing the ferocious realities of Latin American politics, especially the horrors generated by the perennial figure (not yet completely out of the picture) of the Strongman. The true strength of Vargas Llosa, however, is undoubtedly in the essay. His collected essays written between 1962 and 1982, _Contro viento y marea_ (Against the Wind and the Tide) come in either three-volume or single-volume form. The single-volume version makes the perfect pocket book for getting up to speed with how the bright baby-boom students of Latin America won their way towards a solid concept of liberal democracy through the miasma generated by the deadly friction between a self-defeating radical activism and a retrograde local nationalism, the latter backed up by U.S. foreign policy at its most witless. The only real progressivism, he convincingly reveals, is from revolution to reform.
For the beginner in Spanish, his essays are an enticing way in, and for the student of politics south of the Rio Grande there could be nothing better, because Vargas Llosa records, step by step, an intellectual odyssey that began on the left and, in the light of experience, steadily headed rightwards as far as reason could go. The nut left enrols him on the nut right, but really it won't wash. He never lost the humanitarian ideals he learned from his Left Bank heroes (especially Camus, always a good hero to have), and the long mugging he received from reality was delivered largely in the context of practical politics, which he was not afraid to observe from close enough to see the sudden space after people disappeared. Eventually he ran for the presidency of Peru in 1990 and lost to Alberto Fujimori: a throwback strongman with affinities to Rafael Trujillo, the subject of one of Vargas Llosa's later novels. Though he ended up firmly wedded to the belief that the failed states in Latin America needed double-entry bookkeeping more than they needed any ideology, he has never lost his initial commitment to the rights of the deprived. On the subject of open borders, one of the pet themes of the international left consensus, the classic essay in favour of illegal immigration was written by Vargas Llosa.
One of the many advantages of learning to read Spanish is that a copiously productive writer like Vargas Llosa, who responds to current history, can be read while the history is still current. Despite the turmoil, the anguish and the frequent desperation of his raw material, a Spanish word, _hechiceria_ (witchcraft, charm), and a Spanish phrase, _a sus anchas_ (at one's ease), both apply exactly to his prose, one of the more encouraging continuities linking two millennia.
Nationalism is the culture of the uncultivated, and they are legion.
—MARIO VARGAS LLOSA, _C ONTRO VIENTO Y MAREA_, P. 439
FOR THE NEW century, Australia might well become the world's ideal nation. As an Australian by birth I can say that with some pride, but also with trepidation, because Australia still has a lesson to learn. Vargas Llosa is the man to teach it. Latin America in the late twentieth century was a tragic laboratory for testing all the wrong ways to think about a national culture. The foreign policy of the United States was never a help. (In Latin America, the United States behaved in the very way that Harold Pinter thinks it has always behaved everywhere.) But the real hindrance came from dreams of cultural autarky on both the left and the right. In a long series of essays that constitutes one of the key political documents of the modern era, Vargas Llosa established that Latin America had no "dependent" cultures which needed to be "emancipated": either they were already that, simply for being cultures, or else they were folklore.
Speaking across a hundred years, a key contributing figure in Vargas Llosa's position was the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío. Vargas Llosa puts Darío's _cosmopolitanismo_ vital at the centre of the Latin American cultural upsurge which went on to restore the literature of the Spanish world—a literature in which Vargas Llosa himself, although modestly he does not say so, is yet another key figure. Though personally I would put Octavio Paz first—perhaps because, by accident, I actually did—students who want to make a start with Spanish could do worse than to track Vargas Llosa through his essays. Short pieces of expository prose are the easiest route into a new language anyway, and Vargas Llosa's have the merit of being argued concretely from point to point, with scarcely a whiff of metaphysics even in his early phase when he was still impressed by the French left. It could be said—there are plenty who say it—that his rejection of the left has made him a cat's paw of the right, but it is a pretty strange right-wing cat's paw who favours the idea of unrestricted illegal immigration into Spain. For those of us who like his style, watching it mature into its full fluency over the course of decades has been an unmixed pleasure.
But unmixed pleasure should not imply unmixed agreement. His commitment to the _cosmopolitanismo vital_ has its drawbacks. There is a measure of obscurantism lurking within the enlightenment: a dark angel in the sun, positioning itself for its classic attack. Like the philosopher E. M. Cioran, Vargas Llosa admired Borges for his world citizenship. Unlike Cioran, Vargas Llosa had no self-preserving ulterior motive for putting Borges's universal prestige above his questionable local politics. But you don't need a self-preserving ulterior motive to wonder if Borges did not give himself a free pass. In Vargas Llosa's view—an uncomfortable view we need to hear often if we are interested in politics at all—the Latin American countries which fought dirty wars against their radical insurgents had more reason than our compassion would like to grant them. Forcing the incumbent regimes into a criminal response was always among the insurgents' aims: a prophecy that could be coerced by terror into fulfilling itself. But to understand all should not mean to forgive all, if forgiving all entails to forget what matters. The obscenities came from both sides, but the obscenities perpetrated by the incumbent power were always the more reprehensible. To do him credit, Vargas Llosa keeps that possibility in mind, in his cultural arguments if not in his political ones. The regimes that dreamed of cultural autonomy were bound to be repressive. It remains a pity that in the case of Argentina, for example, Vargas Llosa has never considered that Borges and the other luminaries in the constellation that formed around Victoria Ocampo's magazine Sur might have been promoting their _cosmopolitanismo vital_ as a version of that same dream, and thus indulging themselves in a detachment from reality, even while they seemed to be embracing a larger world.
Argentina actually had a national culture which, by Vargas Llosa's definition, was international because vital: the culture of the tango. But the Sur constellation never really went for the tango, any more than the upper orders did, or, for that matter, the various governments inhabiting the Casa Rosada. (Under the junta, the tango was forbidden because people had to gather to dance it, and gatherings were banned.) Borges, in particular, wanted an Argentina that belonged at the international level, whether or not it belonged to itself at the national level. Until the end of World War II, Argentina and Australia were running in parallel. Today, they separately demonstrate what a luxury it is to be a stable, prosperous, democratic nation with a dependable constitution. Australia is all that and more, and Argentina, after yet another implosion of the civil order, is once again none of it and less. Australia can afford to do without nationalism, because it is a nation. To do without nationalism as a political force, you have first of all to satisfy all the requirements which encourage that force to gather strength: the real subject underlying Vargas Llosa's essays, even as he continues to present the true perception that liberal democracy is the indispensable state of affairs for any country. But first of all it must be a country, not just an area of conflict.
W
Evelyn Waugh
Ludwig Wittgenstein
EVELYN WAUGH
Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh (1903–1966) was the supreme writer of English prose in the twentieth century, even though so many of the wrong people said so. His unblushing ambition to pass for a member of the upper orders was held against him by critics who believed that art, if it couldn't be an instrument of social reform, should at least not be the possession of a class that had enough privileges already. Even so irascible a representative of that position as Professor John Carey, however, felt obliged to enrol Waugh's first comic novel, _Decline and Fall_ , among the most entertaining books of the century. By extension, students should be slow to believe that Waugh's most famous single book, _Brideshead Revisited_ , is as self-indulgently snobbish as its denigrators say: usually they have a social programme of their own, and almost always, against their inclinations, they can quote from the text verbatim. The same might be said for critics who can find nothing valuable in his wartime _Sword of Honour_ trilogy: the comic scenes alone are enough to place him in direct rivalry with Kingsley Amis at his early best, and rather ahead of Anthony Powell and P. G. Wodehouse, neither of whom came up with an invention quite as extravagant as Apthorpe's thunderbox. Really it takes blind prejudice to believe that Waugh could not write magically attractive English. But Waugh showed some blind prejudice of his own in believing that he wrote it perfectly. His apparent conviction that only those with a public school (i.e., private school) education in classics could write accurate English was a flagrant example of the very snobbery he was attacked for. It also happened to be factually wrong, on the evidence that he himself inadvertently provided.
A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, it was Tony who introduced me to my first publisher.
—EVELYN WAUGH, _A L ITTLE LEARNING_, P. 201
THE DECAY OF grammar is a feature of our time, so I have tried, at several points in this book, to make a consideration of the decline part of the discussion. Except in a perfectly managed autocracy, language declines, and too much should not be made of the relationship between scrambled thought and imprecise expression. Hitler did indeed abuse the German language, and there was many a connoisseur of grammar and usage who was able to predict, from what he did to the spoken word, what he would do to people when he got the chance. But Orwell set his standard too high when he called for clean expression from politicians: it would have been sufficient to call for clean behaviour. At the moment, the use of English in Britain is deteriorating so quickly that "phenomena," after several years of being used confidently in the singular, is now being abetted by "phenomenon" used in the plural. People sense that there ought to be a distinction. Everybody _wants_ to write correctly. But they resist being taught how, and finally there is nobody to teach them, because the teachers don't know either. In a democracy, the language is bound to deteriorate with daunting speed. The professional user of it would do best to count his blessings: after all, his competition is disqualifying itself, presenting him with opportunities for satire while it does so, and boosting his self-esteem. (When I catch someone on television using "deem" for "deign," it consoles me for having found out that I have spent fifty years stressing "empyrean" on the wrong syllable.) The most interesting aspect of the collapse is that the purist can do so little to stem it, and might even succumb to it himself, sometimes through a misinterpretation of his own credentials. Evelyn Waugh was a case in point. Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height of English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him. But he was wrong about how he did it. In _A Little Learning_ he pronounced that nobody without a classical education could ever write English correctly.
Only a few pages away from that claim, he wrote the cited sentence, which is about as incorrect as it could be, because he ends up talking about the wrong person. He meant to say that it was he, Evelyn Waugh, who was very hard up, and not Anthony Powell. To make the lapse more delicious, Powell himself was the arch-perpetrator of the dangling modifier. At least Waugh had got over the influence of Latin constructions. Powell, to the end of his career, wrote as if English were an inflected language, and at least once per page, in Powell's prose, the reader is obliged to rearrange the order of a sentence so that a descriptive phrase, sometimes a whole descriptive clause, can be re-attached to its proper object. In a book review I once mentioned Powell's erratic neo-classical prosody. He sent me a postcard quoting precedent as far back as John Aubrey. He was right, of course: our prose masters have always been at it. But our prose masters, now as then, ought not to prate about correctness while leaving so much of the writing to the reader. Correct prose is unambiguous. There is no danger of the clear becoming monotonous, because opacities will invade it anyway. Even the most attentive writer will have his blind spots, although deaf spots might be a better name. Kingsley Amis, who was an admiring friend of Anthony Powell, was nevertheless well aware that Powell's grammar was all over the place. (In a letter to Philip Larkin, Amis made a devastating short list of Powell's habitual errors.) Amis himself was a stickler for linguistic efficiency. The only mistake I ever caught him making was when he overdid it. In _Lucky Jim_ , which is a treatise on language among its other virtues, Gore-Urquhart, Jim's mentor in the art of boredom detection, unaccountably seems to approve of the paintings of the fake artist Bertrand Welch. " _Like his pictures_ ," says Gore-Urquhart. Since he says everything tersely, the reader—this reader, at any rate—tends to assume that he means "I like his pictures." But what he means is that he considers Bertrand a fake, like his pictures. The reader is sent on a false trail by a too-confident use of the character's habitual tone. The author should have spotted the possibility of a misinterpretation. But we, the readers, should remember that it is one of the very few possibilities of misinterpretation that Kingsley Amis didn't spot. He spotted hundreds of thousands of them, and eliminated nearly every one. If he had written without effort, many of them would have stayed in. (Exercise: find a complex interchange of dialogue in _Lucky Jim_ and count the number of times you are left in doubt as to who is speaking. You are never in doubt. Now try the same test with a novel by Margaret Drabble.)
The main reason a good writer needs a drink at the end of the day is the endless, finicky work of disarming the little booby traps that the language confronts him with as he advances. They aren't really very dangerous—they only go off with a phut and a puff of clay dust in the reader's face if they aren't dealt with—but those aren't the sounds that a writer wants his sentences to make. Evelyn Waugh didn't really want this sentence to make this sound, but he relaxed his vigilance. He knew what he meant, and forgot that the descriptive phrase was closer to the wrong person than to the right one. If we correct the sentence, we can guess immediately why things went wrong. "A little later, very hard up and seeking a commission to write a book, I was introduced by Tony to my first publisher." But the correct order would have struck the writer as awkward, because the loss of "it was Tony" would have removed the connection to a previous sentence in which Powell had been talked about. In other words, it was Waugh's sense of coherence that led him into the error. With bad writers it is often the way. In their heads, it all ties up, and they don't fully grasp the necessity of laying it out for the reader. Even good writers occasionally succumb. Waugh, who was as good as they get, hardly ever did: but he did this time.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Born into a wealthy Viennese family, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was the glamour boy of English philosophy in the twentieth century, and in the new millennium his influence continues to be potent. If there are still English philosophers who seem to prefer it when nothing is discussed except the means of discussion, their memories of Wittgenstein are probably the reason. Before World War I, there was a period when only Bertrand Russell knew who Wittgenstein was. After valuable false starts as a student of engineering in Berlin and Manchester, Wittgenstein had come to Cambridge to study mathematical logic under Russell, who had the humility (a virtue of Russell's that offset many of his vices) to spot an intellect potentially superior to his own. During the Great War, Wittgenstein fought for Austria as an artillery officer. Captured by the Italians, in the prison camp at Montecassinao he completed the work we now know as the _Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus_ , a set of aphorisms based on the principle that language is a combination of propositions picturing the facts of which the world is composed. Under the impression that he had brought philosophy to an end, Wittgenstein gave away his money and took up the simple life in Austria as a schoolteacher, a gardener's assistant and an amateur architect.
He resembled T. E. Lawrence both in his homosexuality and in his recurring desire to retreat from a stage whose centre he seemed born to occupy. Realizing, however, that philosophy was not over after all, he returned to Cambridge in 1929. First as a research fellow and then as a full professor, he developed a second philosophical phase, or emphasis, in which his original concept of language as a set of pictures was, if not repudiated, certainly elaborated into something more subtle—infinitely more subtle, because he now saw communication as a whole family of language games in which the meanings of words depended on their use. Usage, however, was not everything. A given line of argument could be outright wrong, especially if it sought obsessively for a unity that could not exist. Wittgenstein had thus constructed an instrument for discussing the totalitarian mentality, but he never used it. During World War II he voluntarily served as a hospital porter in London and a lab assistant in Newcastle, but he never said anything in print about the Nazis. Apart from the _Tractatus_ , all his books, collected from notes made from his lectures, were published posthumously. No student should miss the key work of his second phase, _Philosophical Investigations_ (1953), but not even in that otherwise electrifying book is there any sense of current events. His silence might not have been an act of will. It could have been that words failed him. There is evidence, however, that when he finally saw photographs of the hideous aftermath in the concentration camps he forgot his famous rule about being silent on issues of which one cannot speak, and broke down in tears. But in the few years left to him before his death from cancer, he still resolutely declined to say anything specific about the era he had lived through. He had helped to shape it, but only by ignoring it.
Not that Wittgenstein believed there was anything peripheral about his subject. As we know from one of his letters to the linguist C. K. Ogden, he thought nothing could beat the thrill of philosophy. Clearly, for him, close, penetrating reasoning was an aesthetic experience on the level of the Schubert C Major Quintet, which he thought possessed "a fantastic kind of greatness." But for Wittgenstein it was the thought that was seductive, not the language. A condition in which the thing said exceeded the thing talked about was not a condition he could admit, and especially not in poetry. He despised Bertrand Russell's attempts to write plain-language philosophy on a high aesthetic level. Russell wanted to be Spinoza, and Wittgenstein devastated him by telling him he was wasting his time. Wittgenstein was undoubtedly being sincere. He would have thought the same sort of aim a waste of effort even if it came from himself. Yet he himself was in the first rank of German writers. As an aphorist he had no superior and only a few peers: Goethe, Lichtenberg, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Schnitzler, Kafka, Polgar—the list is quite short, and for his almost unearthly detachment he can be said to dominate it.
Wittgenstein's requirement that we should not be seduced by language is understandable in the context of the rich second phase of his philosophy, whose aim we can find summed up for him on his brass plate in Trinity College chapel in Cambridge: " _Rationem ex vinculis orationis vindicam esse._ " (Reason must be released from the chains of speech.) The requirement that we should not be seduced by _his_ language, however, is hard to meet. He had things to say that were as good as Hegel's line about the owl of Minerva. He was the poet without a context, the poet in the waste land. His chief fear was that philosophy would be dominated by science. David Pears—whose short book _Wittgenstein_ (1971) remains valuable even in the flood of light cast by Ray Monk's magnificent biography of 1990—assures us that the whole aim of Wittgenstein's work was to prevent such a domination. But of course philosophy is dominated by science, if philosophy is thought of as a subject in itself. What Wittgenstein proved is that the dominance of science does not extend to language, and that philosophy, as a corollary, is present in all the considered language that is ever used. Far from it being hard to say something significant, to say something insignificant is almost impossible, even for a baby just old enough to know that babbling makes it popular.
Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert on us.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, _T HE BLUE AND BROWN BOOKS_, P. 27
PHILOSOPHY AS anyone uses the word, one would have thought. But for a long time few dared to think that, so Garboesque was Wittgenstein's glamour. When Wittgenstein was in the room, even Isaiah Berlin was at a loss for words. Wittgenstein placed such an emphasis on precision of language that he made the merely eloquent feel slovenly. To get Wittgenstein in perspective, it required first of all his death, and then some unsentimental reflection on the breathtaking scope of what he had never talked about. He received credit for giving away the large amount of money he had inherited, and thus detaching himself from his social privileges and from the involvements and distractions of everyday life. But he also detached himself from everyday life by ignoring what was going on in Europe. After his sufferings in World War I the detachment was understandable, but the result was a chilling hermeticism in his frame of reference. Neither in his philosophy nor in his ancillary writings did he ever say much about what subsequently happened in the German-speaking countries, at the very time when civilization was facing its greatest threat. It could be said that he was under no obligation to, but it is still a strange omission. The advantage to his philosophical position was that by not saying much he never said anything ill considered. His philosophical position was like a defensive aesthetic strategy by which a poet hopes to write poetry in which there is nothing that can be criticized for its looseness: every line a Maginot line.
In the fully developed form of his second phase, Wittgenstein's eventual position about language was so obviously right that it is hard to see, at this distance, how a whole school of philosophy could have grown out of it. " _Ein Ausdrück hat nur im Strom des Lebens Bedeutung_ ," he said in his last days. An expression has meaning only in the stream of life. Could anyone doubt it? Generations of students learned not to ask for the meaning, but to ask for the use. Wittgenstein got the credit. If Shakespeare had ever believed anything else, he would never have written a line. (The drawback of the academic guru is that his students continue, long after graduation, to see him as the incarnation of the seriousness of their subject: but their subject incarnates its own seriousness, or it would never have been worth studying in the first place.) Wittgenstein's real power lay in the fact that he, too, was a literary prodigy. In all phases of his career Wittgenstein was an important writer in the rich German tradition of the aphorism. He favoured the epigrammatic, the dry, the tart. But he was slow—painfully slow, hour after hour slow, sweating and struggling in front of his own class slow—to accept the truth about the simple statement: the truth being that it is an _ignis fatuus_.
The simple statement was never a problem: or, rather, it was never anything except a problem. The difficulty of getting something said clearly was never news: except of course, to the latest intake of philosophy students, who gave Wittgenstein the credit for everything that would have struck them anyway if they had been left alone with the merest metaphysical lyric from the early seventeenth century. Expressing oneself clearly is the most complicated thing there is. Mature English is complicated in order to mean one thing at a time—the closest to the simple that it can ever get. Wittgenstein looked always to the moment when, with the rhetoric blown away and language reduced to the parameters of a children's language game, the "mental mist . . . disappears." It can never quite do that, but with the proper illumination we can tell it is a mist. Wittgenstein was closer to the pay dirt in one of his letters to the philosopher G. E. Moore, when he talked about thought with due attention to what fascinated Heisenberg on his deathbed: turbulence. "One can't drink wine while it's fermenting, but that it's fermenting shows that it isn't dishwater."
As Wittgenstein conceived it, and apparently wanted to conceive it, philosophy should leave everything as it is, after having flooded it with light and air. But there was a consequence of his principle of refinement and precision that was seldom considered within his lifetime, and is still not often considered now. The precise tool was never ready to be brought to bear on the world: only on philosophy itself, which increasingly, under his influence, defined itself as an activity whose references were all to its own ways and means. The completeness with which this exclusive preoccupation suited its professional practitioners should have tipped off the more talented among them that they were engaged in a system for betting on the horses. Few of them, alas, were as talented as Wittgenstein: they could do the logic, but they could not duplicate his sensitivity to language—a sensitivity that was essentially poetic. Like literary theory at a later time, however, analytical philosophy was a game hard to get out of after you had started drawing the salary.
We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves.
—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, _T HE BLUE AND BROWN BOOKS_, P. 125
This is the Wittgenstein that matters to a writer. There is a Wittgenstein that matters to professional philosophers, but they can prove it only to each other. The Wittgenstein that matters to a writer might be mistaken for his meaning by ordinary readers, but he can never be mistaken for his poetic quality, which is apparent even in his plainest statement. The precision of his language we can take for granted, and perhaps he should more often have done the same. His true and unique precision was in registering pre-verbal states of mind. In _The Blue and Brown Books_ (p. 137) he proposes a "noticing, seeing, conceiving" process that happens before it can be described in words. That, indeed, is the only way of describing it. It sounds very like the kind of poetic talent that we are left to deal with after we abandon the notion—as we must—that poetic talent is mere verbal ability. "What we call 'understanding a sentence' has, in many cases, a much greater similarity to understanding a musical theme than we might be inclined to think" (p. 167). But he doesn't want us to think about music as a mechanism to convey a feeling: joy, for example. "Music conveys to us itself!" (p. 178). So when we read a sentence as if it were a musical theme, the music doesn't convey a separate sense that compounds with the written meaning. We get the feeling of a musical theme because the sentence means something. I thought he was getting very close to the treasure chamber when he wrote this. In 1970, reading _The Blue and Brown Books_ every day in the Copper Kettle in Cambridge, I made detailed transcriptions in my journal every few minutes. It didn't occur to me at the time that his prose was doing to me exactly what he was in the process of analysing. It sounded like music because it was so exactly right.
Y
Isoroku Yamamoto
ISOROKU YAMAMOTO
Isoroku Yamamoto (1884–1943) was the son of a schoolmaster called Takano, and the famous surname by which we know him belonged to the family into which he was adopted. After his education at the naval academy he was wounded at the battle of Tsushima in the Russo-Japanese War. He studied at Harvard after World War I and served as a language officer in the early twenties, before becoming naval attaché at the Japanese embassy in Washington later in the decade. His wide knowledge of the United States extended to the factory floors, where he was impressed by American powers of production, and to the gambling joints, where he always fancied his chances. As chief of the aviation department of the Japanese navy in 1935, and as vice navy minister from 1936 to 1939, he argued both for a main force based on aircraft carriers and for avoiding any policy that would lead to a fighting alliance with the Axis powers in World War II. But after being promoted to Admiral and placed in command of the Combined Fleet, he dutifully planned the attack on Pearl Harbor. After his defeat at Midway six months later, and probably before, he knew that to continue fighting was a mere formality; the war was already lost. The idea that his death by enemy action was tantamount to suicide, however, is almost certainly part of the romance that continues to surround his name, not least in Japan, where he is a cult figure, and not exclusively on the political right. His distaste for a war with the Western allies has always rung a bell with post-war liberals aware that, if the enemy had been as pitiless as the Japanese High Command, the defeat could have been more disastrous, the occupation more humiliating, and the subsequent resurgence of both the culture and the economy much less impressive.
The Yamamoto romance benefits from his artistic tastes. Like America's General Patton, Yamamoto wrote accomplished poetry. Again like Patton, and like other romantic commanders such as Rommel and Guderian, Yamamoto probably experienced battle as an aesthetic event: the most likely reason for his participation in a war of which he disapproved. Superior military minds share with poets the uncomfortable position of waiting for lightning to strike, and having to act on it when it does. Yamamoto knew that World War II was the wrong war, but it was the only war he had. Strategy is a talent, and talent will out, even though it is hard to get the credit for it, since it becomes less possible to visualize the larger the scale grows. For that reason alone, the idea of a star strategist never transfers satisfactorily to film, because the action of even the smallest battle is too complex to be dramatized. (Hence the hero of _Patton_ is shown to be decisive by the way he sorts out a traffic jam involving two trucks: the low moment of George C. Scott's career.) In _Tora! Tora! Tora! and Midway_ , both of them Hollywood films but made with Japanese participation, the Japanese producers eked out the necessary paucity of hardware by casting, in each film, one of their most venerable actors as Yamamoto. In _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ he was played by Soh Yamamura and in _Midway_ by Toshiro Mifune. Both actors conveyed genius with a flashing glance and resolution with a fixed frown. In either case, the viewer was left hungering for a more detailed characterization. It can be found in the extensive literature that has built up around Yamamoto in his own language, but almost every general study in English of the Pacific war has a chapter on Yamamoto, usually concluding that although the Japanse navy might have done no better had he lived, it was bound to do worse after he was dead. For the _Pearl Harbor_ attack itself, the Readers Digest picture book of 1966, _Tora! Tora! Tora!_ , with a text by Gordon W. Prange, might sound like an elementary proposition but is still the first book to have, if you can find it.
The book was translated into Japanese and had a huge success in the hero's homeland. It seems a fair guess that the average Japanese reader got the same point as Yamamoto did: that the war with the United States was a wilful mistake. The idea that Japan was tricked into the war by the Americans is one held only by Tokyo right-wingers who dress up like Michael Jackson, by the priests at Yasukuni shrine, and by Gore Vidal in his dotage. Yamamoto would have laughed aloud to hear it. For young people who correctly suspect that a schlockbuster movie like Pearl Harbor dishonours the dead as well as insulting the intelligence of the living, most of the issues concerning Yamamoto and the opening shots of the Pacific war are covered in Prange's later, more complete historical work _At Dawn We Slept_ (1981), but a warning should be attached: once the reader is launched on the study of a war so huge and horrible, he should be prepared at least to consider the unpalatable proposition that the quick ending of it by recourse to the atomic bombs was not only inevitable, but justified. Any revisionist historian who contends that the millions of Japanese soldiers based in the home islands would not have opposed a landing is obliged to believe that the military commanders, without a specific instruction from the Emperor, would have seen reason and surrendered. For those who hold that view, a close study of Yamamoto's face can be recommended. He knows your country well, admires its virtues, and doesn't even think he can prevail: but he wants to fight anyway.
If we are ordered to do it, then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months or a year, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.
—ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO TO PRIME MINISTER PRINCE KONOE, IN LATE 1940
ON AT LEAST two separate occasions, Prince Konoe asked Yamamoto what Japan's chances would be in a war against the United States. Each time, Yamamoto gave roughly the same answer, which is nowadays usually quoted and printed as if it had been given once. Variously translated into English, and variously rendered even into Japanese, Yamamoto's declaration of uncertainty is probably the second most famous thing any Japanese of the Pacific war period ever said, ranking only slightly behind the passage in the Emperor's surrender broadcast which conceded, in impossibly high-flown court language, that the war had developed in ways not necessarily favourable to Japan. Yamamoto's advice to the government seems to have predicted that the unfavourable developments would be inevitable in the long term. Later on he was much criticized for not having expressed himself more firmly, but he must have felt that he didn't need to. He was already on record as having advised that "Japan and America should seek every means to avoid a direct clash, and Japan should under no circumstances conclude an alliance with Germany." That last part was in line with the _genro_ Prince Saionji's advice to the Emperor: advice which the Emperor ignored. Yamamoto never lost hope, however, that the Japanese government, even when Tojo was running it, would see sense and reach an agreement with the United States. He still had hopes even as the Pearl Harbor operation got under way. His last briefing to Admiral Nagumo was that if the negotiations in Washington were successful then the attack would have to be stopped even if the aircraft had already taken off from the carriers, and that there could be no arguing with such an order. Yamamoto, sometimes at the risk of his life, had spent the whole of the thirties preaching the necessity of staying out of a war with the United States. He had studied at Harvard, seen America's factories, and knew more than any other top-ranking Japanese officer about America's war potential. What else could he advise Konoe?
