tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2009-05-03:/roundtable//3 2013-06-18T21:19:04Z Opinions and Analytis from Lapham's Quarterly writers and editors tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2737 2013-06-18T18:03:55Z 2013-06-18T21:19:04Z

The lord and his wife quickly discovered their fatal error, and ashamed and embarrassed by what they had done, they buried the Guinefort outside the castle walls. In due time, Stephen goes on, the castle was destroyed and the land left deserted. But the local peasants, “hearing of the dog’s noble deed and innocent death, began to visit the place and honor the dog as a martyr in quest of help for their sicknesses and other needs.” The worship of a dog was perhaps bad enough, more blasphemous was that the locals had given him the name of a saint, making a mockery of the Church’s institutions. But far graver was what these peasants were doing in the name of this sainted dog: a woman with a sick child would take her or him to the spot in the woods where Guinefort’s body lay buried, and there she would leave her child, naked on a bed of straw, with candles burning on each side of the child’s head. The parent would not return until the candles had burned out, and, as Stephen was told, many children did not survive this ordeal of open flame and flammable straw: “Several people told us that while the candles were burning like this they burnt and killed several babies.” Other children, left defenseless in the forest, were instead devoured by wolves. If the child survived the night, the mother would then dunk it nine times in the river—only then, if the child was still alive, would she or he be pronounced cured. Stephen was aghast at what he found in Dombes, and he used the story in his treatise to emphasize the folly and danger of superstition. But like many accounts from the Middle Ages, Stephen’s story of the cult of Saint Guinefort raises more questions than it answers. At the heart of this: how did a dog come to be recognized as a saint? And why were those who revered this saint leaving their children to die in his name? Among the many things Stephen could have faulted these peasants, he might have started with unoriginality. For, as it turns out, the story of Saint Guinefort was not unique to Lyons, nor even to France. It is actually among the oldest and most durable folktales, which can be traced back a thousand years earlier, to India. There it is known as the “Brahmin and the Mongoose.” The story, as related in the ancient Indian text, the Panchatantra, tells of a Brahmin and his wife, who have a son and a mongoose. As with her human child, the mother “cared for the mongoose also like a son, giving him milk from her breast, and salves, and baths, and so on. But she did not trust the animal, for she thought: ‘A mongoose is a nasty kind of creature. He might hurt my boy.’” While she is out one day she tells the Brahmin to look after their son, but he soon too leaves to beg for alms, so that only the mongoose is there to protect the child when a black snake appears and approaches the cradle. The mongoose, “fearing for the life of his baby brother, fell upon the vicious serpent halfway, joined battle with him, tore him to bits, and tossed the pieces far and wide. Then, delighted with his own heroism, he ran, blood trickling from his mouth, to meet the mother, for he wished to show what he had done.” Proving that no good deed goes unpunished, the mother, when the mongoose approached, “saw his bloody mouth and his excitement, she feared that the villain must have eaten her baby boy, and without thinking twice, she angrily dropped the water-jar upon him, which killed him the moment that it struck.” By the time the Brahmin returns the wife has discovered her error, and bitterly laments the death of the pet loved as a child: “Greedy! Greedy!” she tells her husband. “Because you did not do as I told you, you must now taste the bitterness of a son’s death, the fruit of your own wickedness.” Versions of this story have been found throughout India and southeast Asia, as well as China and Mongolia, among Jewish communities in Egypt, and throughout Europe from Russia to Wales (where it is known as the story of Llewellyn and his hound Gelert). While the snake is the constant menace in the majority of these tales, the mongoose’s role is played by whichever pet is deemed most loyal: as the tale moves north through Europe and through time, the martyred defender changes from mongoose to wolf, and finally, to dog. On its surface, the moral of this fable is clear: rash action leads to folly. But as ethnologist and folklorist Stuart Blackburn suggests, another way to make sense of the fable, particularly as it mutates throughout a series of different contexts, is to pay attention to the frame narrative in which it appears. In many of these frame narratives, particularly in India and Tamil, the problem with the family is that they have grown too close to the mongoose—alongside the danger of hasty decisions is the danger of growing too attached to one’s pets, treating an animal as though it was a child. In one Tamil version of the story, the mother mourns the dead pet as her “precious darling,” and in another he’s described as “their all-in-all—their younger son, their elder daughter-their elder son, their younger daughter, so fondly did they regard that little creature.” In most versions of the story, the animal is the “first-born son,” and the human child is seen as perhaps a reward to the couple for proving their ability to love their animal son. (As Blackburn notes, the Tamil language “leaves no doubt about this fictive affinity: a mongoose is….‘mongoose-child.’”) But if the problem with these Southeast Asian couples was undue affection for their mongooses, by the time the story got to France, the relationship to the pet had changed considerably. For Guinefort is not a lowly mongoose, a creature viewed with suspicion, but a greyhound, and in medieval France, a greyhound was not just any pet and not just any dog. In the thirteenth century Vincent of Beauvais distinguished greyhounds from ordinary hunting and guard dogs; greyhounds, he claimed, are “the noblest, the most elegant, the swiftest, and the best at hunting.” Often incorporated into family crests, the greyhound, like the lion or the ermine, was an exemplum of nobility and chivalric ideals. And so in the story that Stephen relates, the crime is doubled: not only does the lord hastily kill Guinefort, but he disposes of the greyhound’s body in a particularly undignified manner (“[he] threw his body into a well in front of the castle gate, and placing over it a very large heap of stones they planted trees nearby as a memorial of the deed”). Having killed his noble pet in such an ignominious fashion, and having revealed himself to be anything but noble himself, it’s no wonder that the lord’s castle is subsequently obliterated—“by divine will.” On hearing details of this blasphemous story, Stephen’s own punishment of these peasants was far less harsh. He claimed they were basically committing infanticide, leaving their children to die of exposure or wolf attack, and he understood them to be following the directions of a local witch. And while he had at his disposal all the powers of the Inquisition, he opted not to prosecute them for heresy or demand their executions. Instead, he saw them as victims of the serious but far lesser error of superstition: their actions were erroneous but not malicious, and while they may have been consulting witches they were not, in his estimation, themselves witches. While the devil and his minions might use magic to harm children, these women, Stephen saw, believed that they were trying to help their children. Their children, they believed, had become changelings. As with the story of the faithful pet, the belief in changelings also expands well beyond France. When an infant became sick, or would not stop crying, or in any other way exhibited abnormal behavior, parents would sometimes become suspicious that their real child had been abducted by spirits, who had left in its place a spirit-child of their own. The women who left their babies at the shrine of Saint Guinefort were not abandoning their children to die; they were, they believed, taking a changeling within earshot of its spirit-parents, the fauns of the woods, who would hear their spirit-child crying, take pity on it, and replace it with the human child they’d originally abducted. A child who made it through this terrible ordeal was , they believed, simply the original child returned to the parents. As Stephen relates, mothers who took their children to the shrine of Guinefort would invoke “the demons to adjure the fauns in the wood of ‘Rimite’ to take the sick and failing child which they said belonged to them (the fauns) and return to them their own child big, plump, live and healthy.” The barbaric actions by the women of Dombe at the shrine of the dog saint may have been a means for a community to dispose of children who were ill or otherwise disabled—in a manner that was ritualized so as to absolve the individual parents of any guilt. If Stephen was able to convince the local community not to leave their children to die in honor of Guinefort, the practice of turning to the dog for help in healing children would last well into the nineteenth century. Making the pilgrimage to the remnants of Saint Guinefort’s shrine, one would tie two branches together, in order to “knot” a child’s fever, or “unknot” a child’s legs if she or he was slow in learning to crawl or walk. To rid a child of fever the babies’ clothing might be left behind in the woods; an ethnologist following the pilgrimage route in 1879 saw “knotted branches by the thousands,” and a “mass of clothing,” suggesting that the shrine was still heavily frequented. This kind of sympathetic magic was by no means unusual or infrequent, but nineteenth-century scholars and theologians who studied the area were still trying to figure out what it had to do with a noble greyhound who ended up a Catholic saint. Discussing the matter in 1886, Abbé Jean Delaigue of Lyons asked the central question: “Is this Guinefort a saint or is he a dog?” Delaigue comes to the conclusion that Guinefort was a real human saint, and that the local townsfolk had duped this inquisitive interloper with a tall tale. If the Dominican inquisitor had believed the story, Delaigue states, “one can only conclude that he was remarkably credulous and that people took advantage of his simplicity to laugh at his expense.” But even at that late date the matter was not settled; investigating the wooded region in 1879, the ethnologist Louis Augustin Vayyssière reported that “All those whom I approached told me that Saint Guinefort was a dog.” It fell to the scholar Jean-Claude Schmitt, who put all the pieces together, finally, a century later. He traced the origins of the greyhound saint to a relatively obscure human saint named Guinefort, whose vita emerged sometime between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Schmitt diligently traced the spread of Guinefort’s cult from Pavia throughout Europe, including the many versions of his names, and the various similar-sounding saints who were mistaken for Guinefort and vice versa. Of the original Guinefort not much is known—his hagiography is so similar to that of Saint Sebastian, and woefully unreliable. (Like that more famous martyr, he was condemned to be shot “so full of arrows that he resembled a hedgehog”). Among the few salient details is that his feast day was August 22, and that he was known as a protector of sick children. It fell to the scholar Jean-Claude Schmitt, who put all the pieces together, finally, a century later. He traced the origins of the greyhound saint to a relatively obscure human saint named Guinefort, whose vita emerged sometime between the eighth and twelfth centuries. Schmitt diligently traced the spread of Guinefort’s cult from Pavia throughout Europe, including the many versions of his names, and the various similar-sounding saints who were mistaken for Guinefort and vice versa. Of the original Guinefort not much is known—his hagiography is so similar to that of Saint Sebastian, and woefully unreliable. (Like that more famous martyr, he was condemned to be shot “so full of arrows that he resembled a hedgehog”). Among the few salient details is that his feast day was August 22, and that he was known as a protector of sick children. Guinefort’s feast day falls during the “dog days” of summer (July 24-August 24), the period in summer when the dog-star Sirius rose around the same time as sunrise, a time also believed to result in a higher incidence of rabies. Numerous other saints during the dog days are associated with dogs and depicted with them, including Saint Ulrich (feast day July 4; patron invoked against rabid dogs), Saint Roch (feast day August 16; patron of good dogs), and Saint Christopher, whose feast day on July 25 marked the start of the dog days—and who was sometimes depicted as having the head of a dog. Guinefort the dog saint, Schmitt demonstrates, emerged from the confluence of three very different folk traditions that all involved protecting children and which merged in the woods outside Dombe. The fable of a loyal dog, protector of children; a ritual magic to rid children of spirits; and a saint whose life was sketchy and who was known only as a patron of children, were garbled together to form a holy greyhound on whose behalf peasants abandoned children in the woods. The human saint Guinefort, it seems, was often enough depicted alongside dogs that his story became that of the loyal greyhound, in an odd form of mistranslation. Without a clear story of his own, Guinefort’s life became that of a durable folktale, even though it meant a transformation from human to canine. That this community could call a dog a saint is perhaps the strangest aspect of this, but as I’ve discussed in my book The Afterlives of the Saints, it is precisely in the lives of the saints—multitudinous, bizarre, permeable—that Catholicism is most susceptible to folk tradition. The stories of the saints are constantly being adapted to the needs of specific communities, abandoning orthodoxy as necessary, often to the chagrin of the Vatican—be it the current cult of Santa Muerte in Latin America, or the thirteenth-century veneration of a dog. Stephen, the Inquisitor, defender of the faith and orthodoxy, was in no position to appreciate this, and moved decisively to end the cult once and for all. “We then had the dead dog dug up and the grove of trees cut down and burned along with the dog’s bones,” he concludes. “Then we had an edict enacted by the lords of the land threatening the spoliation and fining of any people who gathered there for such a purpose in future.” In his narrative of these events in Lyons, you can read something like a three-act tragedy on the topic of power in the Middle Ages. At first is an all-powerful lord, but one who does not act with the morals and nobility befitting his station, rushing to judgment and then failing to properly bury a noble animal—who as a result of his immorality is punished, his kingdom destroyed. In his wake another source of authority springs up: the folk-saint Guinefort, who heals through magic and works to address the needs of the people in a manner far more intimate than orthodox dogma could. He too, is destroyed, this time by the Church, a third source of power which roots out heresy and superstition in an attempt to restore order. While we sometimes think of the power dynamics in the Middle Ages as hegemonic, with the peasants perennially oppressed by both Lord and Bishop, the story of Guinefort may in fact represent one example of how that power was constantly shifting. And if Stephen thought he got the last word, that he definitively destroyed this wrong-headed folk-belief once and for all, it’s worth remembering that the cult of Guinefort, protector of children, not only outlasted Stephen and the Inquisition, but also the dominance that the Church held over Europe until the Modern Age. In the late 1960s, when the Vatican revolutionized itself to stay current and relevant, Jean-Claude Schmitt was still making inquiries about Guinefort in the regions around Lyon—asking around about a supposed healer in the nearby forest, one of the locals answered Schmitt, “My grandmother told me: it seems he was a dog!”

Colin Dickey By Colin Dickey. A few years before he died in 1261, the Inquisitor and Dominican friar Stephen of Bourbon began writing a long treatise on faith—one that included one of the more tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2678 2013-06-11T16:02:59Z 2013-06-18T21:19:45Z

Chapman’s account, published in the early conservation magazine Forest and Stream, was part of a growing outcry against the destructive fashion of feathers, which caused the deaths of millions of birds each year. Stories of devastated rookeries horrified women across America and England, and editorial columns became the setting for heated calls for action against the cruel consumption of feathers. Harper’s Bazaar attempted to raise women’s consciousness with an 1896 editorial that tugged at maternal instincts by describing the deaths of mother birds and their orphaned chicks: “The birds have to be shot when they are watching over their newly hatched young, leaving the nestlings to die of starvation.” The editorial called for women to familiarize themselves with the basic economics of supply and demand and to abolish the practice of dressing for men through the approval of other women: “it is just possible that the advance of common sense may bring with it more equality between the sexes in this respect, and possibly by their joint efforts they may at least develop a little independence and save the birds.” Federal agents with a seized collection of egrets, c. 1910. (Library of Congress) Feathers, like fish scales and mammal hair, are a bird’s protective layer—the horny outgrowth of skin that decorate the flesh. Their dramatic coloring and airy texture have made them a coveted decorative material for thousands of years across world cultures. Before Marie Antoinette’s head was removed from her body, it was often adorned with a tower of feathers, intricately piled atop a mountainous wig. This particular fashion trend refused to die, reaching a fevered pitch with decorative hats in the last quarter of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States. Bird plumage had been an entirely elite indulgence until fashion went en masse in the era of mail order catalogues, home journalsm and a growing middle class. By the 1880s, the latest fashions had become more accessible than ever. While skins and furs were also popular, it was feathers that seemed to crop out of and envelope every stylish woman. Plumed hats were not only an object of female conspicuous consumption but also a means of female employment. In 1870, millinery was the fourth largest occupation for women in the United States. By the turn of the century it had fallen to fourteenth place but was still employing nearly 83,000 women, including the failed social-climber Lilly Bart from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. In 1895, Vogue announced that thanks to ostrich farms, women were “bitten with the craze” for feathers. In response, the editors recommended that “a hat to command attention and admiration needs to have as many as five or eight plumes, while a picture hat, that huge affair intended to make or mar the wearer, has no limit whatever.” At the same time, bird-watching and botanizing had become genteel pursuits for middle and upper-class women. The paradox between these two trends soon became apparent. Hat made from a bird of paradise, c. 1910. It takes four birds to produce one ounce of plumes, and the growing feather trade threatened bird species around the world. Some, like the bittern, whose feathers were popularly used for muffs, became extinct entirely. In Florida, bird populations were depleted at a particularly astounding rate. The plumes of native Florida species, such as herons, egrets, cranes, roseate, spoonbills and flamingos, were most prized during their mating and nesting seasons, and harvesting of their feathers meant that their young starved and died, eliminating two generations of birds at once. In Boston, Harriet Hemenway’s tea meetings grew in popularity as their cause expanded from condemning plumage fashion to saving wild birds in general. By the end of the first year, their society had grown by some nine hundred members, each paying a lifetime membership of one dollar. They named their organization the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Hemenway and her well-connected circle relied on an effective pairing of persuasion and education. Fashionable women were recruited to discourage their peers from wearing feathered hats and milliners from supplying them. In turn, they supported the efforts of female teachers, ornithologists, and naturalists. In 1900, conservationists also attempted to establish “Bird Day,” encouraging young girls to build nests in order to promote an early love of birds as living beings and not fashion accessories. The Massachusetts Audubon Society attempted to steer fashion in a more sustainable direction by promoting the “Audubon hat,” trimmed with ribbons and feathers from non-protected birds in lieu of plumage. In 1897, just two years after its inception, the Massachusetts Audubon Society gained its first big legislative coup when the state passed a bill outlawing the trade of wild bird feathers. Local chapters continued to sprout up across the country and in 1905 the society was incorporated and renamed the National Audubon Society. Though membership of state Audubon chapters were overwhelmingly female, the cause was also taken up by men, notably George Bird Grinnell, who was the founder of the first and short-lived Audubon Society, named after the painter and ornithologist John James Audubon. But Grinnell, who was the editor of Forest and Stream, could not balance running his new organization and his editorial duties. Just two years later, despite gaining fifty thousand members, Grinnell closed the Audubon Society, though he continued to be an active naturalist and Audubon supporter. An Audubon hat made from pheasant feathers, 1901. (Audubon Society) The anti-plumage movement was gaining ground in other quarters as well. Prominent supporters, including Theodore Roosevelt, an avid outdoorsman and naturalist, and Frank Chapman, who continued to publish and became a bird curator of the American Museum of Natural History, began a public outcry against bird carnage and cruelty Society ladies and actresses declared themselves feather abstainers and even Queen Consort Alexandra of the United Kingdom denounced plumage fashion. Conservationists in the United Kingdom had already made steady progress, passing Sea Birds’ Preservation Act in 1869. In 1900, the Lacey Act was passed in the U.S., criminalizing the trade and transport of certain wildlife, plants, and fish. In 1903, President Roosevelt established the first U.S. wildlife refuge in Florida, creating the Pelican Island National Wildlife Refuge, and in 1910 the state of New York outlawed the sale of native birds The following year the state passed the Audubon Plumage Bill,which banned the sale of native bird feathers and ended the domestic feather trade. Nevertheless, the price for aigrette feathers reached $80 per ounce in 1912, the equivalent of nearly $2,000 in today’s currency. Despite conservation efforts, legislation, and the rising concerns for wildlife, fashion would not waver. But by 1918 the world was at war. Trade routes were cut off and feathers became a scant commodity, along with most food and clothing. With war came austerity and practicality; women no longer had the money and time to devote to frivolities. Adorning oneself with sumptuous feathers was an unpatriotic statement in Britain—a declaration of a willingness to take up precious cargo space for the sake of vanity. Practical changes were afoot as well. The popularity of the automobile made it impossible to cram a hat the size of coffee table into the passenger seat. By the 1920s form followed function and women’s hairstyles had been minimized to the point that they simply could no longer support a large hat decorated with a proliferation of plumage and bird parts. Plume fashion made a brief reappearance in the post-war style magazines of the 1930s, but by then the appetite for feathers had largely been satiated. By the time she died in 1960 at the age of 102, Harriet Hemenway had seen the rise and fall of the plumage craze and the revitalization of many bird species. Though she later turned her attentions away from birds and towards new groups of working and immigrant women, she continued to be an avid birder, wearing her trademark white sneakers and taking pleasure in the knowledge that due to her efforts, the birds she admired would remain in the sky. Related: How to Be a Stuffed Animal, by Frances Stonor Saunders “3 caribou heads, 7 pairs horns, 2 pairs moose horns, 1 moose-head skin, 32 grizzly-bear skins and skulls, 1 blackbear skin and skull, 1 black-timber-wolf skin and skull, 1 coyote-head skin.” 1920 / Prague Angry Bird "A gentleman passed by, looked on for a while, then asked me why I suffered the vulture. “I’m helpless,” I said." 1892 / Yasnaya Polyana Leo Tolstoy is Not an Ostrich "And behold, a tender, refined lady will devour the corpses of these animals with the full conviction of her righteousness."

