Discolampa ethion

Banded Blue Pierrot [ Discolampa ethion ] is a contrastingly marked butterfly found in South Asia that belongs to the Blues or Lycaenidae family.

Range

The butterfly occurs in Sri Lanka, South India, Sikkim to Assam and onto Myanmar. Also in the Southern Andaman islands and Nicobar islands. In South East Asia, the butterfly is found in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Hainan, Malayan peninsula, Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, Philippines, Palawan, Nias, Sumbawa, Anambas islands, and Sulawesi

Spotted From

Wayanad , Kerala

Sincere Thanks to Balakrishnan Valappil For the ID

Still working on my clowns.  I rather like how the Pierrot-type clown is turning.  I’m keeping his normally white costume more dingy gray – these aren’t terribly happy clowns so the idea is to keep them a bit threadbare.  Also, there’s a touch of the absurd with the one clown offering his nose to the jester.

I love the forgiving nature of acrylics, knowing I can go back and rework and redo and rethink and repaint…My work tends to undergo many changes.  In the original sketch, there’s a bird perching of the nose of the jester – he may return.  And the background will need, maybe, a few posters for circuses.

The unfinished hobo clown is smoking a cigarette, poor guy.

The early post on this painting is on November 6.

A Pierrot painted in Sam Francis's Jungian phase

 ( This essay follows http://clarespark.com/2009/11/02/a-ride-through-the-culture-wars-in-academe/.)

[Untitled poem submitted to London Mercury by an Englishman, Lawrence Binyon (a William Blake reviver of the 1920s):] From the howl of the wind/ As I opened the door/ And entered, the firelight/ Was soft on the floor;/ And mute in their places/ Were table and chair/ The white wall, the shadows,/ Awaiting me there./ All was strange on a sudden!/ From the stillness a spell,/ A fear or a fancy,/ Across my heart fell./ Were they awaiting another/ To sit by the hearth?/ Was it I saw them newly/ A stranger on earth? 

 Here are some prestigious irrationalist accounts of Nazi antisemitism, a problem often linked to the scandal of Western immobility as the destruction of European Jewry proceeded apace.  The explanations I shall discuss have helped to shape postwar academic formulations of twentieth-century conflict and race relations, not only our understanding of the Holocaust.  There is much to recommend them, especially when we understand the great overarching, still disputed question: were the horrors of the Nazi period an aberration, perhaps exacerbated by propaganda and bad diplomacy? Indeed, were the horrors so singular, compared with the excesses of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other brutal regimes?  How important was the presence of Hitler to the success of the Nazis, and to what degree were his racial beliefs common enough to explain his widespread support in all classes?  To the extent that the writers I discuss remind us both of Nazi uniqueness and of their continuities with other antidemocratic regimes of  past and present, I believe they are helpful to the vigilant libertarian.  But we must ask, how precise, comprehensive, and non-partisan is their cultural description of history; how scientific are their analytic categories?  A socially responsible historian may not mold events to fit a predetermined outcome.  I will continue my thesis (in numerous blogs on this website) that many antidemocrats view the Enlightenment itself as a Jewish plot–a shadow on the white wall of Authority, an uncanny innovation that estranged them from their families of origin; the aristocratic radicals, long entrenched in the humanities, are particularly energetic in promoting this interpretation.

 [From Alfred Rosenberg’s “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Policy,” conspiratorial Rabbis are speaking:]  “We will adopt every liberal idea of all parties and persuasions and instruct our speakers to dilate upon them, until we have exhausted people with fine speeches and produced in them a disgust for speakers of all persuasions. In order to control public opinion, we must sow doubt and discord by allowing the different sides to express contradictory opinions for so long [that] the Gentiles get lost in the confusion: they will decide that it is best to have no opinion at all on constitutional questions, that the people lack the proper perspective on these things, and that only he who leads the people can really comprehend these things.” [1] 

[Hitler argues with Otto Wegener and Rudolph Hess regarding the possibility of a Jewish state in Palestine:] “The Jew notoriously likes to remain anonymous so long as he is not in our power. He takes off his mask only when he has gained domination—or at least when he believes he has. After the war, it seemed as if, thanks to the war, Jewry had won the upper hand throughout the white world.  So the time seemed ripe for the Jews to pose as the masters. In Germany that was, as it is now, indisputably evident.  Then, when he has succeeded in seizing the leadership in all the white nations, all that remains is the establishment of a headquarters to truly dominate the world.  And that would correspond to the Jewish state. Any sooner, such a state would make no sense, have no significance—it would even be a mistake.

   “The fact that now it is to be situated in Palestine, the Promised Land, the source, three or four thousand years ago, of the migration that would conquer the world—that is not only conceivable, but even proof that my train of thought is correct.

   “It also proves, however, that our struggle and our mission, which only we regard as the struggle and mission for Germany, is perceived by worldwide Jewry as if it were directed against its totality—against the Jews as such.  Therefore, wherever they wield power, they will use it to paralyze and prevent our work.

    “That is why no nation would take in the Jews as a whole if they were to be expelled from Germany, nor would the Jews agree to a Jewish state in the sense of a concentration of the entire Israelite tribe.  For in so doing, they would be betraying their faith in the promise; they would be giving up the struggle, at the very moment when they thought they had, in fact, won it.”

     “It is quite certain,” Hess said, “that we will have the entire Jew-dominated world against us if we simply throw the Jews out of Germany. This they cannot accept, because of the consequences. For in such a case, another nation will do the same, and others will follow in their turn.”

     “We have already reached that point,” Hitler resumed, “when we established the party program.  And to this day, I have been unable to find a better solution than the one we foresaw at that time.

     We must be very clear about the fact that we cannot remove the Jew as such.  Rather, we must make it impossible for parasites to exist; we must prevent them from continuing to gain a foothold on the body of our Volk, from infusing poison into that body or attempting to gain power over it.  At that point, the Jews will leave Germany of their own accord.  For when it becomes impossible for a parasite to live its parasitic existence in a certain place, it wanders off elsewhere, where conditions are more favorable to it, or it perishes.”

    “I truly believe,” I agreed, “that this is the only possible way to achieve our goal.” ["I" is Otto Wegener]

    “But it seems to me that the solution of the social question as we conceive it, and as I would like to bring to fruition and to success in my social economy, also contributes to the possibility of removing this parasitism.”

     “This is contradicted,” Hess interposed, “by the fact that the socialist movements all over the world are run precisely by Jews and were founded by them.”

     “No,” Hitler said.  “That is not a contradiction. The error of the economic order until now, and the error that exists in the general concept of the monetary system, has long been discovered by a few clever Jews, perhaps without their finding a solution.   And the industrialization of the economy and its world-wide expansion will bring it all the more into view—that, too, they have understood.  Therefore they could not help but fear that in time the world will come to the realization that the existing order must be changed—which will certainly also narrow their chances for parasitism, if it does not obliterate them.”

   “ …The Jew’s parasite brain works quickly with its sixth sense. It thinks: if I can no longer engage in my parasitism in its previous form, then I must simply look for some opportunity in the new, in the coming form.  Until now, it was my highest aim to gain power over the state in order to secure my domination and my way of life.  Now, if new forms of government develop, we must simply try to seize power in the newly formed state.  Since the new form will be brought about by revolution and the industrialization of the subjugated working masses, it will be simplest to start by assuming leadership during the revolution.  Then we will be able to use the revolution to bring about, by straightforward means, both the new state and our new domination: the state of the working masses, whom we command and which we rule!

    “It is hard for me to believe the Jew so purposeful and intellectually superior that he actually submitted these considerations so systematically in the councils of the Elders of Zion; that from the first he thought them through in the way just elaborated—that would be uncanny. But his sixth sense guides him instinctively and unconsciously along the correct path, where, admittedly, consciousness has long since come to him.”

   “But then you are dealing with two different methods of the Jews, which must oppose each other and are actually mutually exclusive,” I objected.

    “As long as the Jews use them,” Hitler explained, “they will not hamper each other.  A crow does not scratch out another crow’s eyes.  But if we, for example, wanted to implement such a social economy and establish a state along those lines, resembling the dictatorship of the proletariat, as they call it so splendidly, then you’d be surprised how both groups would pounce on us, the liberalist parasites who employ the methods of the past as well as the Marxist-Bolshevik parasites who practice the new method.  And since they have a firm grip on their populations, although they make up only two to five percent of their number, they will sic these people on us! For now we are dangerous to both: to the one group because we want to free ourselves from them, and to the other because our social economy once again cuts the ground from under them.

   “That is why I am still not at all clear about this social economy. Not that I think it wrong. On the contrary! I’ve already told you as much. But I ask myself whether it is expedient to burden oneself with two enemies at once.  And that is a political consideration.

    “Which is the more dangerous enemy—I mean, the one that threatens us most immediately? Without a doubt it is Bolshevism—we can safely call it Jewish Bolshevism. For if it were not Jewish, it could be given a different format.  In that case, we might even be able to come to terms with it at some later date. But we will never be able to come to terms with Jewish Bolshevism without signing our own death warrant.

“Once we have recognized it as the primary enemy, however, we must avoid rousing the remaining Jews in the world against us until the Bolshevik danger has been removed.  That is why we may not expel the Jews who live in Germany, we may not expropriate their goods, we may not harm a hair on their heads; and that is why we may not go public with our social economy and other problems and plans, with which we would rouse liberalistic world Jewry and the entire liberalistic world against us.  Rather, we must live peacefully with them!  We can keep liberalism in check—indeed we must do so—but it must be done very cautiously, sensibly, with economic expediency. And when we arrive at systematic economic control through the state, which is the problem everyone else is fiddling with, we must manage it in such a way that private property also survives for economic transactions and that private initiative is harnessed for our program.

    “This by no means signifies that we must relinquish or even betray our socialist aims.  The aims remain firm and unshaken.  But the means must be chosen and executed according to the dictates of reason and expediency.” [2]

      Christian antisemitism was conditional: Jews could overcome their badness by conversion to Christianity; whereas in the credo of scientific racism, Jews were genetically unconvertible: stiff-necks were a changeless feature of the national character.  According to Raul Hilberg, the Claude Lanzmann film Shoah, and the public television documentary The Longest Hatred, Christian antisemitism provided the chief precedent for scientific racism, Hitlerian scapegoating, and the toleration of the Holocaust by the Western powers.  The continuing salience of Christian antisemitism must not be ignored.  Whatever it says about complicity or indifference to the fact of the Holocaust on the part of millions of Europeans and Americans, however, this explanation does ignore the actual views of Hitler and his chosen antecedents.  Why should this be?  I would argue that Hitler’s economic response to the Depression may not resemble the carefully equilibrated welfare state created by American conservative reformers before and after the war. While denouncing racism, the leading writers have not relinquished a  pre-existent racialist discourse.

      Ruth Benedict’s Race and Racism (1942) was a warning meant for the upstart capitalists to the Right of the paternalistic New Dealers.  While at first the cultural anthropologist describes scientific racism in “the Third Reich…[as] following a long series of precedents in European anti-Semitism,” Benedict switches.  First she presents a materialist account of antisemitism as false consciousness diverting German workers from the source of their worsening condition: Hitler’s “armament program [which] cut consumer’s goods and increased hours of work and lowered real wages.”  But then she calls for more “social responsibility” with its corporatist, fascist-sounding solution:  “A democratic state, when it lives up to its minimum definition at all, is the one institution that represents all parts of the body politic.  It can propose for itself [sic] programmes which will eventually benefit the whole body.”  I.e., if the American Scrooge did not adopt the reformist tactics of the corporatist liberals, he could expect Nazi-type populist demagoguery directed against the stony-hearted, hyper-individualistic [Jewishly avaricious] bourgeoisie resisting “the regulation of industry,” hence intensifying “racial persecution.”