Why, then, did Yamamoto consent to lead the Pearl Harbor attack? There are several possible answers, all leading by separate paths into the brain of a complex man. Speculations about the subtlety of "the Oriental mind" we can safely discount: they never amount to much more than ignorance and racism snuggling together under a duvet of rhetoric. Yamamoto would have been complex if he had been born and raised in Brisbane. First, he was a gambler anyway. He enjoyed gambling, possibly because he won almost every time. Second, he might have thought the chances reasonably good that the war would be short. If the Japanese diplomatic service had not botched the declaration of war, Pearl Harbor would still have been a surprise attack—an attack on Hawaii, a full two-thirds of the way across the Pacific from Japan, was not much more likely than an attack on Seattle—and might conceivably have brought America to terms, especially if the American aircraft carriers had been put out of action along with the battleships. Third, he was Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, supreme commander, Combined Fleet, Japanese navy. That was his career, those were his orders, and he had a job to do, win or lose.
To hindsight, the third reason seems the most powerful. Like Nelson and Napoleon, Yamamoto was a short man whose military gifts had carried him to great heights. If you look at the press photographs of his funeral cortège arriving at the Yasukuni shrine, the coffin looks about the size of a shoebox. A coffin always looks smaller than the person inside, but Yamamoto, even for a Japanese man of his generation, was of small physical stature. His moral stature meant a lot to him, and long before the war it had already grown enormous. His tactical brilliance, organizational ability and nonconformist daring were legendary, and they were all in service of the navy. Japanese naval aviation was practically his invention. He had opposed the laying down of the last two great battleships, _Yamato_ and _Musashi_. He was for more aircraft carriers and a lot more aircraft. He represented the transition from heavy steel to light metals—from deep keels to free air. The bright young officers adored him for it. Though he was always self-deprecating about his poetry, he was probably serious when he wrote this poem on New Year's Day, 1940.
_Today, as chief_
_Of the sea guardians_
_Of the land of the dawn,_
_Awed I gaze up_
_At the rising sun._
He wrote the poem on board the battleship _Nagato_ , his flagship as commander in chief Combined Fleet. So the rising sun would have been the ship's pennant. The land of the dawn, of course, was Japan: the two characters Ni-hon (usually pronounced Nippon) mean Sun Source, or the Land Where the Sun Rises. Yamamoto, if we may translate a subtle thirty-one-syllable Japanese poem into blunt English words, was on top of the heap. It would be foolish to imagine that he did not enjoy his eminence, even as he saw the looming threat of getting into a war with the wrong enemy. He enjoyed a battle as he enjoyed women, and might even have found a losing battle more interesting, just as he obviously found multiple love-trouble more interesting than a single alliance. On that last point, whenever the time came to quit Tokyo to join his ship, he had to set out early so that he could say his goodbyes without undue haste. He had big appetites, and they weren't just lustful. They were also emotional: a clue to his taste for drama. He might have quite liked the idea of being at the centre of a big story, and what could be a bigger story than working the miracle of saving Japan from the doom he himself had predicted? After all, going ahead with the attack wasn't his idea. He wasn't that crazy. He had, however, planned an excellent attack.
Or it would have been excellent, if it had caught the American aircraft carriers in harbour. When the returning aircraft reported that the American carriers had not been present, Yamamoto, supervising the operation at long range from the _Nagato_ anchored at Hashirajima in the Inland Sea, knew straight away that the Americans had the wherewithal to go on fighting. He was also absorbing the dreadful information that the Japanese declaration of war had been sent too late; that his surprise attack had been transformed into a sneak attack; and that the Americans therefore had redoubled motivation as well as insufficiently depleted means. The deadly combination of the two factors was proved all too soon. In May 1942, only five months after Pearl Harbour, the American carriers fought him to a draw at the battle of the Coral Sea. At Midway, scarcely more than six months after Pearl Harbor, they destroyed him. He had been right about making things tough for the Americans for six months. Six months of supremacy were all that the Japanese enjoyed. After Midway, they had no chance of keeping the initiative. But we make a mistake if we think they were crazy not to admit defeat. There was always the possibility that they could bring their opponents to terms by making it too costly to go on fighting. Because Yamamoto died early, and because the English-speaking gambler is such a sympathetic character, we tend to enrol him in the ranks of those who would have seen reason and sought a sane way out. It is just as likely, however, that he would have gone on fighting to the end, in the manner of his comparably brilliant army equivalent, Yamashita. Though the army's lack of a victorious future in the land battle did not become apparent to all until much later, Yamashita was just as aware as Yamamoto, and just as early, that Japan's adventure was over from the day that supremacy on the sea, and therefore over the supply lines, was lost: and that day was the very first day of the war.
People of a literary bent tend to idealize the poet warriors, of whom, in modern times, Yamamoto must count as the most conspicuous apart from General Patton. But we need to ask ourselves whether a flair for the poetic might not be a limitation to generalship, in which a considered appreciation for the mundane is essential. A poetic flair has an impatient mind of its own: it likes to make an effect, and it has a propensity for two qualities that can easily be inimical to a broad strategic aim. One of those qualities is what A. Alvarez called the shaping spirit, and the other is what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending. Yamamoto's plan for deciding the war on the first day was not only the equivalent of a roulette player's betting his whole bundle on a single number, it was also the equivalent of trying to cram the whole of _The Tale of Genji_ into a single _haiku_. There was bound to be material that didn't fit. Even if the American aircraft carriers had been in harbor they would not have sunk far enough in the shallow water to be beyond salvage. One way or another, the American fleet was bound to come back.
It has been said in Yamamoto's defence that the six months' grace he promised was all the Japanese forces needed to consolidate the Strike South. But there were senior officers who didn't believe it. One of them was Admiral Tomioka, who accurately assessed the risks Yamamoto was taking, and, more importantly, was doubtful about the efficacy of the outcome even if the plan had worked. (Tomioka's analysis is well outlined in Gordon W. Prange's _At Dawn We Slept_ , a work by no means unfavourable to Yamamoto, but one from which Tomioka emerges as the voice of reason on the Japanese side.) If the Japanese command structure had been as well organized from the outset as America's command structure very quickly became, Tomioka would have been in a position to overrule Yamamoto. But the Japanese never did get organized at command level. The drawback of military government was that there was no government to control the military, whose commanders formed a perpetual discussion group from which policy emerged as the highest common factor of contending opinions. The Americans, on the other hand, appointed, as supreme commander in the Pacific, Admiral King, to whom both General MacArthur and Admiral _Nimitz_ reported directly. Though MacArthur hogged most of the limelight, Admiral Nimitz was the key man. His unspectacular qualities, coalescing into an authority all the more daunting for being so reasonable, can be assessed from E. B. Potter's biography, Nimitz. The Japanese continued with Yamamoto, who wrote his Pearl Harbor poem all over again at Midway, except that this time the masterpiece came apart completely. In the Japanese language there is an expression to cover the concept of making an almighty hash of things: to serve the dish with bean paste. At Midway bean paste was the whole dish.
Spiritually, Yamamoto died at Midway. In the matter of his physical death, however, it seems unlikely that he committed suicide in expiation. Romantic interpreters sometimes favour the appealing notion that Yamamoto invited the American ambush that resulted in his being shot down into the jungle of Bougainville on April 18, 1943. While airborne on an inspection tour of the forward areas, he was caught by a flight of P-38s. In a big sky, they knew exactly where to find him. But it is a long step, even for conspiracy theorists, to argue that he had deliberately tipped off the enemy. At Midway, it was indeed true that Admiral Spruance, armed with signals intelligence, knew where to intercept the Japanese aircraft carriers. But the Japanese, like the Germans, were reluctant to accept that their military codes were being read: reluctant even when there was no other plausible reason for a defeat. When he saw the P-38s forming to attack, Yamamoto might have guessed that they were acting on information received: i.e., that the coded radio messages announcing his route had been read in Hawaii. He might even have guessed that the P-38s had intercepted from below—making it look like an accidental encounter—in order to protect the secret in case anyone escaped from the two aircraft carrying him and his staff, or from the escort of Zeros. But by then the guesswork could avail him nothing, and down he went. When the Japanese search party tracked down his corpse in the jungle, he was still strapped into his seat. His sword was beside him. If he had wanted to commit suicide, he would probably have done so on dry land or on the deck of a ship, included the sword in the ceremony, and written a poem first.
It is another romantic notion to suppose that Yamamoto would have become a voice for common sense had he survived. He had been ready to fight a war that he had long predicted was bound to be lost, and he would probably have gone on fighting it long after it became obvious that there was no hope even for a truce. That things were as bad as they could be was already evident on the day after Midway: so evident that the military tried to conceal the scale of the disaster from the Emperor. Talking about a Japanese national character might be pointless, but to talk about a Japanese military culture in the modern period is perfectly legitimate—and one mark of that culture was that its senior officers were ready to fight on far beyond the limits that might have been set by military sanity, let alone political reason.
Imminent defeat was always seen as the climax of the battle. There was even a valid idea behind that view. The idea was to make victory so expensive for the enemy that he would call a halt. The idea was not quite as crazy as it sounds now. In Europe, after the catastrophe of the second Schweinfurt raid in October 1943, the American 8th Air Force had to think twice about continuing with the daylight bombing of German targets. They thought twice and continued, but another massacre of air crew on that scale might have dictated a breathing space for the Luftwaffe to regroup. (It would never have had time to replace its lost fighter pilots, which was the real damage that the Allied air bombardment inflicted on the enemy; but the German fighter aircraft could have been switched to the eastern front, where they were sorely needed.) Similarly, in the Pacific, and very late in the day, Admiral Ohnishi's kamikaze strategy might well have done more than it did to slow down the American navy. Yamamoto, had he been on the scene, would have had no ships to fight with—a fact partly his fault—but he might have been fertile in ideas for how the kamikaze weapon could have been used to better effect. He was never against the concept: until his flight commander, Genda, came up with a less wasteful scheme, Yamamoto's plan for the Pearl Harbor attack entailed the expendability of the pilots. He might have flown a suicide mission himself, if he had ever learned to fly. Like General Yamashita, he might have remained dangerous to the end. When Tojo finally overcame his jealousy and brought Yamashita back from purdah to lead the defence of Luzon, Yamashita turned the expected American walkover into a protracted nightmare.
There is no reason to think that the Japanese home islands would have been defended with less tenacity. Revisionist historians and commentators who deplore the use of nuclear weapons against the two Japanese cities have a humanitarian case, but they weaken it by supposing that they have a military case to back it up. The same pundits who maintain that the bombing campaign against Germany was useless are fond of saying that the conventional bombing by B-29s would have been enough to ensure Japan's quick surrender. There is also a fond confidence that an invasion by the Russians would have brought the same result, although the consideration is usually ignored that the Red Army, which had no amphibious equipment, might not have been in an ideal condition to fight after its troops had swum to Hokkaido.The awkward truth is that the Japanese generals had correctly guessed which beaches the Americans would have used to invade Kyushu and Honshu.The Japanese had several million troops available to fight the battle. The only objection the Emperor raised to what would surely have been a long and bloody last stand was that the preparations were not going ahead fast enough. The atomic bombs changed his mind and he recorded his surrender speech. Some of the young officers tried to kidnap him before it could be broadcast. Older heads prevailed. The best we can say for Yamamoto is that he would almost certainly have been among them, but mainly because his loyalty to the Emperor was undying—the very factor that led the poetic admiral to write his miniature masterpiece in the first place.
Z
Aleksandr Zinoviev
Carl Zuckmayer
Stefan Zweig
ALEKSANDR ZINOVIEV
Aleksandr Alexandrovich Zinoviev (1922–2006) has suffered a fate predictable only in retrospect. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, it buried the reputations of those who had tried to point out its flaws from the inside. Today there might seem nothing remarkable about what Zinoviev tried to tell us: but there was, and there still is, because nobody else carried penetrating criticism to quite such a depth. His _The Reality of Communism_ (1984) is one of the key short books of political analysis in the history of its subject. It might stand out more in the memory if some of his other books—especially the satirical novels, of which _The Yawning Heights_ attracted the most attention—had not been so long. But at any length, he was telling the story from the centre of the action, because he was a philosopher and sociologist who actually worked within the system until he figured out that it was broken. Handsome and energetic, a natural leader along Gagarin lines—he looked more cosmonaut than academic—Zinoviev was no rebel when he started off. During World War II he was a pilot, and afterwards a star student at Moscow State University, rising to academic posts both there and at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. For his increasing anti-Stalinism he was first of all harassed by the KGB and finally expelled from the Soviet Union in 1978, after being stripped of his rank with maximum opprobrium. He settled in Munich, where he continued to write copiously in his native language. His many books were usually published in Russian by Editions l'Age d'Homme in Lausanne before being translated, first into French and then into English. So his work was plentifully available: some might say too much so for its own good. Rarity value would have given him more impact.
After 1990 he entered a new, strange phase in which he backtracked on his own discoveries and declared that the Soviet Union had disintegrated not because of the internal stresses he had pointed out, but because of a brilliantly successful concerted attack mounted by the imperialist West. There was little market for this idea even among diehards. But what ensured the eventual fading of his name was that he had been so clamorously proved right when the yawning heights caved in. Suddenly everyone was an expert, and nobody wanted to be reminded of a time when he wasn't.
I know of no more pitiable spectacle in human society than the Soviet people's intimate closeness to one another.
—ALEKSANDR ZINOVIEV, _K OMMUNISM KAKH REALNOST_, P. 109
AFTER ALEKSANDR ZINOVIEV was expelled to the West in 1978, I met him briefly in London. I was reading a lot of Russian at the time—if you were reading only Zinoviev, you were reading a lot of Russian, because he was torrentially productive—but I couldn't speak enough of the language to sustain a meaningful conversation. His English was in the same transitional stage, so the encounter turned into a smiling competition. I had been reviewing his books as they came out. Some of the books were physically huge. There was a hell of a lot to keep up with. Zinoviev had been told that I was keeping up and he smiled with gratitude. I hope my smile of gratitude was as dazzling as his. I thought he had done mighty things, but I suspected already that his reputation in the West would rapidly plunge now that he had made himself available. An accelerated Solzhenitsyn scenario was easy to predict. The main difference was that Solzhenitsyn's principal message really was contained in his big book _The Gulag Archipelago_ , rather than in the satellite works. Zinoviev's principal message was in his smaller books, especially this one, later translated as _The Reality of Communism_. His big books inflated into comic fiction what was perfectly apprehensible as a factual argument. Nor, indeed, was the comic fiction quite as funny as it might have been if the author had been given a strict word limit. In the not very long run, the big books duly flopped on top of the little ones, and Zinoviev's literary reputation slowed to a crawl. Today, very little of him is even in print.
But it should be remembered that the man who could write a sentence like this wrote hundreds more just as acute. Most of the dissident literature understandably stressed how hellish life was for the dissidents and their dependants. Zinoviev's field was the hellishness of everyday life. He was not an Englishman and had never heard the crack about every Englishman's dream being to travel alone in a first-class compartment. He was a Russian and had been brought up in conditions of enforced propinquity. His genius was to guess that there was something wrong with it. People were not meant to live on top of each other. He always wrote acutely on the subject of housing. While experts in the West were still arguing that a certain amount of overcrowding was the inevitable price of Russia's domestic accommodation being provided at low rent, Zinoviev pointed out that there was no question of the rent's being low: the rent was paid out of stolen wages. The same, he said, applied to the free medical care: not only was it no good, it cost the patient almost everything he should have been earning. All this was observation: visiting Western observers had done some of it, but Zinoviev had the advantage of being on the spot full-time.
What made him exceptional, however, was the theoretical structure that he erected on top of his observations. There was nothing abstruse about the structure. It was as carefully built as it was solidly based. He said that the living conditions could never be allowed to improve beyond a certain point because they were a control mechanism. The system packed everyone together but the resulting irritability had the useful consequence of minimizing human contact. People who spent a large part of the day either standing in long queues or pulling wires to dodge them would not only lack free time to conspire, they would never trust each other. As a theorist, Zinoviev overdid it only when he predicted that even dissidence would turn out to be part of the plan: a built-in safety valve. Commendably, he backtracked on that point not long before he packed his bags. He would probably never have said it if he had not been reduced to despair by the thuggishness with which he was stripped of his academic posts and honours. He was drummed out of the country through a shower of abuse. We tend to forget that the people who were bright enough to predict that such things would happen to them still needed a lot of moral courage to remain calm when they did. But Zinoviev didn't despair for long: not in Russia, at any rate. In the West, he went silent, sharing the fate of several of the prominent émigré dissidents, which was to find out the hard way that they had destroyed the glamour of their special subject by helping to deprive it of its power.
CARL ZUCKMAYER
Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) was a German dramatist born in the Rhineland who later settled in Austria, where the first of his two best-known plays _The Captain of Kopenick_ (1931) made him part of the social landscape. After the _Anschluβ_ in 1938 he immigrated to the United States, where he wrote the second best-known play, _The Devil's General_ (1946). Apart from these and other theatrical works, he also wrote poetry and two novels. At one time in the late thirties, before he reached the United States, he spent a brief period in England as a writer on Alexander Korda's doomed production of _I, Claudius_. While the film spent a fortune getting nowhere, the refugee from Hitler witnessed three other tyrants in action at once: Korda, the director Josef "von" Sternberg, and the self-damagingly childish actor Charles Laughton. It was a demonstration of where temperamental despotism belongs: in the arts, not in politics. Zuckmayer's most notable piece of ancillary writing, however, and perhaps his most resonant achievement, was the autobiography from which I quote below. Memoirs were the mainstream of what the émigré writers achieved, and much of what they recalled can reduce the reader to helpless grief. But Zuckmayer, perhaps because of an irrepressible good humour, remembered to say that the destruction of the old European culture could have been more complete. If all those who remained had behaved badly enough, there might have been less to long for. But most of them behaved quite well, thus allowing room to hope for mankind, even if also to regret all the more bitterly that their good character had not done much to stave off the oncoming disaster.
Most of our friends and acquaintances in theatre, film and literature, who had no personal persecution to fear and could remain in their country, stayed true to us, the exiled, and let us know in every possible way that between them and us there was no division. A few, a very few, turned out to be opportunists, delators and traitors.
—CARL ZUCKMAYER, _A LS WÄR'S EIN STÜCK VON MIR_, P. 387
THIS IS GENEROUSLY said, and it is a relief to know that it is said truly. Among those artists who, enjoying the dubious privilege of racial acceptability, were able to stay on in Nazi Germany if they wished, comparatively few took the opportunity to flourish. None of those could have guessed, before the battle of Stalingrad, that there would be a reckoning within their lifetimes. If they chose not to cooperate, it was a moral choice. The temptations were hard to resist, yet hardly anyone of real note succumbed. The playwright and Nobel laureate Gerhart Hauptmann agreed to speak well of the Nazis, but he did it because he was old; and even at the time he blamed his own cowardice. The case of the eminent actor-manager Gustav Gründgens, who was pleased enough to be patronized by Goering, is celebrated because it was rare, and the picture of him painted in _Mephisto_ is far too dark: Klaus Mann had a mean streak. (Gründgens didn't help his case by the way he defended himself after the war: his book was self-justificatory, without showing any awareness that the necessary prelude to explanation was an admission that justification was impossible.) Nevertheless there were those who could not resist a place on the gravy train. Zuckmayer knew most of them personally. The quoted passage is not all he has to say on the subject. Without abandoning the philanthropic restraint that marks his book of memoirs—its title, translatable as "As if It Was a Piece of Me," is meant partly as a signal that the friendships of a lifetime helped to form him—the great man of the Weimar theatre goes on to give an example of what one of the opportunists managed to achieve.
His name was Arnolt Bronnen, and he was a friend of Brecht. Under Weimar, Bronnen's socially conscious plays attained enough acclaim for the sceptical Anton Kuh to find them fatuous. When the Nazis came to power, Bronnen faced an abrupt demotion from his success, because his father was a Jewish schoolmaster who had married an Aryan woman. Luckily for him, Bronnen's powers of dramatic invention served the purpose. He concocted a deposition by which his mother had betrayed her husband with an Aryan man, and therefore he, Bronnen, was _ein rassenreiner Fehltritt_ : a racially pure false step. Having thus armed himself with the proper dispensation, Bronner was able to get along under the Nazis, although they did not forget that his plays had been a success under the _Judenrepublik_ , their typically oafish nickname for the Weimar democracy. Off the hook but not yet on the bandwagon, Bronnen tried to improve his position by publishing anti-Semitic articles. His piece called "Cleaning Up the German Theatre" featured a would-be nifty flight of punning word play about Max Reinhardt: " _Jetzt aber nicht mehr Reinhardt, sondern rein und hart_!" ("But now no more Reinhardt: instead, clean and hard!" It loses something in translation, but there was never much to lose.) After the Nazis collapsed, Bronnen found another totalitarian bureaucracy to serve. He became an editor in East Germany. The function of an East German literary editor, it hardly needs saying, was to seek out fresh talent and make certain it did not get published.
Zuckmayer was even better acquainted with Hanns Johst, a mediocre man of letters who ranked as a big noise among the Nazi literati. (Johst, not Goering, was the original author of the crack about reaching for his revolver when he heard the word "culture": an instructive example of a clever remark floating upwards until it attaches itself to someone sufficiently famous.) But Zuckmayer correctly spotted that Bronnen was the more interesting moral case. Accusing your own mother of adultery to save your skin is creativity of a kind so special it can almost be called a talent. Our challenge, however, is to convince ourselves that we would not have done something similar: perhaps a less shameless version, but equally self-serving. And the self-serving action becomes easier on the conscience if we can persuade ourselves we are serving our art, which would be impoverished without us. This process of mental deception seems to have proved especially prevalent among the musicians. Perhaps the writers, confined as they were to words, were quicker to spot it when they were telling themselves lies. Musicians could tell themselves that their art was not affected by the world of ideas. The conscience of Herbert von Karajan seems to have been unaffected, either then or later, by his Nazi party membership, which he applied for voluntarily, on the grounds that he needed it to get ahead. The unblushing readiness of the rising young soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf to sing for the Nazi hierarchs (her luxurious apartment had previously belonged to a Jewish conductor forced into exile) makes us doubly grateful for the memory of Marlene Dietrich, who could not sing from the operatic repertoire but had at least seen the nightmare coming, and made her attitude clear from an early date. As an Aryan, she could have gone home to Germany had she wished: but she never did until Hitler was defeated. Zuckmayer's point, however, is even more encouraging: most of those who stayed behaved with honour.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) is a fitting name to introduce the coda of this book, because his life, work, exile and self-inflicted death combine to sum up so much of what has gone before, which is really the story of the will to achievement in the face of all the conditions for despair. Zweig's own achievements are nowadays ofen patronized: a bad mistake, in my view. Largely because of his highly schooled but apparently effortless gift for a clear prose narrative, he attained, while he lived, immense popularity not just in the German-speaking countries but in the world entire, and he is still paying the penalty for it. Except in France, where his major works are never out of print, it is usually safer to call him second-rate. Safer, but not sound. Most of his poems, plays and stories have faded, but his accumulated historical and cultural studies, whether in essay or monograph form, remain a body of achievement almost too impressive to take in. Born into Vienna's golden age, he took the idea of cultural cosmopolitanism to heart, and looked for its seeds in the past, in a series of individual studies that form a richly endowed humanist gallery, in which the first and still the most impressive portrait is his monograph _Erasmus_. Such names as Goethe, Hölderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche, Rilke, Herzl, Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler, Bruno Walter and Joseph Roth might have been expected to attract Zweig's attention, but he also wrote a whole book on Balzac, as well as valuable essays on Dante, Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Renan, Rodin, Busoni, Toscanini, Rimbaud, James Joyce and many more. Full-sized books on Marie-Antoinette, Mary Stuart and Magellan were international best-sellers. For beginners who can read some German, his collection _Begegnungen mit Menschen, Büchern, Städten_ (Meetings with People, Books and Cities) is probably the best place to start, and they will be reading much more German afterwards. His _Die Welt von Gestern_ ( _The World of Yesterday_ ) is—it bears saying again—the best single memoir of Old Vienna by any of the city's native artists, although George Clare's _Last Waltz in Vienna_ will always be the book to read first. A lustrous picture book, _Stefan Zweig_ , came out in German in 1993, and in French the following year. Its dazzling pages prove that he got some of his immense archive of documents and photographs away to safety. His magnificent library in Salzburg, alas, was burned by the Nazis in 1938. They knew exactly what he represented, even if some literary critics still don't. Stefan Zweig was the incarnation of humanism, so when he finally took his own life it was a persuasive indication that the thing we value so highly can stay alive only in a liberal context.
With whom have we not spent heart-warming hours there, looking out from the terrace over the beautiful and peaceful landscape, without suspecting that exactly opposite, on the mountain of Berchtesgaden, a man sat who would one day destroy it all?
—STEFAN ZWEIG, _D IE WELT VON GESTERN_, P. 396
"HEART-WARMING HOURS" sound less corny in German: _herzliche Stunden_. Zweig had a house in Salzburg, and from the terrace he could see across the border into Germany, to the heights on which the exterminating angel perched, gathering its strength. If Hitler had looked in the other direction, he would have seen, on Zweig's terrace, everything he was determined to annihilate, and not just because it was Jewish. There were plenty of gentiles who came to see Zweig. But they were all infected with _Kulturbolschewismus_ , the deadly international disease that presumed to live in a world of its own: the disease that Hitler, in his role as hygienist, had a Pasteur-like mission to eradicate. Everyone who mattered in the European cultural world knew Zweig. It was one of his gifts. He believed in the sociability of the civilized. In the long run it was a belief that might have helped to kill him. When he committed suicide in Brazil in 1942, he already knew that the Nazis weren't going to win the war. But the Nazis had already won their war against the gathering on the terrace.
The question remains of whether Zweig had valued that gathering too much. Never a man for being alone in the café, he had staked everything on the artistic community and the mutual consideration which he supposed to prevail automatically within it. The artistic community, not his worldwide popularity, was the context of his success. When Hitler destroyed that success, Zweig quoted Grillparzer's line about walking alive in the funeral procession behind his own corpse. Zweig had no notion that the Nazi assault on the idea of an artistic community was not unique. As late as the year of his death, he was still saying that there was "no second example" of such murderous irrationality. Though he had once been on a train ride with the Bolshevik cultural commissar Lunacharsky to visit Tolstoy's old estate at Yasnaya Polyana, Zweig knew little of what had been going on in the Soviet Union, where the artistic community of Petersburg that had gone on flourishing between 1917 and 1929—a confluence of talent to match any gathering on his terrace—had been obliterated as a matter of policy. (The crackdown was announced by Lunacharsky himself, the erstwhile bohemian chosen by Stalin to put out the lights of bohemia.) To the bitter end, Zweig believed that the natural state of affairs between exponents of the humanities was one of affectionate respect: a professional solidarity.