Adee Braun By Adee Braun. On a late February afternoon in 1886, journalist and ornithologist Frank Chapman walked down one of New York City’s uptown shopping thoroughfares, eyeing women’s hats. Chapman was on a tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2647 2013-06-06T18:14:44Z 2013-06-18T21:20:20Z

Chesty XIV is promoted to Private First Class. (Marine Corps Photo Archive) Nearly seventy miles northeast of Paris, there are over twenty cemeteries where the bodies of mostly unidentified German, British, and Italian soldiers are buried from the first World War. There is also Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, the final resting place for over six thousand Americans that lost their lives during the Great War, many of whom fell upon the very ground where their last earthy remains lay during Third Battle of the Aisne. It was during that bloody battle that a stray dog became the most decorated canine in American military history. Stubby was a pitbull mix, all big brown eyes and muscle. During training, before going “Over There” (as the popular song put it), Corporal Robert Conroy found the dog roaming around a Yale lot in New Haven, Connecticut that was being used as a makeshift army base. Conroy grew attached to the dog, and eventually his superiors made Stubby the mascot of the 102nd Infantry, 26th Yankee Division to help boost the morale of the troops. A quick learner, Stubby became familiar with the bugle calls, drills, and learned to put his right paw on his right eyebrow when his fellow soldiers gave a salute. Sergeant Stubby receiving awards for service during World War I. When it was finally time to ship off, Conroy smuggled the dog aboard the S.S Minnesota and kept him hidden until the ship was in the middle of the ocean, convincing his commanding officer to let the dog stay after Stubby showed off his saluting abilities. Once the soldiers made it to France, Stubby marched into battle with the doughboys, but soon found himself the victim of a German chlorine gas attack. Stubby was tough, though—he survived the attack and his already strong sense of smell became even more sensitive to even the smallest trace of gas. His new heightened abilities came in handy one morning when the Germans launched a gas attack directly at the sleeping quarters of American troops. Sensing the danger, Stubby went crazy, barking wildly, jumping on beds, and saving countless lives. Stubby also helped locate wounded soldiers on the battlefield, and once single-handedly caught a German soldier in battle by attacking him and barking until American troops caught up with their fellow soldier. For capturing the enemy troop, Stubby was promoted to the rank of Sergeant, becoming the first dog to be given a rank by the United States military. Sgt. Stubby served his country in seventeen battles before he was relieved of combat duty while recovering from a grenade blast. By that time the pooch from New Haven was a celebrity who used his fame to cheer up other wounded soldiers as they recuperated. As soon as the war was over, Stubby was a featured guest in parades all across the country. He met President Wilson (and later Presidents Harding and Coolidge), was awarded over a dozen medals for his service, gaining membership in the American Legion. A taxidermied Sergeant Stubby on display at the National Museum of American History. Stubby retired from active service with his master, Corporal Conroy who survived the and went to study law at Georgetown University Law Center in 1921. Aware there was a celebrity dog on the campus, the school soon arranged a new position for the famous pooch: the mascot of the Georgetown Hoyas. Just like he had during the war, Stubby worked hard at his new position, entertaining the fans during the halftime of football games, and taking daily strolls across the campus where other former soldiers saluted the heroic pooch. Stubby died in his master’s arms in 1926 at the age of ten or eleven. Gone but not forgotten, Stubby was stuffed and to this day he remains a part of the Smithsonian's permanent collection. The dog that earned two stripes, a Purple Heart, several medals from adoring French fans, and the hearts of countless Americans for his bravery also has his name on a brick in the Liberty Monument for soldiers from the First World War that reads: "Sergeant Stubby, Hero Dog of WWI, A Brave Stray." Related: c.1179 / France Loyal Beast "The lion stayed by his side and never left him; from that day on it would accompany him, for it intended to serve and protect him." 1784 / Passy Dissenting Opinion "He is, besides, a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards who should presume to invade his farmyard with a red coat on." 1917 / Washington, D.C. The World Must be Made Safe for Democracy "It is a war against all nations. There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind."

Jason Diamond By Jason Diamond. This spring, the United States Marine Corps welcomed a new recruit into its ranks. Although Private First Class Chesty XIV went through no formal training for the position (inherited tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2640 2013-05-22T16:46:03Z 2013-05-22T16:46:46Z

Black began rat-catching as a young boy in Regent’s Park, showing off his skills to genteel passers-by. “I wasn’t afraid to handle rats even then,” he told Mayhew. “It seemed to come nat’ral to me. I very soon had some in my pocket, and some in my hands, carrying them away as fast as I could, and putting them into my wire cage...I didn’t know the bites were so many, or I dare say I shouldn’t have been so venturesome as I was.” By the age of ten, Black was getting commissions to catch rats for cash, but his real money came from selling rats for gaming. Rat-baiting was a popular London tavern pastime in which dog owners would set their dogs in a pit and bet on their dog’s ability to catch a set number of rats, sometimes by the dozen, in a matter of minutes. Enthusiasts bet on the speed of a dog’s rat-killing abilities (one famous contender, Billy, tore apart a couple dozen rats in a minute and a half). The “sport” was so popular that the government wanted a cut, and put a tax on rat-killing dogs. Jimmy Shaw, the proprietor of a pub that held one of the most popular rat-matches in town, had hundreds of caged rats at the ready culled from suppliers across the country, including Jack Black. A New Jersey rat pit, c. 1891. Published in the Police Gazette. Black was an opportunist. He developed both a gentle touch and a killer instinct, talents which he honed by breeding a menagerie of animals including dogs, ferrets, birds and many breeds of “fancy rats.” He also caught wild birds and supplied them for sport. At Mayhew’s first meeting with Black, he had just returned from catching a dozen sparrows that were ordered for a shooting match at a nearby tea garden. Rats, though, were undoubtedly Black’s focus and fascination. He even informed Mayhew that he had “‘unbeknown to his wife,’ tasted the flesh of roasted rat, and asserted that they were as “moist as rabbits, and quite as nice.” It is unclear exactly how many rats ran rampant in London in the mid-nineteenth century, but it was estimated that a single effective rat-killer of the time killed about 8,000 rats a year, and there was certainly no shortage of rats to keep them busy. In 1813, journalist and rat decrier Charles Fothergill, attempted to do the math on rats’ rapid reproduction noting disapprovingly that the beasts are “continually under the furor of animal love.” He calculated that if left to their own devices, a single pair of rats would produce three million young during their three-year lifespan. Fothergill envisioned that “the whole surface of the earth in a very few years would be rendered a barren and hideous waste, covered with myriads of famished grey rats, against which man himself would contend in vain.” The danger posed by the scurries of rat feet was greater than that of ruined food or fainting gentlewomen: rats were chewing up crops all over England, especially corn, the price of which was tied to that the price of wheat. So when rats feasted on corn in the countryside, the price of wheat (and thus, bread) rose, leaving people all over the country hungry and broke. Back in London, Black’s fight against the ratpocalypse wore on. His chosen weapons of destruction: dogs and ferrets. Black had trained his ferrets to sniff out the rats while his dogs would sniff out the ferrets. Ferrets, with their narrow snake-like body, could slither into rat tunnels and hiding places. When they got lost or trapped, as they often did, Black‘s trained dogs would find them. While the partnership of dogs and ferrets reigned supreme, Black did experiment in training other species at the art of rat-catching, including a monkey (“didn’t do much, and only give [the rats] a good shaking”), a badger named Polly (“difficult in training to get him to kill, though they’ll kill rabbits fast enough”) and two stowaway raccoons (“they weren’t no good at that”). A rat catcher and his dog, c. 1900 (National Media Museum) Nineteenth-century rats were equal-opportunist thieves, invading the townhomes of Belgravia as often as the slums of East London, and collecting whatever they could carry. Black recounts to Mayhew the various spoils he found while ratting: “I found under one floor in a gent’s house a great quantity of table napkins and silver spoons and forks, which the rats had carried away for the grease on ‘em—shoes and boots gnawed to pieces, shifts, aprons, gowns, pieces of silk, and I don’t know what not. Sarvants had been discharged accused of stealing them there things. Of course I had to give them up; but there they was.” The rat’s reputation for having an insatiable sexual appetite, coupled with their supposed predilection for cannibalism, made them the perfect Victorian enemy of lawlessness and sexual deviance. James Rodwell wrote in 1850: “[Rats] have no laws, either civil or religious, to govern them, so to call them Socialists, Communists, or Rats, to me ‘tis equal; for, in my mind, Communism, Socialism, and Ratism are terms synonymous.” Rodwell’s passion for exposing rats as an apocalyptic force while obsessively chronicling their behavior puts him somewhere between early anthropologist and crank. Chapter headings of his second book “The rat: its history and destructive character”, include Thievish Propensity of Rats, How the Rats of Scotland Can Carry Eggs, Rats Standing on Their Heads, Three Cannibal Rats Swallowing Nine Others, The Unreasonable Fear of Rats, and A Rat and a Ferret Snuggling Together in the Author's Bosom. Rodwell, like Black, was a strong proponent of well-trained dogs as man’s savior. Specifically, a well-bred terrier (not a “little, pygmy, dwarf terrier; they are tantamount to useless”), which Rodwell figured could tackle thousands of rats in one month. He called for an end to the tax on rat-killing dogs and for farmers and country folk to set up a rat recycling system by which individuals could redeem money for catching rats that would be then be added to the local rat compost heap. Some rats would be left for the rat-matches so that people could make a little side money and still get their kicks. The fact that rats are ultimately fiercely intelligent mammals can complicate human relationships with them. While there is no American Fancy Cockroach Association, there have always been effete rat enthusiasts (Black used to breed fancy rats as pets for English ladies). The war on rats waged on as the vermin continued to infest London. But as the century progressed, and Victorians’ softened their attitudes towards domesticated dogs, dog-rat matches were eventually replaced by fancy dog shows. The ensuing hundred years have seen both the declaration of Rat Week in 1921, a failed attempt to encourage the annihilation of rats, and the first World Rat Day in 2003 to celebrate them. Yet the legend of the rat-catcher endures; Rat-Catcher’s Day predates both holidays, commemorating the medieval myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Germany. On June 26, wish your local pest-controller a Happy Rat-Catcher’s Day. Image at top: The Rat-Catcher and his Dogs, by Thomas Woodward, 1824 (Tate Britain)

Adee Braun By Adee Braun. Each great civilization is plagued by its own particular infestation—the point at which the balance between man and vermin shifts uncomfortably in the direction of the critters. Biblical Egypt tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2637 2013-05-17T16:13:20Z 2013-05-17T16:45:11Z

Angela Serratore By Angela Serratore. One can hardly visit the main page of any social networking site without being bombarded by the accomplishments of an adorable pet, but pride in one’s animal friends stretches tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2627 2013-05-15T14:23:44Z 2013-05-15T21:01:32Z

The 19th Century Moby Dick, by Herman Melville Ornithological Biography, by John James Audobon The Origin of the Species, by Charles Darwin My Antonia, by Willa Cather The Idiot, by Fydor Dostoevsky Following the Equator, by Mark Twain The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin Folk Tales of Salishan and Sahaptin Tribes, edited by Franz Boas The 20th Century Out of Africa, by Isak Dinisen My Unwritten Books, by George Steiner The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck I Am a Cat, by Natsume Soseki The Plague, by Albert Camus Elizabeth Bishop: Prose, Poems, and Letters, by Elizabeth Bishop The Thirteen-Gun Salute, by Patrick O'Brian West with the Night, by Beryl Markham Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling Poems of W.B. Yeats, by W.B. Yeats A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean American Primitive, by Mary Oliver The Outermost House, by Henry Beston Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov My Dog Tulip, by J.R. Ackerley Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand The Complete Stories, by Flannery O'Connor The Street of Crocodiles, by Bruno Schulz Marcovaldo, by Italo Calvino The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, by Virginia Woolf A Sand County Almanac & Sketches Here and There, by Aldo Leopold "Why Look at Animals?", by John Berger The 21st Century Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson Anthill: A Novel, by Edward O. Wilson

The Editors By The Editors. Ever wonder just how many books go into a single issue of Lapham's Quarterly? Follow along using this complete syllabus, which assembles all the fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2636 2013-05-14T19:00:00Z 2013-05-14T19:01:45Z

Michelle Legro By Michelle Legro. In the summer of 1952, Charles Mingus and his wife moved to 1592 3rd Avenue, a $70 a month, one-room apartment with a kitchenette on top of the noisy tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2634 2013-05-06T15:07:13Z 2013-05-06T15:07:37Z

The poodle also charmed Winston Churchill into making sure that the two he owned, both named Rufus, were included in family dinners. Thomas Mann and Gertrude Stein kept them as companions, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin is the proud owner of a toy poodle named Tosya. But as a perfect example of exactly how the poodle is viewed by people the world over, P.J. Aroon of Foreign Policy pointed out that the Russian President “has tried to keep his fondness for Tosya hidden” the poodle being “the most unmacho of dogs.” Instead, the Russian government shows off photos of Putin playing with Yume, an Akita-Inu, and Buffy, a Bulgarian Shepherd, while we’re left to suspect that Tosya is probably the favorite when the president knows that the cameras aren’t around. People are often surprised and amused to discover poodles are so handy when going out looking for foul. They are excellent truffle finders, and went mushing in the Iditarod from 1988 to 1991. Yet the biggest misconception people have about poodles is their origin; poodles were water-dogs that were bred first, not in France, but in Germany, with the earliest known record of anything resembling a poodle going back to 1524, when a German writer named Conrad Gesner described the “Pudel” as a hunting retriever. A 1622 woodcut that depicts a “Water Dogge” with a very similar coat-clipping to the one we associate with poodles today is the first visual of the dog and its well-known haircut. Even though by today’s standards the poodle cut is the most elaborate and precise in the entire show dog world, the iconic cut serves practical purposes. In the traditional “poodle cut,” the dog’s single layer, moisture-resistant and hypoallergenic coat is shorn close and left long in parts to make swimming easier, but also protect the vital organs in the cold weather. The reasons for the fluffy balls left on the hips, ankles, and tail aren’t as clear to understand. Some say they protect the dog, others say it adds buoyancy in the water, while another group of poodle owners will tell you it is for pure decoration. Breeding eventually yielded two more different sizes of the traditional poodle: the smaller Miniature and Toy. It’s also routinely believed that poodles bred in Germany were brown, while ones from Russia were traditionally black. White poodles were mostly bred in France-as they’re most popular of the three, it’s easy to see why people incorrectly think of the poodle as a French dog. It’s difficult for historians to ascertain exactly when and why poodles first came to Paris, especially since pudlehund is a word derived from Low German, predominantly spoken in the Kingdom of Prussia, whose relationship with France has, historically, been shaky at best. The poodle definitively made it out of Germany in 1636, when Prince Rupert of the Rhine aided King Charles the I in the English Civil War, he brought his white poodle Boye along with him. The dog became well-known in England by accompanying his master into battle and was the subject of propaganda. It was said the dog put a hex on his enemies and was invulnerable in battle, that it was born of demonic origins and endowed with magical powers such as shape-shifting. Boye proved to be mortal after all when in 1644 he escaped camp to follow his master onto the battlefield and was killed at the Battle of Marston Moor. Brave enough to follow their owners into danger, smart and easy to train , and eminently loveable, the poodle really has all the most-prized qualities of man’s best friend, yet the breed has always been misunderstood and maligned But humans that don’t know the greatness of the breed have it totally wrong; the biggest problem the proud poodle has is that they’re simply too good looking for most humans to realize what a great dogs they are. But to anyone who has observed a poodle just going about its business? To see it strut and bounce on its long legs is a chance to admire one of the most beautiful and gracious members of the canine family. Related: 2012 / New York City Burkhard Bilger Patrols With the K-9 Unit “Patrol dogs have one of the most dangerous jobs in public life.&#8221 c. 1179 / France Loyal Beast “Yet the lion stayed by his side and never left him; from that day on it would accompany him, for it intended to serve and protect him.&#8221 1946 / London J. R. Ackerley Arranges a Marriage “Soon after Tulip came into my possession, I set about finding a husband for her.&#8221

Jason Diamond By Jason Diamond. “I remember when he asked to take Charley Dog,” Elaine Steinbeck once said of her famous husband. “He said rather meekly, ‘This is a big favor I’m going to tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2631 2013-04-26T05:15:36Z 2013-04-26T18:20:21Z

Miles Klee By Miles Klee. This year, an archaeological excavation in Egypt unearthed some eight million mummies, none of which were human. The team was digging in a so-called dog catacomb in Saqqara, a tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2615 2013-04-04T14:30:02Z 2013-04-04T19:00:02Z

Paul Collins By Paul Collins. On November 11, 1960, a worker named Bobby clocked in at the Houston-area factory of the Superior Furniture Manufacturing Co., pressed a button on a bedding machine, and set tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2606 2013-03-20T13:23:35Z 2013-03-20T17:14:46Z