      Ironically, this type of historical explanation assigns responsibility for Hitler’s rise to power to his self-designated Other: brutal nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism.  Hitler’s völkisch populist politics and dreams of autarky, however, cannot be conflated with liberalism.  I am not saying that Benedict deliberately does that in her publication of 1942; later centrist or Popular Front ideologues  [3] have constantly likened fascists, however, to McCarthy-ite “fascist Republicans” or “big business” or “Wall Street” or “monopoly capital” or “heavy industry” or “Zionists” or the National Association of Manufacturers in order to distance Hitler from other bureaucratic collectivists (i.e., themselves) intervening in collapsing economies during the interwar period. [4]

      Nor was Hitler in any sense Christian, though many of his most ardent Protestant supporters were.  George Allen Morgan was a philosophy professor at Duke University; in the early 1950s a member of the Psychology Strategy Board of the National Security Council.  In a prestigious publication, What Nietzsche Means (Harvard U.P., 1941), Morgan clearly reformulated cultural conflict in the radical thought of Hitler’s immediate predecessors.  Which is not to say that Morgan made the connection; rather, Morgan and his admirers joyfully defended Nietzsche, and, probably like Jung in 1946, took Hitler for a materialist guttersnipe for whom Nietzsche was the antidote.  To nineteenth-century élite social theorists, Morgan wrote, the relevant antithesis was no longer Christian and Jew, but the sternly ascetic “moderate” pagan culture of aristocracy versus the sentimental bourgeois culture of Jews/Christians that ever incited slave rebellions and destroyed genius–the individuality of the displaced aristocrats.  Crucially, Heraclitean cultural relativism sought to delegitimate the universalist epistemology of science: “diversity” was deployed against Jewish-Christian notions of equality.  Indeed, in the Table Talk Hitler clearly specifies his pagan sentiments: Christ was good because he was an Aryan, not the good Jew he appeared to be; rather, he was destroyed by gold-worshipping Jewish materialists for his anti-capitalist revolutionary activity; Paul and his Christian successors were all levelling bad Jews.  Why?  Because they sentimentally defied the aristocratic principle in nature and protected the weak; for Hitler, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche were the world’s greatest philosophers.[5]  Morgan’s picture is consistent with the evidence I have seen; it does not jibe with the image of Hitler, the maven of sentimental mass culture, as both “Left” and “Right” factions in the American culture wars of the late 1980s and 90s would have it.[6]

      A second and related explanation holds that the Nazis were irrational because they attacked Good Jews (the assimilated German Jews) and/or confused capitalists with communists.[7]  If we could only get rid of such irrational antisemitism, these numerous social theorists may be saying, class envy would disappear.  According to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “A common mistake…is to attribute the existence of antisemitism to the antisemite’s jealousy of Jews’ economic success, instead of recognizing that the economic jealousy is a consequence of an already existing antipathy towards Jews.”[8] Here is the Harvard line: prejudice creates (correctable) class conflict. Similarly, cultural anthropologists like Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, and Klaus Theweleit concentrate on “types” fruitfully quivering in bipolar allegiance/tension.[9]  As Parsonian functionalists they were responding to left-wing social democratic arguments:  that industrial capitalism creates the material conditions and class agency for democratic reform; thus capitalism and socialism are not Hegelian “opposites” or antitheses; rather the rationalist reform movements, led by the most educated and advanced members of the working class, could progressively realize the unfinished libertarian project of the radical bourgeoisie: privileges and pleasures hitherto reserved for the leisured class could be available to all in a context of material abundance or sufficiency.  This is of course was the socialist theory of the pre-Lenin European Left, the Second International, not the bleak ascetic vision promulgated by many Leninists, radical Catholic corporatists and deep ecologists.[10]  When fascists saw materialist capitalism and materialist communism as closely related, they were often merely following assumptions of other Europeans, from the Left and Right alike.  But there were popular conspiracy theories as well, theories that rely upon “the switch.”

      The refusal to examine class position and allegiance in ourselves and in our objects of critical inquiry has created the cuckoo-land of the postwar period.  Take the psychoanalytic theory of ambivalence, as we shall see, a central issue in Hitler’s psychobiography.  Although (as psychiatrists) functionalists will recognize “ambivalence” it is usually conceived as a static push-pull of love-hate, Eros-Thanatos, or action-passivity originating solely in the family, that is, in the play of innate conflicting instincts, not as an historically specific dilemma in which one may, like Hitler, be forced to please social classes that may be at odds with each other; or as other rebellious petit-bourgeois intellectuals, be torn between pleasing oneself and one’s patrons.  That is, the artist may identify with the fully observant, fully feeling [Romantic Wandering Jew] then disavow and demolish the family-shattering perceptions (perhaps attached to angry fantasies) that have briefly been experienced and which have destroyed (in fantasy) the good parent who pays the rent.  Nor do the functionalists address the concrete content and “plausibility” of such “histories” as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in which the communists are purveyors of false utopias, secretly in the pay of finance capitalists, who, controlling the media, mass desire, and the money supply, can make the masses rise at will (no conflict there!); nor do they examine the ongoing prestige of antidemocratic narratives–the linked cautionary myths of selfish (Jewish) Narcissus and over-reaching (Jewish) Icarus; nor the omnipresence of racial (i.e.,cultural) explanations for historical change, with history itself stigmatized as typical Jewish “reduction of religion.”[11]

      Alan Bullock (1991) emphasizes Hitler’s “twisted” antisemitism (madly confusing capitalist and communist, loathing miscegenation); but Bullock erases the tricky Jewish switch from emancipating communist to enslaving finance capitalist delineated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Hitler had read, believed, and promoted.[12]  Lord Bullock fortifies instead his construction of a crazy Hitler (earlier identified as narcissistic failed romantic artist produced by “the countryside,”7-8, 11, 5), while curiously suggesting rational reasons (“internationalism, egalitarianism, and pacifism”) for Hitler’s antimodernism.  Bullock reports Hitler’s views:

 “In international affairs Jewish capitalists sought to divert nations from their true interests and plunge them into wars, gradually establishing their mastery over them with the help of money and propaganda.  At the same time, the Jewish leaders of the international Communist revolution had provided themselves with a world headquarters in Moscow from which to spread subversion internally through propagation of the Marxist parties of internationalism, egalitarianism and pacifism, all of which Hitler identified with the Jews and saw as a threat to Aryan racial values.  [Not to “national communism, anti-capitalist on a world scale”; i.e., natural order? [13]]

[Bullock, cont.]   Turning the argument the other way, anti-Semitism provided Hitler with further justification for Germany to follow a policy of conquering additional living space in the East at the expense of Bolshevik Russia, which Hitler constantly identified with the Jewish world conspiracy.  Not only would this strengthen the racial character of the German people, but it would destroy the base of international Jewry, and cut off the poisonous plant of Marxism at the root.     In Hitler’s twisted cosmological vision, the eternal enemy of the Aryans, the race which possessed the power to create, was the Jew, the embodiment of evil, the agent of racial pollution which had undermined and destroyed one civilization after another…(161).  His was a closed mind impervious to argument or doubt (163).” [14]

      The antifascist ethnopluralists, themselves tied to the “identity politics” that disguise competing material interests as the primary locus of social conflict,[15] ignore the testimony of historical actors. For the Nazis, “class” analysis (of the type offered here) was the poisonous plant of false consciousness: the foregrounding of class antagonisms made the true community of interest within the racial group invisible; thus, as their argument runs, the Protocols would make sense.  For instance, Alfred Rosenberg complained that Italian Fascists were blind to the hidden connections between finance capital and Marxism, were oblivious to the racial brilliance of switching Jews in adapting to novel situations and manipulating them toward the goal of world domination, i.e., the defeat of the völkisch, participatory politics the Nazis would initiate:

  [From Alfred Rosenberg, “The Folkish Idea of the State”;  unlike the Italian Fascists, National Socialists are not duped by Jews:] “Fascism still lacks the insight to see that international private and stock-exchange capitalism, against which Fascism has not begun to fight, was and is the very same element which pays for Marxist propaganda throughout the world, that a community of interest between Marxism and international loan capital existed and still exists–namely, to make the national industries which are tied to the soil dependent on mobile loan capital.  And Fascism has not yet comprehended that this community of interest is symbolized by the fact that the leadership of one as well as the other power finds itself almost exclusively in the hands of the Jewish race or of a few personalities compliant to Jewish money.  The danger for Fascism in Italy consists of the fact that it won a great victory, thanks to one personality, but does not yet represent such a strong ideological system that one could hope it would survive the death of Mussolini.  That danger already exists today that Jewish stock-exchange capitalism naturally takes into consideration the new force as such, and in the realization that it cannot be fought against directly, approaches Fascism as a false friend.

[Rosenberg, cont.] …The internationalism of the Jewish world stock exchange, in league with world revolution, stands today at the highest point of its power.  And yet this internationalism is already fighting for its existence, for its strongest opponent–still invisible in many states, in some already under way, fully developed in National Socialism–is growing.  And the world political task of National Socialism consists of knocking one state after the other out of the world-political power system of today, and in the end, leaving no people under international management, but only a series of organic, folkish state systems on a racial basis.”   [16] 

    Rosenberg’s populist fascism opposes the duplicitous tactic of “the rabbis” (quoted above) whose deployment of intellectual pluralism and combat only confuses the masses, subjecting them to the demagoguery that will destroy normal racial solidarity and independence for the pernicious internationalism that is always, at bottom, a ruse for the rule of money.  Rosenberg, a national socialist, knows exactly what the competition is offering; he is neither confused nor inconsistent, given his racialist assumptions.  Bankers are the enemy and the word banker is “raced” as Jewish and bankers are opposed in interest to “national industries…tied to the soil.”

      A third explanation sees Nazism as bourgeois decadence.  Popular among nativist radicals, it brings out the latent antisemitism in some New Leftists and in counter-culture anti-imperialism.  Both the Soviets and American crypto-Tories have made Hitler (the consummate anti-bourgeois, anti-sentimentalist!) into a product of disintegrating capitalism and sentimental bourgeois culture.  They and similar thinkers have conflated American puritans/Jews and Nazis, functionally equating “genocides,” in this case, the extermination of European Jews, the American Indians, American blacks, the Vietnamese, etc.  Harvard professor F.O. Matthiessen, “a Christian and a Socialist,”identified Melville’s Ahab, a prototypical American, with the alleged savagery of the Hebrew prophets (1941, 1948).[17]  Also centered at Harvard were the Walter Langer team, authors of The Mind of Adolf Hitler, originally a 1943 report for the OSS but revised for publication in 1972 to diagnose hippie-fascists.  Langer, aided anonymously by Henry A. Murray, Ernst Kris, and Bertram Lewin, attempted to account for his subject’s “ambitiousness” and “extraordinary political intuition” (atypical of a “basically illiterate peasant family”); Langer and Murray actually gave credence to rumors that Hitler carried Jewish blood: Langer reported that Hitler’s grandmother might have been a servant in the home of the Baron Rothschild; Murray was impressed by a Jewish godfather to Hitler;[18] what’s more Hitler’s brilliant (Jewish) insights into the minds and hearts of the little men (the class base of fascism for the CIA and other moderates during the 1950s) should be adapted by American mind-managers.  Here are more excerpts from the declassified Murray report to FDR, 1943: 

 [The following diagnosis of Hitler’s condition was prepared by W.H.D. Vernon, under the supervision of Murray and Gordon Allport, all Harvard men:] “ Now it is known that syphilophobia often has its roots in the childhood discovery of the nature of sexual congress between the parents.  With a father who was an illegitimate and possibly of Jewish origin, and a strong mother fixation, such a discovery by the child Adolf may well have laid the basis of the syphilophobia which some adventure with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna fanned to a full flame. [fn: “This is mere conjecture and must be treated as such. But it is the sort of explanation which fits known psychological facts”]…Hitler’s personality structure, though falling within the normal range, may now be described as of the paranoid type with delusions of persecution and of grandeur.  This stems from sado-masochistic splits in his personality…Just as the father is the cause of his mixed blood, the source of his domination and punishment, and of the restrictions of his own artistic development; just as in the childish interpretation of sexual congress, the father attacks, strangles, and infects the mother, so the Jew, international Jewish capital, etc., encircle and restrict Germany, threaten and attack her and infect her with impurities of blood…But the mother is not only loved but hated.  For she is weak, besides he is enslaved to her affections and she reminds him all too much, in his role as dominant father, of his own gentle sensitive nature.  So, though he depends on the German people for his position of dominance, he despises and hates them, he dominates them, and because he fears his very love of them, he leads them into the destructiveness of war where multitudes of them are destroyed.  Besides, the Jewish element in his father identification permits him to use all the so-called “Jewish” tricks of deceit, lying, violence, and sudden attack both to subject the German people as well as their foes (78-80).”

 [Henry Murray: Hitler’s “revengeful dominance” is “a counteraction to insulted narcism” presumably inflicted by his (possibly half-Jewish) father:] “…Knowing something of the character of Alois Hitler, we can safely infer experiences of abasement and humiliation suffered by the son….(196)…Since many of the prominent positions in Vienna were held by Jews, some of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, as well as his hatred of Vienna, can be attributed to humiliations received from the upper classes during these years…(199)  [The “determinants” of Hitler’s antisemitism:]…3. The suitability of the Jew as an object on which to project his own repudiated background and traits: his Jewish god-father (and possibly his Jewish grandfather), his physical timidity and sensitiveness, his polymorphous sexual impulses…5. The realization, after having once embarked on the road to militarism, that the stirred-up aggression of his followers needed some outlet…7. In building his military machine the anti-militaristic Jewish people could not be of much help to him.  At bottom, Fascism is the advocacy of the aggressive drive over and above the acquisitive drive (with which the Jew has generally been identified), and, by the same token, it is the substitution of Power and Glory for Peace and Prosperity, a materialistic paradise on earth (with which Communism and the Jew have also been identified).  Finally, the Nazi doctrine of fanatical irrationality (thinking with the blood) is antipathetic to the intellectual relativism of the Jew.  Thus there are several fundamental points of opposition (as well as certain points of kinship) [where?!! C.S.] between Nazi ideology and Jewish ideology (207-209).