He would have been horrified to find that Thomas Mann thought of him as a mediocrity. It would have been one horror too much; but, unlike the other horrors, it had not been invented by Hitler out of thin air. That Mann had uttered such an opinion was the simple truth. But we should not put too sinister a construction on a snide remark. Mann was never at ease with the idea that some other German writer might sell more books than he did in the world market. The natural state of affairs between exponents of the humanities is one of tension, suspicion, rivalry and, all too often, enmity. Only a catastrophe can bring about, among its survivors, any degree of the automatic mutual regard that Zweig dreamed of so fondly. A great deal of creativity arises from conflict between the creators, and it tends to be annulled when they are driven to make peace by supervening circumstances. Colin Thubron, who can read Mandarin, noted the blandness that prevailed in the literary aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s: when dissent had been alive, the dissenters had dissented among themselves. It is a misconception to think that the emigration from Germany produced nothing—the memoirs alone constitute a whole library of substantial German literature—but equally it would be a misconception to think that the émigrés achieved even a tiny fraction of what they would have achieved had they been left free to quarrel. (They quarrelled anyway, but on a drastically reduced scale: unable to disagree about Hitler, they could disagree only about Stalin.)
In my time, in both London and New York, there have certainly been gatherings on the terrace; and in Melbourne and Sydney they become more frequent and impressive by the year; but the _herzliche Stunden_ can never for long be counted on as a sustaining context. Thomas Mann, a tougher nut in every way than Zweig, noted how in the Vienna of Brahms it was remarkable how the musicians, united only in their mutual suspicion, jealously protected their individuality. (The omniscient Fitelberg, one of Mann's best shots at the figure of the cultural ominivore, says it in _Doktor Faustus_ : "Wolf, Brahms and Bruckner lived for years on end in the same city, namely Vienna, avoided one another the whole time, and none of them, as far as I know, ever met one of the others.") The same applies to the Paris of the great painters. Today their masterpieces hang together in the same galleries. We can find our ideal Paris in New York, Chicago, Moscow and Petersburg. While they were painting, in the real Paris, they would cross the boulevard to avoid each other. For understandable reasons, Zweig wished the world otherwise; but in that respect his World of Yesterday was a never-never land. He was always looking for concrete, tangible realizations of a coherence that can exist nowhere except in the spirit. His celebrated collection of autograph manuscripts, which was in display in the Salzburg house, brought the great artists of the past together: another gathering on the terrace. Typically, upon arrival in his last new country, Zweig wrote a book about it: _Brasilien, Land der Zukunft_ (Brazil, Land of the Future). Quoting freely from the Portuguese, the book is a stunning tribute to his powers of almost instantaneous assimilation. But it also testifies to his corrosive grief. He tries to persuade himself that a land without a past might be a new start for civilization. The real theme, however, has all to do with what he has lost. In Rio de Janeiro the terrace was almost empty, and in Petrópolis, where he took his own life, there was no terrace at all. I have been there, and seen it; and it can be a beautiful place, when the purple _quarezmas_ bloom against the green forest; but it isn't long before you starve for company.
And I realized that for any man, much of the best of his personal freedom would be limited and distorted by photographic publicity.
—STEFAN ZWEIG, _D IE WELT VON GESTERN_, P. 371
This was an early perception of how the destructive effects of fame in the twentieth century were spreading even to the world of art. Zweig knew more about success than any other serious writer of his time. No stranger to press scrapbooks and photo albums, he documented himself with care. He was always a mighty archivist. But he saw the danger, and might well, had he chosen to live, have chosen the next stage to fame: reclusion. (He could never have done without illustrious company, but might have been quite good at scaring them all to silence.) If he could have seen forward in time, he would have well understood the course taken by Thomas Pynchon and J. D. Salinger. He would have been an appreciative student of the minimax approach to the requirements of publicity, by which the star says just enough to keep the mill turning. Nowadays, everyone knows that fame must be managed, or it will do the managing. Marcel Reich-Ranicki, in _Der doppelte Boden_ , says that Heine was condemned to world fame. The "condemned" is the modern word, but Zweig would have seen its force. Even earlier, Proust had foreseen that there would be a desirable status beyond being well-known, in which one was known only by those that fame did not impress. In _Sodome et Gomorrhe_ he noted that the true stars of _le monde_ —by which he meant high society—are tired of appearing in it. Zweig never got tired of it, while it was still a society. He enjoyed his stellar status, but his good heart made him slow to grasp that his very celebrity was one of the reasons the Nazis wanted him dead. The idea that the German-speaking culture was being so prominently represented by a Jew made them angry: a sign that Nazi ideology had only a tangential relationship with nationalism.
We are a lost generation, who will never see a united Europe again.
—STEFAN ZWEIG, QUOTED BY ERWIN RIEGER IN _S TEFAN ZWEIG_, P. 112
The term "lost generation" had already been launched by Gertrude Stein. Zweig merely put it to a more appropriate use. Nobody was trying to kill Hemingway and Fitzgerald except the manufacturers of what W. C. Fields called spirituous fermenti. Zweig's generation was up against a more formidable enemy. Nevertheless his suicide in January 1942 will always be a bit of a mystery. It seems not quite to fit the circumstances: with America in the war, the Nazis no longer looked like winning, and there was no reason to think that he would not have resumed his glittering international position when the war was over. But we could be dealing with a disposition of mind. Despite his success and his huge range of prominent friends, he had been on the verge of despair for most of his life. As the date of this quotation shows, he already felt that way while the Weimar Republic was still in one piece. He had felt that way at the end of World War I. He had wanted a depoliticized world, and it was obvious that the war had had the opposite effect: it had shattered the foundations of society, but it had also reinforced politics to the point where nobody was exempt. By 1928, when Germany was enjoying an economic recovery which might have perpetuated the Weimar Republic if the Depression had not sealed democracy's fate, Zweig had reasons to modify his pessimism. But it deepened, because the political divisions in Europe were deepening too. From the start of his waking life, Zweig had staked everything on the concept of a coherent European humanist heritage. After the Nazis got in, there was nowhere for his pessimism to go except further into despair.
Franz Werfel said truly that Zweig was equipped to live in the countries of exile before there _was_ an exile. He was multilingual, he was famous all over the world, his manners were perfect and there was nowhere that his stream of royalties did not reach. But his personal success meant little to him outside the ambit of its original context. His final breakdown can be seen well under way in the _Tagebücher_ that he kept early in World War II. On page 410, we see that he was already carrying a phial of poison at the time of Dunkirk. On page 464, " _der Epoch der Sicherheit vorbei ist_ " (the epoch of security is over). The word vorbei keeps cropping up. "It is over. Europe finished, our world destroyed. Now we are truly homeless." By "we" Zweig didn't mean just the Jews, a category in which he was reluctant to believe until he found out the hard way that Hitler did. Zweig meant everyone who had lived for the arts, for scholarship and for humanism. He was wrong, of course: Thomas Mann was angry at the selfishness of Zweig's suicide—too personal. But that was the way Zweig felt, even as it became clear that the forces of destruction would not win the war. He thought that they had already won the war that mattered. We who grew up in the aftermath have a right to say that his resignation was premature, but we would be very foolish to slight its sincerity. Our united Europe of today will be doing very well if it can restore the qualities of which he was the living representative, and which led him to destroy himself because he thought they were irretrievably _vorbei_. The price of studying the heritage that produced him is to be steadily invaded by the suspicion that he might have been right. Reader beware.
That was why he read history and that was why he studied philosophy: not to educate himself or convince himself, but to see how other men had acted, and thus to measure himself beside others.
—STEFAN ZWEIG, _E UROPAISCHES ERBE_, P. 53
Zweig always wrote wonderfully about Montaigne, with whom he shared the gift of summarizing and assessing the actions of historical figures, although Zweig probably did it to a different end. Montaigne could have been a man of action: there were many official attempts to lure him out of his library, and one of them secured his services for a diplomatic initiative that probably saved France from ruin. Shakespeare, our supreme student of Montaigne, actually _was_ a man of action for most of his life: the theatre was no cloister, and nobody could have invented Timon of Athens who had not dealt with practical matters, kept the hirelings in line, and acknowledged the power of an account book. Zweig, however, was a man of letters in the most usually accepted sense: i.e., he was not a man of anything else. His gallery of portraits of the mighty, stretching through his writings like the Uffizi collection through its long corridor, does not lead to a paradigm of action, except to the extent that to achieve understanding is an action in itself. There is something passive about Zweig, and, human nature being what it is, the passive invites a kicking. Critics capable of being sensitive about anyone else still find it permissible to be insensitive about him. While he was alive, they found it mandatory. Is he really, they used to ask, any better than Emil Ludwig, who lives high in rented villas and plush hotels while cranking out glib historical success stories to convince Philistine businessmen that they are really Napoleon? Doesn't Zweig, by lavishing the same sympathy on both, reduce Erasmus to the level of Marie-Antoinette? Where is the man, behind that universal curiosity and suspiciously mellifluous style?
Well, the answer is that he is not behind them: he is in them. Zweig was the sum total of his appreciations, to which his style gave the spiritual unity that they never had in life. For those of us reading German as a language not our first, there is always a tendency to be too grateful for the writer who makes it easy. But Zweig makes it better than easy: he makes it effortless. There are whole pages that the beginner can sail through and leave the dictionary until later, because the impetus makes the syntax unmistakeable. Much of his prose rhythm is poetic in the raw sense of being laid out with the specific, point-to-point vividness of verse. Often you will find Zweig writing a clause that you could match to a line by Rilke. They were soulmates, although you can bet, as so often with Zweig, that the admiration was more selfless from his direction than from the other. Rilke and Zweig visited André Chénier's tomb together. Zweig was the one better equipped to appreciate the generosity of Chénier's last night on Earth, which he spent comforting an aristocratic young lady against the chill prospect of the morning, when they would both be taken from the Conciergerie to be guillotined. Rilke would have been more interested in her coat of arms.
The difference between Rilke and Zweig was crucial. Rilke was a mighty lover of the arts, but even that love redounded to his own glory. All that he adored was absorbed into his personal style. He glossed the world over with his own preciosity. Zweig was more humble. He could imagine a world without himself, and when the time came he made what he imagined real. (It is hard to conceive of Rilke committing suicide: how could the world have stood the deprivation?) Yet both of them are glories of twentieth-century literature in the German language. Their books are lined up in the most fruitful kind of competition, in which neither contestant can really replace the other. Collecting Zweig's books is made the more delicious by the variety of formats and publishers. Rilke, even after his death, went on and on in the standard format lovingly chosen for him by Insel Verlag. But the gulf between the physical uniformity of Rilke's books and the physical variety of Zweig's invites us to look for a deeper clue. We can find it in the dates on the title page. Insel Verlag was permitted to go on publishing Rilke in Germany right through the Nazi era. Zweig's books had no single home, and least of all were they at home in Germany and Austria while the Nazis were in power. While Goebbels ruled German culture, the state had no fundamental quarrel with Rilke's humanism. It proscribed Zweig's humanism because Zweig was a Jew. There is a reminder, there, that we should not get carried away by the idea that totalitarianism can't put up with the humanist love of the arts and learning. Josef Brodsky said that Osip Mandelstam was proscribed because his lyricism was intolerable to the state. No doubt it was, but it is even more likely that he was proscribed because he wrote something rude about Stalin. Even the Soviet Union, which was much more thoroughly censorious than Nazi Germany, put up with quite a lot of overt love for the arts. The pre-revolutionary repertoire of classical ballet, for example, was never taken away from the people. (In Communist China it was: one of the several measures by which the Maoists, and especially Madame Mao, were even more insane than the Stalinists). To avoid sentimentality, we should be ready to accept the possibility that an all-knowing state will know enough to co-opt the arts by letting people love them, as long as that love does not interfere with the state's ideological precepts. A smart bad state could afford to let the arts survive, because it would know that they are better at encouraging contentment than arousing rebellion. We should beware, then, of their seduction. Liberals and humanists are always saying that art is the soul of truth. But they are quite often ignoring the truth while they say so.
The most seductive thing about literature is the books. They are a token of how self-contained it all is, or at any rate appears to be. A printed book is actually a miracle of technology that took more than five hundred years to develop, but it does not look or feel impossibly far from the notebook and the pen that are all it takes for us to get a printed book started. For the musician, things are not always so portable. Some of the instruments are beautiful, and increasingly the instrumentalists are beautiful too—female violinists get spreads in Vogue. But a composer can't carry his orchestra around with him, and there were no good old days in which the composer for even a single instrument, except perhaps if he concentrated on the piccolo, could pull it out of his pocket. Chopin never pushed his piano into a café. The painters used to draw in the café but were rarely allowed to paint there. Not only can the writer read in the café, he can write. And the day might always come when the book he reads in the café is the book he wrote. When he looks at his own sentences in print, he will find them transformed. The better they are—let us suppose that he can tell bad from good even when reading his own stuff—the more they will sound as if he didn't write them. They will sound as if they were written by the single voice that all good writers seem to share when at their closest to the truth.
When children carefully inscribe their names at the front of their school-books they add their address to the name, and then add the information that the address is in a certain country, which is in the world, which is in the universe. They are trying to raise their names to universality. Print does all that for you. Print leaves your sedulously practised signature behind, along with your personal handwriting. Strangely enough, this process does not feel like the weakening of identity, but the strengthening of it. We must tread carefully here, because that feeling of having one's identity strengthened by being absorbed into a mass is at the heart of fascism's appeal in all its varieties. But the writers don't cease to be themselves: far from it. They aren't marching anywhere, they look implausible in uniform, and they have a petulant reluctance to give up responsibility for what they say. They might blend together in print, but they become, through being printed, more individual than ever. My heroes and heroines in this book would not only have been less famous if they had never been published, they would have been less defined as characters. It was being published, even after his death, that brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women. As things are, he defines the anguish of an epoch. Albert Camus would have been just a man who got everywhere with women. As things are, he is the exemplar of liberalism as the awkward truth. Anna Akhmatova would have been just a woman who broke men's hearts. As things are, she is remembered forever as the poet who answered the prayer of innocent victims to define the nightmare that had broken the heart of her country.
You can say, if you like, that in every case the private person was the real one. But it would be a very thin conception of what a person is, and a hopelessly impoverished version of reality. Our lives are enriched by people who create works of art better than their personalities: the best excuse for the rogues among them, and the best reason for our raising the virtuous to the plane of worship. The latter reaction might seem extravagant, but we should watch out for those who say so: they are much more short on reverence than we are on judgement. There is an unmistakeable continuity between holy scripture and the accumulated secular text we call literary culture. All we have to remember is that infallibility plays no part in it. On the contrary: fallibility is of the essence. The phrase "it is written" is automatically suspect, especially when the written words are printed. The authoritative typeface might be devoted to an insidious lie. Or there might simply be a misprint. My final quotation, the only anonymous one in the book, is chosen with that possibility in mind.
CODA
Kun-Han-Su
ECKSTEIN AND THE EGYPTIAN KINGHOPPER
Kun-Han-Su
—AN ANONYMOUS TYPESETTER
WHEN THE Vienna newspaper _Presse_ carried a story about the latest poem by Kun-Han-Su, nobody in the Café Imperial had ever heard of Kun-Han-Su except for Eckstein, who knew all about him. Eckstein, referred to always and only by his last name, was famous for knowing absolutely everything. Eckstein told his young admirers about the creative heights to which Kun-Han-Su had carried some of the ancient verse forms under one of the last emperors of the Ming dynasty. Next day the _Presse_ regretfully announced that "Kun-Han-Su" had been a misprint for Knut Hamsun. It transpired that Eckstein had known all about the misprint, and indeed could give an account of misprints, in all languages, throughout the ages.
Eckstein's universal knowledge was also memorably proved when he was out walking with Hofmannsthal and Hofmannsthal's beautiful daughter, Christiane. They saw a hopping bird. Eckstein identified it as an Egyptian kinghopper. "It can't fly," he expatiated. "It can move forward only by hopping. It spends the winter in Egypt, hence the name." Hofmannsthal looked around, saw no persuasive evidence that this conversation was taking place anywhere except in Vienna, and mildly objected: "You said only just now that the bird couldn't fly." Eckstein said: " _That_ far it can fly."
These stories about Eckstein are told by Friedrich Torberg in his _Die Tante Jolesch_ , with due acknowledgement that Eckstein really was a very learned man. In his youth Eckstein was a pupil of Anton Bruckner, and later on he wrote an important monograph about his teacher. Eckstein was enormously well read. He just couldn't bear to admit that there was something he had missed. It is very easy to get that reputation. When strangers know that your speciality is books, their usual way of breaking the ice is to ask you if you have read such-and-such a book. The penalty for saying no is to hear a précis. The quickest way out of a potentially boring conversation is to say yes. But it only takes one smart-arse to test you with a fake title and you're cooked.
As the alert reader will have often noticed, this has not really been Eckstein's book, even when it most seems to be. I have not read everything, nor have I remembered everything I have read. What I tried to do was keep some of it with me and draw lessons from it. Hegel once said that neither a people nor its government could learn much from history. Had he lived to see the twentieth century, he would have found his belief confirmed after World War I, when the victorious powers, pooling their wisdom in the conference at Versailles, carefully laid down the conditions to ensure that the catastrophe which they had barely survived would be soon repeated. There were observers—John Maynard Keynes was one—who guessed what would happen next. But even among them, few were prescient about the scale of the horror. Thinkers who had seen a million soldiers die concluded that the enemy was war itself. They didn't foresee that millions of innocent civilians would die next. They thought that peace could be made a principle. But peace is not a principle: merely a desirable state of affairs. The only answer to Hitler was a contrary violence. There were intellectuals who refused to believe it. There were still more intellectuals who refused to believe that in the Soviet Union the real enemy of the people was the Communist Party: the enemy of its own people, and of any other people living under democratically elected governments. It would be wrong to conclude, however, that there was something about being an intellectual that precluded the seeing of the truth. There wasn't then and there isn't now. For all but the born prodigy of common sense, opinions are arrived at by the sifting of opinion. The process might occasionally lead to error, but ignorance will lead to error always. So we seek out the best of what is said on weighty matters, and naturally assume that the very best resides amongst what is said well.
There is a danger there, as I have tried to point out. Any effective writer of expository prose is an artist of a kind, and artists give shape to the facts. But facts are recalcitrant, and often they refuse to fit, especially when political. The artist who fancies himself above politics is tacitly conceding that the world is too much for him, even as the concession gives him freedom. It can be a fine freedom, but it counts for nothing beside the freedom of the common people, and when the discrepancy shows up with tragic force, we are right to call a halt to our admiration, and ask: is this really so well expressed, if reality is so very different? We question, that is, the earthbound soul behind the transcendental work. To say so might seem to let in the incubus of biographical enquiry, and thus issue a licence to every dunce who wants to make a living out of the elementary revelation that our idols have feet of clay. But there was never any humanism without humans. The only peril is that we will stop short, by failing to realize that the personality of the creator is a created marvel in itself, and all the more so for its weaknesses, which are close to the source of its inspiration. Fame is not the spur. Fame is the result. Creativity starts in the well of human feeling which for want of a better single word we call the soul. It is more glamorous and exciting to believe that creativity starts in the gift; but by what has happened to some gifts we can see that the soul is where they came from, and is what reaches us even when we fight shy of reaching it. Among my hero Alfred Polgar's fellow émigré writers who praised his accomplishments, most felt compelled to frame their encomia as aphorisms that would equal his for brilliance, as if style were the thing in question. And so it was, but the style came from a cast of mind, which the comparatively unspectacular journalist Hans Sahl had the simple boldness to define. He said that Polgar had a spiritual superiority that could transmit the terrible, and that he was not only clever and witty, but wise.
The getting of wisdom is a hard road. Most of us are not equipped by nature to travel it at high speed, and some of us must crawl like babies. Our chafed hands and knees can easily make us wonder if the journey is worth it. If I could go back in time and design my own birth, I would introduce the genetic material that might have made me a bit less of a dunderhead. Even today, in my seventh decade, I meet people forty years younger who are patently more sensible than I was when I set off on my great adventure. I was their age then, but they are my age now: old heads on young shoulders. What I had to learn by trial and error, they seem to have been born knowing. But perhaps they have had the luck to be born into a better time. If so, and if they are to stay lucky, the worse time had better not come back. For those it didn't kill or maim, it injured the air. Uncertainty was something we all breathed in, back then. The horrors of the past and present made us nervous about the future, and the habit is hard to shake. The young might do well to tie a handkerchief over the rear-view mirror and just get on with it. The world is turning into one big liberal democracy anyway. Terrorism will punch angry holes in it, but in the long run nothing will stop the planetary transformation. Even if armed with a second-hand atomic bomb, an obscurantist can do nothing for the poor. Most of the poverty on Earth is caused by the number of people being born who would ordinarily have never been conceived. Prosperity gave them life. All too frequently the life seems not worth living, but when we cry out at the injustice we are asking for more democracy, not less. Subsidiary populations that migrate into the liberal democracies are seeking a legitimate economic advantage in comparison to the homelands they left. They are understandably reluctant to accept that their economic disadvantage in the homelands they left might have been at least partly due to the culture they grew up in. In their adopted countries they are often encouraged in this reluctance by local humanitarians who think it illiberal for an imported culture to be criticized for its backwardness. But when the zealous young men of the imported culture begin to practise terrorism under the encouragement of their religious leaders, even the local absolutists for human rights come to see the point of restricting the freedom of religious leaders to preach violence against the adopted state. So eventually the rule of law under an elected, replaceable government will have even the humanitarians behind it. It can't lose. Why, then, bother to ponder how we got out of the maelstrom? Why be an Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one in three and boreth them to tears? The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency—which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail—began in humanism, and can't long continue without it.
How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don't know how it was put together? It was the human mind that got us this far, by considering what had happened in history; by considering the good that had been done, and resolving to do likewise; and by considering the evil, and resolving to avoid its repetition. Much of the evil, alas, was in the mind itself. The mind took account of that too. The mind is the one collectivity that the free individual can thrive in: which is lucky, because live in it he must. Even within ourselves, there are many voices. Hegel, when he said that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the best thing about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I SHOULD THANK Peter Straus, at that time Picador's chief editor in London, for listening to my first idea of this book and thinking it might be worth a try. Andrew Kidd, who succeeded to the command post at Picador, also deserves thanks for trusting me when I kept on saying that the only way I could define the book was that it would define itself. My deepest and longest thanks, however, must surely go to Robert Weil of W. W. Norton, who not only believed in the project from its formative stages, but gave it knowledgeable and detailed editorial attention from page to page as it steadily accumulated in his office on Fifth Avenue. If things got to the point that he had to schedule an editorial session for his flight back to New York from a conference in China, still he did not give up, and every comment he made in the margin was pertinent. In the spiritual sense, this book would not be the same without him: he was its ideal reader. In the physical sense, it would not be here at all without Cécile Menon. In her plural role as my secretary, assistant, _Webmeisterin_ , chief executive officer and personal trainer, she found time, among her many other tasks, to teach me the computer skills without which any hypertext becomes a runaway train. In most cases, teaching me consisted in realizing once again that I was a hopeless case, and she simply pressed the buttons needed to save the day. To take a single point, it took her no more than two minutes to track down exactly what Cocteau said about the chameleon on the tartan. Thus she saved me desperate hours, and I can only hope that this book will be of as much use to her generation of hungry young culture-vultures as her brilliance and diligence have been to me. A final but vital acknowledgement should go to my copy editor, Trent Duffy, who, as well as spotting ambiguities lurking in the syntax, saved me from many serious blunders, including the results of my irritating mental habit of writing "Milos Forman" for "Louis Malle"—a conspicuous instance of the embarrassing phenomenon known to clinical psychologists as the Malle-Forman malformation.
A book of this kind can be especially taxing in its very last stages of preparation, when the correcting of details persistently adds more details to be corrected. But without the generous donation of time by family members and family friends, far too many blunders on my part would have been enshrined in print. It took Tom Mayer at Norton, however, to ensure that the process of correcting the corrections did not finish off the author along with the book, and I thank him with a whole heart, if not quite, any longer, a whole mind.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Many thanks are due Ruth Mandel at Images Sought and Found for her outstanding photograph research and perseverance in uncovering images of even the most elusive subjects.
Overture: Vienna, © Collection Roger-Viollet
Anna Akhmatova, © Collection Roger-Viollet
Peter Altenberg, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Louis Armstrong, Library of Congress
Raymond Aron, © Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Walter Benjamin, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Marc Bloch, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet
Jorge Luis Borges, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Robert Brasillach, © LAPI-/Roger-Viollet
Sir Thomas Browne, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Albert Camus, © Yousuf Karsh/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Dick Cavett, Frank Capri/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Paul Celan, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Chamfort, © Collection Roger-Viollet
Coco Chanel, © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet
Charles Chaplin, The Granger Collection, New York
Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
G. K. Chesterton, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Jean Cocteau, © Yousuf Karsh/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Gianfranco Contini, © GIOVANNETTI Giovanni/GRAZIA NERI
Benedetto Croce, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet
Tony Curtis, ©John Spring Collection/CORBIS
Ernst Robert Curtius, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Miles Davis, © Bettmann/CORBIS
Sergei Diaghilev, © Bettmann/CORBIS
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet
Alfred Einstein, Smith College Archives, Smith College
Duke Ellington, © Bettmann/CORBIS
Federico Fellini, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
W. C. Fields, © Bettmann/CORBIS
F. Scott Fitzgerald, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Gustave Flaubert, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS
Sigmund Freud, © CORBIS
Egon Friedell, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
François Furet, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA
Charles de Gaulle, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Edward Gibbon, Portrait of Edward Gibbon (1737–94) (oil on canvas) (b/w photo) by English School (18th century). © Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library
Terry Gilliam, © Corbis
Josef Goebbels, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Witold Gombrowicz, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA
William Hazlitt, National Portrait Gallery, London
Hegel, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Heinrich Heine, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet
Adolf Hitler, © Bettmann/CORBIS
Ricarda Huch, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Ernst Jünger, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA
Franz Kafka, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
John Keats, © Corbis
Leszek Kolakowski, Courtesy of the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress.
Alexandra Kollontai, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Heda Margolius Kovaly, © John Foley Photographe Studio Opale
Karl Kraus, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Städtisches Museum Göttingen.
Norman Mailer, © Mark Gerson/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Nadezhda Mandelstam, © Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum
Golo Mann, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Heinrich Mann, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Michael Mann, AP Images
Thomas Mann, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Mao Zedong, AP Images
Chris Marker, Source: British Film Institute
John McCloy, W. Eugene Smith, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Zinka Milanov, The Metropolitan Opera Archives
Czeslaw Milosz, AP Images
Eugenio Montale, © Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos
Montesquieu, The Granger Collection, New York
Alan Moorehead, © Getty Images
Paul Muratov, reprinted from Neulovimoe sozdane: vstrechi, vospominaniia, pisma; by Inna Andreeva. Courtesy of the Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
Lewis Namier, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Grigory Ordzhonokidze, © Sovfoto
Octavio Paz, Steve Northup/Timepix/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Alfred Polgar, Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Beatrix Potter, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Jean Prévost, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet
Marcel Proust, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Edgar Quinet, © Collection Roger-Viollet
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Jean-François Revel, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA
Richard Rhodes, Courtesy of Gail Evenari
Rainer Maria Rilke, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Virginio Rognoni, AP Images
Ernesto Sabato, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Edward Said, © Jerry Bauer/Grazia Neri
Sainte-Beuve, Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY
José Saramago, © 1998 Nobel Foundation
Jean-Paul Sartre, © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet
Erik Satie, © Collection Roger-Viollet
Arthur Schnitzler, Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Sophie Scholl, Reprinted from Scholl, Inge, Die Weisse Rose: Erweierte Neuausgabe, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Maim, May 1955
Wolf Jobst Siedler, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Manés Sperber, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Tacitus, The Granger Collection, New York
Margaret Thatcher, © Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Henning von Tresckow, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Leon Trotsky, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
Karl Tschuppik, Reproduction of the title page of his work Marie-Thérèse, Éditions Bernard Grasset, Paris.