Since Hugh Capet was crowned King of France in the cathedral of Reims in 987, wine from this region has been regarded as “royal.” Originally still and pale pink, it was much in vogue at court. The elaborate wine-making process that led to white bubbly was worked out at the ancient Abbey of Saint Pierre d’Hautvillers by the blind Benedictine monk, Dom Pierre Pérignon—with improvements added later by the “widow” or veuve Nicole Clicquot. Seeking to rid his wine of bubbles regarded as a fault by many at the time—and to render it white to distinguish it from Burgundy—at first he failed at both. Towards the end of his life he did manage to create the world’s first truly white wine—but the bubbles remained. Sampling one of his own bottles, Dom Perignon famously said “I am drinking stars.” In 1668 he was appointed cellerer and procurator of the monastery and wine maker to the Sun King, Louis XIV, who adored the stuff and thought it good for his gout. The summer of 2002 will always be remembered at the Dom Pérignon vineyard in the heart of Champagne; it was a season they say “touched by grace.” Those who preside over the magic arts of viticulture at the domain Dom Pérignon today create a vintage cuvee rose, not annually, but occasionally. 1990 was one such year, 2002 was another. Being declared ready to drink, a vintage champagne is allowed to ferment for ten years or more in the bottle as it continues to produce biological bubbles behind a stout cork and toughened glass. In Dom Pérignon’s own day, bottles would explode as the pressure built up to three times that inside a car tire, shattering weak wood fired eighteenth century French glass and blowing out the oiled hemp stoppers early vintners used. It was the British with their own great thirst for bubbles who first perfected coal fired toughened glass and corks from Portugal that finally made storage safe. Later, following Napoloeon’s defeat at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna that restored the old order, the Russian army occupied Reims and the champagne region, looting all the bottles they could find. Over the next hundred years, the Imperial Russian aristocracy became champagne’s greatest fans. Rose champagne is rare. Only three percent of the 350 million bottles produced annually in the Champagne region of France are pink, perhaps because giving it its tint while maintaining its quality is hard. It’s basically a matter of either adding still red Pinot Noir just before the second fermentation, or leaving the red Pinot grape skins in contact with the wine for a while—both of which are risky and complex. A small mistake can turn the champagne into an unwanted, unsalable red, blue or brown. To find out what the very best rose champagne tastes like, I was invited a few months ago to Istanbul, that watery palimpsest of lost civilizations, where the house of Dom Pérignon was hosting a boondoggle and a bash on the very edge of Europe in honor of their latest creation, a true beluga of bubbly. If each vintage has its distinctive hue, the glass of Dom Pérignon Vintage 2002 that I contemplated in solitude was a mysterious shade of amber. “The Dark Jewel,” Richard Geoffrey, Dom Perignon’s present-day chef de cave, has dubbed it. Seated alone on a sunny open veranda in a Sultan’s Palace on the fast flowing Bosphorus, the stretch of choppy water that divides Europe from Asia, I was here to sip what many consider to be the best vintage in a generation of the finest pink champagne in the world. I fantasized that joining me to share my glass was the ghost of Sultan Abdul Aziz, one of the last Ottomans. It was he who built the neo-classical palais where I sat, and it was he who was later murdered here, so his ghost, I thought, might be thirsty. A modernizer and reformer in love with all things French, he had been the first sultan to journey abroad, visiting Second Empire Paris in the 1860s where the Empress Eugenie threw him massive banquets. Like other nineteenth century rulers, he was partial to bubbly—in particular, the pink kind. Trust me when I say what I drank that day was ineffable. Robert Parker, doyen of American oenophiles, has given it an almost unheard of rating of 98. At Sherry Lehman on New York’s Madison Avenue and Berry Brothers in London—the first shipment, at $5,000 a case, was snapped up in an hour. I can only assume that in the flesh pots and boudoirs of the two greatest cities on earth, “bad girls” have been having “a good time.” Image: Une Soireé Chez La Païva, by Adolphe Joseph Thomas Monticelli

Peter Foges By Peter Foges. Rose champagne is the intoxicant of choice for courtesans and kings. Beautiful, expensive, and rare, it was beloved by the grandest of the grandes horizontales of nineteenth-century Paris—and the tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2602 2013-03-19T14:03:08Z 2013-03-19T14:03:21Z

He adopted the “confessional” form from St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but his essay is not a traditional autobiography: it relates only those early instances of his life which relate to his opium addiction—if anything, it is an autobiography of opium, not the writer himself. And while it’s also true that De Quincey had nothing like a “rival,” as The Scotsman put it, it’s clear that De Quincey did have his successors, chiefly in the evolution of the urban peripatetic. His friend J. R. Findlay later recalled that De Quincey “confessed to occasional accesses to an almost irresistible impulse to flee to the labyrinthine shelter of some great city like London or Paris—there to dwell solitary amid a multitude, buried by day in the cloister-like recesses of mighty libraries, and stealing away by night to some obscure lodging.” Walking through a nightmare city recording his observations with a dispassionate but empathetic eye, De Quincey found kinship with Irish refugees and prostitutes: “Being myself, at that time of necessity a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I naturally fell in more frequently with those female peripatetics who are technically called street-walkers.” De Quincey is the first modern flâneur, and his influence can be felt from Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Baudelaire, from the French Surrealists and Walter Benjamin to W. G. Sebald. The Confessions’ subtitle is as important as its title: “Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar.” De Quincey is no illiterate junkie or uneducated hustler. The vision of opium addiction he presents is from the vantage point of someone who has the education and reflection to understand what he’s done to himself, and to place it in a larger literary and cultural context. The young De Quincey had managed to impress both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, despite being more than a decade younger. He gradually inserted himself into Wordsworth’s circle, living with them at Grasmere for several years (Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy wrote to a friend at one point, “We feel often as if he were one of the Family—he is loving, gentle and happy—a very good scholar, and an acute Logician.”), but the elder poet himself never came to treat De Quincey as an equal—after they’d been friends for five years Wordsworth still condescended to him. This blow to his self-worth may account for De Quincey’s early inability to capitalize on his latent talent. His collision course with drug addiction lay in two halves of De Quincey that had been with him since childhood. First, his capacity for intense and lucid dreams; he would later recall one of his earliest memories of a “remarkable dream of terrific grandeur” when he was less than two years old. The second was his constitution; throughout his life De Quincey was plagued by illness, shooting pains in his stomach that made it difficult to eat or lie down. He was sickly throughout his life, and it was this unrelenting illnesses that led a friend, when De Quincey was nineteen years old, to suggest opium. “Opium!,” De Quincey later recalled. “I had heard of it as I had heard of manna or ambrosia, but no further: how unmeaning a sound it was at that time! what solemn chords does it now strike upon my heart! what heart-quaking vibrations of sad and happy remembrances!” Opium addiction was poorly understood in Britain in the early nineteenth century. The drug was in widespread use and unlicensed—it was used to treat everything from diabetes to syphilis to constipation—and the mechanism of its addictive properties was so poorly understood (and would be so for decades) that withdrawal symptoms were often mistaken for consumption, the remedy being to take more opium. But it deleterious effects weren’t entirely unknown; among those who claimed to have tried to dissuade De Quincey from taking the drug was none other than Coleridge himself, who later stated he “pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning.” Even if true, Coleridge’s entreaties had little effect. De Quincey’s description of discovering opium remains one of the literary masterpieces in the history of drug experiences: I was necessarily ignorant of the whole art and mystery of opium-taking, and what I took I took under every disadvantage. But I took it—and in an hour—oh, heavens! what a revulsion! what an upheaving, from its lowest depths, of inner spirit! what an apocalypse of the world within me! That my pains had vanished was now a trifle in my eyes: this negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened before me—in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed. De Quincey continued, throughout the 1810’s, to build his reputation as a friend and colleague of Wordsworth and Coleridge with an astute and encyclopedic mind—all the while managing not to produce any actual writing. And he continued to self-medicate his various ailments with increasing doses of laudanum. Even watching Coleridge deteriorate wasn’t enough to keep De Quincey from following in his footsteps: with a junkie’s logic De Quincey maintained he was in control of the drug for much of his life. Whatever else opium was, it was not an intoxicant; he saw it strongly opposed to wine, in that it didn’t dull one’s senses but heighten them. “Whereas wine disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the contrary (if taken in a proper manner), introduces amongst them the most exquisite order, legislation, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his self-possession; opium greatly invigorates it.” In reality, it gradually consumed him, and every time he tried to cut back he suffered severe withdrawal. He still held much literary promise, and editors like William Blackwood of Blackwood’s continued to believe in him (“Whatever you choose to send,” Blackwood wrote to De Quincey in 1820, “be it long or short—will always be acceptable.”), but he was alienating these professional connections one by one with his procrastination and unreliability. He finally turned his fortunes around in 1820 through an act of mental jiu-jitsu: if opium was what prevented him from writing, he would turn the tables and write about it. “Opium,” he wrote to William Blackwood, “has reduced me for the last six years to one general discourtesy of silence. But this I shall think of with not so much pain, if this same opium enables me (as I think it will) to send you an article.” Long his artistic nemesis, it had now become his subject. For all its drawbacks, opium had one beneficial effect for De Quincey, that of acting as the ice-axe to free the frozen sea within him. Opium, as it happens, does not enhance one’s dreams, it suppresses them, so that it’s really as one gradually comes off of the drug that those dreams come flooding back with heightened urgency and intensity. It also seems to have freed him from the need to produce a grand, unified and cohesive philosophical treatise; part of what would come to define De Quincey’s style are his fragmentary tangents, his proto-stream of consciousness style that allowed him to move rapidly between dream, memory, and philosophy. Though De Quincey had promised the “opium article” initially to Blackwood’s, a strained relationship led him instead to their rival, The London Magazine, who brought out the first part of the Confessions in September of 1821. Signed anonymously and buried midway down the table of contents; it was an instant success, and the next month the second part was prominently featured in the magazine. The young De Quincey had wanted to be Wordsworth, but the Confessions is in many ways the complete antithesis of Wordsworth’s writing: prose, not poetry; urban, not rural; eschewing transcendence in favor of the darker side of English society. Most significantly, its approach to time was radically different. For Wordsworth, in poems like “Tintern Abbey” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” the moment of epiphany came through recollection, and pleasure came from those moments, “In vacant or in pensive mood,” when memories flashed “upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” There was a magical frisson in a memory recollected at leisure over the space of years, and that gap of time was necessary to an ability to process the beauty of those past moments. De Quincey found in opium a completely different relationship to the world around him. Speaking of the impact of music while on the drug, he writes: “Now opium, by greatly increasing the activity of the mind generally, increases, of necessity, that particular mode of its activity by which we are able to construct out of the raw material of organic sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure.” Opium, in other words, could render the same kind of epiphany Wordsworth sought in recollection, but could do so in real time. Under opium, according to De Quincey, “Space also it amplifies by degrees that are sometimes terrific. But time it is upon which the exact and multiplying power of opium chiefly spends its operation. Time becomes infinitely elastic, stretching out to such immeasurable and vanishing termini, that it seems ridiculous to compute the sense of it on waking by expressions commensurate to human life.” In these passages, De Quincey is closer to Virginia Woolf than Wordsworth, and particularly that modernist conception of time as bifurcated between, as Virginia Woolf put it in Orlando, the “time of the clock” and the “time of the mind.” But this wasn’t the only way opium’s effect on De Quincey’s memory manifested itself, for memories continued to intrude powerfully on him throughout his life and his writing. Not as pleasant interludes, as they had with Wordsworth, but as fantastical nightmares. Midway through the Confessions he describes a night time visit from a wandering, wordless Malay. Real or not, the Malay, De Quincey writes, “(partly from the picturesque exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the anxiety I connected with his image for some days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and brought other Malays with him, worse than himself, that ran ‘a-muck’ at me, and led me into a world of troubles.” The image of this nocturnal visitor, which continued to be “a fearful enemy for months,” haunted De Quincey as so many images haunted him—he could turn a news report of a crocodile attack in Egypt into a scene of nightmarish despair, just as he could take a near collision while riding on a mail-coach and spin from it a “dream fugue” on the theme of “sudden death,” in which “a vast necropolis rising upon the far-off horizon—a city of sepulchres” overwhelms De Quincey’s mind. Ultimately, for all its shocking revelation, Confessions is bound by moral conventions of the time: it follows an arc of rise, fall and redemption. The highs are met with the lows and terrors and demons of the drug, and we are assured, by the essay’s end, that De Quincey has kicked the drug (this was never true). So while Confessions has remained the work he’s best known for, in many ways it was its 1845 sequel, Suspiria de Profundis, that fully captured the depth and range of De Quincey’s opium deliriums. Written not as an unknown youth but as an established author whose public was hungry for more, he could afford to take liberties. While Confessions follows an established narrative arc, Suspiria is wild, untamed (in part because of editing disagreements between De Quincey and his Blackwood’s editor), sprawling and hallucinatory, where De Quincey describes his vision of Levana, the goddess of the nursery, and the Three Graces: The Lady of Tears (“She it is that night and day raves and moans, calling for vanished faces.”), the Lady of Sighs (“And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium.”), and a third, unnamed sister (“She is the defier of God. She also is the mother of lunacies, and the suggestress of suicides… she can approach only those in whom a profound nature has been upheaved by central convulsions; in whom the heart trembles and the brain rocks under conspiracies of tempest from without and tempest from within.”). De Quincey continued to write, gradually overcoming his habitual procrastination and inability to make good on promises. He struggled throughout much of his life with both poverty and addiction, and did not achieve recognition or financial stability until late in his life, when his Collected Works began to appear. Bringing the Confessions back into popular imagination, and contextualizing it within a larger body of singular essay writing, the public could not buy them fast enough. (Henry Crabb Robinson spoke for many of his former friends when he wrote, “I long for the rest of De Quincey, and yet I neither love nor respect the man; I admire only the writer.”) Much of that work was dreck, including hack novels written primarily for money (“20 novels would not task me so heavily as one Opium Eater,” he wrote at one point), and some of his lesser essays. But those volumes also included a number of essays that have long been over-shadowed by the Confessions—his satirical masterpiece “On Murder As Considered One of the Fine Arts,” and his recollections (not always flattering) of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Erudite, engaging, and biting, these works help fill out the life of a long misunderstood scholar—one who changed the face of the essay and of our understanding of addiction. But, then as now, it’s not the scholar of the Confessions’ subtitle that attracts readers, but the Opium-Eater himself.

Colin Dickey By Colin Dickey. To eat. Begin with that verb: not “opium-addict,” nor “smoker” or “drinker”—though this last was most appropriate, since for most of his life Thomas De Quincey preferred laudanum, opium tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2592 2013-03-14T16:05:08Z 2013-03-14T17:30:39Z

A.N. Devers By A.N. Devers. On January 6, 1678 members of the jury of the Plymouth Colony Court were summoned to view a dead body lying by the side of the road and to tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2513 2013-02-20T20:38:15Z 2013-02-20T22:03:26Z

Any number of drugs can flood our consciousness with faulty perceptions. And if the sensory apparatus isn’t filtering properly, you receive an excess of environmental information when you’re least equipped to handle it. This helps explain why the same drug can generate wildly different results—a CIA field agent whose coffee is secretly spiked with LSD might run screaming into the street, while college buddies can drop a tab and spend all day giggling in a grassy field. The recreational drug user in theory understands that she is messing with her own head. The man who doesn’t know he’s been dosed may conclude that existence has been usurped by mere chaos. Aldous Huxley in 1954 wrote as eloquently as one can about taking mescaline, which accomplishes more or less what Psilocybe semilanceata does. He had a more pleasant day than young Edward’s family, however, and in The Doors of Perception quoted Cambridge philosopher Dr. C. D. Broad in describing the mental processes modified: Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. “According to such a theory,” Huxley continues, “each one of us is potentially a Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.” Huxley notes this precarious balance: The schizophrenic is like a man permanently under the influence of mescalin, and therefore unable to shut off the experience of a reality which is he is not holy enough to live with, which he cannot explain away because it is the most stubborn of primary facts, and which, because it never permits him to look at the world with merely human eyes, scares him into interpreting its unremitting strangeness, its burning intensity of significance, as the manifestations of a human or even cosmic malevolence … Dr. Gerald D’Arcy Klee, my grandfather, has glimpsed that malevolence. When I last visited, he was digging up mementos of his public health and psychiatric work in the postwar years for institutions like the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners and Johns Hopkins University. He showed me a copy of a letter written to President Nixon in his first term, urging him to condemn the potential weaponization of LSD (a cousin to Psilocybe semilanceata). A decade before, he’d tested the ergot derivative on soldiers, writing clear-eyed reports such as “Influence of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) on subjective time” and “Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25) and ego functions.” Out of ethical concerns, he was obligated to sample the stuff for himself. “Did he ever say how it was?” I once asked my dad. “Scary,” he replied. Fair enough: a military lab is no one’s idea of a fun place to get high. But it was not immediately obvious that LSD’s effects were so wide-ranging and individuated, easily reshuffled by mood and circumstance. What Dr. Klee explored were the particular responses of certain LSD-dosed soldiers to their subservient position in a scientific inquiry, Trapped like a mouse in a Skinner box, each had his cognitive architecture manipulated and tested accorded to a strict protocol. You can see how it might be tricky to extrapolate your findings from there to Woodstock. Which may be why, ultimately, Nixon never had to address the question of weaponized LSD. A few investigative journalists have offered possible evidence of drug-based mind-control research—the mysterious 1953 death of Dr. Frank Olson, a government biochemist; the mass hysteria in 1951 of the French village Point-Saint-Esprit, which may also have been the result of ergot poisoning from the local baker’s bread. If anything, though, these events demonstrated that you couldn’t hope to anticipate your enemy’s response to forced or unfamiliar inebriation. LSD’s disorienting influence doesn’t seem reducible to total bliss or a total freak-out—it’s a coin with those two sides, and everyone tends to get stuck on one of them, as evidenced by a long mid-century debate between my grandfather and Timothy Leary. From a Playboy interview in 1966: PLAYBOY: Dr. Gerald Klee of the National Institute of Mental Health has written: “Those who say LSD expands consciousness would have the task of defining the terms. By any conventional definition, I don’t think it does expand the consciousness.” What do you think? LEARY: Well, he’s using the narrow, conventional definition of consciousness that psychiatrists have been taught: that there are two levels of consciousness—sleep and symbolic normal awareness. Anything else is insanity. So by conventional definition, LSD does not expand symbolic consciousness; thus, it creates psychosis. In terms of his conventional symbol game, Dr. Klee is right. My contention is that his definition is too narrow, that it comes from a deplorable, primitive and superstitious system of consciousness. My system of consciousness attested to by the experience of hundreds of thousands of trained voyagers who’ve taken LSD defines many different levels of awareness. That “awareness” is telling. An awareness of the action, the risks and the potential benefits. Or, as Leary points out, an awareness of what we are willing to believe. Beyond that, an awareness of one’s purest self. For all the energy Dr. Klee invested in the LSD conundrum, his most frightening paper was about plain old Mary Jane. “Marihuana psychosis,” from a 1969 issue of The Psychiatric Quarterly, concerns a twenty-six-year-old man who smokes “less than two marihuana cigarettes” and suffers a psychotic break. In his own words, the patient recounts Dantean visions of hell and purgatory, spontaneous threats of violence against his girlfriend and a sense of impending annihilation. Background on the subject, however, reveals previous emotional trauma, and a recent analysis titled “Comorbidity between cannabis use and psychosis” concluded that a predisposition to mental illness underlies these disturbing episodes. While hallucinogens can’t be said to bestow madness, they may certainly wake the dormant kind. Still, the marijuana smoker came back from everlasting torture and pain; my grandfather came back from his descent into irrational, bottomless fear; Edward and his family came back from that curious, unlikely trip. Dr. Brande credited his prescription, an “emetric solution to excite vomiting,” with their recovery. Water and a few hours’ quiet coddling might have done the trick just as well. The idea of temporary suffering, sadly, holds little comfort for those drowning in the infinite. Related: Alms for Oblivion, by Lewis H. Lapham Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 A.M., the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. 1970 / San Diego Performance Enhancement She said, “What’s wrong with you?” I said, “I’m high as a Georgia pine.” 1943 / Basel Albert Hofmann Explores an Alternate Universe The lady next door, whom I scarcely recognized, brought me milk—she was no longer Mrs. R, but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask.