 [Murray, cont.]  Hitler has a number of unusual abilities of which his opponents should not be ignorant.  Not only is it important to justly appraise the strength of an enemy but it is well to know whether or not he possesses capacities and techniques which can be appropriated to good advantage.  Hitler’s chief abilities, realizations, and principles of action as a political figure, all of which involve an uncanny knowledge of the psychology of the average man, are briefly these: [21 items follow, including:]…Heiden speaks of “Hitler’s frequently noted incapacity to impose his will in a small circle, and his consummate skill in winning over a crowd prepared by publicity and stage management, and then, with its aid, vanquishing the small circle, too” (211).

     So what is this “Jew”?  Brutal/humiliating/hypermasculine or timid and gay?  Or both, as in Jewish switching, a.k.a. “sudden attack”/”intellectual relativism”?  Not surprisingly, Hebraic types (for Murray, Melville as Ahab) were deplorable to the crypto-Tories/New Dealers, because, after instructing guileless WASPS in mind-control, they turn around to blast good non-humiliating father-figures, to decode the mythic narratives that alone  confer national unity or group solidarity in a pluralist society.[19] 

       The writing of George L. Mosse, distinguished mentor to a generation of New Left cultural historians at the University of Wisconsin, similarly transmits the ambivalence of the moderate conservatives.    Mosse’s investigations into the sources of Nazi culture address modernization theory and develop a utopian, mass political lineage for Nazism.[20]  What were the Nazis: moderns, antimoderns, or a distinctive, confusing new blend of both?  In answer to my letter requesting a clarification of his influential formulations, Mosse replied that he once believed “National Socialism was largely a critique of modernity,” a view he has since revised: “…I think it was part of a protest of modernization…I would say that National Socialism masked modernity even as they were furthering it.” [21] Mosse seems to be saying that, on second thought, the Nazis were cunning and dishonest in their goals.  I wonder if Mosse’s “switch” overrelies on a definition of modernity as the advent of industrialization, not the institutionalization of civil liberties in the state; the unintended effect is to relativize Nazi brutality and level distinctions between autocratic and democratic bourgeois societies, a difference Mosse is elsewhere careful to maintain, cautioning me that I could “certainly compare völkisch movements to American conservatism,” but not “Nazi Germany to the United States.”  He does not say which American conservatives he thinks are völkisch; probably the right-wing populists, not the (élite) ethnopluralists!  Mosse went on to distance himself from analyses like my own that discern analogies between the world-views of ethnopluralism (identity politics) and national socialism.  He wrote, “I reject the current controversy over macho multiculturalism or postmodernism having anything whatever to do with Hitler’s psyche.  That seems to me totally unhistorical.”

      The confusions of conservative Enlightenment permeate Mosse’s writing when he is not in his materialist mood.[22] In The Holy Pretence: A Study in Christianity and Reasons of State from William Perkins to John Winthrop (1968), a book about “emancipation of political action from moral restraint,” Mosse frets that “…the victory of the Dove can lead to unbridled idealism, and the ignoring of secular realities; while the victory of the Serpent means the total acceptance of what the sixteenth century called ‘Machiavellism’” (154).  Mosse lauds the Baroque synthesis that prudently balanced the Serpent and the Dove so that “neither obliterates the other.”  The realism of the secular world was not achieved through science and libertarian ideas, he argues, but through wise adjustments in religion itself (152) [cf. Dumont, 1977].

      The leftward trajectory of the Reformation is an ongoing concern for anyone who analyzes propaganda and fascism.  Writing seven years later in The Nationalization of the Masses (1975), Mosse makes the crucial point that the modern intellectual constantly historicizes and demystifies symbolic discourses; this habit militates against the maintenance of a stable national identity expressed through symbols.[23]  When inside the anti-materialist Aristotelian civic humanist tradition, Mosse will not turn around and demystify “moderate” mind-managers in the West, the followers of Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons.  Given his reputation among New Leftists and other antifascists, Mosse has presented a disturbingly inaccurate synthesis for the intellectual origins of fascist brutality in his “General Theory of Fascism.”[24]  Arguing against the “stereotype” that fascism is a reaction to liberalism and socialism (1), Mosse claims throughout that fascism (Nazism more than Italian fascism) selectively appropriated and, through its control of mass media, put a corporatist spin on Western ideals (5, 14, 17-19).  Hitler and Mussolini are carefully separated; Hitler came out of the jacobin antipluralist, antiparliamentary tradition of mass politics and popular culture (the repulsive part of the West); the more pluralist Mussolini allowed new and old élites to co-exist because he respected aristocratic culture and tradition; this aristocratic culture embraced the German idealism that Mosse suggests was foreign to Nazis (3, 10, 28, 33, 35).  Fascist violence originated in the brutality and camaraderie of World War I (which Mosse blurs with youth and the mobs of the French Revolution, aka Napoleon, “Romantic Nationalism,” “popular sovereignty” and “workers movements,” even “middle-class virtues”), not the medievalism of the aristocracy (4, 6, 9, 10, 17-19, 21, 25, 31, 37, 38).  There was no counter-revolution and no civil war; weak bourgeois institutions simply collapsed, and Hitler and Mussolini presented themselves to fill the void.  Conservatives left the Nazi government after six months (19).

      Mosse is politically allied to the pluralists and pragmatists of the moderate center (many of whom were intrigued with Italian Fascism during the 1930s) and who have abandoned the open-ended processes and unpredictable outcomes of liberal nationalism, instead redefining American nationality on the basis of a mosaic of rooted ethnic groups; i.e., they are ready to play ball inside the fences erected by élites.  With intellectuals like Talcott Parsons and Henry A. Murray, the moderate nationalists have recommended that the state rely on the manipulation of symbols to enforce “integration” and “national unity” while simultaneously denouncing the tyrannical animal called mass politics!

     Of course, as Mosse also realized, one problem with the formulation of a clear-cut Nazi radical conservatism or reaction [25] was Hitler’s desire to bring railroads, improved tools, and “welcoming farms” to central Europe; and, like other eugenicists, Hitler believed he was scientific, critical, and independent, following the truth wherever it might lead.  No less than the Burkean conservatives (including “socialists” like Karl Pearson, then the Fabians), the weaving, quilting Hitler wanted modernity and progress without the loss of a stable national/ethnic identity: capitalism without tears, slavery without guilt.  Sentimental Christians and Jews were de trop.

 [Hitler, Table-Talk, Oct. 15, 1941:]  Inflation is not caused by increasing the fiduciary circulation.  It begins on the day when the purchaser is obliged to pay, for the same goods, at higher sum than that asked the day before.  At that point, one must intervene.  Even to Schacht, I had to begin by explaining this elementary truth: that the essential cause of the stability of our currency was to be sought for in our concentration camps.  The currency remains stable when the speculators are put under lock and key.  I also had to make Schacht understand that excess profits must be removed from economic circulation….All these things are simple and natural.  The only thing is, one musn’t let the Jew stick his nose in.  The basis of Jewish commercial policy is to make matters incomprehensible for a normal brain.  People go into ecstasies of confidence before the science of the great economists.  Anyone who doesn’t understand is taxed with ignorance!  At bottom, the only object of all these notions is to throw everything into confusion (65-66).

 [Hitler, Nov. 5, 1941:]  The Jew is the incarnation of egoism…The Jew has talent for bringing confusion into the simplest matters, for getting everything muddled up…The Jew makes use of words to stultify his neighbors. And that’s why people make them professors….

     If the Jew weren’t kept presentable by the Aryan, he’d be so dirty he couldn’t open his eyes.  We can live without the Jews, but they couldn’t live without us.  When the European realizes that, they’ll all become simultaneously aware of the solidarity that binds them together.  The Jew prevents this solidarity.  The Jew owes his livelihood to the fact that this solidarity does not exist (119-120).

[Hitler, Feb. 3-4, 1942; Hitler identifies with heretics; Jews have instigated the “collective madness” of witch hunts carried out by organized Christianity:]  A Jew was discovered to whom it occurred that if one presented abstruse ideas to non-Jews, the more abstruse these ideas were, the more the non-Jews would rack their brains to try to understand them.  The fact of having their attention fixed on what does not exist must make them blind to what exists.  An excellent calculation on the Jew’s part.  So the Jew smacks his thighs to see how his diabolic strategem has succeeded.  He bears in mind that if his victims suddenly became aware of these things, all Jews would be exterminated.  But, this time, the Jews will disappear from Europe.

     The world will breathe freely and recover its sense of joy, when this weight is no longer crushing its shoulders (288).

               [2] Henry A. Turner, Jr. ed. Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant (Yale UP, 1985): 69-72. Otto Wagener “was a prominent oficial in the Nazi Party with close ties to Adolf Hitler from the autumn of 1929 until the summer of 1933. Wagener served as chief of staff for the storm troop auxiliary, the S.A.; headed the  Economic Policy Section of the party’s national executive (Reichsleitung); worked on special assignment for Hitler in Berlin; headed the party’s Economic Policy Office during the early months of the Third Reich; and briefly served as commissar for the economy.” [ix]

                [3] See the writings of Nation editor Cary McWilliams or the speeches of Michael Parenti.

                [4] Though he distances himself from Marxist explanations for Nazism/fascism as the rule of monopoly capital, Ian Kershaw does see entrepreneurship as a prominent value of Nazism. See The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives, Fourth edition (London: Arnold, 2000): 67. “The mammoth profits of the major concerns were no incidental by-product of Nazism, whose philosophy was closely tied in with provision of a free hand for private industry and eulogization of the entrepreneurial spirit.”

                [5] Table Talk, May 16, 1944, 720; but Hitler also admired Uncle Tom’s Cabin!  Could it be because the freed slaves were to be repatriated in Africa?

              [6] [From my letter to an historian of madness:] I’ve started to read the short book on Hitler and power by Ian Kershaw, and was fascinated to see that he follows a Weberian model of the charismatic leader casting a spell on the nationalized masses, and notes, without explanation, that Hitler sees everything in black and white, vulgarly simplifying complex historical events…And there is not a word about German Romanticism, or Herder, and only unexplained mentions of the volkisch Right. Hitler is treated as the man of the mob, its embodiment even, an outsider and autodidact. So for these conservative writers (like Kershaw), Hitler is fascinating as the encapsulated horror of five centuries of lower-class hubris. And the lower orders really are outsiders to the empyrean realms of traditional elites, are they not? 

                [7] For examples of German irrationality in confusing capitalists and communists, See J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Fuehrer and the People (U.C. Press,1975): 80; Arno Mayer, Why Did The Heavens Not Darken? (Pantheon, 1988): 92; Jeffrey Alexander and Chaim Seidler-Feller, “False Distinctions and Double Standards: The Anatomy of Antisemitism at UCLA,” Tikkun, Jan-Feb 1992, 12-14.  For the latter, genocide was waged initially against assimilated German Jews; it was not about class, rather “nonrational, psychological, and symbolic causes were more important causes of antisemitism than many had once believed.”  The crazy German explanation permeates New Left culture, see Ellen Willis’ well-known article on the myth of the powerful Jew, Village Voice, 9/3/79.  The oddness of the Germans in confusing capitalists and communists seems to be taken for granted by nearly every Jewish scholar I have consulted. See also Louis Harap, who applies the same formula to the Populists: “For Donnelly, the Jews were the preternaturally clever men who were both the money power and the brains of the revolutionary resistance to that power. (This was an example of the polar stereotyping that was to become more common in the twentieth century, culminating in the canard that the Jews were not only the banker- capitalists who were impoverishing the people, but also the leaders of the Bolsheviks, who were leading man into a subhuman state.” Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974), 428. But evangelical Catholics in the 1930s were attacking materialistic civilizations (i.e., rational, secular society): Capitalism and Bolshevism had similarly elevated “natural man.”

     More recently, Saul Friedländer creates a set of opposites that are not antitheses: Referring both to rhetorical strategies in both Mein Kampf and the film The Eternal Jew, and noting that “images of superhuman control typically gives way to the second one, subhuman threats of contamination, microbial infection, spreading pestilence,” he writes, “Images of superhuman power and subhuman pestilence are contrary representations, but Hitler attributed both to one and the same being, as if an endlessly changing and endlessly mimetic force had launched a constantly shifting offensive against humanity.