Dubravka Ugresic, © Jerry Bauer
Miguel de Unamuno, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Pedro Henriquez Ureña, reprinted from Obra Fotografica en la Argentina; by Greta Stern. Art & Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Paul Valéry, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Mario Vargas Llosa, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Evelyn Waugh, © Yousuf Karsh/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Isoroku Yamamoto, AP Images
Alexandr Zinoviev, Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Carl Zuckmayer, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
Stefan Zweig, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York
INDEX
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text.
Acheson, Dean, 470, 473, 474, 476, 477–78
Acton, John Dalberg, Lord, 504–5, 542
Adams, Henry, 299, 471
Adler, Alfred, 716
Adonis, 656
Adorno, Theodor, 103–4
Aeschylus, 390
Agnelli, Gianni, 627
Agricola, Gnaeus Julius, 729
Akhmatova, Anna, xxvi, 5, 11–15, 415, 417, 843
Alain-Fournier, 351, 791
Albee, Edward, 704
Alcibiades, 507
Alexander Severus, Emperor of Rome, 264
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi, 223, 364
Ali, Tariq, 651
Alice Springs, xxi
Allen, Woody, 206
Allyson, June, 435
Almodóvar, Pedro, 271
Altenberg, Peter, 5, 16–22, 233–34, 345, 751
Alvarez, A., 817
Amis, Kingsley, 303, 348, 350, 383, 396–97, 404, 604, 784, 797, 799–800
Amis, Martin, 301, 497, 610
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 612
Andropov, Yuri, 247–48, 552
Annan, Kofi, 466–67
Antony, Mark, 505
Arafat, Yasser, 541, 651
Aragon, Louis, xxvi, 178
Archer, Jeffrey, 232, 313
Arendt, Hannah, 54, 105, 227, 307, 566, 617, 703
Ariosto, Ludovico, 450
Aristophanes, 186, 392
Aristotle, 732
Arkin, Alan, 153
Arletty, 112, 131
Armstrong, Louis, 23–30, 164
Aron, Raymond, xxvi, 31–44, 87, 354, 357, 600, 606, 670, 685, 687
Ashbery, John, 495
Ashkenazy, Vladimir, 622
Assouline, Pierre, 176
Astaire, Fred, 25–26, 439
Astre de la Vigerie, Emmanuel d', 178
Aubrey, John, 799
Auchinleck, Claude, 521
Auden, W. H., 82, 83, 138, 140, 172, 173, 274, 390, 404, 571, 618, 663, 703
Auerbach, Erich, 338–39
Augustus, Emperor of Rome, 266, 505
Austen, Jane, 71, 117
Autolycus, 61
Avernheimer, Raoul, 567–68
Avril, Jane, 392
Axelrod, George, 438
Baba (tango fan), 647
Bach, Johann Sebastian, xxi, 185, 217
Bahr, Hermann, 567
Bailey, Derek, 499
Bailey, Philip, 447
Bakst, Léon, 169
Bakunin, Mikhail, 331
Balanchine, George, 13, 21, 171
Baldick, Robert, 659
Balzac, Honoré de, 156, 173, 212, 834
Bankhead, Tallulah, 596
Barber, Samuel, 197
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules-Amédée, 323
Barbirolli, John, 394
Barenboim, Daniel, 651
Barker, George, 81
Bar Lev, Chaim, 629
Barres, Maurice, 75
Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 13
Basie, William "Count," 27, 191
Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 49, 323, 575, 788
Baudrillard, Jean, 60, 673
Bauer, Felice, 347
Baxter, John, 202
Bayley, John, 486
Beach, Sylvia, 79
Beauvoir, Simone de, 606, 669–70, 674, 677–78
Beaverbrook, Baron, 483, 518
Beccaria, Cesare, Marquis of, 732
Bechet, Sidney, 25
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 127, 171, 184, 186, 217, 393–94, 579, 619
Begin, Menachem, 629
Beiderbecke, Bix, 24, 25, 27–28, 30
Bellini, Vincenzo, 186, 351
Belloc, Hilaire, 122, 124
Bellow, Saul, 301, 367, 410
Bely, Andrei, xxv
Benes , Edvard, 757
Ben-Gurion, David, 629
Benjamin, Walter, 47–56, 307, 529, 596
Benois, Aleksandr, 169
Béraud, Henri, 179
Berberova, Nina, 15, 525
Berdyayev, Nikolay, 402
Berg, Alban Maria Johannes, 29
Beria, Lavrenty, 273, 400
Berlin, Isaiah, 12, 230, 357, 502, 536, 540, 687, 804
Berman, Paul, 471
Bernard, Jeffrey, 17–18
Bernstein, Leonard, 29–30
Best, George, 164–65
Bevin, Ernest, 629
bin Ladin, Osama, 749–50
Bishop, Elizabeth, 784
Bizet, Georges, 186, 349
Bjoerling, Jussi, 482
Blainey, Geoffrey, 519
Blair, Tony, 120, 490, 737
Blavatsky, Helena, 241
Blesh, Rudi, 24
Blobel, Paul, 547
Bloch, Ernst, 49
Bloch, Marc, 57–62, 575, 577
Blunck, Hans-Friedrich, 717
Bogart, Humphrey, 88, 164, 613
Bohlen, Charles "Chip," 470, 473
Böhm, Karl, 619
Bohr, Niels, 611
Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 595
Bonnard, Pierre, 386
Borges, Jorge Luis, 63–71, 134, 558, 640, 644, 793–94
Borgnine, Ernest, 711
Bormann, Martin, 243, 330
Borutin, Sidonie Nadherny von, 370, 372–73, 375
Boswell, James, 232
Boulting, Ingrid, 152
Bowlby, John, 725
Braak, Menno ter, 453
Brahms, Caryl, 437
Brahms, Johannes, xxi, 836
Branagh, Kenneth, 778
Brancusi, Constantin, 92
Brandauer, Klaus Maria, 693
Brando, Marlon, 152–53, 655
Brasillach, Robert, xxvi, 35, 72–76, 177, 179, 575, 674
Brassens, Georges, 126
Brasseur, Pierre, 674
Braun, Eva, 691
Brecht, Bertolt, xviii, xxv, xxvi, 54, 337, 358, 395, 612, 614–16, 617–18, 623, 656, 672, 831
Breker, Arno, 708
Brel, Jacques, 126
Brendel, Alfred, 232, 569
Brezhnev, Leonid, 90, 247, 552
Brickhill, Paul, 518–19
Bricmont, Jean, 673
Broch, Hermann, 233
Brod, Max, 344
Brodney, Oscar, 149
Brodsky, Josef, 137, 841
Bronnen, Arnolt, 831–32
Bronzino, Agnolo, 528
Brooks, Mel, 281
Brown, Frederick, 129
Browne, Thomas, 77–84, 304
Browning, Robert, 122, 124, 238, 348, 451, 784
Bruce, Lenny, 18–19, 369
Bruckner, Josef Anton, 836, 848
Brummell, Beau, 616
Büchner, Friedrich, 323, 349, 352, 566
Buckle, Richard, 170
Buenos Aires, 63, 68
Bukharin, Nicolay, 355, 357–58, 722
Bullock, Alan, 322, 430–31
Bundy, McGeorge, 33
Bunge, Gustav von, 237
Buñuel, Luis, 399
Burckhardt, Jacob, xiii, 351, 527, 529
Burgess, Anthony, 105
Burke, Edmund, 300, 301–2, 304
Burleigh, Michael, 356, 453
Burns, Robert, 447
Burrows, Abe, 95
Burton, Richard, xxix, 690–92, 693–94, 695
Bush, George W., 695
Bush, Kate, 40
Busoni, Ferrnuccio, 581, 834
Bussell, Darcey, xxi, 499
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 284–85, 313, 372, 450, 451
Cade, Jack, 418
Cadicamo, Enrico, 647
Cage, John, 681
Caligula, Emperor of Rome, 505
Callas, Maria, 483
Callow, Simon, 778
Calvino, Italo, 81, 140–41
Cameron, James, 382
Camões, Luíz Vaz de, 450
Camus, Albert, xxvi, 21, 34–36, 37, 39, 87–93, 129, 179, 577, 632, 655, 670, 677–78, 791, 843
Canetti, Elias, 77
Canning, George, 542
apek, Karel, 444, 453
Capone, Al, 467
Capote, Truman, 98, 438
Caracalla, Emperor of Rome, 264
Caravaggio, 394–95
Carey, John, 580, 797
Carney, Harry, 194
Carroll, Lewis, 203
Carson, Johnny, 94, 95, 96, 98, 205
Carter, William C., 580
Casanova, Giovanni Giacomo, 20
Casares, Maria, 129
Casaubon, Edward, 50
Castro, Fidel, 90–91, 360, 688–89
Catullus, 139
Cavafy, Constantine, 295, 400
Cavett, Dick, 94–100, 205
Ceau escu, Elena, 92
Ceau escu, Nicolae, 273, 688
Celan, Paul, 101–5
Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, xviii, xxvi, 74, 92
Cervantes, Miguel de, 700
Chamfort, 106–9
Chandler, Raymond, 80, 367
Chanel, Gabrielle "Coco," 110–14
Chang, Jung, 415, 455–56, 457, 551
Chaplin, Charles, 115–18, 206, 446
Chardonne, Jacques, 674
Charisse, Cyd, 60
Charteris, Leslie, 80
Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René de, 108, 834
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 124
Chaudhuri, Nirad C., 119–21
Chekhov, Anton, 349, 405, 699
Chénier, André, 351, 841
Chesterton, G. K., 122–27
Chevalier, Maurice, 131
Chicago, 6
Chile, 70
China, xviii
Chopin, Frédéric, 295, 296, 351, 619, 681, 842
Christian, Charlie, 26, 27
Churchill, Winston, 259, 384, 474, 510
Cicero, 732
Cioran, E. M., 67, 793
Clare, George, 3, 233, 834
Clark, Kenneth, 230, 304, 548
Clarke, Alan, 512
Claudel, Paul, 618
Clausewitz, Carl von, 43
Cobb, Richard, 55
Cocteau, Jean, 36, 128–32, 169, 681, 682
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 348, 391, 566
Collingwood, R. G., 145
Coltrane, John, 29, 190, 191–92
Comden, Betty, 439
Connolly, Cyril, 172, 768
Conrad, Joseph, 386, 536
Constantine I, Emperor of Rome, 269
Contini, Gianfranco, 133–44, 155, 157, 158, 786
Cooper, James Fenimore, 383
Copland, Aaron, 197
Coppola, Francis Ford, 382
Corbière, Tristan, 143
Coriolanus, 509
Cortázar, Julio, 790
Cortot, Alfred, 619
Corvo, Baron, 682
Costa-Gavras, 653–54
Costner, Kevin, 438
Cousteau, Jacques, 701
Covent Garden, xxi
Cowley, Malcolm, 784
Crane, Hart, 196
Crawford, Cindy, 398
Crawford, Joan, 313
Cripps, Stafford, 521
Croce, Benedetto, xiii, 125, 137, 145–47, 305, 307–8, 390, 446, 734, 749, 771, 786, 787
Crossman, R. H. S., 267
Cummings, E. E., 17, 663
Curtis, Tony, xxvi, 148–53
Curtius, Ernst Robert, 143–44, 154–60, 340, 660
Cuvilliés, François de, 263
Czechoslovakia, 34
Dahl, Roald, 571
D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 492
Dante Alighieri, 19, 125, 133, 137, 139, 141, 143, 144, 155, 158, 447, 450, 492, 834
Darío, Rubén, 558, 769, 773, 792–93
Darwin, Charles, 338
Davies, Marion, 613–14
Davis, Miles, 163–68
de Berniere, Louis, 126
Debray, Regis, 605–6, 633
Debussy, Claude, 680, 681, 682
Defoe, Daniel, 323
Degas, Edgar, 350, 393, 509, 643, 784, 787
de Gaulle, Anne, 258
de Gaulle, Charles, 38, 44, 108, 257–60, 291, 631, 654, 678, 784
de Gaulle, Elisabeth, 258
DeLillo, Don, 135
Del Sarto, Andrea, 526, 527, 528
Demosthenes, 732
Deneuve, Catherine, 399
De Niro, Robert, 151–52, 435–36
Denk, Bertha Maria, 370
De Quincey, Thomas, 323
Derrida, Jacques, 60, 671
Desai, Anita, 119
Descartes, René, 672
Desmoulins, Camille, 107
Desosse, Valentin le, 392
D'Este, Carlo, 383–84
Deutsch, Babette, 617
Diaghilev, Sergei, 13, 21, 110, 128, 169–74, 189, 524, 529, 681
Diamond, I. A. L., 152
DiCaprio, Leonardo, 302
Dickens, Charles, xvii, 122, 124, 834
Dietrich, Marlene, 66, 428, 563, 831
Diocletian, Emperor of Rome, 266
Dirks, Carl, 539, 746
Discepolo, Enrique Santos, 644
Disraeli, Benjamin, 303
Domitian, Emperor of Rome, 729, 730
Donen, Stanley, 439
Dönitz, Karl, 715
Donne, John, 20, 136, 139
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 212, 323, 498, 834
Douglas, Alfred, Lord, 233
Douglas-Home, Robin, 736
Dowell, Anthony, 499
Dozier, James Lee, 625–26
Drabble, Margaret, 800
Dreiser, Theodore, 212
Drew, Elizabeth, 471
Dreyfus, Alfred, 580
Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 35, 75, 175–79, 324, 575, 674, 784
Drummond, John, 170, 294
Dryden, John, 136
Duchovny, David, 399
Dufay, François, 157
Du Genettes, Mme. Roger, 221
Duncan, Isadora, 776
Duparc, Henri, 126, 185
du Pré, Jacqueline, 29
Durkheim, Émile, 31
Dylan, Bob, 163
Dymant, Dora, 347
Eastwood, Clint, 690, 692
Eban, Abba, 541
Eckstein, 847–48
Edinburgh, Duke of, 737–38
Edwards, Blake, 150
Edward VIII, King of England, 283
Eichmann, Karl Adolph, 288
Einstein, Albert, 50, 116, 117–18, 127, 183, 776–77
Einstein, Alfred, 183–87, 351
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 521
Elgar, Edward William, 29
Eliot, T. S., 60, 82, 92, 139, 142, 143–44, 157, 159, 302, 340, 447, 488, 663, 771, 783
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 222, 383, 735
Ellington, Edward Kennedy "Duke," xxv-xxvi, 29, 188–97, 482, 647
Empson, William, 138
Enright, D. J., 579
Erasmus, 66, 840
Eratosthenes, 66
Eszterhas, Joe, 437
Faber-Castell, Gräfin, 285
Fallaci, Oriana, 761
Farrell, Suzanne, 21
Faulkner, William, 80
Faure, Elie, 603
Fauré, Gabriel-Urbain, 126, 185
Faye, Jean Pierre, 323
Febres, Laura, 775
Fedak-Molnár, Sari, 232
Fellini, Federico, 201–4, 272, 627
Felstiner, John, 102
Ferguson, Niall, 374
Fermi, Enrico, 609, 627
Ferzetti, Gabriele, 654
Fest, Joachim, 430, 716, 718
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 451
Feynman, Richard, 380
Fields, W. C., 95, 205–8, 643, 838
Figes, Orlando, 749
Fink, Carole, 57
Finkielkraut, Alain, 33, 251
Finney, Albert, 778
Firbank, Ronald, 213, 301
Fitzgerald, Ella, 26
Fitzgerald, Frances, 210, 212, 219
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 174, 209–19, 403, 437, 838
Fizdale, Robert, 129
Flanagan, Richard, 463
Flanner, Janet, 55
Flaubert, Gustave, 185, 212, 220–23, 385, 403, 413, 493, 658, 660, 772
Flecker, James Elroy, 79
Flockhart, Calista, 152
Flynn, Errol, 517
Fonda, Jane, 331
Fontane, Theodore, 593
Foot, Michael, 740
Foote, Shelby, 262
Ford, Ford Madox, 27, 171
Forman, Milos, 66
Forster, E. M., 396, 582
Forsyth, Frederick, 736–37
Foster, Jodie, 713
Foucault, Michel Paul, 60, 671
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 733
Franco, Francisco, 767
Frank, Anne, 709, 712
Frayn, Michael, 498, 618
Frederick II, King of Prussia, 383, 530
Freed, Arthur, 439
Freeman, Morgan, 437
Freisler, Roland, 707
Freud, Adolfine, 227
Freud, Marie, 227
Freud, Pauline, 227
Freud, Rosa, 227
Freud, Sigmund, xxvi, 1, 3, 4, 66, 224–29, 379, 395, 685, 698–99, 704, 726, 834
Friedan, Betty, 361
Friedell, Egon, xxii-xxiii, 4, 18, 62, 107, 230–49, 306, 390, 529, 530, 566, 568, 679
Friedländer, Max, 530
Frost, Robert, 142
Fry, Christopher, 736
Fuentes, Carlos, 769–70, 773–74, 790
Fujimori, Alberto, 791
Fukuyama, Francis, 248
Furet, François, 33, 250–53, 477, 586, 587, 600
Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 620
Gabor, Zsa Zsa, 484
Galassi, Jonathan, 493
Gandhi, Mahatma, 120, 522
Garbo, Greta, 313, 319–20
García Márquez, Gabriel, 81, 790
Garcin, Jérôme, 574–76
Gardel, Carlos, 644
Garfield, John, 150
Garton-Ash, Timothy, 757
Gauguin, Paul, 393
Gavazzeni, Gianandrea, 137
Gaye, Marvin, 29
Genda, Minoru, 820
Gentile, Giovanni, 145, 717
Gentz, Friedrich von, 422
George, Stefan, 232, 323
George III, King of England, 542, 754–55
George IV, King of England, 542
Gersdorff, Rudolf Freiherr von, 745
Geyl, Pieter, 262
Ghose, Zulfikar, 119
Gibbon, Edward, 261–70, 507
Gide, André, 68–69, 156, 157–58, 160, 178, 296
Gieseking, Walter, 619
Gillespie, Dizzy, 192
Gilliam, Terry, 271–79
Gillray, James, 755
Ginzburg, Evgenia, 362, 417
Glass, Philip, 495
Glass, Seymour, 711
Godard, Jean-Luc, 460
Goebbels, Josef, 93, 103, 241, 243–44, 274, 280–88, 287, 426, 649, 671, 841
Goering, Hermann, 244, 280, 282, 426, 530, 830, 831
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 75, 116, 172, 218, 285, 294, 312, 379, 385, 391, 442, 448, 527, 557, 594–95, 641, 677, 803, 833
Gold, Arthur, 129
Goldhagen, Daniel, 426, 513, 706
Goldkette, Jean, 27
Goldman, William, 436
Gombrich, E. H., 227, 425, 697
Gombrowicz, Rita, 290, 295
Gombrowicz, Witold, xiii, xxvi, 65, 68, 187, 289–96, 356, 383, 444, 486, 668
Goncourt, Edmond-Louise-Antoine Huot de, 108, 659
Goncourt, Jules-Alfred Huot de, 108, 659
Góngora y Argote, Luis de, 560
Gonsalves, Paul, 195
Goodman, Benny, 25, 26–27
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 247, 248
Gordian II, Emperor of Rome, 267
Gottwald, Klement, 366
Gould, Little Joe, 17
Graebe, Hermann, 732–33, 734
Gramsci, Antonio, 50, 147, 656
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, 631
Grant, Cary, 150, 152, 317
Grass, Günter, 81, 591, 597
Graves, Robert, 663
Green, Adolph, 439
Green, Julien, 296
Greene, Graham, 571, 597
Greer, Germaine, 261, 328, 331, 362
Gregorovius, Ferdinand, 262, 527, 752
Gresham, Sir Thomas, xxii
Greville, Fulke, 136
Grigson, Geoffrey, 785
Grillparzer, Franz, 835
Grote, George, 267
Groves, Leslie, 611
Grunbaum, Fritz, 235
Gründgens, Gustav, 830
Guderian, Heinz Wilhelm, 512, 812
Guilbert, Yvette, 392
Guillén, Nicolás, 666–67
Guitry, Sacha, 131, 567, 619
Gumilev, Nikolay, 11, 15
Gurdjieff, George Ivanovitch, 61
Gussmann, Olga, 703
Hagiwara, Tokutaro, 610
Hahn, Reynaldo, 126, 185
Haig, Douglas, 695
Halder, Franz, 539
Halifax, Lord, 283
Hall, Peter, 778
Hamilton, Alistair, 175
Hammett, Dashiell, 80
Hanser, Richard, 707
Hanslick, Edward, 660
Hardenberg, Hans, Graf von, 745
Hardy, Thomas, 144
Harriman, Averell, 470, 473, 475
Harrison, George, 319
Harwood, Ronald, 620
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 567, 620, 830
Hauser, Kaspar, 237
Havel, Vaclav, 66, 634, 756
Hawkins, Coleman, 190, 191
Hayward, Max, 415–16
Hayworth, Rita, 51
Hazlitt, William, 21, 299–304, 447, 538
Healey, Denis, 521
Heaney, Seamus, 308
Hearst, William Randolph, 613–14
Hecht, Anthony, xxiii
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Freidrich, 305–10, 379, 390, 603, 676, 803, 848, 851
Heidegger, Martin, 102, 158, 606, 621, 671, 672, 676–77
Heiden, Konrad, 430
Heine, Heinrich, xxvi, 75, 311–20, 564, 837
Heisenberg, Werner Karl, 686, 805
Heller, Gerhard, 178
Helpmann, Robert, 517
Hemingway, Ernest, 79–80, 211–12, 213, 214, 215–16, 301, 403–4, 518, 838
Henderson, Nicholas, 740
Hentoff, Nat, 167, 189
Heraclitus, 732
Herbert, George, 136
Hersh, Seymour, 472
Herzberg, Hendrick, 601
Herzl, Theodor, 3, 4, 53, 696, 699, 833
Hess, Rudolf, 92
Hesse, Hermann, 69
Heydrich, Reinhard, xviii, 426, 430, 442
Hillgruber, Andreas, 425
Himmler, Heinrich, 61, 243, 244, 273, 275, 280, 282, 284, 329, 330, 426–27, 549
Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 813, 820–21
Hitler, Adolf, xxi, xxv, xxvi-xxvii, xxix, 1, 3, 38, 40, 49, 53, 61, 62, 74, 92–93, 103, 115–16, 155, 159, 160, 178, 225, 227, 235, 243–45, 252, 259, 260, 262, 263, 274, 280, 282, 284, 285, 286–88, 304, 321–27, 329, 332, 337, 338, 368, 374, 394, 417, 421–22, 423, 425, 426–27, 430–31, 442, 444, 452, 453, 454, 455, 457, 463, 470, 506, 509–10, 512–13, 520, 530, 539, 564, 606, 620, 631, 649, 686–87, 697–99, 708, 717, 718, 721, 733, 739, 742–46, 752, 798, 829, 832, 835–36, 839, 848
Hoad, Lew, 401
Ho Chi Minh, 550–51, 688
Hodges, Johnny, 190, 196
Hoffenberg, Mason, 397–98
Hoffman, Dustin, 151
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 4, 17, 233, 323, 847
Höhne, Heinz, 547
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 833
Holiday, Billie, 26
Homer, 117, 125, 139, 386, 446–47, 451
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 124
Horace, 518
Howard, John, 463, 466, 467
Howe, Geoffrey, 736
Howe, James Wong, 151
Hubble, Edwin, 117
Huch, Ricarda, 328–33
Hughes, Howard, 680
Hughes, Robert, 518, 523
Hugo, Madame, 658
Hugo, Victor, 34, 131, 139, 143, 173, 313, 658, 788
Hulme, T. E., 112
Humphries, Barry, 682
Huneker, James Gibbons, 212, 302
Hussein, Saddam, 274, 505, 550
Husserl, Edmund, 672
Hutton, Timothy, 711
Huxley, Aldous, 124, 230
Ibsen, Henrik, 212, 567, 699, 704
Ingrams, Richard, 488
Isaacs, Jeremy, 548
Isaacson, Walter, 470, 473, 477
Isherwood, Christopher, 400
Ivan the Terrible, 272
Ives, Charles, 197
Jacquemard-de Gemeux, Christine, 159–60
James, C. L. R., 121
James, Henry, 97, 212, 385
Janssen, Karl-Heinz, 539, 746
Jarrell, Randall, 61, 412, 711
Jaspers, Karl, 54
Jesenská, Milena, 347
Jesus Christ, 490–91
Johnson, Samuel, 232, 290, 314, 659
Johst, Hanns, 831
Jones, James, 409
Jones, Joe, 195
Jones, Philly Joe, 195
Jong, Erica, 171
Jonson, Ben, 389
Joseph, Franz, 696, 751, 752, 753
Joseph, Gilbert, 673
Joseph, Keith, 735
Jouhandeau, Marcel, 674
Joyce, James, 343, 385, 450, 699–700, 834
Juana Inés de la Cruz, xxvi, 558–61
Judd, Ashley, 435, 437
Julius II, Pope, 786
Julius Caesar, 226, 383, 507, 508
Jünger, Ernst, xxvi, 108, 158, 178, 216, 323–24, 325–27, 337–40, 424, 715, 716, 733
Jungk, Robert, 611
Kafka, Franz, xxv, xxvi, 17, 272, 278, 279, 301, 343–47, 379, 417, 699, 803, 843
Kahlo, Frida, 748
Kainz, Albert, 234
Kaiser, Wolf, 615
Kalmar, Annie, 370
Kant, Immanuel, 307, 390
Kantorowicz, Ernst, 530
Karajan, Herbert von, 619, 832
Kardoff, Ursula von, 707
Karinthy, Friedrich, 232
Karsavina, Tamara, 170–71, 293–94, 776
Keats, John, 171, 174, 214, 348–52, 402, 447
Kelly, Gene, 149, 193, 439–40
Kelly, Grace, 165, 295
Kelly, Paul, 466, 467
Kempe, Rudolf, 619
Kendall, Henry, 136
Kennan, George, 470, 474, 475, 477, 540
Kennedy, John F., 609, 695
Kermode, Frank, 138, 387, 817
Kerr, Alfred, 641
Kerry, John, 695
Kershaw, Ian, 431
Keynes, John Maynard, 848
Khachaturian, Aram, 622
Khrushchev, Nikita, 247, 357, 366, 552, 722
Kierkegaard, Søren, 676
Kilmartin, Terence, 39, 579
Kilmer, Val, 435
Kim Il Sung, 91
King, Billie Jean, 331
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 167
Kingsmill, Hugh, 238
Kinnell, Galway, 82–83, 196
Kinski family, 756–57
Kipling, Rudyard, 63, 64, 618
Kirov, Sergei, 546, 547–48
Kirstein, Lincoln, 171
Kissinger, Henry, 33, 278, 753
Klein, Naomi, 359
Kleist, Berndt von, 745, 833
Klemperer, Otto, 619
Klemperer, Victor, 53, 156, 338–39, 340, 430, 506
Klimt, Gustav, 4, 5, 371–72
Knappertsbusch, Hans, 619
Knightley, Philip, 520
Knopf, Alfred A., 5
Kobal, John, 51
Köchel, Ludwig von, 183
Koestler, Arthur, 39, 88, 240, 357, 722
Kogan, Nina, 531
Kokoschka, Oskar, 4
Kolakowski, Leszek, xxvi, 353–58, 738
Kollontai, Alexandra Mikhaylovna, 359–63, 364, 763
Konoe, Fumimaro, 814, 815
Korda, Alexander, 829
Kovacs, Ernie, 99
Kovaly, Heda Margolius, 364–67
Kraus, Karl, 4, 17, 51–52, 233, 368–75, 380, 564, 697, 698–99, 762–63
Kravchenko, Victor, 417
Kristeva, Julia, 673
Kronenberg, Louis, 344
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 700
Kubrick, Stanley, 397
Kuh, Anton, 92, 232, 751, 752, 831
Kundera, Milan, xxv, 301, 344, 763
Kurtzman, Harvey, 271
La Bruyère, Jean de, 108, 238
Lacan, Jacques, 60, 673
Lacoutre, Jean, 257–58
Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch Gilbert du Motier, 755
Lafforgue, Martin, 69
Laforgue, Jules, 143, 301
Lamont, Norman, 70
Lancaster, Burt, 150–51
Lane, Anthony, 448–49
Laqueur, Walter, 445, 539
Lardner, Ring, 18, 683
Larkin, Philip, 22, 83, 142, 144, 191, 227, 313, 390, 785, 788, 799
La Rochefoucauld, François de, 108, 238
Laughton, Charles, 829
Lawrence, D. H., 212
Lawrence, T. E., 802
Leavis, F. R., 139, 350, 540
le Carré, John, 248, 642
Le Corbusier, 192
Lehndorff, Heinrich Graf von, 745
Leibovitz, Annie, 713
Leishmann, J. B., 617