Miles Klee By Miles Klee. In 1799, the London Medical and Physical Journal published a landmark case study. Its author, Dr. Everard Brande, related the story of a family bizarrely and simultaneously afflicted with tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2509 2013-02-13T15:31:59Z 2013-02-13T16:19:59Z

Of all the documents I helped collect for The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, published in 2008, few were more immediately consequential to the course of Jacobs’s life than the will of Margaret Horniblow. (History failed to notice that the amendment was never signed.) Jacobs recalls: She had promised my dying mother that her children should never suffer for anything; and when I remembered that, and recalled her many proofs of attachment to me, I could not help having some hopes that she had left me free. My friends were almost certain it would be so. They thought she would be sure to do it, on account of my mother’s love and faithful service. It would not be so. Originally promised in the will to Margaret’s mother, Elizabeth, as the property of a three-year-old girl, Jacobs was moved into the home of Mary and James Norcom, Mary Matilda’s parents, known in Incidents as “the old villain” Dr. Flint and his wife, the “jealous mistress.” In “Lines of Work,” Lapham’s Quarterly included Jacobs’ memories of her teenage years in James Norcom’s home. But I now entered on my fifteenth year, a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat them with indifference or contempt. The master’s age, my extreme youth, and the fear that his conduct would be reported to my grandmother, made him bear this treatment for many months. He was a crafty man and resorted to many means to accomplish his purposes. Sometimes he had stormy, terrific ways, that made his victims tremble; sometimes he assumed a gentleness that he thought must surely subdue. Of the two, I preferred his stormy moods, although they left me trembling. He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him, where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. What followed, we know, were years of such abuse and threats on Jacobs’ life. From her narrative, Jacobs is perhaps most well known for the lengths she went to escape from Norcom’s sexual predations—most especially, the seven years she spent hidden away in an attic crawlspace above her grandmother’s house. Jacobs describes the dimensions: “The garret was only nine feet long and seven wide. The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose floor board.” From the attic she wrote letters to Norcom and had them transported north, where they would be postmarked and sent south again to fool him. This drove him crazy. Jacobs would eventually escape at the age of 29, and Norcom would die in 1850. (A newspaper ad offering a $100 reward for her return was complimentary of Jacobs; “she speaks easily and fluently, and has an agreeable carriage and address.”) Working in New York for the family of Nathaniel Parker Willis, Jacobs would write her narrative and publish it herself in Boston in 1861. Near the end of Incidents, she accounts for an even more consequential document than the will that sent her into Norcom’s home: her freedom paper, which was also the record of a paid ransom. “The bill of sale!” Those words struck me like a blow. So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. As the antiquary who went looking for that document, I’m very sad to say it’s no longer on record—another measure of progress lost to history.

Scott Korb By Scott Korb. For children born into slavery in the American south, record-keeping and the marking of birthdays was a haphazard affair. So as far as we can tell, this year marks the tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2507 2013-02-11T18:11:39Z 2013-02-12T17:00:23Z

Once upon a time, Coca-Cola did have cocaine in it—extracts from coca leaves and kola nuts accounted for possibly less than 1/400 of a grain per ounce. (A non-narcotic form of the extract is still used today.) But the company voluntarily started removing it in an earlier concession to teetotalers and, when the Pure Food and Drugs Act came along, that bit of brown-nosing put the company in an ideal market position. Competitors may have needed cocaine to amp up their product; Coca-Cola had its name to stand on. It was positioned as an attractive, but manageable indulgence—one 1906 advertising campaign touted it as “The great national temperance beverage.” Not a hard drink like liquor, but a soft drink, relatively harmless, and even more so with the cocaine flushed out. In the early twentieth century, soft drinks were not the liquid candy we’re all too familiar with today, drawing the ire of activists and politicians as the root of child obesity. As an alternative to hard liquor, pharmacists would pack together a mess of stimulants with sweeteners and citrus flavors, marketing the result as a tonic with vaguely defined medicinal properties. These drinks were enticing, dangerous, and addicting. Turn of the century soft-drinks were the Progressive Era equivalent of Sparks or Four Loko—mildly alcoholic beverages with a stimulating dose of caffeine that tsk-tsk-tskers worried were keeping the kids up all night long, encouraging all manner of shenanigans. And, like Four Loko, soft drinks were chased off the shelves. As Mark Pendergrast documented in For God, Country and Coca-Cola, early twentieth century reformers went a little crazy over the drink’s potential effects. The Georgian, a crusading newspaper whose editor became a Wiley ally, reported that “eight Coca-Colas contain enough caffeine to kill.” An anti-soda evangelical warned that Coca-Cola could drive young women to “inappropriate behavior” and young men to masturbation. Earlier in the century, Virginia had tried to ban Coca-Cola altogether, and for a few months in 1907, after Wiley dug up testimony from a 1901 mistrial putting Coca-Cola’s alcohol content at two percent, the Army forbade soldiers from indulging. Wiley didn’t approve of cocaine or opium any more than he did caffeine, but in his view, those type of stimulants could be easily controlled, especially since they were grown outside the United States. Caffein—he spelled it without the “e”—was everywhere, in beverages “universally employed, almost in every family.” It was difficult to argue against coffee or tea, ubiquitous as they were, and natural, as well. But Coca-Cola was marketed to children, and soft drinks, unlike in coffee or tea, had caffeine that was unnecessary. It was an additive, Wiley though, much like artificial sweeteners or bleach in flour—two other products that were, in his opinion, unacceptable. By the time Coca-Cola went on trial in 1911, there was no exact measure of the harm caffeine could do to the human body. It was clear that caffeine was added into the drink during manufacture, the Supreme Court later wrote: “It appears that in the manufacturing process water and sugar are boiled to make a syrup; there are four meltings; in the second or third the caffeine is put in.” But the tests of caffeine’s effects had been had only been measured on lab animals—as one researcher testified at the trial, it did kill the frogs. Coca-Cola had managed to hire a recent Columbia Ph.D. graduate, Harry Hollingworth, from to test caffeine out on human subjects; anxious to keep his professional reputation intact, he conducted a double-blind study so well-designed it would be used as a model for future research in psychopharmocology studies. He tested the subjects for coordination, steadiness, the speed, accuracy in typewriting, and the ability to name colors and opposites. In the “cancellation test,” participants received a sheet covered in rows of randomly ordered numbers, 0 through 9, each of which appeared exactly the same number of times. Participants had to cross out all of the 7s. Hollingworth found the caffeine to be a mild stimulant that harmed neither the motor nor mental aptitude of his subjects. But it’s not clear that evidence made much of a difference in the trial; there were plenty of doctors willing to testify about the drink’s dangers: I have seen people who got into the habit of using it. I remember one physician who was in the habit of using it and he would go every chance he got around the corner to the pharmacy and get a glass of Coca-Cola…I saw that this man was very much like a man who was addicted to the use of alcohol and who has to [go] and get alcohol...I noticed something wrong with the man, that he was nervous and morose, had lost his [medical] practice…and after this I found out what caused it. The Coca-Cola Company did win its 1911 lawsuit, but eventually the Supreme Court reversed the decision and sent the case back to a lower court. Coca-Cola agreed to reduce the amount of caffeine it put into soda, and both sides considered the problem settled. The government never legally named the danger of caffeine, or Coca-Cola’s intoxicating effect, leaving the answer as ambiguous as the addiction itself. “What is meant by habit forming?” wrote a lawyer for Coca-Cola to Congress. “We are all a bundle of habits, almost everything we do is the result of habit, everything in one sense a habit.” Related: Death in the Pot, by Deborah Blum The “Poison Squad” was weary “of eating chemically treated foods in apothecary doses.” 1672 / London Nauseous Puddle Water Coffee, which rifling Nature of her choicest treasures, has so eunuched our husbands and crippled our more kind gallants that they are become as impotent. 1931 / Seattle Tipped Off My husband is in the habit of buying a quart of whiskey every other day from a Chinese bootlegger. Will you please have his place raided?

Sarah Laskow By Sarah Laskow. In October of 1909, the Coca-Cola Company transported forty barrels and twenty kegs of its signature syrup across state lines, from its hometown of Atlanta to Chattanooga, Tennessee. “Delicious tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2503 2013-02-01T18:16:39Z 2013-02-04T19:43:47Z

The Renaissance: 1400-1600 Gargantua and Pantagruel, by François Rabelais The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes The 17th Century Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford Paradise Lost, by John Milton The 18th Century The Story of My Life, by Giacomo Casanova The Life of Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell The 19th Century Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, by Thomas de Quincey Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass The Complete Poems, by Emily Dickinson Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. Complete Poems and Selected Letters, by John Keats The Hasheesh Eater, by Fitz Hugh Ludlow Rome, Naples, and Florence, by Stendhal Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, by Charles Mackay Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville The Condition of the Working Class in England, by Friedrich Engels The 20th Century A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann Harpo Speaks!, by Harpo Marx An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Johnson POPism: The Warhol Sixties, by Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett Practicalities, by Marguerite Dumas Lady Sings the Blues, by Billie Holiday with William Dufty Straight Life, by Art and Laurie Pepper The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath LSD: My Problem Child, by Albert Hofman More Tales of the Unexpected, by Roald Dahl Jesus’ Son, by Dennis Johnson Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington On the Road, by Jack Kerouac Art and Madness, by Anne Roiphe Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion The Atlas, by William T. Vollmann On Drink, by Kingsley Amis On Hashish, by Walter Benjamin Perfume, by Patrick Suskind The 21st Century When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris Methland, by Nick Reding Ninety Days, by Bill Clegg

The Editors By The Editors. Ever wonder just how many books go into a single issue of Lapham's Quarterly? Follow along using this complete syllabus, which assembles all the fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2013:/roundtable//3.2501 2013-01-28T19:24:05Z 2013-01-30T18:41:44Z

Ergot is the name given to a specific form of Claviceps purpurea, a parasitic European fungus. A purple, talon-like outgrowth, it is commonly found issuing from the ear of rye grains and, to a lesser extent, related cereals like wheat and barley. The French thought it was redolent of a rooster’s spur—hence its name, which is descended from “argot,” the Old French term for a cockspur. Each of these ergot kernels contains a number of alkaloids harmful to humans and animals. When ergot-infected grain is milled into flour and consumed, a host of troubles arise: convulsions and seizures, vivid hallucinations often of demons or animals, a restriction of blood flow to the extremities followed by a falling-off of gangrenous limbs. In many cases the hallucinations seize upon actual prickling or burning sensations arising from the loss of blood flow, leading the sufferer to believe he is crawling with insects or engulfed in flames. Among the few passing mentions of ergot in antiquity is from an Assyrian tablet, dated to around 660 BC, that warns of a “noxious pustule in the ear of grain.” More explicative accounts wouldn’t appear until the Middle Ages, however, when historians began chronicling a spate of bizarre epidemics, which they called ignis sacer (“holy fire”). Mezeray describes a gruesome outbreak in 994 in the south of France that swept away nearly 40,000 people: And when a plague of invisible fire broke out, cutting off limbs from the body and consuming many in a single night, the sufferers thronged to the churches and invoked the help of the Saints. The cries of those in pain and the shedding of burned-up limbs alike excited pity; the stench of rotten flesh was unbearable. Sigebert of Gembloux witnessed in 1089 a similar malady afflicting the people of Lorraine that “caused their limbs to become as black as coal, and from which the patients died miserably, or were reduced to an unhappy life, having lost hands and feet.” Another “plague of fire” near Paris forced victims to seek recourse in a church of St. Mary. A good many were cured, presumably owing to the church’s ergot-free stores of grain. Unfortunately, upon returning home to their contaminated crops they suffered a relapse of their condition, consigning them once more to the church. Some held that the burning affliction was a divine punishment requiring divine intervention. In 1093, a monastic order was founded to care for the beleaguered victims of ergotism. The confraternity chose as its patron St. Anthony of Egypt, venerated for his legendary sufferings—during his protracted struggle in the desert with Satan, the poor hermit was regularly tormented by malevolent visions. The disease thereafter took on the name St. Anthony’s Fire and sufferers flocked to the order’s monasteries, which were signified by detached gangrenous limbs hanging above the entrances. (Limbs were a common motif of ergotism in art as well; Hieronymus Bosch placed a severed foot among the shambolic unfortunates in his triptych The Temptation of St. Anthony.) Some of these hospices even claimed to store collections of mummified limbs for victims to retrieve on the Last Judgment. St. Anthony’s Fire would continue to cast a pall over Europe until the late eighteenth century, when scientific sleuthing finally pointed the finger at spurred rye. The pernicious fungus was little more than a historical footnote when a sudden recurrence in 1951 unexpectedly launched it into headlines worldwide. Doctors in the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, France, had initially been summoned to treat a few patients with indefinite symptoms: nausea, chills, pains, burning sensations. Soon, more townsfolk succumbed to the illness, including the advent of frightful hallucinations. Within weeks the village was gripped by a mad panic: a 68-year-old woman threw herself from a third-floor window to escape the flames she believed to be enveloping her; another man barricaded himself inside his home with a gun, ready to shoot a monster that was stalking him; a third man screamed, “My head is on fire! There are snakes in my belly!” and attempted to throw himself into the Rhone; still another believed “bandits with donkey ears” to be chasing him. By the time it was over, four people were dead and over two hundred more had been made ill. Around twenty-five of these had been placed in straitjackets and institutionalized. The eruption of the disease, which had mostly lain dormant for centuries, must have seemed like traveling back in time—if a medieval ergotism outbreak could unfold over daily news headlines—only this time nobody suspected the work of divine agency. The poisoning was initially rumored to be the plot of some “unknown criminal,” but the real culprit was confirmed later by autopsies performed on two of the victims and reported in the British Medical Journal. Following the revelation, newspapers dubbed the cause of the incident as le pain maudit, the cursed bread. One headline read, “St. Anthony’s Fire May Have Taken Last Victims.” Less than three weeks after symptoms first appeared, the New York Times reported that a miller and a baker had been charged with involuntary homicide. Bread—perhaps the most salient thread in the fabric of French society—had been fouled. A Parisian newspaper was left wondering: “The baker whom we visit every day, the grocer we go to regularly, are they not, after all, maniacs or potential killers of whom we must beware?” Meanwhile, a cadre of scientists at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals were following the incident at Pont-Saint-Esprit with interest, as the Swiss drug company had isolated a dozen ergot alkaloids to be used as remedial agents. (Sandoz was also implicated in a nebulous 2011 claim that the Pont-Saint-Esprit bread had been laced with LSD by the CIA.) In particular, the alkaloid ergonovine had garnered attention for its ability to precipitate childbirth in cases of lingering labor. (The heath benefits of ergot were a long held, but little-known fact; for centuries, ancient “wise women” used it as a nostrum for women in labor, compelling Arabic and European scholars of later eras to report similar findings.) Another alkaloid, the vasoconstrictor ergotamine that causes gangrene, had also been isolated and marketed by the company for use in alleviating postpartum hemorrhaging, and as a migraine remedy. With these and other ergot discoveries in the Sandoz lab, it was in 1938 that a budding company chemist named Albert Hofmann, fiddling with lysergic acid alkaloids in ergot, lit upon a curious new compound: lysergic acid diethylamide. Early research noted restlessness in the experimental animals, but nothing else of interest, and the study was quickly shelved. Five years later, however, Hofmann felt an inexplicable urge to reinvestigate lysergic acid diethylamide. Exactly how the young researcher was first exposed to its effects is unclear—perhaps a soupçon of the chemical had been on his finger when he rubbed his eye—but the “not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition” he later described from that day would not long remain a secret: Last Friday, April 16, 1943, I was forced to interrupt my work in the laboratory in the middle of the afternoon and proceed home, being affected by a remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness. At home I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours, this condition faded away. Hofmann spent much of his life fascinated by ergot and LSD (which he would often repine was his “problem child”), and in later years he claimed in a book that the hallucinogenic brew imbibed during the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece likely contained ergot. In 1976, a behavioral psychologist argued that the fungus was involved in the Salem witch trials, provoking scores of lengthy, heated debates in academic and mainstream publications. Ergotism was also suspected (with little evidence) to be the cause of tarantism, a hysterical dancing disease primarily affecting Germany during the sixteenth century. But for whatever its past sins, the fungus exists in our modern world primarily as a valuable storehouse for remedies—and as the origin of an illicit pleasure. “Who despises poison, knows not what is in the poison,” wrote Paracelsus, as a caution to those who would denigrate nature’s harmful materials.

Laurent Merceron By Laurent Merceron. For the discerning caveman, the focus required to not die from ingesting the wrong thing—a leaf, a berry, a bug—must have absorbed considerable attention. As any wild plant expert tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2494 2012-12-24T22:54:01Z 2013-01-28T19:28:36Z

Although egg nog in one sense or another may date back to fourteenth-century England, the egg nog that the cadets planned to enjoy that evening was a distinctly American tradition. Nog is essentially a mixture of four items found on any colonial farm: the product of chickens, cows, sugar, and booze, the type and taste of which could be masked with spices. George Washington’s particular nog recipe included rye whiskey, rum, and sherry, but the kind of liquor required was never set in stone. The only rule: the more the merrier. And so it was for the West Point cadets. In the days leading up to Christmas Eve, four sets of students blew off their posts to secure alcohol for the occasion. One rowed across the river to the North Tavern, another group bought a gallon of brandy and a gallon of wine, one organized a gallon of liquor on credit, and another bought the eggs, milk, and nutmeg for the nog. Mutton was smuggled in from Benny Haven, should anyone need a nibble. The party started around midnight, with about nine cadets in one dorm room, and gradually increased in size and migrated to another room. Things started to get loud around 2A.M., when Davis and eight others were heard singing and another student tried to quiet them down. By 4A.M. the commotion could be heard through the floorboards, and faculty member Captain Ethan Allen Hitchcock went to investigate. Davis, in a classic frat boy move, hurried into the room to warn the thirteen friends inside—“Put away the grog boys, Old Hitch is coming!”—only to realize Old Hitch was already there. Davis and others were placed under arrest and ordered to their rooms; Hitchcock read the group the Riot Act (which declared any group of twelve or more unlawfully assembled) and satisfied, left the room fifteen minutes later. What happened next resulted in the largest mass expulsion in West Point history. (The night was given the minute-by-minute treatment by James B. Agnew in his 1979 book The Egg Nog Riot: The Christmas Mutiny at West Point.) Angry at Hitchcock for ruining their party, the cadets decided to hunt the captian down and harass him. Over the next two hours, a cat-and-mouse game between the students, the faculty, and sober students who woke up to take arms against their drunken brothers, led to broken windows and furniture, unsheathed swords, hijacked drum and fifes, a lieutenant who was knocked out cold, and one discharged pistol. The 6A.M. reveille was a confusing chatter of horns, drums, yelling and cursing. Twenty minutes later, most of the cadets stumbled down to roll call, some still too drunk to be hungover. Jefferson Davis had missed everything. (His prized future general Robert E. Lee also attended West Point at this time, but he declined to take part in the party.) Instead of following his friends and resisting arrest, Davis stumbled to his room, retched a little, and passed out cold. In his memoirs, Davis would claim that he didn’t name names, but in fact the records show that he implicated his roommate in the melee when the cadet returned to their dorm, waking Davis up as he loaded his gun (this was single unloaded pistol of the evening) Twenty-three cadets were arrested, nineteen were expelled, and Davis was spared, graduating at the bottom third of his class. His time at the academy brewed a long-lasting hatred for Yankees. His love for egg nog remained true. Image: Jefferson Davis, c. 1855.