“Many of the images, not only in Hitler’s vision of the Jew but also in Nazi anti-Semitism generally, seem to converge in such constant transformations. These images are the undistorted echo of past representations of the Jew as endlessly changing and endlessly the same, a living dead, either a ghostly wanderer or a ghostly ghetto inhabitant. Thus the all-pervasive Jewish threat becomes in fact formless and unrepresentable; as such it leads to the most frightening phantasm of all: a threat that looms everywhere, that, although it penetrates everything, is an invisible carrier of death, like poison gas spreading over the battlefields of the Great War.” In Nazi Germany and the Jews Volume 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York:  HarperCollins, 1997): 101-102. Friedländer begins the quoted paragraph by criticizing Hitler’s view of the Jewish conspiracy as implying “a stupefied, hypnotized mass of peoples completely at the mercy of the Jewish conspiracy,” but is he offering a similarly irrationalist explanation as “in fact formless and unrepresentable”? Although Friedländer describes “The Eternal Jew” exhibition of 1937 (p.253-54), an exhibition that presented “racially typical” images of Jews, he does not go on to review the Christian myth of the Wandering Jew (also  der ewige Jude) in all its variants; variants that suggest the wandering Jew as having the characteristics of the return of the repressed; i.e., the facts of the material world that cannot be successfully repressed, but that return in distorted and threatening forms that must be controlled or eliminated for the sake of social harmony.

                [8] Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Executioners, p.40. Cf. Ivan Illich, KPFK broadcast with Jerry Brown, April 5, 1996.  Class societies beset by political conflict (hence structurally discouraging friendship) arise from the artificial manipulation of needs and desires in the modern world.  Overstimulating music (whatever departed from quieting Gregorian chants) have contributed to [anomie].  Illich participates in the ongoing luxury debate, argued against materialism and on behalf of politeia.

                [9] See Gregory Bateson, “Morale and National Character,” Civilian Morale, Second Yearbook of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, ed. Goodwin Watson (Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942): 71-91; Ruth Benedict, Race and Racism, 1942, 163: “If we are to make good use of the great powers of education in combating racism, two goals should be kept clearly distinct.  On the one hand, it is desirable to teach in the regular social studies the facts of race and of the share of different races in our civilization.  On the other hand, it is necessary to hold up ideals of a functioning democracy; it is necessary to help children to understand the mutual interdependence of different groups; it is necessary to encourage comparison of our social conditions with conditions that are better than ours as well as with those that are worse.”  Of course, the idea that race yields other than superficial physical differences is denied throughout, so why is she so insistent on maintaining race as an analytic category?  Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror (Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1989) takes the same “moderate” position, defining its gentle, poetic, pacifist, fragment-loving antifascism against totalitarianism: both militarist (armored) Right and bourgeois scientific hyper-intellectual (armored) Left (including Marx and Freud).  Unlike these avowedly feminist theorists, the fascist type loathes the people he mobilizes (this is the conservative view of Hitler as bad Jew).

                [10] Cf. Meinecke, German Catastrophe, 72-73: “Hitler wanted to overtrump the bourgeois, class-egotistical nationalism of his heavy-industry patrons and money providers, and also the Marxism of the Russian bolshevists, which he attacked with special zeal and which wanted to condemn the bourgeoisie to extinction.  He therefore seized upon the idea that the creation of a new fruitful folk community need not rest upon the one-sided victory of the one or the other of the social forces contending against one another–that the natural groupings of society did not have to be unceremoniously destroyed–but that they must be steered around and educated to serve a community which included them all.  Hitler’s undertaking seemed to promise more continuity with the traditions and values of the existing bourgeois culture than the radical new edifice of bolshevism.  With this idea he bribed a wide circle of citizens.  The working class, he intended, should be inspired with the full pride that their productive work merited and thereby lose all their inferiority complexes which sprang from the beginning of the class struggle.  The same fundamental idea of nurturing the special pride of the professional classes and amalgamating them with the all-embracing community was also extended to the peasantry.  There was no lack of specious enticements for all classes–celebrations, festivals, and so forth…[To combat liberalism’s amorphousness, Hitler created] those youth organizations which were expected to give the whole coming generation uniform basic conceptions and at the same time to satisfy the natural impulses of youth.”

                [11] See editorial, “Psycho-analysis and Faith,” Times Literary Supplement, May 27, 1939, 313, quoted in Freud Without Hindsight: Reviews of his Work 1893-1939, ed. Norman Kiell (International Universities Press, 1988): 647-648: “What is perhaps most remarkable about this theory [Moses and Monotheism, that barbaric Europeans are scapegoating Jews because they (Nazis) are really anti-Christian] is that it is peculiarly Jewish in its reduction of religion to the plane of history, though this plane is conceived with a new comprehensiveness.  But unlike the similar attempt of another great and influential Jewish thinker, Karl Marx, Freud’s is based on the conviction that Jewish monotheism, and its creative development into Christianity, are definitely in the main line of human progress.”

                [12] See Norman Cohn, Warrant For Genocide (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1968).  Cf. my account of the Protocols with Leonard Dinnerstein, “Antisemitism in Crisis Times in the United States,” Anti-semitism In Times of Crisis, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Steven T. Katz (N.Y.: N.Y.U. Press, 1991): 216.  “According to the “Protocols” Jews had an affinity for Bolshevism, manipulated economic and political power, and were determined to undermine the world order.  They allegedly favored alcoholism, spread pornography, subverted Christian principles, and would no doubt take over American government and society if allowed to do so.”  The Introduction argues that religious antisemitism was secularized: “…the perversity of the Jew’s nature in betraying Christ over and over again (throughout history) becomes the biologically determined quality of the Jew which leads to the Jew’s heartless role in the rise of capitalism (or communism–take your pick)….”  The functionalist authors, themselves wedded to “identity politics,” have erased the particular threat of “Jewish” science and anthropology which found a fluid “identity” in learned experience, not tradition or the acquired instincts of national character.

                [13] See Hitler’s Secret Book (N.Y.: Grove Press, 1961, written 1928): 132, 135: “…present day Russia is anything but an anticapitalist state.  It is, to be sure, a country that has destroyed its own national economy but, neverthless, only in order to give international finance capital the possibility of an absolute control…” p.135: “…we base ourselves [!] on the hope that one day the Jewish character–and thereby the most fundamentally international capitalistic character of Bolshevism in Russia–might disappear in order to make place for a national communism, anti-capitalist on a world scale.  Then this Russia, permeated once more by national tendencies, might very well come up for consideration in terms of an alliance with Germany.” This is a very damaging quote to those who think that Nazism was not a movement of the Left, or who while deploring the right-wing direction of nationalism, make tactical alliances with national liberation movements, no matter how anti-intellectual.

                [14] Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (Harper Collins, 1991).  See pages 160-61 for Bullock’s distortion of Hitler’s attitudes toward propaganda as revealed in Mein Kampf, taking his quotes out of context and implying the canard that Hitler cynically and consistently promoted the Big Lie (to bamboozle Germans), rather than fastening such deceptions on the Big Jewish Press and British propaganda during the World War,  but the good father/good teacher Hitler was protecting the masses from the confusion that resulted from ambiguity and uncertainty. ).

                [15] Not only between capital and labor but between producers competing on the market. Whether one is a Marxist or libertarian will affect one’s evaluation of market competition.

                [16] Alfred Rosenberg, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” “The Folkish Idea of the State,” Nazi Ideology before 1933, Introduced and transl. by Barbara Miller Lane and Leila J.Rupp (Austin: University of Texas, 1978): 57, 64-65, 70-71.  These ideas should be compared to David Welch’s reading of the 1934 Nuremburg rally (as presented in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will) in which Welch ignores Hitler’s obvious attempt to affirm labor unity with the Party after the purge of the S.A.Rohm-Strasser faction, apparently in order (for Welch) to claim the over-riding interest of establishing “the principle of leadership” (i.e., Hitler is the hypnotist lacking a coherent ideology).  However, the theme disclosed in Welch’s evidence is not leadership as domination, but merging/the rebuilding of Germany as a proletarian nation/immortality.  See David Welch, Propaganda and German Cinema 1933-1945  (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983): 156-157.  The lines Welch quotes that refute his own argument include “…Corpsmen. ONE PEOPLE, ONE FšHRER, ONE REICH!” ONE.  Today we are all workers together and we are working with iron… SONG. We are true patriots, our country we rebuild.  We did not stand in the trenches amidst the exploding grenades but nevertheless we are soldiers. VARIOUS..down with the Red Front and reaction. ALL. You are not dead, you live in Germany.  HITLER. My comrades, you have now presented yourself to me and the whole German people in this way for the first time.  You are representatives of a great ideal.  We know that for millions of our countrymen work will no longer be a lonely occupation but one that gathers together the whole of our country.  No longer will anybody in Germany consider manual labor as lower than any other kind of work.  The time will come when no German will be able to enter the community of this nation without having first passed through your community.  Remember that not only are the eyes of hundreds of thousands in Nuremberg watching, but the whole of Germany is seeing you for the first time.  You are Germany and I know that Germany will proudly watch its sons marching forward into the glorious future….”

     Cf. the introduction to the screening of Triumph of the Will, on public television, 9/17/92.  Film critic Michael Medved explained that the world’s greatest culture had succumbed to monstrous madness; the thrust of the propaganda was put vaguely as Hitler the Savior’s unification of Germany in response to the S.A. purge, the only source of divisiveness Medved mentioned.  The film was so compelling, he said, that only clips could be shown in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series.  The issue of Nazi Germany’s pseudo-proletarian identity was entirely evaded by Medved, yet it was the principle theme of the film, with the frequent reiteration of Germany’s classless and casteless new social structure (at the same time legitimating the leadership of the most racially fit fighting minority that had selflessly brought the revolution to this stage).  In fact, the S.A. was not a source of division, but the stronghold of “left” populists who had demanded a völkisch, anticapitalist revolution that would abolish class divisions to restore racial unity; it was always the materialist bourgeoisie, Marxists and Jews who intruded, not the S.A. splitting the country.  I found the two hour film soporific; the claim that it is brilliant and irresistible supports the thesis that Hitler successfully deployed propaganda to put one over on the German people.

                [17] See F.O.Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford U.P., 1941); From The Heart of Europe (Oxford U.P.,1948): 182-183.  See Lord James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol.II (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1891): 275-276, 278, 281-82, for a more ambivalent account of American [Chosen People]: “If you ask an intelligent citizen why he so holds [incorrect majorities will be persuaded of the right], he will answer that truth and justice are sure to make their way into the minds and consciences of the majority.  This is deemed an axiom, and the more readily so deemed, because truth is identified with common sense, the quality which the average citizen is most confidently proud of possessing.  This feeling shades off into another, externally like it, but at bottom distrust–the feeling not only that the majority, be it right or wrong, will and must prevail, but that its being the majority proves it to be right.  This feeling appears in the guise sometimes of piety and somtimes of fatalism.  Religious minds hold–you find the idea underlying many books and hear it in many pulpits–that Divine Providence has specially chosen and led the American people to work out a higher type of freedom and civilization than any other state has yet attained, and that this great work will surely be brought to a happy issue by the protecting hand which has so long guided it (276).”

                [18] Walter Langer, The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report (Basic Books, 1972): 102-103. Murray, op.cit.

                [19] Alex Bein (cited above) relies on Alan Bullock and the Langer report in his presentation of Hitler’s personality.  The influence of the crypto-Tories in American Studies is the terrain of my book on the Melville revival.  One of the central debates in American history surfaces in an essay by Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” Region, Race and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (N.Y.: Oxford U.P., 1982): 143-177.  This subtly argued essay challenged the New Left/American Studies interpretation of white supremacy (not class conflict) as the motor of American history.

         [20] Compare to Sternhell, Ze’ev. Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Meisel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Pre-fascist ideology in France set the stage for the Vichy Revolution in 1940-41. Revolutionary syndicalism and radical nationalism of the late 19^th century were fused in the 1920s and 1930s to create a novel, mass based, youth-inspired revolt against materialism and decadence blamed on liberalism, democracy and reformed Marxism (i.e. social democracy). For the prefascists, the enemy was finance capital and monopoly, seen as Jewish, American and British. The deracinated individual was the source of decadence, and the compensatory discourse was corporatist/communitarian and meant to integrate the proletariat into the nation through a strong planning state, coterminous with the nation. Emphasized family, work (in tradition of medieval guilds), and region. Did not eliminate profit or private property. Neither ideology nor economic crisis alone could have created this revolutionary departure from the principles of 1789; hence the implicit warning to other social democrats: don’t allow economic crisis to develop: this ideology is still extant. Sternhell somewhat plays down the antisemitic, Christian character of the sources of the ideology, though he does not deny it. France was “impregnated” by the ideology of fascism (a revolution of the spirit: modern, aesthetic, and moral, exalting blood and soil, instinct, force, violence, the healthy body, sacrifice, and monkish asceticism, futurism, modern architecture of Le Corbusier, and Freud). The nonconformist journalist politicos in the 1930s penetrated popular culture; only a few of them, however, explicitly embraced nazism and fascism, though they came very close. Henri De Man the principle theorist of an idealist Marxism. (Sternhell does not consider historical materialism to be idealist.)