Lenin, V. I., 3, 11, 90, 113, 245, 246, 247, 389, 456, 475, 546, 547, 550, 688, 747, 749
Lennon, John, 319
Leno, Jay, 96, 97
Lenya, Lotte, 614
Leopardi, Giacomo, 492
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 674
Letterman, David, 96–97
Levetzow, Ulrike von, 20
Levi, Primo, 415, 416, 546
Levin, Ira, 80
Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 34, 604–5, 606, 670
Liberace, 239
Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, xxvi, 18, 263, 306, 379–405, 674, 803
Lichtenstern, Vilma, 703
Lincoln, Abraham, 23, 626
Lindbergh, Charles, 623
Liston, Sonny, 98, 411–12
Littrico, 247
Liu Shaoqi, 458
Livy, 730
Lloyd, Harold, 202
Logue, Christopher, 125
Lollobrigida, Gina, 150
Longhi, Roberto, 496
Loos, Adolf, 4, 6
Louganis, Greg, xix
Louis XIV, King of France, 755
Lovelace, Richard, 136
Lovett, Robert, 470
Low, David, 519
Lowell, Robert, xxvi, 784
Lucretius, 19, 352, 732
Ludendorff, Erich, 751
Ludwig, Emil, 451, 452, 840
Ludwig II, King of Bavaria, 171
Lukács, George, xxvi, 354, 355
Luna, Felix, 273–74
Lunacharsky, Antoly, 355, 418, 835
Luther, Martin, 489
Lysenko, T. D., 246–47, 418
MacArthur, Douglas, 6, 818
Macauley, Thomas Babbington, Lord, 236, 261, 268, 382
McCarthy, Joe, 477
McCarthy, Mary, 172
McCay, Winsor, 203
McClintick, David, 384–85
McCloy, John, 470–80
MacDiarmid, Hugh, 663, 667
Macdonald, Dwight, 488, 597
MacDowell, Andie, 709
Machiavelli, Niccolò, xiii, 42, 262
McKellan, Ian, 778
McKellar, Dorothea, 136
Mackendrick, Alexander, 151
MacKenzie, Compton, 211
McLaughlin, Martin, 140
McMahon, Ed, 96
Macmillan, Harold, 269
MacMillan, Kenneth, 499–500
MacNeice, Louis, 141, 345, 352
McQueen, Steve, 439
McShann, Jay, 647
Madariaga, Salvador de, 444
Madonna, 317
Madsen, Michael, 435–36
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 596
Magee, Bryan, 677
Magellan, Ferdinand, 834
Mahfouz, Naguib, 652
Mahler, Gustav, 4, 185, 394, 690, 834
Mahon, Derek, 784
Mailer, Norman, 409–13
Maintenon, Madame de, 755
Major, John, 70, 269
Makart, Hans, 51
Malebranche, Nicolas de, 58
Malevich, Kazimir, 531
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 49, 142
Malle, Louis, 151, 713
Malory, Thomas, 450–51
Malraux, André, 603
Mamet, David, 437
Mandelstam, Nadezhda, xxvi, xxx, 14, 364, 414–19, 564, 763
Mandelstam, Osip, xxiv, xxx, 14, 414, 841
Manet, Édouard, xxi, 498
Mann, Erika, 420, 425, 751
Mann, Golo, xiii, xxvi, 34, 38, 420–27, 565, 729, 749
Mann, Heinrich, 388, 428–31, 441, 451, 453–54, 565
Mann, Katya, 442
Mann, Klaus, 420, 425, 751, 830
Mann, Michael, 432–40
Mann, Thomas, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 17, 66, 121, 160, 167, 174, 212, 228, 291, 292–93, 294, 330, 355, 401, 420, 422, 425, 428–29, 441–54, 566, 581, 596, 622–23, 641, 704, 716, 835–36, 839
Manstein, Erich von, 512–13, 744–45
Mantovani, Annunzio Paolo, 127
Manzoni, Alessandro, 732
Mao, Madame, 842
Mao Zedong, xviii, xxvi-xxvii, 90, 262–63, 322, 400–401, 455–59, 464, 551, 614, 688
Marais, Jean, 129, 132
Marcus Aurelius, Emperor of Rome, 514
Margolius, Rudolf, 366
Maria Theresa, 751
Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, 834, 840
Marinara, 203
Marker, Chris, 460–69
Martin, Steve, 206
Marvell, Andrew, 20, 136
Marvin, Lee, 149
Marx, Groucho, 326
Marx, Karl, 40, 246, 247, 353, 389, 749
Mary, Queen of Scots, 834
Masaccio, 186, 349, 351
Masaryk, Tomás Garrigue, 757
Massine, Léonide, 128
Massu, Jacques, 654, 655
Mastroianni, Marcello, 203
Matisse, Henri, 619
Mauriac, François, 178–79, 576
Maurras, Charles, 75, 157, 177, 717
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 14
Medawar, P. B., 240
Medvedev, Roy, 417
Mehring, Walter, 452, 596
Melba, Nellie, 517
Melville, Herman, 64–65
Mencken, H. L., 212, 302–3, 499
Menem, Carlos, 645
Mengele, Josef, xviii, 235
Menzel, Adolph von, 321–22
Mephistopheles, 448
Meredith, George, 238
Merezhkovsky, Dmitriy, 323
Merrill, James, 165
Metternich, Klemens Wenzel von, 412, 480, 753–56, 757
Mezzrow, Mezz, 24–25
Michelangelo, 186, 483, 786
Mickiewicz, Adam, 450
Mifune, Toshiro, 812
Milanov, Zinka, 481–84
Miley, Bubber, 195
Milhaud, Darius, 681
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 14
Miller, Henry, 411, 704
Miller, Jonathan, 279
Milosevic, Slobodan, 762, 763, 764
Milosz, Czeslaw, 187, 289, 356, 485–91
Milton, John, 84, 301, 447–48
Mirabeau, Comte de, 108
Mishima, Yukio, 81
Mitchell, Joseph, 17
Mitterrand, François, 73
Modigliani, Amedeo, 747
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 323–27
Molesworth, Nigel, 135–36
Molière, 389
Molnár, Ferenc, 232, 233
Molnar, Michael, 225
Molotov, Vyacheslav, xix, 475
Mommsen, Theodor, 262, 267
Monet, Claude, 733
Monk, Ray, 803
Monk, Thelonious, 28, 193
Monroe, Marilyn, 152–53
Montaigne, Michel de, xv, 501, 503, 507, 674, 701, 730, 732, 779, 834, 840
Montale, Eugenio, xxix, 133, 137, 140, 142, 147, 492–500
Montand, Yves, 653
Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de, xxvi, 214, 262, 263, 265, 501–14, 729, 732
Montgomery, Bernard Law, 521
Montgomery, Robert, 382–83
Moore, Demi, 438
Moore, G. E., 306, 805
Moore, Michael, 461
Moorehead, Alan, 515–23
Moravia, Alberto, 627
Môrike, Eduard Friedrich, 754
Moro, Aldo, 625
Morton, Jelly Roll, 24, 25
Mosley, Oswald, 618
Motley, John, 450
Moussorgsky, Modest, 12, 497, 775–76
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, xxi, 183, 184, 221, 351, 717, 776–77
Mugabe, Robert, 466
Muggeridge, Malcolm, 383, 785
Muir, Edwin and Willa, 344
Mukhamedov, Irek, 499
Muratov, Paul, 524–32
Murdoch, Keith, 520
Murray, Gilbert, 444
Musil, Robert, 4, 17, 233, 240, 322
Musset, Alfred de, 301
Mussolini, Benito, 92, 93, 145, 201, 276, 331, 530
Myers, Rollo, 682
Nabokov, Vladimir, xxv, 196, 385, 536, 658, 660, 661, 756
Nagumo, Chuicho, 814
Naipaul, V. S., 119
Namier, Lewis, 262, 535–42
Nanton, Tricky Sam, 195
Napier, Charles James, 262
Napoleon I, Emperor of France, 260, 652, 687, 755, 815
Napoleon III, Emperor of France, 585, 659
Nathan, George Jean, 212, 302–3
Nehru, Pandit Motilal, 120
Nelson, Horatio, 815
Nepos, Cornelius, 730
Nero, Emperor of Rome, 730
Neruda, Pablo, xviii, 666–67, 748–49
Nerva, Emperor of Rome, 730
Newman, Ernest, 183
Newman, Paul, 149
Newton, Isaac, 83, 116, 241
Nicholas of Cusa, 732
Nichols, Mike, 318
Nicolas, Sébastien-Roch see Chamfort
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, xxviii, 75, 312, 323, 338, 345, 674, 803, 833
Nijinsky, Vaslav, 21, 499
Nikisch, Ernst, 324
Nimitz, Chester, 818
Nixon, Richard, 189, 194, 456
Nolte, Ernst, 425, 549–50
Nono, Luigi, 494
Norris, Chuck, 436
North, Thomas, 503, 507
Novalis (Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg), xiii
Nureyev, Rudolf, 13
O'Brien, Conan, 97
O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 631
O'Brien, Flann, 239, 302, 370
Ocampo, Victoria, 66, 177
Octavian, 505
Ogden, C. K., 186, 802
Ohnishi, Takajiro, 820
O'Neill, Eugene, 80
Ono, Yoko, 681
Ophuls, Max, 151
Oppenheimer, Robert, 380, 608
Ordzhonokidze, Grigory Konstantovich, 545–53
Orff, Carl, 622
Organbide, Pedro, 69, 70–71
Orledge, Robert, 185, 682
Ortega y Gasset, José, 299, 486, 766, 769
Orwell, George, xxvii, 31, 37–38, 89, 346, 369, 387, 459, 577, 587, 618, 675, 798
Osorgin, Michael, 525
O'Toole, Peter, 778
Ouspensky, Peter D., 61
Oven, Wilfred von, 281–84, 286, 287–88
Ovid, 125, 294
Oz, Amos, 630
Ozouf, Mona, 251
Paar, Jack, 94
Pacino, Al, 433, 435–36, 440
Paglia, Camille, 331
Painter, George D., 580
Palach, Jan, 634
Palin, Michael, 272, 277
Papen, Franz von, 326
Paradis y de la Laguna, Maria Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gonzaga, Condesa de, 559, 560
Pareto, Vilfredo, 31, 717
Parker, Charlie, 26, 28, 167, 192, 647
Parker, Dorothy, 239, 357, 374
Parker, Suzy, 113
Pascal, Blaise, 49, 379, 403, 674
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 133
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich, 167, 579, 612
Patten, Chris, 740
Patton, George, 812, 817
Pavarotti, Luciano, 496
Pavlova, Anna Pavlovna, xxv
Paz, Octavio, 557–61, 769–70, 773, 790, 793
Peacock, Thomas Love, 389–90
Peake, Mervyn, 102
Pears, David, 803
Peerce, Jan, 482
Peppard, George, 438
Perelman, S. J., 166, 437
Peron, Eva, 645–46
Peron, Juan Domingo, 69, 273–74, 639
Perutz, Leo, 234
Pessoa, Fernando, 664, 665, 666
Pétain, Marshal, 73, 92
Petersen, William, 432–33
Petrarch, 19, 127, 133, 139, 350
Pevsner, Nikolaus, 541
Pfafflin, Friedrich, 373
Philip II, King of Spain, 708
Piazolla, Astor, 647
Picasso, Pablo, xxiii, 128, 169, 178, 618–19, 656, 681, 776
Pidal, Menéndez, 774
Pierce, Charles, 352
Pinochet, Augusto, 70, 273
Pinter, Harold, 317–18, 792
Pirandello, Luigi, 567
Plato, 394
Plissetskaya, Maya, 622
Plumb, J. H., 539–40
Plutarch, 503, 507, 779
Podhoretz, Norman, 33
Poe, Edgar Allan, 323
Polanski, Roman, 487
Polgar, Alfred, 5, 17, 55, 233, 240, 452, 562–70, 697, 803, 849
Pollaczek, Clara, 703
Pollock, Jackson, 172
Pol Pot, xviii, 278, 279, 418, 551, 688
Pompey, 507–9, 513
Ponselle, Rosa, 483
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 276, 628, 653–57
Pontormo, Jacopo da, 528
Pope, Alexander, 20, 263, 388
Popper, Karl, 2, 353, 354, 357, 676, 677
Porter, Cole, 374
Porter, Peter, 138, 185, 390
Porterfield, Christopher, 94
Portman, Natalie, 440, 709–14
Potter, Beatrix, 571–73
Potter, E. B., 818
Poulenc, Francis, 169
Pound, Ezra, 60, 92, 220, 386, 451, 493–94, 495, 671–72, 784
Powell, Anthony, 82, 318, 404, 641–42, 797, 799, 800
Power, Samantha, 471
Prange, Gordon W., 813, 818
Prater, Donald, 454
Prescott, William, 262
Presley, Elvis, 132, 317
Prevert, Jacques, 126, 238
Prévost, Jean, xxvi, 58, 59, 574–77
Price, Richard, 437
Priestley, J. B., 79
Probus, Marcus Aurelius, 268
Prokofiev, Sergey, 13–14, 622
Propertius, 19
Proust, Marcel, xxiv, xxvi, 39, 49, 74, 131, 156, 173, 385, 392, 449, 498, 578–82, 641, 658, 660, 661–62, 663, 703, 779, 838
Ptolemy, 117
Puccini, Giacomo, xxii, xxv, 126, 497
Pugliese, Oswaldo, 647
Pushkin, Aleksandr, 14, 15, 20, 108, 196, 348–49, 388, 579, 756
Pynchon, Thomas, 837
Quinet, Edgar, 585–87
Rachmaninoff, Sergey, 619, 681
Racine, Jean, 139
Radiguet, Raymond, 128, 349, 351
Rand, Ayn, 80
Rand, Sally, 260
Rathenau, Walther, 324
Rather, Dan, 136
Ravel, Maurice, 29, 680, 681, 682
Reagan, Ronald, 633
Rebatet, Lucien, 177, 252, 575
Redford, Robert, 438, 693
Redgrave, Vanessa, 630
Reed, John, 212–13, 302
Reich, Wilhelm, 61
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, 126, 356, 400, 443, 486, 487, 563, 570, 591–99, 616, 718, 837
Reinhardt, Max, 568, 831
Remarque, Erich Maria, 451–52
Rembrandt, 304, 385
Renan, Ernest, xvii, 834
Renoir, Jean, 482–83
Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 171, 643, 776
Resnais, Alain, 277
Reston, James, 476
Revel, Jean-François, xiii, 33, 44, 107, 108, 109, 251, 580, 581–82, 586, 600–606, 671, 672–73, 676, 678–79
Reverdy, Pierre, 111
Reyes, Alfonso, 774
Rhine, J. B., 240
Rhodes, Richard, 607–11
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 283
Richet, Denis, 250
Riding, Laura, 663
Riefenstahl, Leni, xxi
Rieger, Erwin, 838
Rienzo, Cola, di, 267
Rietschel, Magda, 241
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 97, 173, 218, 348, 350, 372–73, 581, 612–24, 784, 833, 840–41
Rimbaud, Arthur, 172–73, 350, 351, 484, 834
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay, 776
Ripa di Meana, Ludovica, 133–35
Ritt, Martin, 691
Rivarol, Comte de, 107
Robb, Graham, 173
Robertson, Cliff, 165, 384–85
Robespierre, Maximilien de, 671
Robinson, Bill "Bojangles," 25, 26
Robinson, Mary, 467
Robinson, Robert, 139–40
Rodin, François-Auguste-René, 834
Rognoni, Virginio, 625–35
Rolfe, Frederick, 682
Rollins, Sonny, 29
Rommel, Erwin, 520, 812
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 7
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 259
Rose, Charlie, 99
Rosenberg, Alfred, 243, 303
Rosenfeld, Paul, 212
Ross, Diana, 166
Rossellini, Isabella, xxvi
Roth, Joseph, 55, 233, 452, 563, 595, 700, 752, 753, 834
Roth, Philip, 301, 344, 410, 699, 704
Rotten, Johnny, xviii
Roux, Edmond Charles, 111
Rowling, J. K., 571
Ruark, Robert, 215
Rubinstein, Arthur, 295, 619
Rudel, Hans-Ulrich, 288
Runciman, Stephen, 262
Rundstedt, Karl Rudolf Gerd von, 512
Rushdie, Salman, 223, 656
Russell, Bertrand, 306, 677, 704, 801, 803
Russell, George, 155
Sabato, Ernesto, 63, 67–68, 71, 134, 294, 558, 639–49, 775
Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, Anna Amalia Herzogin von, 285
Sadat, Anwar, 629, 630
Sade, Marquis de, 505
Sagan, François, 81
Sahl, Hans, xxvi, 849
Sahl, Mort, 369
Said, Edward, xxiv, 630, 650–57
Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 658–63, 730, 834
Saintsbury, George, 230, 400
Saionji, Prince, 814
Sakharov, Andrei, 247–48, 417
Sali, Carlos de, 647
Salinger, J. D., 318, 498, 711, 837
Sallust, 507, 730
Salmasius, Claudius, 268
Salomon, Ernst von, 324
Santayana, George, 238
Santillana, Juana de Asbaje y Ramirez de, 558–61
Sapegno, Natolino, 158
Saramago, José, 664–68
Saroyan, William, 532
Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 31–32, 33, 34–35, 36–37, 39, 87, 179, 220–21, 402, 412, 444, 461, 513, 576–77, 602, 632, 669–79, 685, 719
Satie, Erik, 128, 169, 680–83
Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 268
Schaefer, Whitey, 51
Schama, Simon, 540
Schelling, Max von, 330
Scheurig, Bodo, 743
Schiaparelli, Elsa, 130
Schiele, Egon, 5
Schiller, Friedrich von, 568–69, 641, 677
Schirach, Baldur von, 674
Schlabrendorff, Fabian von, 744, 745
Schlegel, Friedrich, 594
Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 33
Schnabel, Artur, 185
Schnitzler, Arthur, xxvi, 4, 17, 228, 233, 349, 379, 568, 684–705, 753, 803, 834
Schoenberg, Arnold, 4
Schofield, Penrod, 215
Scholl, Hans, 706, 708–9
Scholl, Inge, 707
Scholl, Sophie, 364, 706–14
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 108, 321, 379, 390, 416, 674, 677, 767, 803
Schorske, Carl E., 4
Schubert, Franz Peter, 184–87, 235,
351
Schulz, Bruno, 187, 487
Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 225
Schwartz, Bernard see Curtis, Tony
Schwarzkopf, Elisabeth, 620, 832
Scorsese, Martin, 664
Scott, George C., 812
Scott, Ridley, 433
Scott Moncrieff, C. K., 579
Scruton, Roger, 671
Seagal, Steven, 436
Sebald, W. G., 121, 126
Seldes, Gilbert, 212
Sendak, Maurice, 571
Sereny, Gitta, 424
Sert, Misia, 129, 130
Seurat, Georges, 186, 351
Seuss, Dr., 571
Sévigné, Marie de, 402, 661
Shakespeare, William, 20, 79, 82, 105, 136, 139, 215, 222, 226, 300, 301, 308, 348, 350, 387–89, 390, 402, 418, 437–38, 446, 447, 448, 451, 503, 507, 508, 509, 566–67, 692, 725, 776–79, 788, 805, 840
Shalamov, Varlan, 417
Shane, Scott, 248
Shapiro, Nat, 167, 189
Sharon, Ariel, 630
Shattuck, Roger, 129
Shaw, George Bernard, 126, 145, 235–36, 302, 532, 566, 567
Shaw, Irwin, 409
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 139, 349, 350, 389, 397, 450
Sher, Antony, 778
Shields, Brooke, 713
Shirer, William, 257
Sholokhov, Mikhail, 622
Short, Philip, 455–56, 457, 551
Shostakovich, Dmitry, 13–14, 293, 394, 622
Shultz, George, 248
Sichov, Viktor, 114
Siedler, Wolf Jobst, 715–18
Silver, Joel, 694
Simon, Carly, 165
Simon, John, 283
Simon, S. J., 437
Skelton, Barbara, 331
Slánsky, Ruldof Salzmann, 366
Slessor, Kenneth, 517, 785–86
Smart, Elizabeth, 81
Smith, Bessie, 26
Snow, C. P., 116–17
Snow, Edgar, 456
Soane, John, 263
Sokal, Alan, 673
Sokolova, Lydia, 682
Solti, Georg, 621
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, xxv, 285, 402–3, 417, 418, 678, 736, 737, 739, 741, 827
Sorel, Georges-Eugène, 717
Souday, Paul, 641
Soueif, Ahdaf, 478
Southern, Terry, 25, 397–98
Souvarine, Boris, 417
Soyka, Otto, 234
Spark, Muriel, 331
Speer, Albert, 284, 424, 549, 716, 718
Spenser, Edmund, 450
Sperber, Hugo, 233, 234–35
Sperber, Manès, xxvi, 54, 616, 719–26
Spielberg, Steven, 725
Spinoza, Baruch, 803
Spruance, Raymond A., 818
Staël, Madame de, 328, 755–56
Stahl, Julius, 324
Stahlberg, Alexander, 745
Stalin, Josef, xxi, xxv, xxvi-xxvii, 11, 12, 14, 15, 37, 38, 40, 41, 61, 89–90, 178, 246–47, 251, 259, 262, 282, 285, 322, 330, 353, 355, 358, 361, 394, 414, 416, 418, 455, 456, 457, 458, 464, 474, 475, 505–6, 509–12, 513, 545–47, 550, 606, 617, 639, 648, 687–88, 719, 724, 747, 748, 749, 750, 835, 836, 841
Stangl, Franz, 548
Stauffenberg, Claus von, 742
Steegmuller, Francis, 129, 221
Stein, Gertrude, 214, 838
Steiner, George, 53, 104, 159, 344, 677
Stendhal, 575
Sterling, Jan, 165
Stern, J. P., 343, 368, 380, 431
Sternberg, Josef "von," 829
Sterne, Laurence, 402
Stevens, Wallace, 138
Stewart, James, 149
Stewart, Jon, 96
Stewart, Rex, 190, 195–96
Stimson, Henry, 473, 474
Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 495
Stockton, Alexander Macmillan, Earl of, 269
Stone, I. F., 248
Stoppard, Tom, 166, 277, 437–38, 684, 787
Strauss, Richard, 171, 189, 620–22
Stravinsky, Igor, xxv-xxvi, 13, 66, 110, 127, 169, 174, 291, 494, 622
Strayhorn, Billy, 197
Streep, Meryl, 693
Strindberg, August, 323, 704
Stuart, Mary, 834
Styron, William, 78
Suetonius, 507, 730
Swift, Jonathan, 278, 370, 389, 459
Syme, Ronald, 446, 537
Symons, Arthur, 527
Taber, Robert, 628
Tacitus, Cornelius, xxvi, 186, 262, 263, 401, 424, 446, 448, 501, 504, 506–7, 729–34
Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de, xxvi, 108, 361, 392, 480, 541, 755
Tanizaki, Jun-ichirō, 81
Tarkington, Booth, 215
Tasso, Torquato, 135, 450
Taylor, A. J. P., 421, 423, 540
Tchaikovsky, Pytor Ilyich, 127
Teller, Edward, 43, 609
Templier, Pierre-Daniel, 682
Tenniel, John, 203
Tennyson, Alfred, 63, 450
Thatcher, Margaret, 70, 269, 735–41
Theocritus, 518
Thomas, Evan, 470, 473, 477
Thubron, Colin, 836
Thucydides, 501, 507, 730, 731
Thurber, James, 211, 571, 623
Thurn und Taxis, Marie von, 372
Tiberius, Emperor of Rome, 448, 504, 506, 729, 730, 731
Tito (Josip Broz), 763
Titza, Graf Stefan, 753
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 586, 653
Todd, Olivier, 88
Tojo, Hideki, 814, 820
Tolstoy, Lev, 14, 84, 213, 385, 397, 520, 612, 725–26, 835
Tomioka, Tadatoshi, 818
Torberg, Friedrich, 4, 231–32, 233, 234, 615, 847–48
Torquemada, Tomás de, 222
Toscanini, Arturo, 481, 834
Toulouse Lautrec, Henri, 392–93, 395
Towne, Robert, 437
Toynbee, Arnold, 50
Tresckow, Henning von, 332, 742–46
Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 430
Trier, Lars von, 271
Troilo, Anabal, 647
Trollope, Anthony, 269
Trotsky, Leon, 246, 361, 747–50
Truffaut, François, 460
Trujillo, Rafael, 791
Tschuppik, Karl, 751–58
Tucholsky, Kurt, 400, 564, 698
Tudjman, Franjo, 762
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 212, 385
Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 733
Tuwim, Julian, 356
Twain, Mark, 63, 239, 383
Tynan, Kenneth, 567
Tzara, Tristan, 681
Uccello, Paolo, 528
Ugresic, Dubravka, 761–65
Unamuno, Miguel de, xxvi, 221, 766–72
Updike, John, 410
Ure, Mary, 691
Ureña, Pedro Henriquez, 767, 773–79
Ustinov, Peter, 230
Valenzuela, Luisa, 276
Valéry, Paul, 444, 783–89
Van Damme, Jean-Claude, 689
Vangelis, 433
van Gogh, Theo, 223, 364
Vargas Llosa, Mario, 105, 292, 465, 558, 561, 632–33, 790–94
Vaughn, Robert, 439
Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, 108, 238
Verdi, Giuseppe, 171, 481, 497, 643
Verlaine, Paul, 173
Vermeer, Jan, 494
Vertov, Dziga, 13
Vico, Giambattista, 305
Victoria, Queen of England, 383
Vidal, Gore, 99, 221, 303–4, 410, 471, 476–77, 479, 623, 813
Virgil, 19, 139, 245, 267, 390, 446, 448
Vlaminck, Maurice de, 747
Volkogonov, Dmitri, 513, 748
Volkov, Solomon, 622
Voltaire, 74, 388, 661, 732
Wagner, Cosima, 221
Wagner, Gustav Franz, 548–49
Wagner, Otto, 4
Wagner, Renate, 703
Wagner, Richard, xxvi, 65, 126, 171, 173–74, 241, 244, 267, 321, 345, 446, 567, 621, 643, 660, 680
Waissnix, Olga, 703
Wajda, Andrezj, 356
Waller, Fats, 92
Walter, Bruno, 481, 834
Wassermann, Jakob, 598, 697
Watkins, Vernon, 142
Watson, Emily, 714
Watt, Montgomery, 325
Watteau, Antoine, 733
Waugh, Evelyn, 82, 213, 490, 498, 797–800
Wavell, Archibald, 521
Wayne, John, 692–93
Weber, Max, 31, 274
Webern, Anton von, 29
Webster, Ben, 168, 190–92
Wedekind, Frank, 323
Weidenfeld, Lord, 232
Weill, Kurt, 614, 615
Weinzierl, Ulrich, 563
Weissmuller, Johnny, 60
Welles, Orson, 79, 174, 411, 614
Werfel, Alma, 565
Werfel, Franz, 233, 565, 568, 697, 776, 791, 839
Wessel, Horst, 282
West, Mae, 207, 613
White, E. B., 80
White, Patrick, 641–42
Whiteman, Paul, 24, 27
Wilde, Oscar, 233, 237–38, 303, 401, 686
Wilder, Billy, 66, 152
Willans, Geoffrey, 135
Willett, John, 617
Williams, Cootie, 190, 195–96
Willis, Bruce, 694
Wills, George, 472
Wilmot, Chester, 521
Wilson, Edmund, 123, 209, 210, 211–12, 212, 213, 683
Wilson, Harold, 764
Windt, Edgar, 307
Winslet, Kate, 302
Winterhalter, Franz, 51
Wittelsbach family, 263
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xxv, 186, 238, 379, 754, 801–7
Wodehouse, P. G., 797
Wolf, Hugo, 836
Wolfe, Thomas, 84, 410
Wölfflinn, Heinrich, 526, 527–28
Woodward, Bob, 471, 477
Wordsworth, William, 348
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 694
Yamamoto, Isoroku, 811–21
Yamamura, Soh, 812
Yamashita, Tomoyuki, 817, 820
Yeats, William Butler, xxv, 20, 60, 79, 144, 312, 394, 498
Young, Lester, 29, 168, 191
Young, Sean, 438
Young, Wayland, 82
Zakaria, Fareed, 471
Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 417
Zhao Ziyang, 737
Zhdanov, Andrey, 12
Zhisui Li, 401, 456
Zhou Enlai, 459
Zinoviev, Aleksandr, 248, 354, 417, 457, 687–88, 825–28
Zinoviev, G. Y., 550
Zola, Émile, 580
Zonghetti, Claudia, 525
Zuckmayer, Carl, 829–32
Zweig, Stefan, xxvi, 3, 228, 390–91, 451, 452, 503, 504, 621, 833–43
All history is contemporary history.