Michelle Legro By Michelle Legro. From 1817 to 1833, West Point was ruled by the iron fist of Colonel Sylvanus Thayer, who as superintendent had revolutionized discipline at the elite military academy, prohibiting cadets tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2493 2012-12-20T17:24:48Z 2012-12-20T17:28:13Z

The Prophet Hen of Leeds (1806): Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions presents the curious case of a hen who convinced a village that the time to repent was upon them—alas, her eggs, altered with vinegar by local pranksters, were not divine after all: A hen, in a village close by, laid eggs, on which were inscribed, in legible characters, the words “Christ is coming.” Great numbers visited the spot, convinced that the day of judgment was near at hand. Like sailors in a storm, expecting every instant to go to the bottom, the believers suddenly became religious, prayed violently, and flattered themselves that they repented them of their evil courses. Harold Camping (1994, 1995, 2011): Camping, head of Oakland's Family Radio and host of the station's Biblical discussion talk show Open Forum, predicted the end in his book 1994? He calculated that the Tribulation would end on September 6, followed by the Last Day and the Second Coming of Christ between Sep. 15 and Sep. 27. Camping (who has since retired from the prediction game) later readjusted his prediction to the middle of 1995, May 2011, and September 2011, and was forced to answer uncomfortable questions about money he’d collected from supporters in advance of Judgment Day: Camping says listeners have given because of "their desire to propagate the gospel" and have given to Family Radio "because we can do this more efficiently."That money is still going out...We are not out of business, we've learned that we still have to go another five months," he says. Earlier, Camping said all billboards and new advertising would stop. It's unclear what donations will be spent on, as Camping has said the donations don't go directly toward the station's operations."We are spending it as wisely as possible. Maybe by Oct. 21, we will only have $10 left," he said.” Professor James Kasting (c. 500,000,000): According to Kasting, a professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, increased temperatures from the sun will cause the Earth’s oceans to evaporate and increase the carbon-dioxide content of the air to a level dangerous to living creatures: "My calculations show the oceans may evaporate much earlier," said Professor Kasting. "They are somewhat pessimistic and present a worst-case scenario, but they say a billion years." "Astronomers always knew that the oceans would evaporate, but they typically thought it would occur only when the Sun left the main sequence - that will be in five billion years." Stars leave the main sequence when they stop burning hydrogen. The Sun will then become a red giant, swamping and obliterating Mercury. Venus will lose its atmosphere and become a burnt-out planet. "If we calculated correctly, Earth has been habitable for 4.5 billion years and only has a half billion years left."

Angela Serratore By Angela Serratore. If interpretations of the Mayan calendar crying "apocalypse!" are to be believed, the end of the world is nigh. Take comfort, though, in four doomsday prophecies that came and tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2492 2012-12-17T17:19:38Z 2012-12-17T18:33:10Z

By 1799, there were enough cases on record for one physician, Pierre Lair, to identify some patterns and recurring characteristics of victims of spontaneous human combustion: 1. Victims were older, usually over 60. 2. Victims were overweight. 3. Victims led inactive lives. 4. Victims were alcoholics. 5. Women were more prone to spontaneously combust than men. 6. At the scene there was often an external flame, such as a candle or fireplace. 7. Combustion was extremely rapid. 8. The flames were difficult to extinguish. 9. The flames produced a strong empyreumatic odor. 10. The surrounding room was coated with a thick, yellow, greasy film. 11. The first usually consumed the trunk of the body, but left the head and extremities intact. 12. Accidents occurred during fair weather, and more often in winter than in summer. Lair also ranked various spirits in terms of their likely contribution to Spontaneous Combustion: gin, followed by brandy, whiskey, and finally, rum. Of all these various causes, it was #4—consumption of spirits—that the nascent Temperance movement latched on to. Moralists have long advocated abstaining from alcohol, but in the United States, during the radical reform era of the nineteenth century (when causes ranging from abolition to vegetarianism to phrenology all promised to cure all of society’s ills), the temperance movement found fertile ground. Teetotalers including Carrie A. Nation and Frances Willard started a slow boiling fervor that would finally boil over when the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919—and it wasn’t long before the threat of Spontaneous Human Combustion was added to their arsenal. The February 1863 issue of the Pennsylvania Temperance Recorder, for example, carried a story of a medical student, Jacob C. Hanson under the subdued title of “Fire! Fire! Blood on Fire!” The story claimed that Hanson had been working in a physician’s office when a drunkard stumbled in and admitted to the doctors that he had consumed two gallons of rum in five days. Hanson, alarmed at the imminent possibility of Spontaneous Human Combustion, suggested drawing blood to avert the catastrophe; according to the Recorder, “a pint bowl filled with this fluid was handed to one of the spectators who ignited a match, and on bringing it to contact with the contents of the bowl, a conflagration immediately ensued: burning with a blue flame the space of twenty-five or thirty seconds.” Lest one think that the fear of spontaneous human combustion as a result of drink was a fringe phenomenon, one only has to consider the work of the literary greats of the day. Thomas de Quincey confessed to fearing that his addictions might lead to such “anomalous symptoms,” including spontaneous combustion. “Might I not myself take leave of the literary world in that fashion?” he wondered. A drunk explodes in Melville’s Redburn, and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland also features spontaneous human combustion (though, in a rarity, the victim there is not an alcoholic). And then there is Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, a novel notable not just for being one of the towering masterpieces of Victorian fiction, but because of its thirtieth chapter, in which the minor character—the alcoholic landlord Mr. Krook—spontaneously bursts into flames. Dickens’ good friend, George Lewes, was not impressed. “The death of Krook by Spontaneous Combustion is certainly not an agreeable incident,” he wrote in his column for The Leader, “but it has a graver fault than that of ‘shocking’ people with ‘sensitive nerves;’ it is a fault of Art, and a fault in Literature, overstepping the limits of Fiction, and giving currency to a vulgar error.” Lewes went on: Dickens, therefore, in employing Spontaneous Combustion as a part of his machinery, has committed this fault of raising the incredulity of his readers; because even supposing Clairvoyance and Spontaneous Combustion to be scientific truths, and not the errors of imperfect science, still the simple fact that they belong to the extremely questionable opinions held by a very small minority, is enough to render their introduction into Fiction a mistake. The novel was still in the process of serialization, and Dickens responded in the next installment, adding a preface that claimed that among “men of science and philosophy” there was much “learned talk about inflammable gasses and phosphuretted hydrogen.” Dickens cited the case of the Countess de Bandi, as well as a few others, hoping that would end the matter, but it did not; Lewes responded with more level-headed skepticism, only to be met with an increasingly defensive Dickens. The novelist also wrote a personal letter to Lewes, where he repeatedly pointed to alcoholism as a cause of combustion when it came to “women in the decline of life.” “Refer to the Annual Register for 1773 for the case of Mary Clues—a woman of fifty, and a drunkard,” he wrote. “To the Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the case of Grace Pitt—a woman of sixty; not stated to be a drunkard, but not likely to have been a lady of very temperate habits, as she got out of bed every night to smoke a pipe, and had drunk an immense quantity of spirits within a few hours of her death. Refer to Le Cat for the case of Madame Millet who got drunk every day.” Lewes finally gave up, so Dickens had the final word when he added a preface to the final publication of Bleak House a year later. “I have no need to observe that I do not willfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject,” Dickens stated, claiming some thirty such cases on record of exploding drunkards (including the Millet trial), and ending with a triumphant flourish: “I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received.” It’s not as though that testimony wasn’t widely available (indeed, Lewes had quoted ample evidence against spontaneous combustion in his rebuttals), but so long as the debate over prohibition raged, reformers could and did find favorably reports and hypotheses to cite their contention that alcoholism could literally set the world on fire. And so, strangely, it was the belief in spontaneous human combustion that outlasted the temperance movement, not the other way around. While largely discredited by the beginning of the twentieth century, it lingered in the medical literature. As the height of Prohibition, Dr. W. A. Brend’s well respected Handbook of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology (1928) contained an entry for spontaneous combustion: “Spontaneous combustion of the body, in the sense that the layman attaches to the words, never occurs; but, very rarely, a state of the tissues exists for which Dixon Mann suggests the term preternatural combustibility. The condition has been most frequently noticed in the bodies of fat, bloated individuals who have been excessive drinkers. Probably, in such cases, inflammable gases are generated in the body after death, and, if a light is near, become ignited, leading to a partial consumption of the soft tissues.” Twelve years after Repeal, one could still find statements such as this, from the Transactions of the Medical Society of London in 1945, which confessed that “we are entirely in the dark as to the real nature of the chemical changes which give rise to this state, but it seems reasonable to infer that they are in some way or other connected with the long use of alcohol.” Related: 1844 / England Work is the Curse of the Drinking Classes When one reflects that many a mother gives the baby on her arm gin to drink, the demoralizing effects of frequenting such places cannot be denied. 1842 / Springfield, IL Better than a Gallon of Gall We found intoxicating liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody. 1535 / Lyon Baby Wants His Bottle As soon as he was born he cried out, “Drink! Drink! Drink!” as if inviting the whole world to drink, and so loud that he was heard through all the lands of Booze and Bibulous.

Colin Dickey By Colin Dickey. In 1725, a tavern owner in Rheims, France named Jean Millet was accused of the murder of his wife. Millet’s wife was overweight, past her prime, and Millet, an otherwise tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2393 2012-11-28T16:47:24Z 2012-11-28T17:29:03Z

Margie’s Auntie Jovan, for instance, fell deathly ill one day for no apparent reason. Her head pounded and she could barely stand. After three days of this, a friend of hers sought the help of an itinerant Indonesian healer who, upon gazing into his crystal ball, saw a coffin. He determined that Jovan had been cursed and that it was a good thing that he did not see a wreath of flowers laid upon that coffin or his help would have come too late. He instructed the friend to bring him such a wreath to counteract the spell. When he described the person who had cursed Jovan, the description perfectly fit Neneng. Of course. If I seem skeptical, well, that’s the nature of curses, isn’t it? Margie is skeptical of my curses and I’m skeptical of hers. That’s the default when it comes to curses. It’s a matter of belief, goes the conventional wisdom, and if you don’t believe you won’t be affected. And it’s easy to disbelieve if you’re not the one who’s been cursed. Curses most often belong to the dispossessed, their last and ultimate defense. The best curses come from those who have a history of oppression. Think of the Roma in Europe, Haitians, Afro-Cubans, “Can curses pierce the clouds and enter heaven?” Queen Margaret asks in Richard the Third. A curse is a last resort, when earthly justice fails, an act of desperate rage that requires no surefire answer from God as to its efficacy. The curser curses first and takes credit later. In Margaret’s case, her question is rhetorical. She expects no answer except in results. Both her husband and her son have been murdered. What does she have to lose? “Why, then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses!” she cries. In her case, God listens and all those who have had a hand in the deaths of her husband and son eventually meet their ends just as she has predicted. Rarely are the effects of a curse quite so transparent or tidy. Some of the best curses arguably come from my people, the Jews, not Israelis, but the Jews of the Shtetl, those who cursed in Yiddish. Oddly, on the day of my brother’s wedding in 1980, my great Uncles Morty and Bill sat with me on my grandmother’s porch in Long Beach, New York, and taught me all the Yiddish curses they knew. To this day, I’m not sure why they chose a happy occasion on which to spout curses, except that this side of my family was a dour lot, and too much happiness perhaps put them ill at ease and they needed to counter with some good old-fashioned spite: Lie with your head in crap and grow like an onion May you give birth to a trolley car. May you have two beds and a fever in each. If the curses of the Jews are colorful, they’re also the easily ignored. How can you take such clever curses seriously? They’re infected by a built-in self consciousness. May you give birth to a trolley car? The forbears of my people, the Israelites, cursed better or at least more earnestly. Here, the prophet Elisha curses a bunch of rambunctious boys. And on his way up to Beth-El, he encountered some small boys from the city who mocked him: “Come up, Baldy! Come up, Baldy!” When he looked behind and saw them, he cursed the boys in the name of the Lord and then from the wildwood emerged two she-bears who tore apart forty-two of the children. From there, he headed to Mt. Carmel and afterwards returned to Samaria. (Kings 2, 23-25, my translation). The crime hardly seems to matter - it’s the sting of the slight that counts. Male pattern baldness is no less a reason to call on God’s vengeance than the murder of your husband and son. What might seem to a bystander as the disproportionate use of force is for Heaven to balance, not us poor mortals who might see such a scene as, well, overkill. “The word “wildwood” is most often translated as simply “woods” or “forest,” but the notion of wildness needs to be stressed, I think. It’s the notion of the heavens as elemental, the curse as an extension of nature, the wildness of a tornado or a hurricane or she-bears. The curse is the force of madness and rage, a different frequency from that of the supplicant murmuring gently prayers. Curses are not sensible; they are not uttered in moments of reflection, and so the results can be messy. Zora Neale Hurston records a curse from the Algiers section of New Orleans so long and mean that simply hearing it would have made me faint dead away: That the South wind shall scorch their bodies and make them wither and shall not be tempered to them,” it reads in part. “That the North wind shall freeze their blood and numb their muscles and that it shall not be tempered to them. That the West wind shall blow away their life’s breath and will not leave their hair grow, and that their finger nails shall fall off and their bones shall crumble. That the East wind shall make their minds grow dark, their sight shall fail and their seed dry up so that they shall not multiply.” This is only a fraction of the text of the curse, which ends despairingly, “O Man God, I ask you for all these things because they have dragged me in the dust and destroyed my good name; broken my heart and caused me to curse the day I was born. So be it.” Despair and rage and dispossession find some solace in words and gestures towards an unseen hand that is much stronger than ours, and if it’s not stronger or it refuses to slap silly our oppressors, then the words themselves have the power to make your blood pressure rise, whatever anger that lies inside you, rise volcanic to the surface. And that in itself is a partial remedy for impotent rage. The simple channeling of that anger into a funnel of spite. There’s something undeniably beautiful about a well-worded curse. Go ahead. Give it a try. In my own case, I put some curses on a group of summer campers in New Hampshire when I was eleven. I belonged at the time to an arcane secret society called “The Silver Sword Society.” I was its only member and I have no idea how I came up with that name or the method of cursing people I didn’t like - running them through with an invisible (but apparently silver) sword and then waiting for the curse to take effect. Every time I cursed someone, something bad happened almost immediately. I made one of my bunkmates so hysterical with my curses (after he’d dislocated a finger playing hot potato, something that could have been caused by nothing other than my curse, of course!), he, a hefty boy, sat on my chest until I agreed to remove the many swords with which I had impaled him. Later that day, I was visited by the head counselor Marty who solemnly warned me to “stop it already!” with the curses. I doubt he took the curses seriously, but he took the disruption of camp life quite seriously - drunk on my power, I had become a kind of curse kingpin in the days preceding his appeal to me, campers visiting me with requests in return for candy bars. Although my cursing days were over, I learned that the line of influence in this world is not always visible, rational, or wholly explicable. From my anthropology courses in my college career, I subsequently learned that in some societies, a curse is the only logical explanation for someone’s misfortune. In the several years since the woman in India cursed me, how has my life been affected? This is a tough question. My fortunes have not been terrible. A book I published that Spring was met with good reviews but somewhat lackluster sales. A movie deal was struck and then fell through. I suffered a few colds, an inexplicable rash, a mild bout of depression. I was not rich yet and I was getting less handsome by the day. I believed that the old woman’s magic was working. After learning that I had been cursed, a friend remarked, “Your life seems to be going pretty well.” “Ah, but how much better would my life be if I hadn’t been cursed?” This is a difficult question to answer, but one I determined to determine. While in Hong Kong, I asked a friend, a reasonable person, if she knew of anyone who might be able to remove a curse? I’ve known this person for a decade, but I’ve never seen such a look on her face - she seemed to be reevaluating every moment of our long friendship. “A curse? No, I don’t.” And that was the end of that. I finally had my chance when I brought a group of students to the Philippines and was making up the itinerary. I chose to visit Siquijor for a few days. Here, at last, was the opportunity to have my curse removed. The healer we arranged to meet was a woman in her eighties who lived at the end of a dirt road in the hills of Siquijor. Her shack was a multi-purpose facility. Amid chickens and dogs, a few men sat around a videoke machine with large bottles of Red Horse beer. As I made my way across the courtyard, I banged my head smack into a post, probably not the most auspicious omen, but I tried to chalk it up to my clumsiness, rather than cosmic irony. On the other side of the ersatz karaoke bar was a small room that stank of ammonia from below the bamboo floor where the chickens hid from the sun, but otherwise the room was neat if Spartan, its only decoration a calendar from Japan. From inside a dark room adjacent to the clinic wafted the sounds of the NBA playoffs, no more incongruous than the adjacent karaoke bar. The old woman, dressed rather stylishly in a purple blouse, her gray hair pulled back with a scrunchy into a ponytail, worked on a client, a woman suffering from asthma while I waited on a bamboo bench and watched her work. With a wooden straw, she blew into a jar of clear water while moving the jar slowly around the woman’s body, the sounds of the bubbles mixed with the old woman’s grunts and sharp intakes of breath. I was impressed. There were no snakes, but it was still tactile and sensuous, and this is what you want when working with magic, to physicalize the mysterious and ineffable. Otherwise, how do you know it’s working? A smooth stone lay at the bottom of the jar - the stone, she said, had been given to her by the Santo Nino. The stone was cold and incredibly heavy, my guide said. He had touched it once. Her brand of magic was an amalgam of local animism and Catholicism; she crossed herself before she began her work. Of all Western religions, Catholicism is perhaps best suited to mix and match with other ancient rituals and beliefs, its pantheon of saints, its incense, its holy water, all tactile and visible manifestations of the mysterious at work in the world. Of all Western religions, none allow more for the intercession of the supernatural in the everyday lives of mortals. A friend of mine prays to St. Jude, the patron Saint of Lost Causes to find parking spaces, and she claims he always comes through for her. The trick of crossing your fingers for good luck originated in the Middle Ages as a quick sign of the cross to ward off the devil and evil spirits. Certainly, even the most skeptical among us have crossed our fingers. As the woman blew on her straw, the water started growing cloudy and little specks of dirt floated in the jar. She stopped blowing and examined the jar, withdrew a piece of something and showed it to her patient, then rinsed the jar clean and filled it with water again, repeating the process of blowing into the water until it clouded again. When it was my turn, my guide asked me what was wrong? A curse, I said. A barang. This was not her specialty, it turned out. She was better with asthma. “What part of the body is affected?” she wanted to know. That was hard to tell. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe the mind.” She nodded. “Fearful,” she surmised. She started in on me, blowing bubbles along my shoulder, my chest, my groin. My case was acute. I could have guessed as much. She used three jars of water on me, each one clouding up, big chunks of flotsam swirling in the water as she grunted and blew. Oddly, I didn’t feel even slightly curious where the junk was coming from. I should have been at least a tad curious. I’m related directly to Houdini. He was my great grandmother’s nephew. I suppose I was letting him down in my complete lack of interest in how the clear water became dirty. He spent much of his professional career debunking psychics, but only because he wanted so desperately to believe in an afterlife so that he could communicate with his departed mother. Psychics hated him and he was the object of many a curse. Who knows if they eventually worked? He did, after all, meet his end on Halloween. I suppose a skeptic would assume the junk in the jar originated in the straw or that she hid it in her cheeks. Probably. Maybe. I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. At one point, she fished out a dark piece of something and said it looked like a scale of some sort. Before I could get too excited by the coincidence, I remembered that I had mentioned snakes when I was explaining the nature of my malady. She placed the dark thing on my finger and I studied it. Definitely not a scale but a soggy piece of wood. I passed it around the room, where some of my students were looking on. A few touched it, but most refused. When the old woman had finished, she blew down my neck and said a prayer. I asked her if the curse was removed. “Wala,” she said. All gone. Still, I bought a jar of special coconut oil from her, made with three hundred herbs, gathered during Holy Week and prepared on Black Saturday. “And rituals,” my guide said. “There are rituals for this.” Meanwhile, Margie was asking around for a panagang, protection to counter the powerful spells of Evil Auntie Neneng that were killing or almost killing Margie’s relatives. She wanted to find someone who specialized in barang, not asthma. Yes, there are such people, she was told, but they live high up in the mountains. They always do. I’m not sure why. But if you want someone really powerful, don’t expect to find her in a karaoke bar. You have to do some trekking. Unfortunately, we had limited time, so dispelling the spells of Evil Auntie Neneng would have to wait for another visit. Of course, the question remains whether my curse was removed or not. I wondered in subsequent days whether an Indian curse could be removed by a Filipino healer who specializes in asthma. I even wondered whether I had indeed been cursed at all or if my woes, often indefinable, could be relegated to the nefarious and incurable human condition of daily life. A couple of days later on the island of Bohol, while walking in my flip flops on a side street, I severely gashed my big toe on a rock. Later that day, my eye inexplicably swelled shut. And that evening, while walking home from a bar on the beach, I gashed my other big toe open on another rock, this time so badly that my flip flop was awash in blood and I left a rather ghastly trail all the way back to our hotel. I fretted that my curse seemed stronger than ever. Six weeks later, I traveled to Cuba - that summer found me careening wildly from one point of the globe to the other, mostly for reasons to do with my teaching and writing. In Cuba, I was scouting a workshop of undergraduates I would lead later in the year. One of the stops on my itinerary that July was La Regla Church, one of the centers of Santeria belief in Cuba, and a short ferry ride across Havana’s harbor. Of West African origin and hybridized by Afro-Cuban slaves over several hundred years, Santeria is another manifestation of the dispossessed taking control of their lives in cosmic fashion, and another free mixing of Catholicism and animism. As my guide led me to the church, we passed a smattering of women seated on the curbside, calling to us to have our fortunes told. My guide, Yunelbis, a thirty-ish woman dressed smartly in her official guide shirt of light blue, jeans, and a pair of designer glass knock-offs, scoffed at one woman’s entreaties to listen to her. “She’s maybe a little mad,” Yunie told me in English as the woman tried to tell her something that would make her pause and listen and linger and presumably pay. I’ve seen many churches in my day - undoubtedly more churches than synagogues because churches are on any tour in nearly every land I have visited. La Regla Church itself was not the most impressive I’ve seen, but the fervor of the supplicants inside was more impressive than what I’ve witnessed under the echo-chamber domes of Europe’s cathedrals, dozens of men and women praying passionately before icons, a hundred candles burning, each one a private supplication., human hope as always wafting upward to a vanishing point, while oddly enough, piped-in Western music played: All by Myself,” by Eric Carmen. Yunie pointed out the Santeras and Santeros, woman and men dressed all in white from head to toe - the religion had undergone a revival after originally being suppressed by the Communist Party. Now, even a number of the ruling elite are among believers in Santeria. When we left the church, another woman seated on a low wall appealed for us to listen to her - Yunie had seemed so skeptical before that I assumed she would brush aside this woman as she had the first one, but she didn’t. As if, well, in a spell, Yunie walked directly over to the woman and I followed. The woman, anywhere from forty to sixty years old, had a yellow kerchief tied around her hair and wore half a dozen bead necklaces, a couple of beaded bracelets and jeans with chalk-like patterns that recalled, perhaps unintentionally, leg bones. Her name was Maritza, and she sat beside her own portable altar, at the center of which a most impressive doll resided. The doll’s skin was dark like Maritza’s and its lips were red and it wore glasses. Like Maritza, it too wore a kerchief, but one that was pointed in the back, somewhat more regal, like a Pope’s mitre. Its ruffled yellow skirt was arrayed around it, and the doll, too, wore necklaces of beads. Her name was Francisca and she was the spirit with whom Maritza spoke in order to divine. Beside the doll stood a bottle of cacao oil on one side, and a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus on the other. I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to get my curse removed again. Perhaps I would spend the rest of my life, traveling from one center of animism to another, trying to get my curse removed. This compulsion in itself might be a kind of curse. I told her through Yunie that I had been cursed by an old woman in India. “Yes,” she said. “It’s a powerful curse. Very powerful.” I knew exactly what “very powerful” meant, and I took out my wallet. She told me that I had stepped on something and that I was suffering health problems in my foot. Upon reflection, it does seem to me now that the woman in India with the snakes cursed my feet. This makes perfect sense. As I ran away from her in the market, she might logically (if logic has anything to do with it), curse the feet that were taking me away from her. Not only had I gashed both my toes on the same day, but recently I’d started to suffer from an intense pain in my left heel, a condition that has since been diagnosed by my doctor as Achilles’ tendonitis. I asked Maritza which foot was the one giving me problems. She brushed her hands along both legs, stood back and pointed decisively to my right foot. I couldn’t be happier that she guessed wrong. If she had guessed right, I’d be a complete mess by now, instead of merely a partial mess. We went ahead with the ritual then. She tossed some cowrie shells . The shells landed right side up and this, she said, meant I had the “blessing of Olofi,” the Santeria name for the Almighty. She proceeded to rub cacao oil on my legs, told me to make the sign of the cross - hmm, not something I had much practice at. Mine was more like “the mark of Zorro. “ And she draped me with a white shell necklace and told me I needed to wear it always, but especially on Mondays and Fridays. Then she told me to give her some money and a beso, a kiss, on the cheek. Intercession, of whatever variety, almost always feels good, whether it actually does good or not. While Christopher Hitchens, a devout atheist, expressly forbid Christians to pray for him when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, I say, bring them on, the more prayers, the better. Send me your talismans, too. I’m certain I’ve been cursed, as you undoubtedly have been cursed by someone somewhere at some time. Assume it’s so and see if you can break the spell. My most recent foot ailment has practically healed though I don’t wear my necklace very often, not even on Mondays and Fridays. I’d like to think at this point I’m curse-free, but I’ll never know because it’s just as difficult to tell whether you’ve been healed as whether you’ve been cursed. Someday, I’ll succumb to something. There’s no escape. Even now, I’m having a little trouble breathing.