    This book is directed against Marxist interpretations of fascism as a reaction by monopoly capital to working class militancy in a period of economic crisis. Sternhell thanks A. James Gregor (a self-described fascist and biographer of Mussolini) in the acknowledgments.(vii) and places five of his books in the bibliography. Also Mosse’s General Theory of Fascism, and Masses and Man.

    Sterhell does not explain how Freud could contribute to fascist ideology, given that Freud did not advocate unleashing the instincts, as did Jung, for whom the unconscious, home of the racial ancestry and spirits, was a source of creativity.

                [21] Cf. Erik Levi, Music In The Third Reich (N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1994): 124, commenting on the paradoxical Nazi views of technological progress misted over with anti-industrial romanticism. , a conflict that was apparent in confused music policies.

                [22] See The Crisis of the German Ideology (1962), and Toward The Final Solution (1980).

                [23] George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany From the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (Howard Fertig, 1975).

                [24] See Mosse, “Introduction: A General Theory of Fascism,” International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979): 1-41.

                [25] Mosse’s Nazi Culture was criticized by readers as ignoring the role of technology in the Third Reich, he reports.  See also Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967)

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Skin Pierrot Halloween

Something happened to Tara Pierrot, she looks so different:

(Outfit NOT included)

Menu-driven facelight is inlcuded.

Skin Pierrot

Based upon the skin Tara reloaded, we did this variation:

(Outfit NOT included)

Pierrot is available in this styles:

Every single skin includes a menu-driven facelight, the bundle of all styles comes with a fitting no-mod/no-trans shape

Picasso, Seated Pierrot, 1918

   I did not expect that there would be so many readers for part one of this essay, so I am putting most of the remaining materials on the website today. In the published version of my book, much that is here was either rewritten, deleted, or sharply cut. But I have no better way to link misogyny and antisemitism than I have done here with the study of specific characters as they interacted: Raymond Weaver and Melville’s granddaughter, Eleanor Melville Metcalf.  As you will see, I am particularly interested in the image of the modern artist as Pierrot or Cain, sometimes appearing as Lulu (but not here), in revolt against “the moral mother” and Victorian (bourgeois) culture. The disturbing S-M material has not been published before.

[Daniel Macmillan to his brother Malcolm, June 15, 1833]…though I was very young, only ten, when [father] died, I have the deepest reverence for him. He was a hard-working man, a most devout man, and as I have heard mother say, cared for nothing but his family, that is, did not care what toil he endured for their sakes. You knew him better than I did, you can value him more highly. I now remember with pleasure, and with something better than pleasure, the manner in which he conducted family worship. Though I did not understand a word of his prayer, the very act of bowing down on my knees did me good, at least I think so….[Mother] has such high and noble notions that no one could ever venture to say an impudent thing to her, or talk scandal in her presence. If any one did so once, it never was repeated; some quietly spoken but most bitter and biting saying put an end to such garbage...there is nobody like mother in the whole world. If ever I saw any one with the same tenderness, strength and calmness, the same joyousness of heart, with the same depth, I should instantly fall in love with her, that is if there was any chance of it ever coming to anything! But at present a grave seems the most likely place for me. Pray send mother to Glasgow. I want her to cheer me. No, I can cheer myself. But to go back to the old subject. I tell you that I am proud of my parentage. Besides, I am very glad that my mother is a Teuton. From her we take any mental superiority we may have. What a most beautiful forehead she has! What an eye! What a face, take it all in all! A noble temple for her noble soul! I am rather glad to have some of the Celt in my nature, but glad that the Teuton stands uppermost–as I think it does. I desire to keep the Fifth Commandment.[1]

       Early in his novel Black Valley(1926), Weaver attested to his understanding of Melville’s and Thomson’s dreamy revelations, which he called “the irony of being two.” Weaver transmits Melville’s and Thomson’s images linking sex, revolution, and apocalypse in Gilson Wilburforce’s  confession of his incestuous sexual initiation with an older woman at the age of nineteen (he is a Pierre, just emerging from his teens). Gilson is grilled by his inquisitorial double, the Satanic Gracia West, who plays Ahab to Gilson’s whale (or, if you like, Claggart to Billy Budd):

 ”…And the woman with the daughters and the goldfish? Do you remember? The first night off Yokohama?…

     Gilson flushed scarlet, and bit his teeth into his parched lips. Tears gleamed in his eyes. He swallowed a sob. His body was ice.

    Narrowing her eyes, Mrs. West studied him closely for perhaps a full minute, before she replied to his eloquent silence.

    “Now you have told me nearly everything,” she said finally, with cool but gentle deliberation.

    There was another long pause.

    “Tell me. Was it mother? Or daughter?” The words came with slow distant impersonality, her voice bleached of every color of emotion.

    Gilson buried his face in his hands, his rigid body shaken by hot leaping sobs.

    Mrs. West again tilted her head backward thirstily, and held her eyes closed.

    “It’s too contemptible to plead that I was drunk!” Gilson exclaimed between his sobs, fairly spitting his words from him like unclean and loathsome things. “Drunk!”

    “She seemed so lovely to me at first,” Gilson forced himself to go on, his face still covered. “She usually came to sit with us while we were playing cards each evening, and at the end, I’d help her to her cabin. It all happened so naturally, and didn’t seem shocking at all. When we were about to stop, she’d say how she resented that every pleasant thing had always to come to an end, and then she’d order some more drinks, and then some more. Her daughters used to wait up for her. There they were, every evening, in their pajamas, and were terribly amused at her, and used to stand her up under the port-hole–under the goldfish–at the end of the hallway between their cabins–and laugh at her as she tipped about with the roll of the ship–and shake their fingers in her face in great sport–and swear for the fun of it. Then she would laugh too.–She has the most golden laugh I’ve ever heard–and so gay, and so fresh, and so eager for happiness;–and the daughters, in their bright cool pajamas, seemed so clean!–And then, three nights ago–with Mrs. Burgoyne—-”

    Gilson clenched his teeth as if steeling himself against the probe of a lancet into his very quick, and wedged his cheek between his fists, speech obliterated.

 ”–you first tasted the mystery of life and death.”

      Like a tongue of lightning, Mrs. West’s impetuous insight had blasted through all reserve and crashed into the inner sanctuary of Gilson’s heart. For one blinding moment the burning air brayed with a blood-red voice. The sky shot molten darts and reeled into black silence. And then the glittering plunge of waves against the boat, the steady vibration of the propeller, and the white railing immaculate in the sun. [Compare to the end of Moby-Dick without the Epilogue.]

    “And now you are dazed; revolted; incredulous,” continued Mrs. West. “Your innocence, your sacred innocence, you feel you have forever lost. And lost among such sordidness. You nursed and cherished it, perhaps. As a wonderful gift to bestow. As if, indeed, virginity were not a thing to be achieved! Now it can never again be yours to give, you feel. Fantastical.–And here am I, acting as if I thought by talking to you I could teach you what every young man should know! Someone else must teach you that. But probably nobody all at once. I believe, Gilson, that we must sin into innocence. Does this seem a hideous idea to you?–But the hideousness of life is, of course, unspeakable. We won’t try to talk about it. I’m warned by Saint Paul’s pernicious example. So!–You have burst through some of the swaddlings of infancy. And you are now convinced that you are no longer fit for the kingdom of heaven!”

    Though Gilson had listened to Mrs. West with wide-eyed absorption, much had seemed to him merely unintelligible. And yet there was to him a kind of necromancy in what she had said. For now that his shame was known to another soul, by some subtle magic the shame seemed transformed, and ebbed away as Mrs. West spoke. And at her closing exclamation, tempered partly in mockery as it was, there had broken across Gilson’s tear-stained face a strange faint radiance, as of a new wisdom, a new pride, a new strength, still elusively shy, but maturing to a deep rich music coursing through his blood.

    “And in her arms,” said Gilson in hushed awe, “the thought of my mother—–”

    “Gilson!”—–

    It was the voice of Mrs. Wilburforce: a percussion of reality that shattered the enchantment. The stiletto glint of Mrs. West’s black eyes vanished into the wide and haunted vacancy of his mother’s gaze.

    “Gilson,” she said, “your eyes were so dreamy, and moist, and lucid, and pure, as you sat there lost in thought, it almost seemed that my boy was again a little child. Such innocence—-”….[2]

       Father is too weak to protect him from the abuse of the virtuous mothers, a thought that runs through Melville, Thomson, and Weaver.  Raymond Weaver’s story is a valuable testament to the resentments engendered by child-rearing which is moralistic rather than moral; it should give pause to scholars who believe that “domestic feminism” raised the status of women. The Weaver papers contain a fan letter from another victim of the moral mother, a reader who thought he understood the autobiographical content of Weaver’s exposé; from the language, tone and address, we may infer that the writer did not receive an elite education, but rose from a puritanical working class or lower middle-class background to a position where he could afford to live on Washington Square:

 [fan mail:] I want to write you a letter telling you how much I enjoyed your book Black Valley, but I do not exactly know how to go about it. So I’ll make the best fist of the job I know how and begin.

    In the first place you have wonderful courage to set forth the picture of Gilson as you have done, for there is no doubt in my mind that Gilson is yourself. To explain, it took courage to tell the world just how pure the heart and soul of a young boy could be. To be popular you are supposed to make the boy a stout young dumb bell with a strange leaning twords [sic] crime. Then you are supposed to spend pages telling about how pure and spotless some young girl is.

    Then you have what it takes to paint the picture of the pious female. Man, don’t you know that you are losing your best market for your books when you tell the truth that way?

 The young hero in fiction that sells the book is he who is straight only after a great fight with himself. And much must be said about the innocent woman. You and I know there is more going on in the mind of every young woman than any man ever dreams about until he is past forty.

 Black Valley makes one think–and like it. The style is good, the story is well told. Give us some more like it. [Signed, J.L. Fitz-Gibbon, December 31, 1931, with a Washington Square address, but on the stationery of Tex-La Pecan Orchards, San Antonio, Texas]   

     Raymond Weaver also preserved a student paper analyzing Melville’s social ideas. Like Weaver (who socialized with New Humanist critics), David Rein [3]worried about Melville’s mysticism and the romanticism inherited from Rousseau: “He thought too much on the ultimate scheme of things. He was too often at the cosmic extremities of thought.” Having criticized Melville’s (or Weaver’s) defeatism, Rein describes Melville’s manly resistance to witches brews, imputing his alienation to women and the reading public:  “Melville’s pessimism, however, was not passive, something in him, perhaps the very vigor of his manhood, refused to lie still under a potion of helplessness.” “It is known that his wife was intellectually incapable of sharing his thoughts. Melville’s long silence on sex corroborates this viewpoint. What he might have said would, perhaps, have been too offensive and unfair to the wife he was still living with.” “The critics and audience of Melville were too smug and stupid to know his deeper thoughts.”

    Here is an example of Weaver’s “great sense of tragedy” and his “heroic vision” identified by the Spectator and Trilling. Here too is James Thomson’s position of radical pessimism. A “man” is too weak to resist the power of the mother who unfairly uses magic to enslave her young. He does not directly encounter and confront the real mother, but invents an indifferent Nature, an inflexible Necessity that smothers and chokes all human initiative and resistance to oppression. But this is a projection of what the child would like to do to Mother, but cannot. The “heroic” part is the whale turning on his persecutors, Billy’s smashing Claggart’s forehead, then stoically accepting his doom. Such definitions of heroism lead to the “tragedy” of personal and social violence. In the art and lives of Melville, Thomson and Weaver, aggression was directed outward toward women, Jews and the omnipotent Bumble [Thomson's name for the bourgeois philistine]; inward against their flesh and self-esteem.

       Herman Melville’s astrological chart, drawn in Weaver’s hand, lies in the folder containing the Melville family pictures. A letter to Weaver from Henry A. Murray explains why.  “…I am most desirous of investigating the oracle of Horoscopes. Herman M. was born at 11:30 P.M. August 1st, 1819–I should like to know the position of the stars on that date etc. & the Lady’s interpretation as well. Also as a control my own–Sat. May 13, 1893 I think in early AM before sunrise.—It was the custom among some people to have their horoscopes read & then in a monstrous frenzied orgy–defy the Fates and the stacked cards & swear defiance. Does handwriting come into this game?”[4]

        Both Herman Melville and Raymond Weaver, like Murray, created a defiant persona, a Superman, defined against the philistinism of the middle-class and the suffering but servile lower orders, to demonstrate their successful resistance to the demands of bourgeois society; demands, however, which were transmitted and enforced in the family by the morally superior mother acting as sergeant-at-arms on behalf of upper-class male authority (which in turn is determined by impersonal economic forces, an analysis which is not engaged by the misogynist). But this noble and defiant self was a “pasteboard mask” only partly defending against inner feelings of emptiness and futility. Any wandering but persistent Ahab was likely to strike through the mask. To avoid the humiliating exposé, pre-emptive action was necessary: the whale (in Mother’s eyes the little monster), rises from the deep, now gigantic, now shimmering like a god, to destroy the Ahab/Wandering Jew/Mother whose potions have depleted his sense of himself, his “manhood.” Having written a “wicked book” Melville feels “spotless as a lamb” because he has destroyed part of himself, the internalized “evil eye” (blinded in Ahab and Pierre) which would condemn him. The parricidal ruthlessness, or as Weaver put it, the lack of a “robust conscience” which he attributed to Melville; the “narcissism” so keenly spotted by Melville in others (Annatoo, Ahab, Mary Glendinning) were wryly exposed as self-portrait (in Pierrot and Pierre) to the reader who cared enough to look and look and look and look.