– BENEDETTO CROCE
At certain times the world is overrun by false scepticism. Of the true kind there can never be enough.
– BURCKHARDT,
_W_ _ELTGESHICHTLICHE_ _B ETRACHTUNGEN_
One insults the memory of the victims of Nazism if one uses them to bury the memory of the victims of communism.
– JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, _L A GRANDE PARADE_
In a universe more and more abstract, it is up to us to make sure that the human voice does not cease to be heard.
– WITOLD GOMBROWICZ, _J OURNAL_
We should esteem the man who is liberal, not the man who decides to be so.
– MACHIAVELLI
To philosophize means to make vivid.
– NOVALIS
Those are nearer to reality who can deal with it light-heartedly, because they know it to be inexhaustible.
– GOLO MANN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
_Unreliable Memoirs_
_Falling Towards England_
_May Week Was in June_
_North Face of Soho_
FICTION
_Brilliant Creatures_
_The Remake_
_Brrm! Brrm!_
_The Silver Castle_
VERSE
_The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003_
CRITICISM
_Reliable Essays: The Best of Clive James_
_The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)_
_Visions Before Midnight_
_The Crystal Bucket_
_First Reactions_
_At the Pillars of Hercules_
_From the Land of Shadows_
_Glued to the Box_
_Snakecharmers in Texas_
_The Dreaming Swimmer_
_On Television_
_Even as We Speak_
_As of This Writing_
_The Meaning of Recognition_
TRAVEL
_Flying Visits_
Copyright © 2007 by Clive James
Published by arrangement with Macmillan Publishers Ltd, Great Britain
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
Book design by Chris Welch
Production manager: Anna Oler
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
James, Clive, 1939—
Cultural amnesia ; necessary memories from history and the arts / Clive James
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-393-06116-1 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-393-06116-7 (hardcover)
1. Civilization, Western. 2. Intellectuals—Biography. 3, Artists—Biography. 4. Musicians—Biography. 5. Philosophers—Biography. 6. Intellectual life—History—20th century. 7. Humanism—History—20th century. 8. Memory—Social aspects. I. Title.
CB245.J338 2007
909'.09821—dc22
2006036398
ISBN 978-0-393-33354-1
ISBN 978-0-393-28542-0 (e-book)
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10110
www.wwnorton.com
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street
London W1T 3QT
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaBook"
} | 6,118 |
\section{Introduction}
The white dwarf luminosity function has become an important tool
to determine some properties of the local neighborhood, such as
its age (Winget et al. 1987; Garc\'\i a-Berro et al. 1988; Hernanz
et al. 1994), or the past history of the star formation rate (Noh
\& Scalo 1990; D\'\i az-Pinto et al. 1994; Isern et al. 1995a,b).
This has been possible because now we have improved observational
luminosity functions (Liebert, Dahn \& Monet 1988; Oswalt et al.
1996; Leggett, Ruiz \& Bergeron 1998) and because we have a better
understanding of the physics of white dwarfs and, consequently,
reliable cooling sequences --- at least up to moderately low
luminosities.
The most important features of the luminosity function of white
dwarfs are a smooth increase up to luminosities of $\log(L/L_{\sun})
\sim -4.0$, and the presence of a pronounced cut-off at $\log(L/
L_{\sun})\sim -4.4$, although its exact position is still today
somehow uncertain since it hinges on the statistical significance
of a small subset of objects, on how the available data is binned
and on the fine details of the sampling procedure. Most of the
information on the early times of the past history of the local
neighborhood is concentrated on this uncertain low luminosity portion
of the white dwarf luminosity function.
A major drawback of the luminosity function of white dwarfs is that
it measures the volumetric density of white dwarfs and, therefore,
in order to compare with the observations one must use the volumetric
star formation rate, that is the star formation rate per cubic parsec,
whereas for many studies of galactic evolution the star formation
rate per square parsec is required and, consequently, fitted to
the observations.
Another important issue is the fact that the sample from which the
low luminosity portion $(M_{\rm V}>13^{\rm mag})$ of the white dwarf
luminosity function is derived has been selected on a kinematical
basis (white dwarfs with relatively high proper motions). Therefore,
some kinematical biases or distortions are expected. Although there
are some studies of the kinematical properties of white dwarf stars
--- see, for instance, Sion et al. (1988) and references therein ---
a complete and comprehensive kinematical study of the sample used
to obtain the white dwarf luminosity function remains to be done.
It is important to realize that a conventional approach to compute
theoretical luminosity functions (Hernanz et al. 1994; Wood
1992) does not take into account the kinematical properties
of the observed sample. A Monte Carlo simulation of a model
population of white dwarfs is expected to allow the biases
and effects of sample selection to be taken into account,
so their luminosity function could be corrected --- or, at
least, correctly interpreted --- provided that a detailed
simulation from the stage of source selection is performed
accurately. Of course, a realistic model of the evolution
of our Galaxy is required for that purpose.
Finally, the available white dwarf luminosity functions (Liebert
et al. 1988; Oswalt et al. 1996, Leggett et al. 1988) have been
obtained using the $1/V_{\rm max}$ method (Schmidt 1968), which
assumes a uniform distribution of the objects, yet nothing in our
local neighborhood is, strictly speaking, homogeneous. In fact,
stars in the solar neighborhood are concentrated in the plane of
the galactic disk. Moreover, it is expected that old objects should
have larger scale heights than young ones. This dependence on the
scale height probably has effects on the observed white dwarf
luminosity function --- especially on its low luminosity portion
where old objects concentrate --- and, once again, a realistic model
of galactic evolution is required for evaluating the effects of the
departures from homogeneity of the observed samples. To our knowledge,
this effect was only taken into account for the bright portion of the
white dwarf luminosity function (Fleming, Liebert \& Green 1986)
and not for the low luminosity portion where the effects are
expected to be more dramatic.
Perhaps the most sucessful application of the white dwarf luminosity
function has been its invaluable contribution as an independent
galactic chronometer to a better understanding of our Galaxy.
Despite this fact there have been very few attempts --- being
those of Garc\'\i a-Berro \& Torres (1997), Wood (1997) and Wood
\& Oswalt (1998) the only serious ones --- to systematically
investigate the statistical uncertainties associated with the
derived age of the disk. Nevertheless the approach used by Wood
\& Oswalt (1998) makes use of the {\sl observed} kinematic properties
of the white dwarf population instead of using a standard model
of the evolution of our Galaxy, which presumably should include
the effects of a scale height law. Besides, these authors use the
theoretical white dwarf luminosity function obtained from standard
methods to assign probabilities and, ultimately, to assign
luminosities to the white dwarfs of the sample. Finally, in
their calculations Wood \& Oswalt (1998) computed the cooling
times of all the white dwarfs of their sample by interpolating
in a model cooling sequence of a 0.6~$M_{\sun}$ white dwarf, thus
neglecting the effects of the full mass spectrum of white dwarfs.
In this paper we explore the statistical reliability and
completeness of the white dwarf luminosity function taking
into account all of the above mentioned effects that were
disregarded in previous studies. Special emphasis will be
placed on the statistical significance of the reported cut-off
in the white dwarf luminosity function. For that purpose we
will use a Monte Carlo method, coupled with bayesian inference
techniques, within the frame of a consistent model of galactic
evolution, and using improved cooling sequences.
To be precise, we want specific answers for the following questions:
are the kinematics of the derived white dwarf population consistent
with the observational data? Which are the effects of a scale height
in the observed samples? Is the sample used to derive the white dwarf
luminosity function representative of the whole white dwarf population?
Or, at least, is this sample compatible with the white dwarf population
within the limits imposed by the selection procedure? Which are the
statistical errors for each luminosity bin? Which is the typical
sampling error in the derived age of the disk?
The paper is organized as follows: in \S 2 we describe how the
simulated population of white dwarfs is built; in \S 3 we
describe the kinematical properties of the samples obtained
in this way and we compare them with those of a real, although
very preliminary and possibly uncomplete, sample; in \S 4 we
study the spatial distribution of the samples, we assess the
statistical reliability and completeness of the white dwarf
luminosity function and we derive an estimate of the error
budget in the determination of the age of the disk; finally,
in \S 5 our results are summarized, followed by conclusions
and suggestions for future improvements.
\section{Building the sample}
The basic ingredient of any Monte Carlo code is a generator of
random variables distributed according to a given probability
density. The simulations described in this paper have been done
using a random number generator algorithm (James 1990) which
provides a uniform probability density within the interval $(0,1)$
and ensures a repetition period of $\hbox{\lower .8ex\hbox{$\,\buildrel > \over\sim\,$}} 10^{18}$, which is
virtually infinite for practical simulations. When gaussian
probability functions are needed we have used the Box-Muller
algorithm as described in Press et al. (1986).
We randomly choose two numbers for the galactocentric polar coordinates
$(r,\theta)$ of each star in the sample within approximately 200 pc
from the sun, assuming a constant surface density. The density changes
due to the radial scale length of our Galaxy are negligible over the
distances we are going to consider here and can be completely ignored.
Next we draw two more pseudo-random numbers: the first for the mass
$(M)$ on the main sequence of each star --- according to the initial
mass function of Scalo (1998) --- and the second for the time at which
each star was born $(t_{\rm b})$ --- according to a given star
formation rate. We have chosen an exponentially drecreasing star
formation rate per unit time and unit surface: $\psi\propto {\rm
e}^{-t/\tau_{\rm s}}$. This choice of the shape of the star formation
rate is fully consistent with our current understanding of the chemical
evolution of our Galaxy --- see, for instance, Bravo et al. (1993).
Once we know the time at which each star was born we assign the $z$
coordinate by drawing another random number according to an exponential
disk profile. The scale height of newly formed stars adopted here
decreases exponentially with time: $H_{\rm p}(t)=z_{\rm i}\,{\rm e}
^{-t/\tau_{\rm h}} + z_{\rm f}$. This choice for the time dependence
of the scale height is essentially arbitrary, although it can be
considered natural. We will however show that using these prescriptions
for both the surface star formation rate and the scale height law to
compute the theoretical white dwarf luminosity function leads to an
excellent fit to the observations (see Isern et al. 1995a,b and \S 4)
which does not result in a conflict with the observed kinematics of
the white dwarf population (see \S 3). The values of the free
parameters for both the surface star formation rate and the scale
height have been taken from Isern et al. (1995a,b), namely:
$\tau_{\rm s}=24$ Gyr, $\tau_{\rm h}=0.7$ Gyr, $z_{\rm i}/z_{\rm f}
=485$.
In order to determine the heliocentric velocities in the $B3$ system,
$(U,V,W)$, of each star in the sample three more quantities are drawn
according to normal laws:
\begin{eqnarray}
n(U)&\propto&{\rm e}^{-(U-U'_0)^2/\sigma^2_{\rm U}}\nonumber\\
n(V)&\propto&{\rm e}^{-(V-V'_0)^2/\sigma^2_{\rm V}}\\
n(W)&\propto&{\rm e}^{-(W-W'_0)^2/\sigma^2_{\rm W}}\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where $(U'_0,V'_0,W'_0)$ take into account the differential rotation of
the disk (Ogorodnikov 1965), and derive from the peculiar velocity
$(U_{\sun},V_{\sun},W_{\sun})$ of the sun for which we have adopted
the value $(10,5,7)\; {\rm km\; s^{-1}}$ (Dehnen \& Binney
1997).
The three velocity dispersions $(\sigma_{\rm U},\sigma_{\rm V},
\sigma_{\rm W})$, and the lag velocity, $V_0$, of a given sample of
stars are not independent of the scale height. From main sequence
star counts, Mihalas \& Binney (1981) obtain the following relations,
when the velocities are expressed in km~s$^{-1}$ and the scale height
is expressed in kpc:
\begin{eqnarray}
U_0&=&0\nonumber\\
V_0&=&-\sigma^2_{\rm U}/120\nonumber\\
W_0&=&0\nonumber\\
&&\\
\sigma^2_{\rm V}/\sigma^2_{\rm U}&=&0.32+1.67\ 10^{-5}\sigma^2_{\rm U}
\nonumber\\
\sigma^2_{\rm W}/\sigma^2_{\rm U}&=&0.50\nonumber\\
H_{\rm p}&=&6.52\ 10^{-4}\sigma^2_{\rm W}\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
which is what we adopt here (see as well \S 3.3). Note, however, that
our most important input is the scale height law, from which most of
the kinematical quantities are derived.
Since white dwarfs are long lived objects the effects of the
galactic potential on their motion, and therefore on their
positions and proper motions, can be potentially large, especially
for very old objects which populate the tail of the white dwarf
luminosity function. Therefore, the $z$ coordinate is integrated
using the galactic potential proposed by Flynn et al. (1996).
This galactic potential includes the contributions of the disk,
the bulge and the halo, and reproduces very well the local
disk surface density of matter and the rotation curve of our
Galaxy. We do not consider the effects of the galactic potential
in the $r$ and $\theta$ coordinates. This is the same as assuming
that the number of white dwarfs that enter into the sector of
the disk that we are considering (the local column) is, on
average, equal to the number of white dwarfs that are leaving
it. Of course, with this approach we are neglecting the possibility
of a global radial flow, and thus, the possible effects of
diffusion across the disk. However, the observed disk kinematics
suggest that radial mixing is efficient up to distances much larger
than the maximum distance we have used in our simulations (Carney,
Latham \& Laird 1990).
From this set of data we can now compute parallaxes and proper
motions for all the stars $(\sim\,200\,000)$ in the sample.
Given the age of the disk $(t_{\rm disk})$ we can also compute
how many of these stars have had time to evolve to white dwarfs
and, given a set of cooling sequences (Salaris et al. 1997,
Garc\'\i a--Berro et al. 1997), what are their luminosities.
This set of cooling sequences includes the effects of phase
separation of carbon and oxygen upon crystallization and has
been computed taking into account detailed chemical profiles
of the carbon-oxygen binary mixture present in most white dwarf
interiors. These chemical profiles have been obtained using the
most up to date treatment of the effects of an enhanced reaction
rate for the $^{12}{\rm C}(\alpha,\gamma)^{16}{\rm O}$ reaction.
Of course, a relationship between the mass on the main sequence
and the mass of the resulting white dwarf is needed. Main sequence
lifetimes must be provided as well. For these two relationships we
have used those of Iben \& Laughlin (1989). The size of this new
sample of white dwarfs typically is of $\sim\,60\,000$ stars
(hereinafter ``original'' sample). Finally, for all white
dwarfs belonging to this sample bolometric corrections are
calculated by interpolating in the atmospheric tables of
Bergeron et al. (1995) and their $V$ magnitude is obtained,
assuming that all are non-DA white dwarfs.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\vspace*{12cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps01 hscale=70 vscale=70 voffset=-120 hoffset=-100}
\caption{Some relevant distributions obtained from a single Monte
Carlo simulation, the solid lines correspond to the original sample
whereas the dotted lines correspond to the restricted sample. See
text for details.}
\end{figure}
Since the final goal is to compute the white dwarf luminosity
function using the $1/V_{\rm max}$ method (Schmidt 1968) a set
of restrictions is needed for selecting a subset of white dwarfs
which, in principle, should be representative of the whole white
dwarf population. We have chosen the following criteria for
selecting the final sample: $m_{\rm V}\le 18.5^{\rm mag}$ and
$\mu\ge 0.16^{\prime\prime}\;{\rm yr}^{-1}$ (Oswalt et al. 1996).
We do not consider white dwarfs with very small parallaxes $(\pi\le
0.005^{\prime\prime})$, since these are unlikely to belong to a
realistic observational sample. All white dwarfs brighter than
$M_{\rm V}\le 13^{\rm mag}$ are included in the sample, regardless
of their proper motions, since the the luminosity function of hot
white dwarfs has been obtained from a catalog of spectroscopically
identified white dwarfs (Green 1980; Fleming et al. 1986) which is
assumed to be complete. Additionally all white dwarfs with tangential
velocities larger than 250 km~s$^{-1}$ were discarded (Liebert, Dahn
\& Monet 1989) since these would be probably classified as halo
members. These restrictions determine the size of the the final
sample which typically is $\sim\,200$ stars (hereinafter
``restricted'' sample). Finally we normalize the total
density of white dwarfs obtained in this way to its observed
value in the solar neighborhood (Oswalt et al. 1996).
In Figure 1 we show a summary of the most relevant results for a
disk age of 13 Gyr. In the top panel, the mass distribution of
those stars that have been able to become white dwarfs (solid line,
left scale) and of those white dwarfs that are selected for computing
the luminosity function (dotted line, right scale) are shown. Both
distributions are well behaved, follow closely each other, and peak
at around $0.55\,M_{\sun}$ in very good agreement with the observations
(Bergeron, Saffer \& Liebert 1992). In this sense, the restricted
sample could be considered as representative of the whole
white dwarf population.
In the middle panel of figure 1 we show the raw distribution of
luminosities for the stars in the original (solid line, left scale)
and the restricted (dotted line, right scale) samples. The
differences between both distributions are quite apparent: first,
the restricted sample has a broad peak centered at $\log(L/L_{\sun})
\sim -3.5$, whereas the original sample is narrowly peaked at a
smaller luminosity (0.6 dex). Obviously, since the restricted
sample is selected on a kinematical basis --- see the lower
panel of figure 1, where the distribution of proper motions
for both samples is shown --- some very faint and low proper
motion white dwarfs are discarded. Thus, the restricted sample
is biased towards larger luminosities. Therefore, the cut-off
of the observational luminosity function should be biased as
well towards larger luminosities. However, it is important to
realize that only $\sim$ 0.6\% of the total number of white
dwarfs with $\log (L/L_{\sun})>-4.0$ are selected for the
restricted sample, and therefore, used in computing the white
dwarf luminosity function. This number decreases to $\sim$ 0.04\%
if we consider the low luminosity portion of the white dwarf
luminosity function --- that is, white dwarfs with $\log(L/L_{\sun})
<-4.0$ --- where most of the information regarding the initial
phases of our Galaxy is recorded. The distribution of proper
motions (lower right panel of figure 1) shows that most white
dwarfs for both the original and the restricted sample have
proper motions smaller than $0.4^{\prime\prime}$ yr$^{-1}$.
However, the restricted sample has a pronounced peak at
$\mu\sim\,0.3^{\prime\prime}$ yr$^{-1}$, and shows a deficit
of very low proper motion white dwarfs, as should be the case
for a kinematically selected sample, whereas the original
sample smoothly decreases for increasing proper motions.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\vspace*{12cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps02 hscale=65 vscale=65 voffset=-110 hoffset=50}
\caption{Tangential (upper left panel) and radial (lower left panel)
velocity distributions for the original sample and the corresponding
distributions for the restricted sample (upper and lower right panels,
respectively). Also shown as dotted lines are the tangential and
radial velocity distributions of the restricted sample with a looser
restriction in proper motions (see text for details).}
\end{figure*}
\section{The kinematic properties of the white dwarf population}
Since the pioneering work of Sion \& Liebert (1977), very few
analysis of the kinematics of the white dwarf population have
been done, with that of Sion et al. (1988) being the most relevant
one, despite the fact that the low luminosity portion of the
white dwarf luminosity function is actually derived from a
kinematically selected sample. Sion et al. (1988) used a specific
subset of the proper-motion sample of spectroscopically identified
white dwarfs to check kinematically distinct spectroscopic subgroups
and test different scenarios of white dwarf production channels.
However, a major disadvantage of this subset of the white dwarf
population is that the three components of the velocity are derived
only from the tangential velocity, since the determination of radial
velocities for white dwarfs is not an easy task, especially for
very cool ones. Obviously it would be better to have the complete
description of the space motions of this sample, but it is nonetheless
true that we already have two-thirds of the motion available for
comparison with the simulated samples and that the latter samples
can account for this observational bias.
The sample of Sion et al. (1988) consists of 626 stars with known
distances and tangential velocities (of which 421 white dwarfs belong
to the spectral type DA and 205 stars belong to other spectral types).
In this proper motion sample there are 523 white dwarfs for which
masses, radii and effective temperatures could be derived --- see
Sion et al. (1988) for the computational details --- of which 372
have masses larger than 0.5 $M_{\sun}$ and, therefore, are expected
to have carbon-oxygen cores. Of this latter group of white dwarfs
there are 305 with spectral type DA and 67 belong to other spectral
types. For this particular sample of white dwarfs cooling ages were
derived using the cooling sequences of Salaris et al. (1997) and,
given a relationship between the initial mass on the main sequence
and the final mass of the white dwarf (Iben \& Laughlin 1989), main
sequence lifetimes (Iben \& Laughlin 1989) were also assigned, and
the birth time of their progenitors was computed. However, the
errors in the determination of the mass of the progenitor can
produce large errors in the determination of the total age of
low mass white dwarfs. For instance, for a typical $0.6\,M_{\sun}$
white dwarf an error in the determination of its mass of
$0.05\,M_{\sun}$ leads to an error in its cooling age of $\sim\,0.3$
Gyr at $\log(L/L_{\sun})=\,-2.0$ and of $\sim\,0.8$ Gyr at
$\log(L/L_{\sun}) =\,-4.0$, whereas the error in the determination
of its main sequence lifetime is of $\sim\,2$ Gyr. Thus, the mass
dependence of the cooling sequences is relatively small, whereas
the mass dependence of the main sequence lifetimes is very strong.
Finally, it could be argued that since this sample includes both
DA and non-DA white dwarfs, appropiate cooling sequences should be
used for each spectral type. However, the errors introduced by using
unappropiate cooling sequences (that is cooling sequences for
He-dominated white dwarf envelopes) in the calculation of the
cooling times of DA white dwarfs are small when compared to the
errors introduced in dating white dwarfs by poor mass estimates.
Therefore, the temporal characteristics of the white dwarf
population from them derived should be viewed with some caution.
Note as well that there is not any guaranty that the sample of Sion
et al. (1988) is representative of the whole population of white
dwarfs, since it is by no means complete, and therefore some cautions
are required when drawing conclusions. To be more precise, the sample
of Sion et al. (1988) has very few low luminosity white dwarfs. In
fact, this sample contains only twelve white dwarfs belonging to the
low luminosity sample of Liebert et al. (1988), of which only four
have mass, tangential velocity, and effective temperature
determinations. Therefore, we have added to this sample ---
hereinafter ``observational'' sample --- three additional white
dwarfs of the sample of Liebert et al. (1988) for which a mass
estimate could be found (D\'\i az-Pinto et al. 1994). Nevertheless,
this sample provides a unique opportunity to test the results
obtained from a simulated white dwarf sample.
\subsection{The overall kinematical properties of the samples}
First we compare the overall kinematical properties of the white
dwarf simulated samples with those of the observational sample,
regardless of the birth time of their progenitors. In Figure 2 we
show the distributions of the tangential and radial velocities for
both the original and the restricted sample. The tangential velocity
distribution of the original sample is shown in upper left panel of
figure 2 and the tangential velocity distribution of the restricted
sample is shown as a solid line (left scale) in the upper right panel.
The restricted sample, which is kinematically selected, has a smaller
tangential velocity dispersion $(\sigma_{\rm tan}\sim\,80$ km~s$^{-1})$
than the original sample $(\sigma_{\rm tan}\sim\,100$ km~s$^{-1})$.
Here we have defined for operational purposes only the dispersions
to be as the full width at half maximum of the distributions. Moreover,
both samples are peaked at different tangential velocities: at
$V_{\rm tan}\sim\,45$ km~s$^{-1}$ for the original sample and at
$V_{\rm tan}\,\sim\,65$ km~s$^{-1}$ for the restricted sample,
showing clearly that the restricted sample is biased towards
larger tangential velocities, as it should be for a proper
motion selected sample. In fact the most probable tangential
velocity of the restricted sample is almost one third larger
than that of the total sample of white dwarfs. This kinematical
bias is clearly seen as well in the behavior of the distribution
at low tangential velocities where the restricted sample shows a
deficit of low velocity stars, as expected from a kinematically
selected sample. Note as well the existence of an extended tail
at high tangential velocities, indicating the presence of high
proper motion white dwarfs. Of course, all these effects are
simply due to the selection criteria and, in particular to the
assumed restriction in proper motion. The distribution of radial
velocities of the original sample is shown in the lower left panel
of figure 2 and the radial velocity distribution of the restricted
sample is shown as a solid line (left scale) of the lower right
panel. Both distributions have similar dispersions $(\sigma_{\rm
rad}\sim \,90$ km~s$^{-1}$) and both are well behaved and centered
at $V_{\rm rad}=0$, as it should be since there is not any
constrain on the radial velocities of the restricted sample.
\begin{figure}
\vspace{6.5cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps03 hscale=50 vscale=50 voffset=-120 hoffset=-40}
\caption{Tangential velocity distribution of the sample of Sion et al.
(1988).}
\end{figure}
In Figure 3 the tangential velocity distribution of the
observational sample is shown. By comparing the tangential
velocity distributions of figure 2 (upper panels) and figure 3
we can assure that the observational sample does not have a clear
kinematical bias since it does not show a clear deficit of low
tangential velocity white dwarfs --- the ratio between the height
of the peak and the height of the lowest velocity bin is the
same for both the original sample and the observational sample:
roughly 1/4 --- and does not have an extended tail at high tangential
velocities as the restricted sample does. Moreover, the observational
sample peaks at $V_{\rm tan}\sim\,40$ km~s$^{-1}$, whereas the original
sample (which is not kinematically selected) peaks at a very similar
tangential velocity $(V_{\rm tan}\sim\,45$ km~s$^{-1})$. However the
tangential velocity dispersion $(\sigma_{\tan}\sim\,60$ km~s$^{-1})$
of the observational sample is roughly one-third smaller than that
of the original sample. This might be due to the absence of low
luminosity white dwarfs in the observational sample. Notice that
intrisically dim white dwarfs are selected on the basis of a large
proper motion and, therefore, are expected to have, on average, larger
tangential velocities, thus increasing the velocity dispersion. To
check this assumption we have run our Monte Carlo code with a {\sl
looser} restriction on proper motions $(\mu \ge 0.08^{\prime\prime}\;
{\rm yr}^{-1})$. The result is shown in the upper right panel of
figure 2 as a dotted line (right scale). Although the number of
selected white dwarfs increases from $\sim\,85$ to almost 250 the
tangential velocity dispersion decreases from $\sigma_{\tan}\sim\,80$
km~s$^{-1}$ to $\sigma_{\tan}\sim\,60$ km~s$^{-1}$ in good agreement
with the tangential velocity dispersion of the observational sample.