Robin Hemley By Robin Hemley. The old woman, dressed in a sari and covered in silver bangles, placed a basket beneath my eyes and opened the lid. Inside, dozens of baby cobras writhed. I stood tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2396 2012-11-27T15:11:39Z 2012-11-27T15:11:10Z

The Canteen was the brainchild of actor John Garfield, a “flag-waving socialist” unable to enlist because of a heart condition, and Bette Davis, the so-called “fourth Warner Brother” and reigning queen of the studio. They wanted a place for troops to have fun before embarking on tour—and for the stars to facilitate that fun. Garfield suggested the idea, but Davis ran with it, finding an abandoned nightclub a block off Sunset Boulevard and calling upon her agent, Jules Stein, to head the financial committee. Stein was head of powerhouse talent agency MCA, notoriously private, tremendously powerful, and effectively able to make everyone in Hollywood do anything he wanted. Stein convinced Columbia’s notoriously acerbic studio head, Harry Cohn, to donate the profits from Talk of the Town, starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur, in exchange for publicity linking the film to the cause. With a massive fundraiser at Ciro’s (the hotspot of the Hollywood social scene) and the film profits, the Canteen was in business. And here’s where it gets truly inconceivable. Every night of the week (save Sunday), 2000 GIs would pour into the Canteen. These troops were days, if not hours, away from embarking to the Pacific. They would get all the free food and “refreshments” they desired. And by “refreshments” I mean coffee, tea, water, and soda—no alcohol allowed. And they spent the night...dancing. With the stars. Some of the stars were B-List, “starlettes” as they were often called, on contract to studios, with just a few credits to their names. Pretty faces, questionable talent. Today’s analog = reality stars. But there were always big stars as well—Bette Davis cutting cake, archrival Joan Crawford washing coffee cups, Betty Grable setting the record for jitterbugging, amassing three hundred cut-ins in a single hour. Bing Crosby brought his two young sons along to sing Christmas Carols on Christmas Eve; Dorothy Lamour dressed up as Santa Claus. Years later, Johnny Carson would later recall his night at the Canteen as a naval air cadet, dancing with Marlene Dietrich. The Canteen was democratic in the most essential sense of the word. The stars did the dishes while the soldiers, for one, fleeting night, lived the life of the movie star, surrounded by beautiful, bountiful women. Buxom stars in a sea of hungry boys: the potential for scandal was high. Anyone caught sneaking alcohol—or slipping it to one of the stars—was handed over to the LAPD. Stein set strict rules for the women, preventing them from exchanging addresses, “fraternizing” outside of the club, or, god forbid, making out on the dance floor. Black, Filipino, and Hispanic servicemen were officially discouraged from attending, lest their “mixed dancing” up and angered the rest of the service men. It was an ostensibly chaste, however bigoted, establishment. Save, of course, what the stars got away with behind closed doors. Hedy Lamarr hooked up with co-performer John Loder while her fiancee was off at war; Susan Hayward sent a Dear John letter to her boyfriend, paired up with master of ceremonies Jess Barker, and married him three months into her pregnancy. But as actor Jack Carson recalled, “there were some real lookers at the Canteen...but Bette was the one they clustered around.” After the mysterious death of her husband one year into the operation of the canteen, Davis took up with Signal Corps Corporal Lewis A. Riley, even following him to the South when he was transferred from Los Angeles to Atlanta. Warner Bros. was far from thrilled. But then, imagine that, Corporal Riley was transferred overseas! Davis returned to Hollywood, got bored, and went back to attracting the eyes of all the Canteen boys. Starlets amassed piles of wings and dogtags, given to them by boys who may or may not have come back. Dietrich once came straight to the Canteen after a day of filming Kismet, covered head to toe in gold paint, and whipped the crowd into an inexorable frenzy. Warners even made a movie, Hollywood Canteen, featuring the dozens of stars in regular rotation, all of whom donated their salary to the Canteen fund. (Joan Crawford called the film “a very pleasant pile of shit for wartime audiences.”) Today, we have plenty of philanthropist stars. But this was no telethon or Make-a-Wish Visit, no PSA taping or Make a Difference Day. This was a six-day-a-week affair that went on for four years. And while no star was there every day (Davis, after all, had to take time to go chase a soldier to Georgia) many of them were there several days a week, every week, without fail. These men and women weren’t lying in bunkers or taking bullets—or anything even a shade that dangerous—but they were performing an ideological public service, completely gratis, that equaled any number of propaganda posters, training films, or Victory Gardens. In the early 1940s, a Hollywood movie star was the closest American came to royalty. There was Charles Lindbergh, there was the President, and then there were the stars—faces that weren’t just familiar to those who bought fan magazines, but everyone. They were the most glamorous, the wealthiest, the most visible—and they were spending their nights with seas of men, men who would take their Canteen experience as a talisman, a remembrance of the gratitude of all of America, even the highest of the high. Sure, stars who performed at the Canteen experience a publicity boost: it was magnificent PR, which is part of the reason the studios embraced it so wholeheartedly. But the success of the Canteen, and the impossibility of its existence today, underlines just how much our political and cultural climate has transformed. In 2001, Karl Rove met with Hollywood executives to go about arranging a latter-day Hollywood unit, hoping to arrange public service spots, documentaries, and other forms of “war on terror” collaboration—even, potentially, a revival of the Hollywood Canteen. But Rove’s efforts never came to pass. It wasn’t because today’s stars are too selfish, or studio heads were too concerned with the bottom line. There were few troops on the ground, fewer still “shipping out” in the traditional way, and there was little to no access to the independent information about the war. It was, as many have pointed out, a wholly different war, with dramatically different discourses of nationhood, sacrifice, and citizen collaboration. In World War II, the government transformed fear into unity. In the atmosphere of self-sacrifice, the Hollywood Canteen was not remarkable—it just was. Such a sustained commitment to a government cause, and what it seems to represent, leaves us in the same sort awe as if Marlene Dietrich, bathed in gold, just took our hand and led us to the dance floor. Related: 411 / BC Cleaning House In the last war we were too modest to object to anything you men did—and in any case you wouldn’t let us say a word. Essay The Meaning of Home, by J.M. Tyree The cast of The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller and starring his wife Marilyn Monroe, was a rag-tag family of that only Hollywood could produce. c.1920 / United States The Gigolo of Every Woman's Dreams Wherever Rudolph Valentino went the sirens of the motorcycle cops screeched ahead of him, flashlights flared,the streets were jumbled with hysterical faces... Photos: Marlene Dietrich dancing with serviceman, Bette Davis serving food to soldiers.

Anne Helen Petersen By Anne Helen Petersen. “Through these portals pass the most beautiful uniforms in the world” —Sign over the entrance to the Hollywood Canteen When America went to war following the bombing of Pearl tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2394 2012-11-19T06:12:07Z 2012-11-19T19:57:19Z

Brendan Carney Byrne By Brendan Carney Byrne. “You can’t be a half a gangster,” proclaims the tagline of Boardwalk Empire’s third season. One of the implications, besides the obvious ones for protagonist Enoch “Nucky” Thompson’s soul, tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2389 2012-11-13T15:20:17Z 2012-11-13T17:30:44Z

James Buchanan, the only president to remain a bachelor his entire life, brought as his White House companion his niece, Harriet Lane. The daughter of relatives less well-off than Buchanan, Lane had accompanied the new president to London when he was posted there as an ambassador to St. James, and saw, as did her family, her position as his designated female escort as a chance to elevate her social standing and, eventually, find a suitable husband. Washington (and, soon after, the rest of the country) was infatuated with Lane. Her choice of inaugural gown, with a neckline some two inches lower than was the custom of the period, sparked a sharp demand for similar gowns, and descriptions of her beauty were abundant: Miss Lane is rather below the medium height, but has a fine figure, and is of that blonde type of Saxon beauty so familiar to Christendom since the multiplication of portraits of Queen Victoria. She wore a white dress trimmed with artificial flowers similar to those which ornamented her hair, and clasping her throat was a necklace of many strands of seed-pearls. And yet Miss Lane’s talents were not all wrapped up in aesthetics. As the nation’s hostess in a time when that job did not come with a social secretary and an event planner, she was responsible for seating arrangements at official White House dinners. It was a job fraught with tension, as relations between North and South spiraled into disaster during her uncle’s presidency. Lane, of course, was close to her uncle, but in this especially thorny period of social interaction benefitted greatly from being his niece and not his wife. She was, as a single, vivacious young woman, allowed to be equally friendly with families across the political divide without seeming to favor one over another. By all accounts she performed admirably, eliciting compliments from those most antagonistic to the Union. A record of White House social history points out that “so exceedingly brilliant was her reign that Jefferson Davis wrote saying that ‘the White House under the administration of Buchanan approached more nearly to my idea of a Republican Court than the President’s house had ever done before since the days of Washington.’” Lane was fiercely devoted to her uncle, waiting to marry until she herself was thirty-seven and his tenure as President had long since ended, but she continued to be remembered by an adoring public—several Navy ships bore her name (one still does), and First Ladies through the early twentieth century saw their successes compared to hers. Alas, not all women chosen to preside over the White House were as much of an asset as Lane. Andrew Jackson, whose wife Rachel died in 1828, chose as the official White House hostess his niece, Emily Donelson. An 1830 New Year’s party Donelson threw marked the official end of the mourning period for Jackson’s wife, and Donelson quickly became, at the age of twenty-one, the queen bee of the burgeoning Washington social scene. However, her social success soon begat a scandal, and the Jackson administration was thrown into turmoil. In 1831, Senator John Eaton, a Jackson intimate and a recent widower, married in Margaret “Peggy” Timberlake, the daughter of a Washington boarding-house owner and herself a recent widow. Feeling the match unsuitable and insisting proper mourning custom had been defied by the rushed marriage, the wives of Jackson’s closest associates closed ranks upon the new Mrs. Eaton and refused to see her socially. Margaret Bayard Smith, a Washington socialite, wrote to a friend on the subject of Eaton’s snubbing: A stand, a noble stand, I may say, since it is a stand taken against power and favoritism, has been made by the ladies of Washington, and not even the President’s wishes, in favor of his dearest, personal friend, can influence them to violate the respect due to virtue, by visiting one, who has left her strait and narrow path. With the exception of two or three timid and rather insignificant personages, who trembled for their husband’s offices, not a lady has visited her, and so far from being inducted into the President’s house, she is, I am told scarcely noticed by the females of his family. His own late wife having been plagued by rumors and scandal—Rachel Jackson was, upon her marriage to Andrew, still legally wed to her first husband—Jackson begged his niece, as the lady with highest social standing in the city, to receive Mrs. Eaton into her society. But the twenty-one-year-old Emily, backed by the wives of Vice President John C. Calhoun and other political figures, refused. As White House hostess, Emily was duty-bound to assist Jackson in social endeavors, but her position as niece and not wife allowed her the freedom to stand in opposition to Jackson on this matter—they were not a traditional family unit, and indeed Donelson, on more than one occasion, fled the White House for her native Tennessee so as to avoid having to discuss the matter. Martin van Buren, (who, incidentally, was also unmarried), stood with the President on the Eaton matter, but he was virtually alone, and in the spring of 1831, all but one of Jackson’s cabinet resigned. Emily Donelson, who had ceased speaking to her uncle upon his refusal to back her desire to exclude Mrs. Eaton from society, declined to continue serving as White House hostess and was replaced by the President’s daughter-in-law, but the damage was already done. John C. Calhoun, who felt his political fortunes decline as a result of Jackson’s opposition to the stance taken by Mrs. Calhoun, returned to South Carolina and was elected as that state’s Senator, and became an ardent champion of states’ rights and the eventual secession of the Southern states. The Petticoat Affair, as the whole debacle came to be known, was a fly in Jackson's ointment until his death in 1845, and was immortalized on the silver screen as The Gorgeous Hussy, a tarted-up version of the story starring Joan Crawford as the Peggy Eaton character and Lionel Barrymore as Jackson. In their tenures as First Lady, Martha Jefferson Randolph (daughter to Thomas Jefferson), Angelica Singleton Van Buren (daughter-in-law to Martin van Buren,), Priscilla Cooper Tyler (niece of John Tyler,), Mary Arthur McElroy (sister to Grover Cleveland), and Margaret Wilson (daughter of Woodrow Wilson,) all answered the call of relative and country to assume the duties as White House hostess, and served mostly without incident, navigating the interpersonal responsibilities of the job. Harriet Lane and Emily Donelson, though, made their mark on the Presidency and the nation by using their status and peculiar positions to wield influence—for good, and for gossip. Related: 1775 / Braintree, MA Desolation Row I shudder at the approach of winter, when I think I am to remain desolate. 1507 / Urbino Camera Ready So we can truthfully say that true art is what does not seem to be art—and the most important thing is to conceal it. 1983 /New York City On the Contrary If self aggrandizement through invoking the weakness of others is one characteristic of gossip, then men may be far more “gossipy” than women. Pictured from left to right: Martha Jefferson Randolph, Emily Donelson, Harriet Lane.