      Walter Benjamin concluded his famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction” with the warning that fascism aestheticized politics; that people were viewing their destruction “as an aesthetic experience of the first order,” as Homeric spectacle.[5] We have been describing the Melville/Thomson/Weaver dreamy detachment from themselves and their fascination with “evil.” We have supposed that their gloomy assessments of human nature and the prospects for social amelioration were distorted by the social relations of early childhood; not derived from the experience of emotionally mature and thoughtful social activity. Neither Melville nor Thomson left a summing-up, a reliable statement to posterity concerning their stance toward the modern world; such an apologia was left by Weaver.[6] It could have been written by Melville or any number of ironic, enigmatic and elusive modern artists and writers who believe they are anticapitalist but who, like Allan Melvill, hold themselves aloof from “the dust of parties,”[7] finding refuge in aestheticism. I reproduce it here, with a bracketed running commentary to remind the reader that the primary source for Weaver’s sketch of the history of Western culture is his failed rebellion against the domineering parent.

CONTRITE OPENNESS OF THE PAGAN MIND JOYN’D TO MASK:
 PIERROT PHILOSOPHIQUE

     Pierrot is one of the eternal verities of literature and life: immortal like Pan and the Pagan Gods, but with the difference that he realizes that all eternity is but in the fleeting moment, all delight a poignant sorrow, all beauty a snare to the flesh and a thorn in the spirit, all success at the best, a not ignoble failure. [Cf. Maria G. to Augusta, June 29, 1850: "in the midst of life we are in death...May we all have the wisdom to realize this awful truth, to live prepared to dye..." Also Susan Lansing's copy of "Cling Not to Earth." Weaver has not escaped traditional Christian other worldliness; even though there is no heaven or hell, the asceticism remains.]

     The eager, sophisticated quick-eyed Greeks were as noble children in their envisioning of this world: staunch-hearted, sobered by a loving intimacy with nature, whom they made mistress and mother. [Once upon a time there were children so strong and manly they were not taken in by deceitful mothers. The children controlled the parent, whose bodies they could enjoy without being swallowed up.] But this ardent Homeric strength corrupted itself with barbaric splendor, and while Roman magnificence spread its broad and mighty conquest, there rose from the lowest depths of humanity the great unrest of the disregarded masses: the voice of the silent slave, of the sorrow-burdened artisan, of the halt, the blind, the leperous, the voice of the passionately hungry disinherited–a deep wild voice that gathered with whirl-wind impetuosity. [Self-aggrandizing, power-mad, narcissistic parents, while mesmerized by the booty of conquest (the colonized are the children, the booty the children's bodies), are simultaneously sowing the seed of revolution, a storm  which will level everything in its irresistible path.]

      The Roman Empire, the ancient world, was preparing itself to die, and the death-throes were frightful: tumult, blood, poverty and plague from within, and without, the pressure on all sides from barbaric hordes. ["hordes" corrected from "hoards": a Freudian typo.] Then humanity found in the Cross the justest symbol of its torn, world-weary and crucified spirit, and conceived a new and other-world salvation through apotheosis of pain. Life was painted in sharp and violent chiaroscura, all pure righteousness and deep-dyed abomination, and the consequences of this were exaggerated to eternity.

     The old Paganism, fallen from its former nobility, was regarded as the kingdom of Satan set up in reality; Pagan literature was declared to be obscene, irreverent and unholy, and all Pagan art with its frank celebration of the beauty of the human body, seductive and diabolical.

    In this terrible dilemma of the agonized conscience, natural abundance was sacrificed to moral order. To the Pagan, life was a beautiful thing, to be accepted joyfully in all its rich variety, and every vital impulse was gratified as a gift from the Gods, pregnant with a morality of its own. To the Christian, man entered this world in utter and innate degradation, loaded with the overwhelming burden of a “mysterious["] “original sin” whose magical properties would have been meaningless to the contrite [sic!] openness of the Pagan mind. This “sin” the Christians viewed with a sardonic optimism, and that sin should exist, and that sin should be punished in eternal Hell-fire, they considered a fitting and beautiful thing. The flesh was made vile and guilty, and the keenest joys came to be in asceticism and mortification of the body. “Ye are not beasts, but immortal souls, not slaves of flesh and matter [mater], but masters of your living bodies, servants of the living God alone.” [The angry children have attacked and killed the parents. Once passions are out-of-control, there is no going back. Divided, and confused, tired and persecuted, parents and children lacked the rational vision to restore the Greek union with nature, this time around tempered with austerity. Instead, the parents think of a new and more effective way to torture little children. Nature is no longer to be enjoyed; the child subdues its body to perfect its eternal bondage to the parent. But what is meant by the "contrite openness of the Pagan mind"? Can it be that there is no escape from history for Weaver; that even as Pagan, he feels naughty for his parricidal and incestuous impulses, and even this pasteboard mask, the best one he's got, is all too easily pierced with a Freudian slip?]

    Then came Darwin and Industrial Revolution, and in vain the ways of God cried out anew, and in querulous and hysterical disagreement, to be justified to man. Life lost its Pagan thrill of flame-touched winged experience, and ceased to be as it was in Homeric times, something carelessly to use, to waste, to enjoy. [Now we know why he's contrite; he's been playing with fire.] The magnificent readiness to persecute and ecstatically to be tortured of the lurid centuries of Christian fanaticism died from the breasts of nature: martyrs ceased to sing in the flames. The broad earth, that once was trod in the calm of self-trusting integrity with proud adventurous purpose, blackened its valleys with a race inglorious alike in its birth and its living: a puny people, small and morbidly self-conscious in its lives, and vulgar in its pleasures: a spawn that made a fetish of riches, and mocked its vaunted freedom by slavery to Mammon. [There are two lines of possible interpretation here. First, Mother, described as "the broad earth" is tired of being walked on by her confident but "proud" Hellenistic sons. She is so burned up that she has impoverished the Greeks by producing a swarm of parasitic Hebraists. Weaver knew Matthew Arnold's categories, and knew Melville's image of the Jews as flies living in the skull of the Holy City (in the Journal) and Margoth in Clarel.  The puny people could be rival siblings, or they might represent Weaver as an infant, furious at being removed from the breast, and whose narcissistic needs were never satisfied. But his dependency needs frighten him, because his mother, who may turn on him at any moment, is not reliable. So he recreates her as the one who clings and resents his manly independence. In Black Valley, Gilson's mother is dying of breast cancer. It is the decay of the middle ages-- really his mother's waning authority, that has produced a "vaunted freedom," symbolized in Weaver's novel by the sticky trap of Gilson's affair with the sensual and narcissistic, vampirish modern woman, black-haired O-Yo-Ake-San, who is also a projection of Weaver as child who takes and takes, and from whom he is rescued by his demonic double Gracia West. Crazy Gracia does Gilson's dirty work by smothering Mother before she can learn that Gilson has impregnated a Japanese Eve (this act a symbol of his autonomy, like Pierre's merger with Isabel) and convincing Gilson not to marry, but to put himself into her (evil) hands. There is no escape from evil mothers in the modern world.]

    It was in such later evil times that Pierrot, the last of the lesser Gods was born; neither Pagan nor Christian, but changeling of our modern days. Of his parentage we know nothing, though he was born perhaps by some roue Bishop to a woodland nymph, or else by a satyr to a nun. When we first meet him it is a French Cafe chantant, consorting with all the out-cast of society, whimsical both in dress and in manner, masking from the crowd the deep thoughtfulness at the bottom of his nature, and giving no hint of what he most deeply is–a philosopher who seeks to embody in his life a creed whose one abiding truth lies in its fallibility. [He "most deeply is" not a heterosexual, and he would prefer that his mother not find this out; to protect himself from killing and/or being killed, he pretends that there are no enduring moral values.]

    While still a youth, Pierrot’s adolescent sympathies were stirred by the strange mystery of the suffering that he saw on all sides of him. The spectacle of sky-tapestry and silent summer dawns, and the breathless beauty of the strange men and women of whom he caught but a fleeting glance, no longer held him enthralled by their rich immediacy; but in their presence he felt a new and bated anxiety–a sorrow that in a world so lovely in some of its visible aspects [note the qualifier], so much hideousness, disease and pain could hold sway. The heritage of long Christian centuries had quickened his feelings to which his earlier Pagan ancestors were blind. That harshness, that insensibility, that so frequently was synonymous with cruelty among the Greeks and Romans, and that was a necessary condition of their calm joy in life, he was born to late to enjoy. And that Calvinistic acceptance of the evils of this world as a necessary term in the statement of the moral problem was foreign to his nature. Some told him that God was good, and loving, and omnipotent, and he nursed this belief jealously: but in the end it went down as irreconcilable with the facts of the crowded streets among which he lived. He walked along the lighted boulevards of nights, the long file of arc-lamps burning like threaded jewels, with above the glinting stars so sharp and brilliant they would have clattered if they had fallen; and the immortal stars filled him with a dumb awe as they hung away in dizzy infinitudes of space. Off beyond the rumbling fever of the streets he knew that suns in all degrees of life and death hung in their orbits; and the pettiness of all things merely human froze him into a sense of microscopic isolation. [The facts that prove there is no benignant God: the cities produce "rumbling fever" (his unacceptable feelings) that make him feel immobilized and fearful, totally vulnerable to the punishment of the parents.] And out to sea he wandered for peace, and inland he traveled, and stood among the Alps. Everywhere he saw evidence of the same resistless energy, now spinning into suns, now rearing itself into mountains, now wasting itself in the endless drift and toil of the sea; bringing forth life in infinite variety–the fish, the bird, the reptile, the horse, the dog: his brothers. And before these facts he felt the vanity, the superficiality of all logic, the needlessness of all argument, the futility of all endeavour, the crushing momentum of time, and and the inexhaustable  fertility of matter; and nowhere any intention, any responsibility, any conscious goal. The same energy that had brought to birth suns with cataclysms [birth is hideous, said Gracia to Gilson] and aeons of labor was flowing ceaselessly through him: and struggle as he might to arrest it, with irresistible impetus it would move on. His God-like privilege was to have perceived it in its flux. His dignity, he felt, lay not in what he did, but in what he understood. All matter toiled about him in travail of doing: and he too spun dizzy in the vortex. [How many times did Mrs. Weaver complain about childbirth to Raymond?] Yet within him, constant among change, was the observant eye before which all passed in phantasmagoria: a passive spectator ever alert in the silent theater of his mind, a spectator that compared and pronounced judgement on the actors as they passed. Far from experiencing the impatience of the Lady of Shallot for “shadows”, he felt that only when calmly contemplative before the mirror of his senses could he ever come to any personal significance above the beasts. And so it was that he formulated to himself as ideal, the role of idler, spectator, and poseur. [He made too much trouble for his mother by being born. If he erases himself as a material being, he can pretend that he never hurt her or anyone else.]

    Pierrot, as we have said, soon came to feel the manifold absurdity of attempting to withstand the great momentum of the cosmic forces in whose swirling current he lived. All that he could do materially he saw could avail but little, and in the end, nothing. He saw the epic absurdity of any concern to improve either people or things. Like a huge, good-natured comedy the universe flowed along: and he felt that wisdom lay in accepting the inevitable with all possible grace and charm. The furious moiling in the gold-mill by which most people make their lives so dyspeptic and unlovely; the passion for reform, and the fever for fame–that “last infirmity”-: all these held no compunction [?] for Pierrot. Far more important did he believe it to keep his native preference fresh and unsullied, his senses unclogged and vital [cf. William Blake], and his prejudices frankly and smilingly unreasonable. And though he made idling his life’s chief business, yet he kept clear the distinction between idling and doing nothing. To idle he conceived to mean to give himself up graciously to the moment, with a sweet disposition to accept gracefully all consequences, to glide with the flow of time as with a lovely melody. He sought to avoid sweat and savagery: all was to be merely creative acceptance, a determination to be omniverously interested, a refusal to be caught by surprise. He was an artist at heart, and amusingly repellant did he find the intemperance of reformers and the deluded ebulition of men burning with “missions”. If you never finish your epic romance in ten volumes; if your theories of reinforced concrete construction never come to fruition; if the millions of Mongolians in Asia never adopt an alien religion: what of it? Far more important is it to keep one’s blood cool and one’s temper sweet, and one’s eyes clear to the romantic scenery along the by-ways of life. Pierrot accepts existence, and deliberately, with the attitude of the old Tang poet who resigned a governorship because he disliked wearing a ceremonial robe: a man with an unsoiled sense of relative values. And the Charming old Chinese gentleman who spent his whole life in writing one story that was published by his heirs in one hundred and two volumes–a work not known to have been read by more than three people, and this though there was no lack of clashing adventure and melting sentiment. This delightful old idler is said to have written the end of the story first–very dramatic, romantic, and convincing. And so interested did he become in the conlusion, he wrote backwards toward the beginning, day after day, year after year. He died at the mellow age of eighty one with his work not yet begun but long since concluded. To the highly energised man-of-affairs, such a life must seem a purile waste, a prodigious inanity: but Pierrot smiles approval. The old Chinese gentleman had been true to his nature; he had wasted no time in unbecoming haste; he had made no disproportionate effort to block the mighty rush of nature’s infinite flow with a mean little fence of bristling perpendicular pronouns. He had known no torture of conscience, no racking of the flesh; in peace and gentleness and innocence had he lived and died–and what diviner destiny may a man ask?