A final test can be performed by imposing a {\sl tighter} restriction
on visual magnitudes ($m_{\rm V}\le 15.5^{\rm mag}$). The resulting
sample is now smaller --- 58 white dwarfs --- as should be expected,
whereas the tangential velocity dispersion decreases to $\sigma_{\tan}
\sim\,40$ km~s$^{-1}$ and the most probable tangential velocity remains
almost unchanged ($V_{\rm tan}\sim\,40$ km~s$^{-1}$). On the other hand
the radial velocity distribution --- dashed line and right scale in the
lower right panel of figure 2 --- is nearly indistinguishable from the
previous sample, selected with a tighter restriction. Nevertheless, the
differences between the observational sample and the simulated samples
could be considered as minor. Therefore we conclude that the simulated
population of white dwarfs is fairly representative of the real
population of white dwarfs.
\subsection{The temporal behavior of the samples}
Up to this moment we have compared the global kinematical
characteristics of the simulated samples with those of the
sample of Sion et al. (1988), but one of the major advantages
of this latter sample is that all the mass determinations
have been obtained using the same procedure, and consequently, in
this sense, the sample is relatively homogeneous. Therefore, we can
tentatively obtain the temporal variations of the kinematical
properties as a function of the birth time of the progenitors
of the white dwarfs belonging to the observational sample, and
compare them with those of the simulated samples.
\begin{figure}
\vspace{6.5cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps04 hscale=50 vscale=50 voffset=-120 hoffset=-50}
\caption{Time distributions of the restricted sample (non-sahded
diagram) and the observational sample (shaded diagram) and percentage
of missing white dwarfs in the observational sample. The total number
of objects in each time bin is shown on top of the corresponding
bin.}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\vspace*{16cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps05 hscale=80 vscale=80 voffset=-100 hoffset=10}
\caption{Components of the tangential velocity as a function of the
birth time of the white dwarf progenitors for the restricted (left-hand
panels) and the observational sample (right-hand panels), see text
for details.}
\end{figure*}
To this regard, in Figure 4 we show the histograms of the distribution
of the birth times of white dwarfs belonging to the observational
sample (shaded histogram) and to the restricted sample (non-shaded
histogram). The number of objects in each time bin is also shown
on top of each bin of the histogram. Time runs backwards and,
therefore, old objects are located at the left of the diagrams,
whereas young objects contribute to the time bins of the right
part of the diagrams. It is important to realize that old bins
may include kinematical data coming from either bright, low-mass
white dwarfs, or dim, massive white dwarfs. The time bins have
been chosen in such a way that the distribution of white dwarfs in
the observational sample is efficiently binned. The first bin
in time corresponds to objects older than 7~Gyr and has only 5
objects, most of them corresponding to intrinsically faint objects
belonging to the sample of Liebert et al. (1988). The last bin
corresponds to objects younger than 1~Gyr. The remaining three
bins are equally spaced in time and correspond to white dwarf
progenitors with ages running from 1 to 7~Gyr in 2~Gyr intervals.
All the bins have been centered at the average age of the objects
belonging to them ($\sim$ 7.7, 5.9, 3.7, 1.9 and 0.5~Gyr,
respectively).
Since the youngest time bin corresponds to intrinsically bright white
dwarfs it is expected that this time bin is reasonably complete in the
observational sample. Therefore we have chosen the total number of
stars in the simulated samples in such a way that the restricted sample
has a number of objects in the youngest time bin comparable with that
of the observational sample. Since there is no clear restriction in the
ages of white dwarfs belonging to the restricted sample, the statistical
reliability of the remaining time bins of the observational sample
can be readily assessed. Note the huge difference in the number of
white dwarfs between the observational sample and the restricted
sample for the oldest time bins of figure 4. Clearly, the completeness
of the observational sample decreases dramatically as the birth time
increases. The percentage of missing white dwarfs $(\eta)$ in the
observational sample as a function of the birth time of their
corresponding progenitors is also shown in figure 4 as a solid
line, assuming that the youngest time bin of the restricted
sample is complete. We have considered the observational sample
to provide reasonable estimates of the temporal variations
of the velocity when one third of the expected number of white dwarfs
is present in the corresponding time bin. This roughly corresponds
to birth times smaller than 3.7~Gyr. Therefore, the only time bins
that we are going to consider statistically significant are the
youngest three bins.
In Figure 5 we show as solid lines the temporal variation of the
components of the tangential velocity as a function of the total
age (white dwarf cooling age plus main sequence lifetime of the
corresponding parent star) of white dwarfs belonging to the
restricted sample (left-hand panels), and the same quantities
for white dwarfs belonging to the observational sample (right-hand
panels). Although we have not considered the data for $t_{\rm total}
>3.7$ Gyr to be reliable due the incompleteness of the observational
sample, we also show the temporal variations of all the three
components of the tangential velocity for these times as dotted
lines for the sake of completeness. The thinner vertical line
corresponds to $t_{\rm total}=3.7$ Gyr. As can be seen in this
figure, the general trend for young objects is very similar for
both samples. In particular both the restricted and the observational
sample have negative velocities across the galactic plane with
velocities of $W\sim\,-10\,{\rm km~s}^{-1}$, both samples lag
behind the sun with similar velocities of $V\sim\,-25\,{\rm km~s}
^{-1}$ and $-20\,{\rm km~s}^{-1}$, respectively, and both samples have
positive radial velocities of roughly $U\sim 20\,{\rm km~s}^{-1}$.
Finally, old objects in both samples lag behind the sun (middle
panels) being the lag velocity comparable for both samples:
$V\sim\,-20\,{\rm km~s}^{-1}$ and $-25\,{\rm km~s}^{-1}$,
respectively. Moreover, we have computed the time-averaged
values of the velocities shown in figure 5 and we have found
$\langle U\rangle\sim\,10$ and $12$ km~s$^{-1}$, $\langle
V\rangle\sim\,-28$ and $-23$ km~s$^{-1}$, and $\langle
W\rangle\sim\,-8$ and $-7$ km~s$^{-1}$, respectively. We
have computed as well the time-averaged values of the velocity
dispersions for the restricted and the observational samples:
$\langle\sigma_{\rm U} \rangle\sim\,41$ and 42 km~s$^{-1}$,
$\langle\sigma_{\rm V} \rangle\sim\,27$ and 30 km~s$^{-1}$,
and $\langle\sigma_{\rm W} \rangle\sim\,25$ and 25 km~s$^{-1}$,
and we have found that they are also in good agreement.
\begin{table}
\centering
\caption{Average values of the three components of the tangential
velocity and their corresponding dispersions (both in km~s$^{-1}$) for
several choices of $z_{\rm f}$ (in kpc).}
\begin{tabular}{crcccrr}
\hline
$z_{\rm f}$ &
$\langle U\rangle$ &
$\langle V\rangle$ &
$\langle W\rangle$ &
$\langle \sigma_{\rm U}\rangle$ &
$\langle \sigma_{\rm V}\rangle$ &
$\langle \sigma_{\rm W}\rangle$ \\
\hline
0.05 & 11.93 & $-13.87$ & $-3.54$ & 12.33 & 7.43 & 8.03 \\
0.10 & 12.77 & $-16.60$ & $-5.42$ & 20.42 & 11.09 & 10.85 \\
0.20 & 12.00 & $-19.86$ & $-4.02$ & 27.84 & 15.25 & 16.06 \\
0.30 & 9.40 & $-24.95$ & $-5.16$ & 31.52 & 19.54 & 20.70 \\
0.40 & 10.13 & $-24.93$ & $-7.33$ & 36.57 & 21.40 & 24.08 \\
0.50 & 9.34 & $-27.77$ & $-7.70$ & 41.38 & 26.75 & 24.74 \\
0.60 & 11.45 & $-29.90$ & $-5.83$ & 41.92 & 26.98 & 30.63 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
As already noted in \S 2, the most important ingredient needed to fit
adequately the kinematics of white dwarfs is the exact shape of the
scale height law. In fact, the luminosity function (see section 4
below) is only sensitive to the ratio of the initial to final scale
heights $(z_{\rm i}/z_{\rm f})$ of the disk and to the time-scale of
disk formation $(\tau_{\rm h})$ but not to the exact value of
say $z_{\rm f}$. However when the kinematics of the sample are
considered the reverse is true. That is the kinematics of the simulated
samples are very sensitive to the exact value adopted for the final
scale height. This is clearly illustrated in Table 1, where the
time-averaged values for the three components of the tangential
velocity and the tangential velocity dispersions are shown for
several choices of the final scale height, but keeping constant
the above mentioned ratio. As it can be seen there, the time-averaged
radial component of the tangential velocity, $\langle U\rangle$,
and the time-averaged perpendicular component of the tangential
velocity, $\langle W\rangle$, are not very sensitive to the choice
of $z_{\rm f}$, whereas the time-averaged lag velocity is very
sensitive to its choice. Regarding the velocity dispersions all
three components are sensitive. We have chosen the value of
$z_{\rm f}$ which best fits the average values of the observed
sample. In order to produce the results of figures 4 and 5 a
value of 500 pc was adopted for $z_{\rm f}$, which is typical
of a thick disk population. It is important to point out here
that increasing (decreasing) $z_{\rm f}$ by a factor of two
without keeping constant the ratio $(z_{\rm i}/z_{\rm f})$
doubles (halves) $\sigma_{\rm W}$ for objects in the
youngest time bin, which is the most reliable one, thus
making incompatible the simulated and the observational
samples. Similarly, increasing $\tau_{\rm h}$ by a factor
of two changes dramatically the behaviour of the lag velocity
since it changes the value of $V$ for objects in the youngest
time bin from $\sim\,-20$ to $\sim\,-10$ km~s$^{-1}$. We conclude
that the proposed scale height law is not in conflict with the
observed kinematics of the white dwarf population.
\begin{figure}
\vspace{13cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps06 hscale=70 vscale=70 voffset=-120 hoffset=-100}
\caption{Overall kinematical properties of the observational sample.}
\end{figure}
\subsection{A final remark on the reliability of the samples}
Finally, it is interesting to compare the results of a kinematical
analysis of the observational sample with the predictions obtained
from main sequence star counts as given by equation (2). In Figure
6 we show the correlations between the $V$ component of the tangential
velocity (top panel), the ratio $\sigma_{\rm V}/\sigma_{\rm U}$
(middle panel), and the ratio $\sigma_{\rm W}/\sigma_{\rm U}$
(bottom panel) as a function of the radial velocity dispersion
$\sigma_{\rm U}$ obtained from the data of main sequence stars
compiled by Sion et al. (1988). Except for the last bin the
agreement between the data obtained from the white dwarf sample
and the data obtained from main sequence stars is fairly good
($\sigma_{\rm V}^2/\sigma_{\rm U}^2\sim\,0.3$, $\sigma_{\rm W}^2
/\sigma_{\rm U}^2\sim\,0.5$ and $V/\sigma_{\rm U}^2\sim\,-20$).
However, it should be taken into account that the data coming
from the last bin is obtained, as previously mentioned, with only
five stars. Moreover, all these objects belong to the low luminosity
sample of Liebert et al. (1988), which is strongly biased towards
large tangential velocities and, besides, systematic errors affecting
either mass and radius determinations or luminosity determinations
(the bolometric corrections adopted in the latter work are highly
uncertain) can mask the true behavior of the sample.
\begin{table}
\centering
\caption{Average values of the three components of the tangential
velocity and their corresponding dispersions (both in km~s$^{-1}$)
for the Monte Carlo simulation, the observational sample, and the
Edvardsson et al. (1993) sample.}
\begin{tabular}{crcccrr}
\hline
Sample &
$\langle U\rangle$ &
$\langle V\rangle$ &
$\langle W\rangle$ &
$\langle \sigma_{\rm U}\rangle$ &
$\langle \sigma_{\rm V}\rangle$ &
$\langle \sigma_{\rm W}\rangle$ \\
\hline
MC & 10 & $ -28 $ & $ -8 $ & 41 & 27 & 25 \\
WD & 12 & $ -23 $ & $ -7 $ & 42 & 30 & 25 \\
E93 & 14 & $ -21 $ & $ -8 $ & 39 & 29 & 23 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table}
A final test of the validity of the assumptions adopted in this
paper to derive the simulated populations can be performed by
comparing the results of this section with the kinematical
analysis of a sample of main sequence F and G stars (Edvardsson
et al. 1993). These authors measured distances, proper motions
and radial velocities (among other data) for a sample of 189 F
and G stars. They also assigned individual ages for all the stars
in the sample from fits in the $T_{\rm eff}-\log g$ plane. The
same sample has been re-analyzed very recently by Ng \& Bertelli
(1998), using distances based on {\sl Hipparcos} parallaxes and
improved isochrones. We refer the reader to the latter work for
a detailed analysis of the errors and uncertainties involved in
dating individual objects. Although an analysis similar to that
performed in \S 3.2 can be done, for the sake of conciseness
we will only refer here to the average values of the three
components of the tangential velocity and its corresponding
dispersions. For this purpose in Table 2 we show the averaged
values of the three components of the {\sl tangential velocity} and
their corresponding dispersions for the restricted sample of our
Monte Carlo simulation, labelled MC, the observational sample,
labeled WD, and the three components of the {\sl velocity} and their
dispersions for the Edvardsson et al. (1993) sample, labeled E93.
As already discussed in \S 3.2 the agreement between the Monte
Carlo simulation and the observational sample is fairly good. The
comparison of both samples with the sample of Edvardsson et al.
(1993) reveals that the agreement between the average values of
the three samples is remarkably good, even if the dating procedure
for individual objects is very different in both observational
samples. The same holds for the averaged values of the three
velocity dispersions. We conclude that our equation (2) represents
fairly well the kinematical properties of the observed white dwarf
population.
\section{The white dwarf luminosity function}
\subsection{The spatial distribution and completeness of the
simulated white dwarf population}
The $1/V_{\rm max}$ method (Schmidt 1968, Felten 1976), when applied
to our simulated white dwarf population, should provide us with an
unbiased estimator of its luminosity function, pressumed completeness
of the simulated samples in both proper motion and apparent magnitude,
and provided that the spatial distribution of white dwarfs is
homogeneous. Strictly speaking this means that the maximum distance
at which we find an object belonging to the sample is independent of
the direction. In our case this is clearly not true --- and, most
probably, for a real sample this would certainly be the case as
well --- since we have derived the simulated samples assuming an
exponential density profile across the galactic plane. Since the
scale height law exponentially decreases with time (see \S 2) it
is difficult to say ``a priori'' which is the final spatial
configuration of the simulated white dwarf samples introduced
in the previous sections.
\begin{figure}
\vspace{6.5cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps07 hscale=50 vscale=50 voffset=-120 hoffset=-35}
\caption{Histogram of the $z$ distribution for both the original sample
(right scale) and the restricted sample (left scale).}
\end{figure}
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\vspace*{12cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps08 hscale=65 vscale=65 voffset=-110 hoffset=50}
\caption{Cumulative histograms of apparent magnitude and proper motion
for both the original and the restricted sample. See text for details.}
\end{figure*}
In the histogram of Figure 7 we show the logarithmic distribution of
the number of white dwarfs as a function of the absolute value of the
$z$ coordinate for both the original sample (right scale) and the
restricted sample (left scale). Clearly, both distributions correspond
to exponential disk profiles with different scale heights. Also shown
in figure 7 are the best fits to these distributions. The corresponding
scale heights from them derived are $\approx 1.3$ kpc for the original
sample, which is typical of a thick disk population, and considerably
smaller $\approx 129$ pc for the restricted sample which can be
considered typical of a thin disk population. This is not an evident
result since, as has been explained in \S 2, the simulated populations
take naturally into account the fact that old objects are distributed
over larger volumes (that is, with larger scale heights and therefore
with larger velocity dispersion perpendicular to the plane of the
galaxy) than young ones. Therefore, one could expect that the final
spatial distribution of the restricted white dwarf population ---
which is kinematically selected --- should reflect properties of an
intermediate thin-thick disk population and certainly this is not
the case. Obviously, since there is not any restriction in the
distances (within the local column) at which a white dwarf belonging
to the original sample can be observed the expected final scale height
for this sample should be much larger, in good agreement with the
simulations. Regarding the restricted sample, our results clearly
indicate that we are selecting for this sample white dwarfs lying
very close to the galactic plane. Moreover, if we change by a factor
of two $z_{\rm f}$ as explained in \S 3, the final scale height of the
restricted sample does not change appreciably and, on the other hand,
the dispersion of velocities perpendicular to the galactic plane does
not agree with its observed value. Therefore, the final scale height
of the restricted sample is clearly dominated by the selection
criteria. It is important to realize that this scale height, taken
at face value, is not negligible at all when compared with the value
of the maximum distance at which a parallax is likely to be measured
with relatively good accuracy --- which is typically 200 pc --- and
which imposes an additional selection criterion (see \S 2) for white
dwarfs belonging to the restricted sample, which are the white dwarfs
which are going to be used in the process of determination of the white
dwarf luminosity function. Therefore, the $1/V_{\rm max}$ method
must be generalized to take into account a space-density gradient.
For this reason we have used the density law of figure 7 to define
a new density-weighted volume element $dV'=\rho(z)\,dV$ (Felten
1976; Avni \& Bahcall 1980; Tinney, Reid \& Mould 1993), being $\rho
(z)$ the density law derived from figure 7. This new, corrected,
estimator provides a more accurate determination of the white
dwarf luminosity function and, ultimately, a more realistic
value of the space density of white dwarfs. All in all, for
reasonable choices of a scale height law its effects on the
derived white dwarf luminosity function in principle cannot
be considered negligible.
The second, and probably more important issue, is the completeness
of the samples used to build the white dwarf luminosity function.
This is a central issue since the $1/V_{\rm max}$ method assumes
completeness of the samples. The reader should keep in mind that
{\sl the original sample is complete by construction}, since it
consists of all white dwarfs generated by the Monte Carlo code,
regardless of their distance, proper motion, apparent magnitude
and tangential velocity; whereas the restricted sample is built with
white dwarfs culled from the original sample according to a set of
selection criteria and, therefore, its completeness remains to be
assessed.
In Figure 8 we explore the completeness of the simulated
samples. For this purpose, the cumulative star counts of white
dwarfs with apparent magnitude smaller than $m_{\rm V}$ for the
original sample are shown in the top left panel of figure 8, whereas
the corresponding diagram for the restricted sample is shown in the
top right panel. Also shown in figure 8 are the cumulative star
counts of white dwarfs with proper motions larger than $\mu$
belonging to the original sample (bottom left panel) and to
the restricted sample (bottom right panel). For a complete sample
distributed according to a homogenous spatial density, the
logarithm of the cumulative star counts of white dwarfs with
apparent magnitude smaller than $m_{\rm V}$ are proportional
to $m_{\rm V}$ with a slope of 0.6 (see, for instance, Mihalas
\& Binney 1981). We also show in the top panels of figure 8 a
straight line with such a slope. It is evident from the previous
discussion that our samples are not, by any means, distributed
homogenously. Note as well that the effects of a scale height
law are tangled in the standard test of completeness of the
samples. Nevertheless, the effects of a scale height law can be
disentangled since they should be quite apparent in the
cumulative star counts diagram of the original sample, which is
complete. A look at the top left panel of figure 8 reveals
that the effects of the scale height law are evident for
surveys with limiting magnitude $m_{\rm V}\hbox{\lower .8ex\hbox{$\,\buildrel > \over\sim\,$}} 19^{\rm mag}$.
Therefore, we can now assess the completeness in apparent
magnitude of the restricted sample, since the turn-off for this
sample (see top right panel of figure 8) occurs at $m_{\rm
V}\sim\,17^{\rm mag}$. Consequently, the effects of the scale
height law can be completely ruled out, and this value can be
considered as a safe limit for which the restricted sample is
complete in apparent magnitude.
The completeness of the restricted sample in proper motion can be
assessed in a similar way. Again, the assumption of an homogenous
and complete sample in proper motion leads to the conclusion that
the logarithm of the cumulative star counts of white dwarfs with
proper motion larger than $\mu$ should be proportional to $\mu$
with a slope of $-3$ (see, for instance, Oswalt \& Smith 1995,
and Wood \& Oswalt 1998). A look at the bottom left panel of
figure 8 reveals that for the original sample this is not by
far the case. In other words, since this particular sample is
complete by construction the hypothesis of an homogenous
distribution of proper motions must be dropped. This is again
one, and probably the most important, of the effects associated
with a scale height law since the kinematics of the samples are
highly sensitive to the choice of the scale height law (see
\S 2, equation (2) and table 1). It is important to realize
that the effects of a scale height law are more prominent
in proper motion than in the spatial distribution and this
can be directly checked for a real sample, thus providing
a direct probe of the history of the star formation rate
per unit volume. Finally, in the lower right panel of
figure 8 the cumulative star counts in proper motion of
white dwarfs belonging to the restricted sample are shown.
As expected, the effects of a scale height law are in
this case negligible since we are culling white dwarfs
with high proper motion for which the original sample is
reasonably complete (see the lower left panel of figure
8). The exact value of the turn-off is in this case
$\mu\sim\, 0.3^{\prime\prime}\;{\rm yr}^{-1}$, in close
agreement with the results of Wood \& Oswalt (1998).
It is quite clear from the previous discussions that one
of the ingredients that has proven to be essential in the
determination of the white dwarf luminosity function is
the adopted scale height law. In principle one should
expect two kinds of competing trends. On the one hand, the
effects of the scale height law should be more dramatic
for old objects, because old objects have a larger velocity
dispersion (although the effects of a spatial inhomogeneity
should be, as well, less apparent) and the tail of the white
dwarf luminosity function is populated predominantly by this
kind of white dwarfs (intrinsically dim, high proper motion
objects). Therefore, one should expect that the cut-off in
the white dwarf luminosity function is influenced either by
the spatial distribution of white dwarfs or by their velocity
distribution or by a combination of both. On the other hand,
objects populating the tail of the luminosity function are
intrinsically dim objects and, therefore, in order to be
selected for the restricted sample they must be close neighbors.
This, in turn, implies that the average distance at which we are
looking for white dwarfs is small and, consequently, the effects
of a scale height law should be less apparent. The reverse is
true at moderately high luminosities. Therefore it is interesting
to see which are the dominant effects as a function of the luminosity.
For this purpose, in Figure 9 we show several average properties of
white dwarfs belonging to the restricted sample as a function of their
luminosity for a typical Monte Carlo simulation.
\begin{figure}
\vspace*{12cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps09 hscale=70 vscale=70 voffset=-120 hoffset=-100}
\caption{Average properties of the restricted sample as a function of
the luminosity. Bottom panel: average $z$ coordinate of white dwarfs of
the restricted sample; middle panel: average tangential velocity for
these white dwarfs, the observational data has been taken from Liebert
et al. (1988); and top panel: average proper motion of these objects.}
\end{figure}
In the top panel of figure 9 we show the average distance to
the galactic plane of white dwarfs belonging to the restricted sample.
As it can be seen, the average distance to the galactic plane of
intrinsically bright white dwarfs can be as high as 100 pc,
which is a sizeable fraction of the derived scale heights of
the white dwarf samples. Consequently we expect that the effects
of an inhomogeneous spatial distribution should be very prominent
at high luminosities. Conversely, the average distance to the galactic
plane for white dwarfs near the observed cut-off in the white dwarf
luminosity function is only $\sim\,10$ pc. Therefore as the luminosity
decreases we are probing smaller volumes and the effects of an
inhomogenous {\sl spatial} distribution at low luminosities are
expected to be, from this point of view, small (but see, however,
the discussion in \S 4.4).
In the middle panel of figure 9 the average tangential velocity
of objects belonging to the restricted sample is shown as a function
of the luminosity. The observational data is shown as solid circles
and has been obtained from Liebert et al. (1988). Their adopted
restriction in proper motion $\mu_0=0.80^{\prime\prime}\;{\rm yr}
^{-1}$ is significantly larger than the one we adopt here $\mu_0=
0.16^{\prime\prime}\;{\rm yr}^{-1}$, which is consistent with the
cut-off in proper motion adopted by Oswalt et al. (1996). Therefore
we expect a smaller average tangential velocity. The agreement is
fairly good since, given the ratio of proper motion cut-offs, the
average tangential velocity of our restricted sample should be roughly
a 20\% smaller: a closer look at the middle panel of figure 9
shows that the average tangential velocity reported by Liebert et
al. (1988) is $\sim\,120$ km~s$^{-1}$, whereas we obtain $\sim\,90$
km~s$^{-1}$. These figures reinforce the general idea that our
simulations are fully consistent with the observed kinematics of
the white dwarf population.
Finally, in the bottom panel of figure 9 the average proper motion
distribution of those stars belonging to the restricted sample is
shown as a function of the luminosity. As it can be seen there, low
luminosity white dwarfs belonging to the restricted sample have, on
average, large proper motions. As expected from the discussion of the
two previous panels, the distribution of proper motions is smoothly
increasing for luminosities in excess of $\sim\,10^{-3}\,L_{\sun}$:
since the average value of the tangential velocity remains
approximately constant, and we are selecting objects with smaller
average distances, the net result is an increase in the average
proper motion. Moreover, white dwarfs belonging the low luminosity
portion of the white dwarf luminosity function are preferentially
culled from the original sample because of their high proper motion.
That is the same to say that the selection criterion is primarily
the proper motion one and that the criterion on apparent magnitude
has little to do for these luminosities, in agreement with the results
of Wood \& Oswalt (1988). As a final consequence the effects of an
inhomogenous distribution in {\sl proper motions} will be more
evident at high luminosities, where the average proper motion
is smaller (see the discussion of the lower left panel of figure
8). All in all, the effects of the inhomogeneities in both
proper motion and $z$ will be more prominent at high luminosities,
where the observational luminosity function already takes into
account these effects (Fleming et al. 1986).