Angela Serratore By Angela Serratore. At an Iowa campaign stop in August, President Barack Obama, speaking of his beloved family, modestly placed himself at the bottom of the Obama household roster: “I don’t usually tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2386 2012-11-09T19:22:34Z 2012-11-12T16:24:37Z

The conversation the three men had that night was one of modern history’s most fateful. Max Beaverbrook, the thuggish, dynamic, Canadian, owner of the powerful Daily Express, and the mysterious wheeler dealing Brendan Bracken, boss of The Financial Times, were “outsiders.” So was Churchill. They agreed Chamberlain could no longer carry on politically. He had lost the support of the opposition parties and most of his own conservatives and simply had to go. But who could replace him as Prime Minister at the most perilous moment in nine hundred years of British history, with German invasion forces beginning to build? They were only two: Winston Churchill, the de facto Minister of Defense, and the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. Churchill was deeply mistrusted by his peers, and thought by some to be mad. His selection, many felt, would be calamitous. Lord Halifax—hereditary member of the House of Lords, darling of the establishment—was the favored of the two by far. For the past five years Halifax had been busy appeasing Hitler, while from the fringe of power, Churchill opposed him. All knew that as a war leader Churchill, the emotional romantic, would fight on to the end, whatever the odds. It was equally obvious that Halifax, the cold, hard-headed realist, would not. He was an instinctive peace man, ever willing to establish secret links with Mussolini and determine Hitler’s terms. So what did Beaverbrook and Bracken advise? They knew the drill, the ancient workings of Britain’s unwritten constitution: No election was required to change a leader; “soundings” taken in secret to establish who would serve under who; a prime ministerial resignation offered to the king; “advice” to the monarch as to who to “call” to form the next government; a royal summons for the pre-selected “new leader” to go the palace to be royally anointed; the promise to “do one’s best” the kissing of hands. To their champion that night they advised silence. They made Churchill promise that when asked by Chamberlain, as they were sure he would be the following day, whether he would agree to serve under Halifax, he would stare into space and hold his tongue, a hard thing to do for one inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity. Events unfolded just as predicted. Halifax and Churchill were summoned by Chamberlain the following afternoon around tea time. Three men in one small room. He would tender his resignation in half an hour, Chamberlain said, and proposed to advise the king to call on Halifax to succeed him. Would Churchill agree to serve under Halifax? Would he be number two? “Usually I talk a great deal,” Churchill recalled later in his memoir, “But on this occasion I was silent. A very long pause ensued, two minutes or more. It seemed like a lifetime…At last Halifax spoke.” It was the appeaser who cracked first in this apocalyptic game of chicken. This is what Halifax recorded in his diary: “I said it would put me in a hopeless position not being a member of parliament. I should be a cipher. Winston would be a better choice”. “By the time he had finished,” Churchill wrote years later in his own war memoir, “it was clear that the duty would fall upon me—had in fact fallen upon me. After it was over Lord Halifax and I sat in the sun a while speaking pleasantly of nothing in particular.” He was prime minister by six that evening. It is on the record. Chamberlain was disappointed. The King was saddened. (“I told Halifax I was sorry not to have him as PM,” is the entry in the royal diary). Joseph Kennedy, the anti-British Irish-American U.S. ambassador, and the White House were dismissive. But not the British people. They roared their approval—and went on roaring until 1945. Some said it was the silence that saved the world.

Peter Foges By Peter Foges. London, May 8, 1940 After eight months of sitzkrieg and phony war, the first large-scale fighting had finally broken out between Britain and Germany, and the Brits were on tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2382 2012-11-05T17:45:16Z 2012-11-05T18:17:43Z

It’s this law of the jungle that gives tremendous insight into the nihilistic mode of twenty-first century western politics, all brinkmanship, deferrals and recess: for without a volley, there is no spin. Even mainstream news later picked up on Obama’s Taoist technique of non-engagement, crowning him “No Drama Obama.” His duel with Sen. John McCain was not unlike a ping-pong game in which the winner is bent exclusively on returning the ball: let the other guy overreach and trip himself up. And as long as senators are more preoccupied with staying out of bad headlines than generating good ones, we will always suffer a Congress that spends its days passing legislation that decides the national mammal (currently favored: bison). But policy vacuums and suit-wearing ciphers allow the reactive press—and we may as well include Twitter here—to explode or twist what nuance has not already been drained from the dialogue. Witness Obama’s “you didn’t build that” adlib, instantly isolated and decontextualized. Or, in The Thick of It, take Nicola Murray, Hugh Abbot’s harried successor, who bungles a talking point regarding her party’s leader by substituting one preposition for another, thereby undermining the man she means to support. After the interview, Malcolm Tucker, the sharpest-tongued of the bunch, is characteristically furious at the misstatement: Nicola: For fuck's sake, Malcolm! Malcolm: Shouldn't that be "Of fuck's sake"? Nicola: What? Malcolm: Can I just quote it to you? “The Prime Minister is the right man for the moment.” Nicola: Yeah, that's what you told me to say. Malcolm: Of the moment! I said of the moment! There is a huge difference between me saying, “Nicola, I'd like to go for a walk with you” and “Nicola, I'm going to make a hat out of your entrails.” The oratory has moved backstage. You get hypercautious, deer-in-headlights press conferences, where even a minor stumble is chum for the sharks; meanwhile, the powers that be are swearing baroquely in rooms that would be smoke-filled were it not for certain legislation. Ollie and Glenn, two fictional advisers in the Department of Social Affairs, a young backstabber and an obsolete drone, are ever one-upping each other’s put-downs. It’s clear that they relish the moments in which they need not be conciliating PR flacks with a phone glued to either ear, but they toggle schizophrenically between both modes as occasion demands, aiming to appear either merely competent or an alpha male. David Slayden and Rita Kirk Whillock describe these cognitive realignments well in the introduction to Soundbite Culture: The Death of Discourse in a Wired World: At a time when there are more means of facilitating discourse than ever before, less real communication is taking place, particularly if one assumes communication to be a reasoned exchange of views (reached through a process of thought and reflection) with a spirit of give-and-take, of point and counterpoint, characterized by a verbalized expression and representation of the self. Indeed, we would argue that discourse, as such, has been subsumed by ritualistic and stylistic performance, frequently dictated by the channels of discourse themselves, and that the conception and presentation of self have become increasingly fluid and imagistic, shaped by the demands of the mediated environments in which such performances take place. Nowhere is this need for specialized styles and rituals more evident than The Thick of It’s two hour-long specials, "The Rise of the Nutters" and "Spinners and Losers", which follow a prime minister’s surprise resignation and the ripples that will determine a new leader, all in the space of one horrendous night. Watching these episodes is a bit like speed-reading Machiavelli: alliances are made and destroyed in minutes, and the hapless Daily Mail struggles to verify news that is too fluid to pin down. The political players, having no time but plenty of misinformation, are forced to bluff, play dumb, and outright lie. In the end, the story comes full circle: the original heir apparent ascends, and all we’ve seen was Sisyphean effort. If The Thick of It is tender in its verbal savagery, if it makes us sympathize with the misguided souls who chose to, in theory, serve and guide the people, it is precisely in the revelation that they are not lazy or amoral per se; they must simply dedicate their scattered resources to staying ahead of the narrative. One notes the tragic embassy attack in Libya this fall, a sudden crisis that had Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign issuing forceful arguments before the nature of the event was fixed. Ethics just aren’t in the timetable. There is always a noble aspiration just around the next bit of damage control. For any of us who’ve smacked our heads and wondered how an elected official “could have said something so stupid,” the TV series answers belligerently that gaffes are born of mouths attempting to evade them. What counts as a gaffe has little to do with a mistake in actual governance; in popular usage, it’s an accidental confession of some toxic belief, as Romney’s “corporations are people” and “47%” moments or Obama’s “bitter” comments illustrate. So perhaps Washington’s gaffe-prone elite, from Joe Biden to Bush II, are best understood as problematically honest. Likewise, it’s a minor apocalypse when hard data escapes the bureaucratic maze, but the accidentally broadcasted intel from The Thick of It—unconfirmed crime stats, a wayward (and obscene) inter-office email—are falsified in headlines. Surrogates have taken the falls. Most importantly, the granular data is suppressed. And so the rare flicker of transparency offers a view as distorted as any other; the truth may have gotten out, but it’s been tortured beyond recognition. What progress stands to be made in this minefield of meanings? At best, there are useful methods for staying off the record. Malcolm Tucker gives vent to an avalanche of psychosexual abuse that can’t be quoted in the seediest tabloid, while his Conservative shadow cabinet counterpart, Stewart Pearson, envelops himself in a cloud of buzzwords that no one outside a think tank can hope to parse. These coping mechanisms allow you to weather the summit and obfuscate your strategy, but to what ennobling purpose is unclear. Tucker refers to the “It” of the program’s title as “a war,” an attritional one in which you’re sure to see some “friendly fire.” Yet it’s always for the polis that he supposedly fights—an electorate he claims he cannot help unless he and his colleagues have total control. Give the ancient despots credit: at least their lust for power and contempt for the common man were naked. It’s modern rulers who have made long careers in claiming good intentions. Related: 1503 / Urbino Camera Ready So you see that to reveal intense application and skill robs everything of grace. 1879 / Hartford, CT Campaign Promises If you know the worst about a candidate to begin with, every attempt to spring things on him will be checkmated Working the Room: Presidential Humor Lincoln had an ear for entertaining, collecting anecdotes like the drunken hog-stealing tale and keeping them at the ready to make a point.

Miles Klee By Miles Klee. "Jesus Christ, you're like a fucking omnishambles, you are. You're like that coffee machine, you know? From bean to cup, you fuck up." --Malcolm Tucker, The Thick of It, tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2373 2012-10-18T11:36:00Z 2012-10-18T11:56:23Z

The Editors By The Editors. Ever wonder just how many books go into a single issue of Lapham's Quarterly? Follow along using this complete syllabus, which assembles all the fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and plays tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2363 2012-09-14T16:51:46Z 2012-10-18T03:04:48Z

Yet in the cloistered precincts of academia there was alarm. Sheldrake, after all had been one of the elect, a brilliant member of the molecular biological fraternity, hard to dismiss as a crank. His utterly subversive hypothesis was treason. It necessitated vigorous refutation. The one-two punch of punishment dreamed up by the scientific Curia was mockery—followed by excommunication to the kooky fringe. They decreed that henceforth, Sheldrake would be barred from science’s hallowed halls, for ever ineligible for its Nobel Prizes. Thus in most serious journals his book was met with scorn, his ideas excoriated. The Guardian damned him as a “mystic” whose hypothesis “explained the unreal with the non-real: like multiplying zero by zero.” It was in the pages of Nature that the anathema reached fever pitch. In a lead editorial, the magazine pronounced A New Science of Life, “heresy.” Even worse, it was magic—surely the most deadly insult one modern empiricist can hurl at another. “Many readers,” editor John Maddox thundered, “will be left with the impression that Sheldrake has succeeded in finding a place for magic within scientific discussion.” Which may, Maddox added slyly, “have been part of the objective in writing such a book.” As if that imputation of alchemy and medieval un-reason were not harsh enough to squeeze the living daylights out of the 278-page tome, Maddox, like some Renaissance Inquisitor presented with a tract arguing the case for Copernicus, ended by calling for the book to be burned. It was clear that the mainstream scientific career of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, former fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, was now toast. How could one paper-bound book cause such a rumpus? What on earth had Sheldrake said or done? In his book, Sheldrake kicks off by bashing reductionism, in which life boils down to chemistry, chemistry to physics; the whole is explicable by analyzing the parts. Sheldrake disagrees believing the whole to be more than the parts and he lists a plethora of biological conundrums that have piled up. For instance, he asserts that reductionism cannot explain or predict the development of the pattern or form of living things, (known as “differentiation”) nor their behavior. You just can’t get from A to Z—from egg to organism, from genotype to phenotype—deploying our current physical and chemical theories. Not even close. Instead he posits a phenomenon that you won’t find in the standard text books, namely a “field.” Modern theoretical physics is full of fields, they’re fashionable. Sheldrake’s particular field controls and determines the shape or form of any plant or animal from its simple cellular beginnings all the way to its multi cellular and vastly complex maturity. He calls it a “morphogenetic field” (a term he borrowed from embryology).There exists in his view such a field for each type of living thing which somehow regulates its growth. So of what might these fields consist? Sheldrake has only a vague suggestions. Perhaps he writes, “chemical and biological forms are repeated not because they are determined by changeless laws, but because of a causal influence from previous similar forms. This would require an action across space and time unlike any known type of physical action”. He calls all this “the hypothesis of formative causation”—a new type of causation as yet undreamed of by modern physics. Is Rupert Sheldrake some kind of latter day Issac Newton, proffering a new and revolutionary paradigm? Or is he a pseudo-scientific magician? Well Newton himself was both, of course. You’ll find his laws of motion in any elementary text, but little about his work on alchemy or his lifelong search for the elixir of life. John Maynard Keynes pronounced him “not the first of the age of reason but the last of the magicians.” As the great historian of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out in Newton’s supposedly mechanico-corpuscular universe, gravity interpreted as an innate attraction was nothing less than “occult,” a species of magic. To this day it remains mysterious. In the absence of the discovery of observable waves or particles, gravity is nowadays simply assumed to be an irreducible primary property of matter, like size, position, or shape. Or, who knows, like a “morphogenetic field”? When “scientific revolutions” occur, they are often accompanied by persecution. Nicolaus Copernicus died before the church fathers could get to him, but his posthumous work, De Revolutionibus Orbium Celestium in which he overturned Ptolemy’s geo-centric astronomy, was banned—no one was permitted, on pain of death, to quote it. Galileo disobeyed, of course, was hauled before the inquisitors, and found “vehemently suspect of heresy” for having followed Copernicus and sentenced to house arrest. His own work on astronomy, The Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, was banned too. Galileo was uncommonly well connected—and very lucky. His contemporary and fellow astronomer Giordano Bruno had fewer friends and was less favored by fate. This friar maintained not only that the earth revolved around the sun but that the sun was one of millions of identical stars and that around each were solar systems populated by intelligent life. This was not only “magic thinking” by sixteenth century standards but truly revolutionary. The church couldn’t wait to get rid of this dangerous priest, burning him to a crisp in the middle of Rome. In his sweeping intellectual dissent and reckless arrogance, Sheldrake could be said to be Bruno’s heir. They haven’t burned him yet, but he was seriously stabbed by an insane Japanese man at a public meeting a few years back, who accused him of practicing “mind control.” Such are the occupational hazards of a scientific sorcerer.