    The world lay about Pierrot, a great variegated spectacle, a turgid conflict; singularly beautiful in some of its aspects–too beautiful at times for mortal man to contemplate-: but in the main, huge, bungling, Rabelaisian. And this great spectacle thundered past Pierrot, bewilderingly complex and unmanageable; and Pierrot stood well aside, fascinated by its eddys and back-waters, giving free play to the onward dash. Yet abidingly near at hand Pierrot found one curiously refractory object that challenged to mastery: his own warm, lithe body, stirred by strange whims of the blood and unaccountable tensions of the nerves. And he struggled with this marvelously knit thing of bones and sinews to make it obedient to his will. Around him lived other curiously animated human forms; some loathsome with age or broken by disease and sorrow; some rapturous like the dawn in beauty. And Pierrot was surprised beyond loving expectation to find all these humans absolute strangers among themselves; often though dwelling in deceptive proximity of space yet with souls more separated than antipodal suns of the Milky Way. Pierrot soon learned that in vain do we grimmace to our fellow men for understanding; that love at best can but mirror back to us our own ideals: ideals that only too frequently vanish from their object at the moment of bodily surrender; that he as flesh-bound soul must dwell forever in dumb and toothless isolation. Then it was that Pierrot found ironic solace in the role of poseur, and sought to win what joyn [sic] he could from beautiful masks. [When he feels his body in sex, he experiences himself as an evil, and therefore abandoned, baby. The false self, made as beautiful as a flower, gives him a measure of solidarity with others.]

     While yet a boy, Pierrot had come to a passionate attachment for one of his play-fellows, and Pierrot had been present when the lad he loved had died. “My God, he is dead!” the broken-hearted father had sobbed, and Pierrot was chokingly moved. Yet even at that moment of keenest sorrow, a Something in Pierrot had stood off and pronounced: “That cry was good–it would have gone well on the stage.” And throughout life, in leaping pain and in pulsating delight, always in the central quiet of Pierrot’s mind had sat this Spectator and judged [sic]. Yet these judgments were never moral–for Pierrot knew no standard of virtue by which he dared to measure his fellow men, himself with no rag of ethical certainty, no shred of unequivocal truth: truth being at best an unstable equilibrium of lies. He felt it gigantically absurd that he should permit himself to declare upon the good or evil consequences of any act. His one consideration was to discover in all behavior some grace, some unobtrusive elegance, some mastery of technique. The Jesuits had taught that a goodly result might justify a series of diabolical antecedents–a programme which to Pierrot was twice malicious in its double inversion. To do all things with persuasive grace, to sanctify the meanest act by lovely enactment: that was the ultimate goal of all effort.

     Yet sometimes, fairly smothered by the voluptuous richness of the broad sky and the miraculous earth, he has felt an impotent rebellion against the gaping externality of lovely objects, and has craved to be mastered by them wholly, to be consumed utterly by their loveliness, to slip into their beauty and be lost. Even more has the beauty of fair living bodies ravished him with a passion for some wild and undivined total possession of them; and he has wished that as Cleopatra dissolved her pearl in rosy wine, that he might make a Saturnalian draught of all the souls he had ever loved, and drinking, go divinely mad.

    Thus lives Pierrot, the tireless idler, the sad commedian, the tragically sincere poseur. This is to have failed in life, perhaps–but with what a grace! [end, "Pierrot Philosophique"]

    Masked, Weaver is “joyn[ed]” with  his “Socratic demon,” thirsty Gracia West who drinks Gilson’s rage, leaving him empty but pure. Engorged, her stiletto eyes are his; with the bleakness of Thomson’s “Melencolia” they detect the frauds of the material world: Jew-Marxist-Freudians like Lionel Trilling, students given to vanity and perversity, seductive mothers and adoring wives and sisters, and certain members of the Melville family. But Weaver’s thundering voice belies the wish for “a lovely enactment” in all things; the vocal landslide that mocks–but longs for– the cottage in Nathan’s pastoral (in Clarel). Thus his notes on Elizabeth Shaw Melville’s niece and confidant, Josephine Shaw McK. (Weaver’s informant concerning Herman’s violence toward Lizzie):

“Cousin Josie: Deaf–coarse bobbed hair–walks with a hideous rocking–with strange straps and paraphanalia [sic] rattling under her skirt. Loathsome in appearance–and as keen as an old Devil.”

    Weaver could have been the sea-crabb, or Herman looking under the masculine Fanny Kemble’s skirt, identifying with Pierce Butler so that he too might amputate himself off from his maternal half.

       Besides describing Herman’s relations with his wife and sons, Lizzie’s sloppy appearance and laziness (“Lizzie careless in appearance–slippers–shawl–stockings down–She loved her ease too–fond of settling own news paper”), and the emnity of Lizzie’s brothers (“His brother-in-laws (Sam & Lem) hated him.”), the keen old Devil had apparently described the warm admiration and devotion of the Melville and Shaw women: “Herman lived in a family of adoring women.” “His mother-in-law adoring–when he comes to bring back Lizzie “the perfect gentleman he always is.” There are question marks next to two of the adorers: “Mrs. Melville–adoring?” and “? Frances”; (he must have been thinking of the daughter Frances, not the sister). Lizzie, Helen and Augusta are noted without comment, but the list is finished with “(cf Nietzsche)”.

      As we have seen above, Weaver had his doubts about all ostensibly nurturing women; his notes to Sophia Hawthorne’s diary comment on this deceptive type, the “whole-hearted adoring wife.” “—further adoring reflections. One is reminded of Butler’s Christina or Mrs. Ruskin–the awful mother of that awful prig.” [Folder 2, Weaver papers]. In his 1928 Introduction to The Shorter Novels of Herman Melville, Weaver attributed a major source of Melville’s torment to the duplicities of women, revealed at last in the disillusion which inevitably accompanied sex: it was a trial which the manly author pluckily endured.

 [Weaver:] The riddle of Mardi goes near to the heart of the riddle of Melville’s life…The allegorical part of Mardi…is a quest after Yillah, a maiden from Oroolia [I rule you?], the Island of Delight…Yillah is lost beyond recovery. In its intention to show the vanity of human wishes it is a kind of Rasselas–though a Rasselas which, for its “dangerous predominance of imagination,” Dr. Johnson would have despised. The happiness sought in the person of Yillah is the total and undivined [?] possession of that holy and mysterious joy that touched Melville during the period of his courtship. When he wrote Mardi he was married, and his wife was with child. And Mardi is a pilgrimage for a lost glamour.

  In these wanderings in search of Yillah, the symbol of this faded ecstasy, the hero is pursued by three shadowy messengers from the temptress Hautia; she who was descended from the queen who first incited the kingdom of Mardi to wage war against beings with wings.[!] Despairing of ever achieving Yillah, the hero in the end turns toward the island of Hautia, called Flozella-a-Nina, or “The Last Verse-of-the Song.” “Yillah was all beauty and innocence; by crown of felicity; my heaven below:–and Hautia my whole heart abhorred. Yillah I sought; Hautia sought me. Yet now I was wildly dreaming of finding them both together. In some mysterious way seemed Hautia and Yillah connected.”

    The hero lands on the shore of Hautia’s bower of bliss. “All the sea, like a harvest plain, was stacked with glittering sheaves of spray. And far down, fathoms on fathoms, flitted rainbow hues:–as skeins-full of mermaids; half-screening the bower of the drowned.” Hautia lavished him with flowers, and with wine that like a blood-freshet ran through his veins,–she the vortex that draws all in. “But as my hand touched Hautia’s, down dropped a dead bird from the clouds.” And at the climax of the surrender into which Hautia had betrayed him, it was, between them, “snake and victim: life ebbing from out me, to her.”

    Later, in Pierre, Melville came to reflect upon “the inevitable evanescence of all earthly loveliness.” The nuptual embrace, he says, “breaks love’s airy zone.” The idealities of courtship, he wrote, “like the bouquet of the costliest of German wines, too often evaporate upon pouring love out to drink in the disenchanting glasses of matrimonial days and nights.” And Pierre exclaims: “By heaven, but marriage is an impious thing!”

    This darkly figured hieroglyph of Melville’s discontent was neither acclaimed by the public nor deciphered by Melville’s wife. Withal, Melville was now not only a husband, but a father besides; and for his income he depended solely on the earnings from his books. The reviewers had, in effect, given him clear warning that he could not support his family in luxury by the sale of cryptic libels upon it. Mardi had been followed rapidly by Redburn. Though his household at 103 Fourth Avenue was populous with relatives and visitors, he had shut himself away from the distraction of this varied company. In a letter to Hawthorne he later confessed: “The calm, the coolness, the silent grass-growing mood in which a man ought always to compose–that, I fear, can seldom be mine.” Endless bustle within the house; outside, as Mrs. Melville writes to her mother, screams of street vendors “continually under our windows in every variety of cracked voices”–screams in which the guests from Boston “find much amusement.” Mrs. Melville further writes that “Herman thinks I had better go back to Boston to see if the change of air will not benefit me,” but she could not bring herself selfishly to follow Melville’s solicitude: “I don’t know as I can make up my mind to go and leave him here–and besides, I’m afraid to trust him to finish up the book without me!” It was a life to enamour even a misanthrope to the family hearth.[?] To quiet them all momentarily, Melville would put them copying manuscript. Yet, despite everything, Melville had stuck to his desk. [end Weaver quotes, XXII-XXIV]    

    In this excerpt from Weaver’s essay, we see the continued juxtaposition of the rainbow “half-screening” the catastrophe; the productive silences broken by “cracked voices” and  “screams” are reminiscent of the trance that begins Pierre, shattered by Pierre’s marching off with Lucy’s crimson flower in his lapel; in Yillah and Hautia, as in Thomson’s Mother of Beatitude, bliss is mysteriously connected to the Mother of Annihilation: the Indian skull is interwined with flowers: a snaky image that rivets Nathan and prepares us for the fall into deism, science, and moral insanity: the child of Nature (Pierre as the massacred Indian) is finally arbored by crazy Isabel’s ebon vines. These are the symbols that rule the romantic imagination and adoring but priggish women have put them there; women who, like Jews, have too much power in the modern world and who, like Hautias and Sphinxes, make ceaseless war on “beings with wings.” “Where ‘dat old man?” The rest is anti-history: Isabel’s “All’s o’er and ye know him not” is tied to Billy Budd’s “God bless Captain Vere.” The defenses of the fathers are too dangerous to assail: having granted that, there is no way out of the labyrinth. “Where dat old man?” 

      I have led the reader through the Weaver underworld to avoid the errors of moralism and the defensive aestheticism generated in Melville, Thomson, and Weaver. An oppositional criticism should provide a non-violent alternative to the usual wars on artists and readers. Weaver’s conduct with regard to Eleanor Metcalf is not attractive; we want to understand the social relations that explain his last words on the matter of Herman Melville. The remainder of this chapter will examine Weaver’s repression of the critical evidence that Melville’s mental states were of tremendous concern to him and to his family. We will then try to account for Weaver’s assault on his own carefully nurtured reputation, placing key documents in his papers, literally coming out from behind Pierrot’s mask to expose his naked psyche.

CLEANING UP

[William Blake, circa 1793] I saw a chapel all of gold/ That none did dare to enter in,/ And many weeping stood without,/ Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

 I saw a serpent rise between/ The white pillars of the door,/ And he forc’d & forc’d & forc’d,/ [Till he broke the pearly door, deleted.] Down the golden hinges tore.

 And all along the pavement sweet,/ Set with pearls & rubies bright,/ All his slimy length he drew,/ Till upon the altar white

 Vomiting his poison out/ On the bread & on the wine./ So I turned into a sty/ And laid me down among the swine.    