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Total number of white dwarfs, $N_{\rm WD}$, and white
dwarfs in each bin, $N_{\rm i}$, for each of the twenty realizations
of the simulated white dwarf luminosity functions.}
\begin{tabular}{rrrrrrrrrrr}
\hline
$i$ &
$N_{\rm WD}$ &
$N_1$ &
$N_2$ &
$N_3$ &
$N_4$ &
$N_5$ &
$N_6$ &
$N_7$ &
$N_8$ &
$N_9$ \\
\hline
1& 200& 1& 8& 5& 14& 42& 38& 42& 44& 6 \\
2& 216& 1& 6& 11& 18& 29& 48& 49& 53& 1 \\
3& 203& 0& 4& 8& 22& 36& 39& 45& 43& 6 \\
4& 176& 0& 6& 6& 17& 18& 35& 41& 44& 9 \\
5& 210& 1& 5& 8& 17& 24& 49& 48& 53& 5 \\
6& 191& 1& 7& 10& 23& 24& 37& 44& 37& 8 \\
7& 202& 0& 3& 12& 29& 27& 42& 50& 35& 4 \\
8& 222& 0& 1& 16& 18& 38& 41& 50& 57& 1 \\
9& 197& 0& 5& 12& 20& 22& 34& 51& 47& 6 \\
10& 198& 1& 1& 9& 16& 28& 44& 49& 47& 3 \\
11& 204& 0& 5& 10& 21& 25& 38& 44& 53& 8 \\
12& 198& 1& 3& 14& 20& 33& 36& 50& 35& 6 \\
13& 175& 0& 3& 14& 20& 23& 32& 44& 37& 2 \\
14& 182& 0& 6& 9& 15& 28& 40& 43& 35& 6 \\
15& 185& 2& 6& 6& 19& 30& 31& 44& 43& 4 \\
16& 213& 1& 3& 16& 21& 33& 31& 45& 56& 7 \\
17& 189& 2& 2& 11& 25& 22& 32& 43& 44& 8 \\
18& 207& 1& 4& 7& 17& 33& 38& 41& 61& 5 \\
19& 217& 1& 10& 10& 28& 17& 47& 55& 42& 7 \\
20& 210& 0& 4& 13& 19& 31& 38& 46& 55& 4 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{$\chi^2$ test of the compatibility of the Monte Carlo simulated
samples.}
\begin{tabular}{cccccccccccccccccccc}
\hline
$i$ &
2 &
3 &
4 &
5 &
6 &
7 &
8 &
9 &
10 &
11 &
12 &
13 &
14 &
15 &
16 &
17 &
18 &
19 &
20 \\
\hline
1& 0.24& 0.80& 0.21& 0.41& 0.37& 0.05& 0.03&
0.16& 0.24& 0.33& 0.32& 0.04& 0.70& 0.86& 0.17&
0.06& 0.75& 0.02& 0.34 \\
2& & 0.46& 0.09& 0.93& 0.26& 0.31& 0.59&
0.48& 0.79& 0.48& 0.30& 0.37& 0.36& 0.47& 0.29&
0.11& 0.67& 0.19& 0.86 \\
3& & & 0.40& 0.69& 0.81& 0.78& 0.22&
0.73& 0.69& 0.88& 0.90& 0.44& 0.89& 0.85& 0.67&
0.56& 0.81& 0.16& 0.89 \\
4& & & & 0.63& 0.86& 0.13& 0.01&
0.81& 0.20& 0.88& 0.19& 0.24& 0.77& 0.60& 0.14&
0.57& 0.36& 0.37& 0.26 \\
5& & & & & 0.65& 0.35& 0.16&
0.80& 0.90& 0.92& 0.38& 0.26& 0.68& 0.65& 0.39&
0.43& 0.90& 0.54& 0.84 \\
6& & & & & & 0.77& 0.01&
0.92& 0.32& 0.89& 0.86& 0.59& 0.94& 0.85& 0.44&
0.89& 0.32& 0.83& 0.49 \\
7& & & & & & & 0.11&
0.68& 0.52& 0.47& 0.89& 0.80& 0.55& 0.34& 0.27&
0.61& 0.11& 0.42& 0.50 \\
8& & & & & & & &
0.12& 0.67& 0.11& 0.23& 0.20& 0.03& 0.06& 0.46&
0.04& 0.31& 0.01& 0.76 \\
9& & & & & & & &
& 0.58& 0.99& 0.77& 0.82& 0.77& 0.68& 0.77&
0.83& 0.53& 0.59& 0.92 \\
10& & & & & & & &
& & 0.54& 0.69& 0.58& 0.54& 0.57& 0.45&
0.51& 0.74& 0.07& 0.81 \\
11& & & & & & & &
& & & 0.56& 0.41& 0.72& 0.67& 0.85&
0.81& 0.87& 0.46& 0.95 \\
12& & & & & & & &
& & & & 0.79& 0.84& 0.67& 0.77&
0.77& 0.29& 0.15& 0.71 \\
13& & & & & & & &
& & & & & 0.62& 0.51& 0.38&
0.60& 0.15& 0.10& 0.63 \\
14& & & & & & & &
& & & & & & 0.79& 0.24&
0.38& 0.40& 0.25& 0.56 \\
15& & & & & & & &
& & & & & & & 0.47&
0.65& 0.82& 0.16& 0.61 \\
16& & & & & & & &
& & & & & & & &
0.78& 0.79& 0.04& 0.96 \\
17& & & & & & & &
& & & & & & & &
& 0.38& 0.28& 0.50 \\
18& & & & & & & &
& & & & & & & &
& & 0.04& 0.93 \\
19& & & & & & & &
& & & & & & & &
& & & 0.12 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
\subsection{The Monte Carlo simulated white dwarf luminosity
functions}
\begin{figure}
\centering
\vspace{15cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps10 hscale=75 vscale=75 voffset=-110 hoffset=-83}
\caption{Panel showing different realizations of the simulated white
dwarf luminosity function --- filled squares and solid lines ---
compared to the observational luminosity function of Oswalt et al.
(1996) --- filled circles and dotted line.}
\end{figure}
In Figure 10 we show a set of panels containing the white dwarf
luminosity functions obtained from ten different Monte Carlo
simulations. That is the same to say that ten different initial
seeds were chosen for the random number generator and, consequently,
ten {\sl independent realizations} of the white dwarf luminosity
function were computed (in fact, we have computed twenty independent
realizations, of which only ten are shown in figure 10). The
adopted age of the disk was $t_{\rm disk}=13$~Gyr and the set
of restrictions used to build the sample is that of \S 2, which
is the same set used by Oswalt et al. (1996) to derive their
observational white dwarf luminosity function. The simulated
white dwarf luminosity functions were computed using a generalized
$1/V_{\rm max}$ method (Felten 1976; Tinney et al. 1993; Qin \& Xie
1997) which takes into account the effects of the scale height. The
error bars of each bin were computed according to Liebert et al.
(1988): the contribution of each star to the total error budget
in its luminosity bin is conservatively estimated to be the same
amount that contributes to the resulting density; the partial
contributions of each star in the bin are squared and then added,
the final error is the square root of this value. The resulting
white dwarf luminosity functions are plotted as solid squares; a
solid line linking each one of their points is also shown as a
visual help. Also plotted in each one of the panels is the
observational white dwarf luminosity function of Oswalt et al.
(1996), which is shown as solid circles linked by a dotted line.
For each realization of the white dwarf luminosity function the
value obtained for $\langle V/V_{\rm max} \rangle$ is also shown
in the upper left corner of the corresponding panel. Finally,
and for sake of completeness, the total number of objects in
the restricted sample, $N_{\rm WD}$, of the different realizations
of the white dwarf population, and the distribution of objects,
$N_{\rm i}$, in each luminosity bin, $i$, of the Monte Carlo
simulated white dwarf luminosity functions are shown in Table
3. The total number of white dwarfs belonging to the restricted
sample is roughly 200, which is the typical size of the samples
used to build the currently available observational luminosity
functions. This number is important since the assigned error
bars are strongly dependent on the number of objects in each
luminosity bin.
\begin{figure*}
\centering
\vspace*{16cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps11 hscale=80 vscale=80 voffset=-100 hoffset=10}
\caption{Probability distribution functions for each luminosity bin.}
\end{figure*}
It is important to notice the overall excellent agreement between
the simulated data and the observational luminosity function.
However, there are several points that deserve further comments.
The first one is that the simulated white dwarf luminosity functions
are systematically larger than the observational luminosity
functions for luminosities in excess of $\log(L/L_{\sun})=-2.0$.
This behavior reflects the effects of the spatial inhomogeneity
ot the simulated white dwarf samples. It is important to realize
that the hot portion of the white dwarf luminosity function of
Oswalt et al. (1996) has been derived without taking into account
the effects of a scale height, in contrast with the procedure
adopted by Fleming et al. (1986), where those effects were
properly taken into account. When one compares the luminosity
functions obtained in this section with that of Fleming et al.
(1986) the agreement is excellent. Also of interest is the
fact that the hot portion of the white dwarf luminosity
function varies quite considerably for the different realizations.
The reason for this behavior is that at high luminosities the
evolution is dominated by neutrino losses and it is fast. Therefore,
the probability of finding such white dwarfs is relatively small
and the statistical signifance of those bins is low. Consequently,
the exact shape of the luminosity function at $\log(L/L_{\sun})
\ge -3.0 $ is strongly dependent of the initial seed of the
pseudo-random number generator. This is further confirmed by
comparing the second and the third column of table 3 where the
total number of objects in the restricted sample and the number of
objects in the first bin of the white dwarf luminosity function
of each realization of the Monte Carlo simulations are shown.
As a consequence the real error bars that should be assigned to
each bin are presumably larger than those of figure 10. Moreover,
any attempt to derive the volumetric star formation rate using
data from the bins at high luminosities (Noh \& Scalo, 1990) is
based on very weak grounds. It is also important to notice that
the completeness of the simulated samples as derived from the
value of $\langle V/V_{\rm max} \rangle$ is relatively large.
In fact, for a complete and homogeneous sample this value
should be equal to 0.5; since the simulated sample samples are
not homogenous the values obtained here can be considered as
reasonable.
\begin{table*}
\centering
\caption{Error bars of the twenty independent realizations of the
Monte Carlo simulated white dwarf luminosity functions in each
luminosity bin and the same quantities for the Bayesian luminosity
function (last row).}
\begin{tabular}{cccccccccc}
\hline
$i$ &
$\Delta \log(n_1)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_2)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_3)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_4)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_5)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_6)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_7)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_8)$ &
$\Delta \log(n_9)$ \\
\hline
1& 1.000&0.484&0.517&0.464&0.597&0.238&0.261&0.180&0.454 \\
2& 1.000&0.718&0.432&0.368&0.446&0.253&0.179&0.163&1.000 \\
3& 0.000&0.631&0.514&0.363&0.283&0.285&0.215&0.216&0.453 \\
4& 0.000&0.877&0.537&0.524&0.393&0.272&0.224&0.190&0.525 \\
5& 1.000&0.723&0.476&0.481&0.319&0.256&0.347&0.171&0.474 \\
6& 1.000&0.461&0.431&0.376&0.285&0.447&0.251&0.210&0.372 \\
7& 0.000&0.974&0.474&0.392&0.340&0.262&0.316&0.699&0.517 \\
8& 0.000&1.000&0.473&0.417&0.385&0.353&0.213&0.206&1.000 \\
9& 0.000&0.590&0.539&0.387&0.362&0.500&0.304&0.205&0.439 \\
10& 1.000&1.000&0.541&0.440&0.496&0.275&0.213&0.195&0.628 \\
11& 0.000&0.763&0.577&0.312&0.258&0.338&0.245&0.177&0.381 \\
12& 1.000&0.746&0.441&0.446&0.404&0.240&0.435&0.201&0.429 \\
13& 0.000&0.618&0.450&0.362&0.373&0.270&0.306&0.191&0.775 \\
14& 0.000&0.741&0.644&0.486&0.281&0.344&0.195&0.190&0.425 \\
15& 0.768&0.887&0.560&0.409&0.292&0.357&0.423&0.178&0.824 \\
16& 1.000&0.890&0.450&0.326&0.335&0.344&0.214&0.332&0.458 \\
17& 0.785&0.965&0.446&0.318&0.497&0.324&0.203&0.171&0.408 \\
18& 1.000&0.537&0.496&0.536&0.349&0.254&0.197&0.161&0.484 \\
19& 1.000&0.383&0.517&0.478&0.362&0.319&0.393&0.259&0.411 \\
20& 0.000&0.710&0.347&0.376&0.350&0.273&0.262&0.262&0.550 \\
B& $^{+0.574}_{-\infty}$ &0.343&0.343&0.416&0.520&0.167
&0.114&0.089&0.496 \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{table*}
Finally, it is convenient to point out here that we have done
a $\chi^2$ test of the compatibility of the Monte Carlo simulated
samples. The results are shown in Table 4, where the probability
of an independent observer to find the realizations compatible
is shown for each pair of realizations. As it can be seen, this
probability can be as low as 0.01, which is the same to say
that the corresponding luminosity functions are completely
incompatible, even if they have derived from the same set
of input parameters and selection criteria. Obviously, the
conclusion is that for a reasonable number of objects in the
restricted sample, the white dwarf luminosity function is
dominated by the selection criteria.
\subsection{A bayesian analysis of the simulated samples}
As previously stated, changing the initial seed of the random
function generator the Monte Carlo code provides different
independent realizations of the white dwarf luminosity function.
All these realizations are ``a priori'' equally good. Besides,
since the number of objects that is used to compute the white
dwarf luminosity function is relatively small, large deviations
are expected, especially at relatively high luminosities for which
the cooling timescales are short. This, in turn, results in very
probable underestimates of the associated uncertainties, especially
at luminosities larger than $\log(L/L_{\sun})\ga -3.0$. Consequently
we have used bayesian statistical methods (Press 1996) to obtain a
realistic estimation of the errors involved and the most probable
value of the density of white dwarfs for each luminosity bin.
The problem can be stated as follows: for a given luminosity, $L$, we
want to know the most probable value of the white dwarf luminosity
function, $N$, given a set of $N_{\rm i}$ simulations assuming that
all simulations are equally good. To compute $N$ one must maximize
the probability distribution
\begin{equation}
P(N/N_{\rm i})\propto \prod_i \frac{1}{2}\Big(P_{\rm G_i}+P_{\rm B_i}
\Big)
\end{equation}
where $P_{\rm G}$ and $P_{\rm B}$ are the probability of being a good
and a bad simulation, respectively. We can calculate them following
closely Press (1996):
\begin{eqnarray}
P_{\rm G_i}&=&\exp\bigg[-\frac{(N_{\rm i}-N)^2}{2\sigma_{\rm i}^2}
\bigg]\nonumber
\\
&&\\
P_{\rm B_i}&=&\exp\bigg[-\frac{(N_{\rm i}-N)^2}{2S^2}\bigg]\nonumber
\end{eqnarray}
where $\sigma_{\rm i}$ is the error bar of each bin of the luminosity
function and $S$ is a large but finite number characterizing the
maximum expected deviation in $N_{\rm i}$. We recall that the
contribution to the error of each white dwarf is equal to the
inverse of its maximum volume squared.
The results are shown in Figure 11, where the probability
distributions corresponding to each luminosity bin, computed
with the previous method, are displayed. The logarithm of the
luminosity of each bin in solar units is shown in the upper
right corner of each panel. All the probability distributions,
except that of the brighter luminosity bin, have a Gaussian
profile. This is a direct consequence of the poor statistical
significance of the first bin. In order to produce these
probability distributions 20 independent realizations of the
simulated samples were used. This is a reasonable number: increasing
the total number of simulations does not introduces substantial
improvements in the statistical significance of the first bin,
which is the less significant. From these probability distributions
a better estimate of the statistical noise can be obtained. We have
estimated the resulting error bars by assuming a conservative 95\%
confidence level (approximately $2\sigma$). In Table 5 we show
the computed deviations for each of the twenty realizations of the
Monte Carlo simulated white dwarf luminosity functions and the
most probable error bars computed at the 95\% confidence level.
The error bars obtained from a bayesian analysis of the twenty
Monte Carlo simulations compare favourably, roughly speaking,
with those of each individual Monte Carlo simulation. However,
for samples where the total number of white dwarfs is smaller
than 200 (the simulations presented here) the errors for each
of the luminosity bins are severe underestimates of the real
errors, especially at low luminosities.
\begin{figure}
\vspace{6.5cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps12 hscale=50 vscale=50 voffset=-120 hoffset=-25}
\caption{Bayesian luminosity function.}
\end{figure}
In Figure 12 the most probable white dwarf luminosity function
--- hereinafter bayesian white dwarf luminosity function --- with
its corresponding error bars is shown, obtained by maximizing the
probability distributions of figure 11. Except for moderately
high luminosities --- i.e. for luminosities larger than $\log(L/L_
{\sun})=-2.0$ --- where the effects of the spatial inhomogeinities
are most obvious the agreement between the observational luminosity
function and the bayesian luminosity function is excellent. Moreover,
for the bayesian white dwarf luminosity we have computed a synthetic
value of $\langle V/V_{\rm max}\rangle$ as an average of the
corresponding values for each of the twenty realizations with
the weights given by the probability of each realization obtained
from the probability distributions of figure 11. We have obtained
a value of $\langle V/V_{\rm max}\rangle=0.464$ which remains close
to the canonical value of $\langle V/V_{\rm max}\rangle=0.5$, valid
for an homogenous and complete sample.
\begin{figure}
\centering
\vspace{15cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps13 hscale=75 vscale=75 voffset=-110 hoffset=-83}
\caption{Panel showing different simulated luminosity functions (filled
squares) and their corresponding fit using a standard method.}
\end{figure}
\subsection{The age of the disk}
Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the simulations
presented here is the age of the disk itself. The value of 13
Gyr adopted in this paper fits nicely the observational data
of Oswalt et al. (1996) as can be seen in figure 12. This a
direct consequence of the adopted scale height law, since using
the same set of cooling sequences and a conventional approach to
compute the white dwarf luminosity function with a constant
volumetric star formation rate, Salaris et al. (1997) derived
an age for the solar neighborhood of 11 Gyr when the effect of
phase separation upon crystallization was taken into account and
of 10 Gyr when phase separation was neglected. Thus the ultimate
reason of the increase in the adopted age of the solar neighborhood
is not due to the details of the adopted cooling sequences. Instead,
this increase can be easily explained in terms of the model of
galactic evolution. We recall that the white dwarf luminosity
function measures the number of white dwarfs per {\sl cubic
parsec} and unit bolometric magnitude. Therefore in order to
evaluate it the volumetric star formation rate is required. In
our case we can define the effective star formation rate per cubic
parsec as $\psi_{\rm eff}(t)\approx\psi(t)/H_{\rm p}(t)$. With the
laws adopted here for $\psi(t)$ and $H_{\rm p}(t)$ it is easy to
verify that the effective star formation rate only becomes significant
after $\sim\,2$ Gyr (Isern et al. 1995a,b).
\subsection{Statistical uncertainties in the derived age of the disk}
The easiest and more straightforward way to assess the statistical
errors associated with the measurement of the age of the solar
neighborhood is trying to reproduce the standard procedure. That
is, we have fitted the position of the ``observational'' cut-off
of each of the Monte Carlo realizations with a standard method
(Hernanz et al. 1994) to compute the white dwarf luminosity
function using {\sl exactly} the same inputs adopted to simulate
the Monte Carlo realizations, except, of course, the age of the
disk, which is the only free parameter. The results are shown
in Figure 13 for ten of the twenty realizations. As is usual
with real observational luminosity functions the theoretical
white dwarf luminosity functions were normalized to the bin
with minimum error bars. The derived ages of the disk for each
one of the realizations are shown in the upper left corner of
the corresponding panel. As it can be seen, there is a clear bias:
the derived ages of the disk are {\sl systematically} larger
than the input age of the Monte Carlo simulator by about half a
Gyr. This a direct consequence of the binning procedure, since
we are grouping white dwarfs belonging to the maximum of the
white dwarf luminosity function in the lowest luminosity bin,
and can be avoided by using the cumulative white dwarf luminosity
function, which minimizes the effects of the binning procedure.
\begin{figure}
\vspace{6.5cm}
\special{psfile=garciaberro.ps14 hscale=50 vscale=50 voffset=-120 hoffset=-25}
\caption{Bayesian analysis of the derived age of the disk.}
\end{figure}
We have used the bayesian inference techniques described in \S
4.3 to assign a purely statistical error to our age estimates.
In order to do this we need to know a formal uncertainty for
each one of the independent realizations. Since the value of
$\langle V/V_{\rm max}\rangle$ is a good measure of the
overall quality of the sample (despite the fact that the
samples are inhomogenous) we have adopted $\sigma_{\rm i}=
2\,(0.5-\langle V/V_{\rm max}\rangle)\,t_{\rm disk}$. The
correspoding probability distribution is shown in Figure 14,
which leads to a most probable age of the disk of $t_{\rm
disk}=13.5\,\pm\,0.8$~Gyr at the 95\% confidence level
($2\sigma$) which has to be compared with the adopted
input age in our Monte Carlo simulation which was taken to
be 13~Gyr. This uncertainty is in good agreement with the
results of Wood \& Oswalt (1998). If one relaxes the confidence
level to $1\sigma$ the associated error bar is $\pm\,0.4$~Gyr.
It is nonetheless important to realize that there is a systematic
increase in the inferred disk ages of $\sim\,5$\%.
\section{Conclusions}
We have built a Monte Carlo code which has allowed us to reproduce
quite accurately the process of building the white dwarf luminosity
function from the stage of object selection and data binning. Our
Monte Carlo simulation includes a model of galactic evolution based
on well established grounds. The simulated samples obtained with
our code reproduce very well the overall kinematical properties
of the observed white dwarf population. We have explored as well
the temporal evolution of such properties and we have found that
there is a fair agreement between the observed distributions and
the simulated ones. However, we have shown that observed sample
has very few old white dwarfs and this has constrained our
kinematical analysis to the most recent 3.7 Gyr, which can be
considered as reasonably secure. Nevertheless, we have shown that
the precise shape of the temporal distributions encode a wealth
of information and, therefore, more detailed analysis should be
undertaken with improved observational samples. We have also
extended our kinematical analysis by comparing the averaged
properties of both the observational white dwarf sample and
the Monte Carlo simulated sample with a sample of old main
sequence F and G stars. The results of this comparison lead
to the conclusion that our model of galactic evolution is
fully compatible with the properties of the observed samples.
Using our synthetic populations we have assessed the completeness
of the samples used to derive the white dwarf luminosity function
and studied their spatial distribution, and given a set of selection
criteria consistent with the observational procedures, we have built
several independent realizations of the white dwarf luminosity function
and compared them to the observational luminosity function of Oswalt
et al. (1996). Our results regarding the white dwarf luminosity
function can be summarized as follows:
\begin{enumerate}
\item Given the selection criteria adopted by Oswalt et al.
(1996), our Monte Carlo simulation strongly suggest that the
observational samples are complete up to $17^{\rm mag}$
and that the primary selection criterion at low luminosities
is the proper motion one, in agreement with Wood \& Oswalt
(1998).
\item The Monte Carlo simulated white dwarf luminosity functions
present an excellent agreement with the observational data.
\item The effects of a scale height law are not negligible at all
in the spatial distribution of the samples, especially at moderately
large luminosities were they are more prominent. A scale height of
roughly 130 pc is derived from the Monte Carlo simulations for the
objects used in building the white dwarf luminosity function. However,
we have established without any doubt that the effects of a scale
height law should be more apparent in the cumulative distribution
of proper motions. Although the effects of the scale height law
on the tail of the white dwarf luminosity function seem to be
negligible at first glance, a detailed analysis reveals that this
inflation effect increases the derived ages of the disk by a
considerable amount, which can be typically 2~Gyr.
\item By using bayesian inference techniques we have been able
to establish that the current procedure to assign the observational
error bars to the white dwarf luminosity function is reasonably for
a sample of 200 stars.
\item Finally, the statistical uncertainty in the age of the disk
derived from a bayesian analysis is roughly 1~Gyr, in agreement
with Wood \& Oswalt (1998), and we have determined that there is
a systematic trend due to the binning procedure which increases
the disk ages inferred from the observational luminosity function
by roughly a 5\%.
\end{enumerate}
Nevertheless, a good deal of work remains to be done. Future
improvements may include a more detailed analysis of the
kinematical properties of the sample of old white dwarfs. For
this purpose, it would be very useful to have more reliable
observational samples. In our case this means not only complete
samples but also more accurate mass determinations. It would be
also convenient to analyze the three dimensional motion of the
white dwarf population but, for the moment, this seems to be
unavoidable for the faintest white dwarfs due to the absence of
spectral features. Also of interest is to study the contamination
of the input samples used in the process of building the white
dwarf luminosity function with white dwarfs belonging to the
galactic halo. This, in principle, cannot be discarded since
halo members are selected on the basis of high proper motion,
which is the dominant selection criterion at the dim end of
the disk white dwarf luminosity function. A detailed statistical
analysis of the cumulative counts of white dwarfs still remains
to be done, instead of using the differential space density.
Last but not least, the tests proposed in this paper could be
applied to a real sample, thus providing us with very useful
hints about the structure and evolution of our Galaxy.
\vspace{1 cm}
\noindent
{\sl Acknowledgements} This work has been supported by DGICYT grants
PB94--0111 and PB94--0827-C02-02, and by the
CIRIT grant GRQ94--8001.
| {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaArXiv"
} | 1,339 |
Ploioderma cedri är en svampart som beskrevs av Suj. Singh, S.N. Khan & B.M. Misra 1987. Ploioderma cedri ingår i släktet Ploioderma och familjen Rhytismataceae. Inga underarter finns listade i Catalogue of Life.
Källor
Sporsäcksvampar
cedri | {
"redpajama_set_name": "RedPajamaWikipedia"
} | 5,635 |
{"url":"https:\/\/testbook.com\/question-answer\/the-uniform-arrival-and-uniform-service-rates-obse--5d1deb2bfdb8bb2e79e321f4","text":"# The uniform arrival and uniform service rates observed on an approach road to a signalized intersection are 20 and 50 vehicles\/minutes, respectively. For this signal, the red time is 30 s, the effective green time is 30 s, and the cycle length is 60s. Assuming that initially there are no vehicles in the queue, the average delay per vehicle using the approach road during a cycle length (in seconds, round off to 2 decimal places) is _______ .\n\nFree Practice With Testbook Mock Tests\n\nThis question was previously asked in\n\nGATE CE 2019 Official Paper: Shift 2\n\n## Solution:\n\nExplanation:\n\nWebster\u2019s average delay is given by,\n\n$$\\left( {{d_i}} \\right) = \\frac{{\\frac{{{C_o}}}{2}{{\\left( {1 - \\frac{{{g_i}}}{{{C_o}}}} \\right)}^2}}}{{1 - \\frac{{{q_i}}}{{{S_i}}}}}$$\n\nWhere,\n\ndi is an average delay, Co is Cycle length, gi is effective green time\n\nqi is normal flow.\n\nGiven,\n\nCycle length (C0) = 60 seconds\n\nNormal flow (qi) = 20 veh\/min\n\nSaturation flow (Si) = 50 veh\/min\n\nEffective green time (gi) = 30 seconds\n\n$${d_i} = \\frac{{\\frac{{60}}{2}{{\\left[ {1 - \\frac{{30}}{{60}}} \\right]}^2}}}{{1 - \\frac{{20}}{{50}}\\;}} = 12.5\\;seconds$$","date":"2021-07-28 03:09:38","metadata":"{\"extraction_info\": {\"found_math\": true, \"script_math_tex\": 0, \"script_math_asciimath\": 0, \"math_annotations\": 0, \"math_alttext\": 0, \"mathml\": 0, \"mathjax_tag\": 0, \"mathjax_inline_tex\": 0, \"mathjax_display_tex\": 1, \"mathjax_asciimath\": 0, \"img_math\": 0, \"codecogs_latex\": 0, \"wp_latex\": 0, \"mimetex.cgi\": 0, \"\/images\/math\/codecogs\": 0, \"mathtex.cgi\": 0, \"katex\": 0, \"math-container\": 0, \"wp-katex-eq\": 0, \"align\": 0, \"equation\": 0, \"x-ck12\": 0, \"texerror\": 0, \"math_score\": 0.451709121465683, \"perplexity\": 4119.032202226667}, \"config\": {\"markdown_headings\": true, \"markdown_code\": true, \"boilerplate_config\": {\"ratio_threshold\": 0.18, \"absolute_threshold\": 10, \"end_threshold\": 15, \"enable\": true}, \"remove_buttons\": true, \"remove_image_figures\": true, \"remove_link_clusters\": true, \"table_config\": {\"min_rows\": 2, \"min_cols\": 3, \"format\": \"plain\"}, \"remove_chinese\": true, \"remove_edit_buttons\": true, \"extract_latex\": true}, \"warc_path\": \"s3:\/\/commoncrawl\/crawl-data\/CC-MAIN-2021-31\/segments\/1627046153521.1\/warc\/CC-MAIN-20210728025548-20210728055548-00253.warc.gz\"}"} | null | null |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.