Peter Foges By Peter Foges. Rupert Sheldrake was a scientific superstar; later he was mocked as a magician. A British-born biologist, a former scholar and member of the faculty at Clare College, Cambridge, and tag:laphamsquarterly.org,2012:/roundtable//3.2331 2012-09-12T19:41:17Z 2012-09-13T16:06:22Z

Throughout the nineteenth century, virtually every major novelist or short-story writer, on the continent as well as in England and America, produced tales of the weird and supernatural. However, such stories weren’t simply campfire entertainments. By now they were “philosophical romances,” products of a world where science and revolution had overturned the ordered hierarchies and old verities. Above all, they explored the human personality and the galaxies of inner space. For instance, through his fantastic fables, E.T.A. Hoffmann examined mesmerism, automatons, “nervous” conditions, the psychology of artists and musicians, alienation, the nature of dreams, somnambulism, prenatal influence, magnetism—all hot topics of the day, and most still of interest to us. His most famous tale, “The Sandman,” eventually gave rise to one of Freud’s greatest and most influential essays, “The Uncanny.” In France, even pillars of realism, such as Honoré de Balzac, Prosper Mérimée and Guy de Maupassant, gravitated to the supernatural. Balzac’s earliest masterpiece, La Peau de chagrin—one of his etudes philosophiques—concerns a piece of wild ass’s skin that grants wishes, a charm that the novelist uses as a metaphor for personal and creative energy. In Mérimée’s “The Venus of Ille,” a mysterious statue of the ancient goddess provides a lesson in tough love and the proper valuation of women. As for Maupassant, this student of Flaubert and the human heart regularly uses the weird tale to explore psychological disorder. In his famous tale, “Le Horla,” a man detects an unseen presence in his daily life, then grows gradually convinced that this invisible entity has moved into his mind and may be controlling his actions. In “Who Knows?” the narrator imagines that his furniture is alive. As should be clear, the supernatural is the habitual mode by which writers explore the irrational and the subconscious: As within, so without. Dickens’ Fat Boy used to whisper “I wants to make your flesh creep,” but most practitioners of the weird tale aim for a bit more than just that. It is, I think, significant that the great age of occult fiction—particularly in England—runs from the 1860s through the 1930s. The Oxford Movement and the Catholic revival after Newman, a disgust with the dehumanizing aspects of modern industrial society, the 1890s fascination with the decadent and Satanic, the scientific investigations of the Society for Psychical Research, the widespread belief in spiritualism and Theosophy, the pioneering modern psychology of William James and Sigmund Freud—all these fueled the period’s growing conviction that there were unacknowledged, unconscious or unseen forces at work all around us. Little wonder, then, that the ghost story flourished. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea” depicted a clergyman haunted by an invisible monkey: Is it a projection of unfulfilled desires? A guilty conscience? The return of the repressed? In “Carmilla”—still the best of all stories of the undead—Le Fanu transmuted vampirism into a metaphor for lesbian desire. When reading his work the reader is swept up by his narrative power, his artistry in the use of description, folktale and local color. But the nightmares touch archetypal nerves. In “Madam Crowl’s Ghost,” the servant Mrs. Jolliffe confronts the robot-like horror of Madam Crowl, who suddenly rises from her bed: And in an instant she opens her eyes, and up she sits, and spins herself around, and down wi’ her, with a clack on her two tall heels on the floor, facin’ me, ogglin’ me in my face wi’ her two great glass eyes, and a wicked simper wi’ her old wrinkled lips, and long fause teeth…If I’d a thought an instant, I’d turned about and run. But I couldn’t take my eyes off her, and I backed from her as soon as I could; and she came clatterin’ after, like a thing on wires, with her fingers pointing to my throat, and she makin’ all the time a sound with her tongue like zizz-zizz-zizz. Le Fanu’s greatest admirer was M.R. James, the Provost of Eton, whose Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904) scared little boys with accounts of revenants and mysterious mazes and accursed treasures and whistles that it would be best never to blow. In general, James’s tales all take the form of “a warning to the curious”—perhaps an appropriate message to Edwardian schoolboys—and they usually show the comeuppance or destruction of scholars and clergymen, which must always go down well with their pupils. In general, James’s protagonists simply go too far; they surrender to a passion, be it the solution of an arcane scholarly mystery or a spiteful desire for revenge on a colleague. In effect, though, James established the form of the classic English ghost story. He particularly specialized in ominous foreboding, capped usually by a single moment of revelation, a short, sharp shock. In one of his tales, the protagonist returns home after an unsettling day: Then he dozed, and then he woke, and bethought himself that his brown spaniel, which ordinarily slept in his room, had not come upstairs with him. Then he thought he was mistaken; for happening to move his hand, which hung down over the arm of the chair within a few inches of the floor, he felt on the back of it just the slightest touch of a surface of hair, and stretching out in that direction he stroked and patted a rounded something. But the feel of it, and still more the fact that instead of a responsive movement, absolute stillness greeted his touch, make him look over his arm. What he had been touching rose to meet him. For all the artistry of James and his acolytes (commonly referred to as The James Gang and including E.G. Swain, A.N.L. Munby, and H.R. Wakefield, among others), the very greatest tales of the supernatural achieve a sense of the cosmic. While James was a dweller on the threshold, Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) and Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) were openers of the way. The first two, in particular, divide the honor of having produced the greatest weird tale of all time. In Machen’s “The White People” (1904), which critic Roger Dobson has called a Satanic Alice in Wonderland, an adolescent girl recalls her early childhood, chattering in run-on sentences of her nurse’s unsettling “fairy tales” and the private “games” they played, of an eerie place in the hills full of strange stones and circular patterns, of a certain little manikin made out of clay. Writing with a chilling innocence, the guileless girl recalls a series of increasingly disturbing encounters with a pagan Otherness: I am going to write here many of the old secrets and some new ones, but there are some I shall not put down at all. I must not write down the real names of the days and months which I found out a year ago, nor the way to make the Aklo letters, or the Chian language, or the great bountiful Circles, nor the Mao Games, nor the chief songs. I may write something about all these things but not the way to do them, for peculiar reasons. And I must not say who the Nymphs are, or the Dols, or Jeelo, or what voolas mean. All these are most secret secrets… In Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows,” (1907) two men spend a night on a small island in the Danube and discover that they have “…intruded, have, in fact, come upon a gap in the curtain of the universe.” In the words of H.P. Lovecraft, who knew about these things, Blackwood possessed a preternatural ability to evoke the presence of “an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours.” It is worth noting that both Machen and Blackwood, like W.B. Yeats, were members of the theosophical society, the Order of the Golden Dawn. De la Mare, in his turn, was fascinated by dreams, illusions, childhood, and the uncanny throughout his life, producing ghostly poems like “The Listeners” and a score of unsettling stories, including that most subtle of vampire tales, “Seaton’s Aunt.” Supernatural fiction typically works best in its short form. As Edgar Allan Poe famously argued, the unity of place, atmosphere and effect can then be sustained, unbroken. So it’s no surprise that Machen’s The Hill of Dreams (1907), De la Mare’s The Return (1910), and Blackwood’s The Centaur (1916) are somewhat neglected. These great novels of transcendence, all published within a ten-year span, are demanding works, written in lyrical prose, with Henry Jamesian subtlety, and marked by intense visionary power, each of them employing the conventions of the supernatural to reflect on questions of personal identity, the role of the artist in society, man’s relationship to nature, and the possibility of a more intense life, both in this world and the next. In these three books the supernatural merges with the mystical or metaphysical. They underscore the period’s fascination with unorthodox states of perception, as well as its obsession with what one might call astral porousness, the possibility of communication with an immanent realm of spirit. All three novels are about dissatisfaction with the world as it is and a yearning for some kind of spiritual growth or enlargement of vision. In poetry and some mainstream authors (Alain Fournier, Proust), such yearnings might typically focus on the lost paradise of childhood. For a smaller group of writers, they might lead to a rhapsodic disordering of all the senses (Rimbaud) or to powerful records of schizophrenia, as in Paul Ableman’s I Hear Voices or the autobiographical fiction of Anna Kavan. But in the realm of the supernatural, the most common trope is possession, sometimes taking the form of an attack, sometimes of a seduction. Consider, as an example, the 1895 classic The Lost Stradivarius, by John Meade Falkner. After discovering a mysterious violin, a virtuous and hard-working young baronet named John Maltravers undergoes a gradual change in personality. He withdraws from his friends and family, grows indifferent to his young wife, and spends more and more time in Naples, where he restores an ancient villa and, it is rumored, engages in pagan rituals. The violin, it turns out, once belonged to a decadent and lascivious nobleman who was drawn to esoteric learning and forbidden practices. Maltravers, in effect, emulates his predecessor. But is his personality corrupted or liberated? As the critic Mark Valentine has written, The Lost Stradivarius offers both a classic ghost story and “a finely poised spiritual drama counterpointing art, ecstasy and license against duty, decorum, and rectitude.” That word ecstasy recurs throughout Arthur Machen’s fiction and nonfiction. While Walter Pater famously maintained that art should aspire to the condition of music, Machen believed it should go further, it should convey “rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown.” Most realistic fiction, he felt, was nothing more than “dignified reporting.” Instead, Machen contended that “fine literature is simply the expression of the eternal things that are in man, that it is beauty clothed in words, that it is always ecstasy, that it always draws itself away, and goes apart into lonely places, far from the common course of life.” As one Machen character declares, “The whole universe, my friend, is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter.” The aim of supernatural fiction should be to tear away the veil, to awaken us. This esthetic informs The Hill of Dreams, Machen’s portrait of the artist as solitary and doomed. It begins: “There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.” Young Lucian grows up in the Welsh hills, an introspective, dreamy boy, given to meditating on the past, especially on early Britain, a time when Celtic magic brooded “on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest.” During his wanderings, in which he sometimes imagines himself a fairy-tale hero, Lucian repeatedly experiences moments of exhilaration and mystery, as if the forests were haunted, when rustling in the shadows might be more than just the wind’s passage. Aside from mooning about, Lucian spends most of his time reading old poets and esoteric volumes: He dived deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his province…The strange pomp and symbolism of the Cabala, with its hint of more terrible things; the Rosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas of Vaughan, dreams of alchemists—all these were his delight. Such were his companions, with the hills and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely waterpools; books, the thoughts of books, the stirrings of imagination, all fused into one phantasy by the magic of the outland country. In due course, Lucian makes “a pious attempt to translate into English prose the form and mystery of the domed hills, the magic of occult valleys, the sound of the red swollen brook swirling through leafless woods.” He suffers rejection, plagiarism and mockery. For a while he is saved by love. But his beloved Annie is compelled to visit a relative and leaves Lucian alone for weeks on end, then months. During her absence, he writes mystical poetry, illuminates his manuscript pages himself and then binds them into a golden book, a personal breviary. Gradually, however, his imagination and curious learning lead him into a world of fantasy, one in which he sees not the present but the imagined past. Out of his vulgar, modern-day village, he reconstructs, quite literally in his mind’s eye, the ancient city of Siluria and the gardens of Avallaunus. It is a realm of wondrous villas, shady courts, tessellated pavements: Lucian wandered all day through the shining streets, taking shelter sometimes in the gardens beneath the dense and gloomy ilex trees, and listening to the plash and trickle of the fountains. Sometimes he would look out of a window and watch the crowd and colour of the market-place, and now and again a ship came up the river bringing exquisite silks and the merchandise of unknown lands in the Far East. In his dream-kingdom, he grows decadent and exotic in his tastes: “He made lovers come before him and confess their secrets; he pried into the inmost mysteries of innocence and shame, noting how passion and reluctance strive together for the mastery.” In his reveries he meets “women with grave sweet faces” who “told him . . . how they had played and watched by the vines and the fountains, and dallied with the nymphs, and gazed at images reflected in the water pools” or “had loved the satyrs for many years before they knew their race.” But the longer Lucian spends his waking hours at Avallaunus, the more disconnected he grows from the real world. His neighbors begin to notice that his bones seem to be growing through his skin and that “he had all the appearance of an ascetic whose body has been reduced to misery by long and grievous penance. People who chanced to see him could not help saying to one another: ‘How ill and wretched that Lucian Taylor looks!’ They were of course quite unaware of the joy and luxury in which his real life was spent, and some of them began to pity him, and to speak to him kindly.” Eventually, Lucian moves to London, where he attempts to write a masterpiece. But the noise, filth and vulgarity of the metropolis trouble him with their nightmarish intensity:Nothing fine, nothing rare, nothing exquisite, it seemed, could exist in the weltering suburban sea, in the habitations which had risen from the stench and slime of the brickfields.” When he goes out for food, “the rocky avenues became the camp and fortalice of some half-human, malignant race who swarmed in hiding, ready to bear him away into the heart of their horrible hills.” He stays indoors more and more, eats and drinks less and less, until the real and the unreal begin to blur, the outside world increasingly mirroring the inner one. “Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one from the other.” Lucian hears the call of faeryland, or is it merely a final madness? In The Hill of Dreams Machen’s hero is simultaneously alienated from commercial society by his poetic visions, swept away by the mystical chthonic forces emanating from the Welsh hills, and clearly growing insane. In what may be a deliberate echo of Balzac’s The Unknown Masterpiece—in which a painter creates a canvas that is nothing but swirls and ugly daubs of paint—Lucian’s great work turns out be a mass of meaningless scribbles. At least to our eyes. But Lucian himself follows the ecstasy within, abandoning this gimcrack world of ours forever. The book ends with a slight variation on its beginning: “There was a glow within as if great furnace doors were opened.” If The Hill of Dreams might pass for a fin-de-siecle novel in the mode of Joris-Karl Huysman’s A Rebours (Against the Grain), its theme of alienation is made almost literal in Walter de la Mare’s The Return. Arthur Lawford, “a rather fair, not unsubstantial, rather languid” middle-aged man, is recovering from illness when one day he wanders into the Widderstone graveyard. His thoughts, naturally enough, turn introspective: “ ‘What is the good of it all? he asked himself inconsequently—this monotonous restless, stupid life to which he was soon to be returning, and for good.” Growing a bit tired, he sits down on a bench next to the grave of a Frenchman named Nicholas Sabathier, said to be a suicide. When Lawford awakes from his nap, he feels full of unexpected energy, races home to be in time for dinner, and rushes up the stairs into his room to change. When he glances in the mirror, he discovers another man’s face gazing back at him. His wife Sheila is appalled by this transformation—What will the servants say? What will the neighbors think if they see her living with this thin, distinctly wolfish and foreign-looking man? She’s not even sure that Lawford isn’t an impostor, demanding proof after proof of his identity. Is he, in fact, entirely the man he was? More and more, Lawford registers a heightening of his self-consciousness and what the ancients would call a psychomachia: A consciousness had begun to stir in him that was neither that of the old, easy Lawford, whom he had never been fully aware of before, nor of this strange, ghostly intelligence that haunted the hawklike, restless face, and plucked so insistently at his distracted nerves. He had begun in a vague fashion to be aware of them both, could in a fashion discriminate between them, almost as if there really were two spirits in stubborn conflict within him. It would, of course, wear him down in time. There could be only one end to such a struggle—the end. In an attempt to reverse his physical transformation, Lawford returns to the cemetery, where he converses with a rather enigmatical stranger named Herbert Herbert. When Lawford visits Herbert’s home he learns that his new face resembles that of the dead Sabathier. At the same time Lawford meets Herbert’s sister Grizel—and falls in love with her. But whom does Grizel love? There are hints that Sabathier committed suicide because of Grizel. Yet how can this be, since the Frenchman died a century earlier? And why has no one in the town ever heard of the Herberts and their house? As with the protagonist of The Lost Stradivarius, Lawford’s “possession” initiates an expansion of personality, an introduction to a life far richer and more spiritually satisfying than that of his old petit bourgeois existence. On a simple level, this might be an account of a midlife crisis. But De la Mare makes nothing easy—he is as subtle an artist as Henry James, and the last chapters of the novel are roiled with ambiguity. Who returns and to what and why? Does the book end happily or not? With the avowed pantheist Blackwood the presentation of alienation and rebirth grow positively mythic. In this classic of transcendental fiction, Terence O’Malley is deeply sensitive to Nature, susceptible to singular states of exaltation (that Celtic blood!), distinctly lonely. “Chief cause of his loneliness . . . seemed that he never found a sympathetic, truly understanding ear for those deeply primitive longings that fairly ravaged his heart.” While sailing to the Caucasus as a kind-of freelance journalist, O’Malley encounters a mysterious, laconic Russian and his son. The man, in particular, is physically big, but also somehow suggests a greater bulk and size than meets the eye. It’s as though another invisible shape emanated from his body and extended it. When O’Malley finally speaks to him and explains that he is going to the Caucasus, the somewhat child-like stranger’s first words are: “Some of us…of ours…” he spoke very slowly, very brokenly, quarrying out the words with real labour, “…still survive…out there…We…now go back. So very…few…remain…And you—come with us…” O’Malley relates all this much later, to a London friend, who works in an insurance office. He stresses that there was nothing about this invitation that could be likened to a “ Call of the Wild,” a desire “to let off steam.” Instead he soon recognized in himself a hunger for something unavailable to him in this bustling, hustling century. This isn’t my time, he says, “it’s not even my world! And I loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheapjack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity.” In the course of the ship’s voyage, O’Malley is warned about the big Russian. Stahl, the ship’s doctor, has known the man in the past and fears for O’Malley’s very soul. In fact, Stahl believes the Russian isn’t really quite human, that he is some kind of being from the primordial Urwelt of the earth. He explains that this gentle giant has been wandering the world, “companionless among men, seeking his own, finding no place where to lay his head.” That last phrase should set off echoes. As the Gospel of Luke says, “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head.” Stahl contends that the Russian is actually a Cosmic Being, “a direct expression of cosmic life. A little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival—a survival of her youth.” Following the teachings of the German philosopher and scientist Gustav Fechner, both Stahl and O’Malley agree that the Earth is “a conscious, sentient, living Being,” and that “the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is something more than a picturesque dream of the ancients.” As O’Malley and Stahl continue to observe the father and his son, they remark on the rapidity of their movement and a distinct sense of larger, shadowy forms hovering around their bodies. Despite Stahl’s cautionings, O’Malley continues to be drawn to the pair. For the Irishman, at least, “The gates were opening.” O’Malley yearns more and more for something wilder, simpler, something lost but perhaps not irretrievably so, “the true, pure, vital childhood of the Earth—the Golden Age—before men tasted of the Tree and knew themselves separate.” As he says when imagining that lost paradise: I feel as if I’d fallen asleep in one world and awakened into another where life is trivial and insignificant, where men work like devils for things of no value in order to accumulate them in great ugly houses; always collecting and collecting, like mad children, possessions that they never really possess—things external to themselves, valueless and unreal. Throughout The Centaur Blackwood mixes together a critique of industrial society, an early formulation of what is now called the Gaia thesis, his own pantheist philosophy, contemporary beliefs in astral bodies, and the new discoveries in psychology. His insistent, almost kerygmatic truth throughout is simply that we are much greater than we know. In addition, O’Malley stresses the universal mystical belief “that a man must lose his life to find it, and that the personal self must be merged in a larger one to know peace—the incessant, burning nostalgia that dwells in the heart of every religion known to men: escape from the endless pain of futile personal ambitions and desires for external things that are unquenchable because never possible of satisfaction.” Before the ship lands at Batoum, there will be a mysterious death, an apparent suicide. At Batoum itself, the Russian will disappear, but O’Malley is convinced that they will meet again. Making his way inland, toward the cradle of the human race, he hears tales of “true Pagans who worship trees, sacrifice blood, and offer bread and salt to the nature-deities.” He even picks up rumors of beings who come in the spring “and are very swift and roaring…You must always hide. To see them is to die. But they cannot die; they are of the mountains. They are older, older than the stones. And the dogs will warn you, or the horses, or sometimes a great sudden wind.” I’ll say no more, though Blackwood goes on to describe O’Malley’s ecstasy in which he finally experiences “the Great At-one-ment.” Nonetheless he returns to this world for a while, though his ultimate destiny resembles that of Lucian in The Hill of Dreams rather more than that of Lawford in The Return. “He remembered dimly the Greek idea of worship in the Mysteries; that the worshipper knew actual temporary union with the deity in his ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his sphere of being.” Far too long, I think, the realist novel has dominated our thinking about the course of English literature. Let us honor the marvelous as well as the matter of fact! It is time we paid more attention to metaphysical fiction, whether labeled fantasy, supernatural thriller or spiritual psychodrama. Some high spots of this lineage include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, James Hogg’s Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, George MacDonald’s Phantastes, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. These demanding and disturbing novels of Machen, De la Mare, and Blackwood belong in their company. But there are many more examples in the twentieth century, from the light-hearted to the tragic: Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes, David Garnett’s Lady Into Fox, David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, Charles Williams’ All Hallow’s Eve, John Crowley’s Little, Big, and Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, to mention just a few. Such books remind us that we are all strangers and pilgrims.

Michael Dirda By Michael Dirda. We have recourse to magic and belief in the supernatural when what exists isn’t what we want. Human desires being limitless, it is thus likely that a vestigial tropism