 My Dear Mr. Weaver: Mr. Van Wyck Brooks told me this summer that you had gathered a number of details about Herman Melville that you weren’t at liberty to publish in your biography. I wonder if there is anything which would be of help in doing the little critical biography I’m engaged in for the Murray Hill Biography Series; anything, that is, which, without being divulged, might guide or enrich my own interpretation. It would be a great privilege & help if you would permit me to call upon you, at your convenience & discuss the subject. I don’t wish to start any hares that you’ve run to cover. Faithfully yours Lewis Mumford [Oct. 28, 1927]

 My dear Mr. Weaver, …I have been mulling over all the baffling problems that you opened out to me; and I wonder if you can throw any light on the following questions:

 1. When did Melville’s “attacks” definitely begin? 2. Do thy have any relation to the carriage accident? 3. At what dates did the Melville family attempt to put him away? 4. Was the aunt you saw in Boston Melville’s sister or his wife’s? 5. Are there any records of Melville’s services at the Customs Office? 6. When did Melville begin to suspect the paternity of his children?

 The fact that Melville’s wife couldn’t bear to mention his name, or that his son committed suicide does not necessarily throw any light on Melville’s disorder: if they did Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe would be a candidate for the asylum, and Xantippe doubtless had similar feelings about Socrates. If the relations between husband and wife were venomous and terrible, it is hard to explain Bridegroom Dick (1876) & if the family were inimical, what is one to make of the subsidy that published Clarel?

    I am not trying to counter your facts: I am merely attempting to get them in line with other facts: and since, doubtless, you have asked similar questions yourself I should be grateful for your answer–even if the answer is, that there is no answer.

    With thanks again for your patience and courtesy…[Lewis Mumford to RW, Dec. 14, 1927. Buried in Henry Murray's annotations to Pierre (1949) is the remark that Melville was "morbidly distrustful of his wife's fidelity." (478)]

 Dear Mr. Weaver: I am now finally cleaning up my Melville–the sprat alas! grew into a whale! and I feel, no less than at the beginning, my deep load of gratitude to you. I have tried to signify this in my preface: and I can only reiterate it in private: now matter how far we may differ in our interpretations of Melville, my own work could not have been done without yours and I humbly and gratefully acknowledge this….[October 1928, Mumford to RW, Weaver papers]  

 Dear Mark [Van Doren], Probably you will not have heard, unless in a roundabout way, that Raymond had last week a threatening heart attack. Fortunately the worst of came while he was actually in a specialist’s hands, and in the hospital…The trouble is diagnosed as coronary occlusion. But the prognosis is good if Raymond will consent to manage his energies carefully. And the convalescence will be a slow one. I think he is resigned to this, and naturally he knows that we will want him to take care of himself. He is now in a better state of mind, perhaps, than he has been in for some time….[H.R. Steeves, July 10, 1946]

 Minute for the Faculty of Columbia College upon the Death of Raymond Weaver [.] The death of Raymond Weaver on April 4, 1948, removed from the Faculty of Columbia College one of its most powerful and beloved members. Except for the three years, 1912 to 1915, which he spent as teacher of English in Hiroshima, Japan, he had devoted forty-two years of his life to this academic community. Born in Baltimore in 1888, he came as a student to Columbia College and graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Science in 1910. He was made Master of Arts in 1917; instructor in English in 1917, associate in 1919; assistant professor in 1923; associate professor in 1937; and professor in 1946.

     Raymond Weaver was one of the great teachers in modern times. He cared for his subject; and for his students, with an intensity which kept him always in immediate contact with whatever was personal, important, and alive. The trivial, the neutral, did not exist for him. Poetry was a world in which he naturally lived, sharing its pleasures and its terrors with whose whom he knew. One of his students has written: “To be a great teacher and still to be one’s self, retaining the fine salt of one’s own character–this, too, was within his compass.” And a colleague has said: “He was personally and intensely implicated in every idea he ever dealt with. He related every moment of the classroom to life, and his vision of life was heroic.” Poetry for him was not something that other people wrote and read. It truly and simply existed for him and his students. His concern was never with what Dante and Shakespeare and Homer reflected or represented, but with what they knew and felt in their own souls.

   Raymond Weaver’s death is an irreparable loss to many colleagues in many departments of the University. Without bending his will to please others, he gained universal regard by his unceasing devotion to the profound and the beautiful. His courtesy was unimpeachable, as was his tenderness to those who knew him best. He might have spoken the words that Keats wrote in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey: “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and truth of Imagination.”

   In 1921 he published Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic, a book which established the modern reputation of its subject and which remains the indispensable biography of a great American writer. In subsequent years he edited from manuscript such works of Melville as Journal up the Straits and the magnificent tale of Billy Budd, a literary treasure which the world owes to his efforts. In 1926 he published Black Valley, a distinguished and successful novel. And he was editor of other volumes. But these things the public has already judged and received into its favor. What only the Columbia community knows is that it has lost a completely irreplaceable man. [Signed] Dino Bigongiari, John Angus Burrell, Andrew J. Chiappe, Mark Van Doren 

 Dear Mrs. Erskine, I have resigned my instructorship here at Columbia–an enterprise exciting enough to me, for I leave with very mixed emotions. Most should I have liked the advice of Professor Erskine. But I had to act rapidly–and have taken the step. I am teaching next year at the Brooklyn Polytechnic–with promise of real and almost immediate advancement. From one point of view I have entered into the wilderness: but at Columbia was wilderness also–though at Columbia there are a very few golden voices. Professor Thorndike was on the whole inclined to encourage my departure. He said he could not advance me here: that his policy must be to use ‘cheap labor’ (the phrase is his) for most of the undergraduate work. He implied that I cheapened myself by staying on here so surrounded: that my final prospects were better if I at this time made my declaration of independence….[Raymond Weaver, July 2, 1919.] Weaver was reading Melville for the first time; his Nation article appeared one month later listing his affiliation with Brooklyn Polytech. In 1921, RW told friends he was to write a biography of Disraeli (which never came off, nor are there notes. In 1922, back at Columbia (when?) RW wrote to Erskine: he had been offered as associate professorship at Amherst, he complained that he was “very tired now–used up by piecing out my life on the stint that I am paid, and in the end getting nowhere beyond each year a little added work and the armed forbearance of those who have blocked me.” Later that year, RW effusively praised Erskine’s Collected Poems; in 1928, he abjectly apologized for having forgotten to teach Erskine’s class on Macbeth. On 17 March 1929, Weaver told Erskine he must seen him: “I’m going into the hospital–and before I’m normal again, you’ll be sailed….”In 1939, Weaver was being considered for the head of the Rutgers English Department (Folder 20).]

 Dear Mark: Who can tell where the lightning’s going to strike! It hit me out of a clear sky–though fantastically enough, the bolt was delivered by hand, wrapped in paper, and by a messenger who smiled a silly kind of kindness as if he hadn’t the smallest realization of what explosives he carried.

   Your Robinson book of course. Mark, it’s gorgeous! I haven’t been so happy, and so moved, in many a day. It has sent me out of my mind (and I’ve read it twice)- you must forgive my intemperance.

   With the madness first upon me, I telephoned Cornwall to confess it. But I got a voice that sounded dead black. That gleamless voice seemed to intend to say that you were out–having driven Dorothy to the station (this was on Sunday night, around 8-thirty.) Still possessed, I resolved to telegraph you. I walked out, found a Postal place, and indited a long night-letter. The operator was a son-of-a-bitch. “Your address,” he said”–Falls Village, Cornwall. Connecticut–there’s no such place.” “I can believe that,” I said. “Yo’ can?” he drawled, with gallows [sic] of phlegm around his wind-pipe as he drawled it. ‘Yo’ ought’a know you can’t send a telegram to two places at once.”

   With this, I got as mad as Hell! I wanted to tell you, as straight and as quick as I could, that I was a lunatic: i.e., that I was so enthusiastic over your book that I knew my enthusiasm to be a rare burst of wisdom on my part: and I wanted to thank you.

   So I cursed out that operator, called him a jack-ass and a fool, tore up the telegram, and walked to 59th Street to regularize,–if I could– my blood. For, having read your book immediately upon its arrival, I had gone out and bought all the best of Robinson I didn’t already have, and plunged into him. What this did to me! I’ve read so much bad poetry in my life that I had, to the moment when your book arrived, boasted a superior sophistication in rating poetry as being pretty much just something to vomit upon.

   Then, the miracle. I read your book–dived into Robinson–recognized what poetry can be–went batty–and in that state of higher grace resolved that all writing that isn’t poetry isn’t worth looking at….[RW to Mark Van Doren, 7 June 1927]

 Dear Mark: I got back early this morning from a week-end in Long Island feeling very fit and set-up. As always, I was short of cash–so I took the manuscript of the Melville book to 59th Street–The Carnegie Bookshop–and offered it for $200. They didn’t blink an eye and said they were sure they could sell it–at a “considerably advanced price” to themselves. I don’t believe they will sell it….[RW, 9 Sept. 1935]

 Dear Mark: [From Honolulu, where he has been on Sabbatical]…As you know, I can be very slow on the pick-up. This has been true of me in my relations with these Islanders. The “best” families are descended from Missionaries–and some of them have been very hospitable to Burrell & me. All the while I never gave a thought to the fact that Melville had expressed himself bitterly about these same missionaries–calling Dr. Judd, the ancestor of one of the most pretentious of the island families “a sanctimonious apothecary adventurer.” I had never given a thought to the fact I had expressed myself contemptuously of these same missionaries.–And only the day after I had very recently been entertained by some of their descendants did I discover that the brother of my hostess (the brother being a Walter F. Fryar, an old boy, formerly governor here) had just published a pamphlet on “Anti-Missionary Criticism” instigated by Melville in particular and me in large parenthesis. Here, it seems, they still tenderly nurse a grudge what once seemed to me self-evident truth–and now that I am reminded of it again, still does.

     The urge in me is to write you what would turn out to be a sociological treatise on this island–its extraordinarily interesting mixture of population,–its blind provincial isolation,–its internal policies, as a Chinese-Hawaiian Irishman at the university recently said, in the hands of “unscrupulous men of wealth, church-going men ‘of noble missionary stock’ whose grandfathers brought the word of God here, and acquired most of the land by a violation of the Seventh Commandment,”–its—-: if I don’t choke myself off, this windy start will land hurdle [hurtle?] me into the void. Im now in the midst of reading Korzybski’s Science and Sanity (one of the most interesting books ever written…), and as a result should be a little less incautious in committing further “semantic disturbance”–an ideal phrase to infuriate the Edmon’s in their Platonizing….[30 April, 1939.]

SOME AMBIGUOUS ENDINGS, SEMANTICALLY DISTURBING A CHARMED WORLD

     It is difficult to analyze Raymond Weaver’s behavior without understanding his identification with Melville. Both writers complain that they are damned by dollars, enslaved by Mammon, muzzled by the market: they dare not tell the Truth. And yet they chokingly blab (with “gallows of phlegm”): Melville with his anonymous monarchist threatened by the American mobocracy, or his graffiti (which express either Tory sentiments or the coexistence of Tory and communist beliefs, cf. “Daniel Orme” “omitted” from Billy Budd); Weaver with the gossip which reached the ears of Van Wyck Brooks, his revelations to Lewis Mumford and Jay Leyda, and the letters, self-portrait, and memoir which repose in his papers at Columbia. Both men viewed “madness” as instinctual liberation which went too far, and worried about their possible “insanity.” Both men could be variously tender and abusive; both felt they had to vindicate their moral purity and loyalty to dominant institutions, yet both thought they should have told the truth (which is a sign of autonomy and self-respect), though it be plucked from underneath the robes of Senators and Judges or the skirts of Fanny Kemble and Cousin Josie. Unable to resolve the contradiction between truth and order, both men protected their innocence by denying the existence of truth but fretted about corrupt expedients, taking their case to posterity.

    Late in life, Melville and Weaver put themselves on trial: Melville in the unpublished “Billy Budd,” Weaver in the unpublished memoir of his gentleman’s agreement with Eleanor Metcalf to protect Melville from the imputations (of insanity, abusiveness, homosexuality?) which could diminish his stature as a “deep-diving” artist; an agreement which Weaver failed to keep. Presumably the ambiguous character of the facts they place before us, the jury, will absolve them of responsibility for the wounds they have inflicted on others. Or perhaps we will see that in art and life they were victimized by forces which, for Melville at least, were too powerful to resist: swindling snake-eyed scientists, modern women, and Mammon, all of whom had blackened the valleys with industrial capitalism and revolts on the ragged edges of female genitalia. Perhaps Weaver’s memoir is a counter-object to Billy Budd. More manly than the acquiescent and womanish Billy Budd (in his student David Rein’s reading), Weaver would strike a blow for freedom, untying pink tape, re-ordering the too-neat bundles deposited in a little boy’s trunk. Or perhaps both these scenarios are operating: defiance coexists with a Calvinistic sense of sin in the psychology of the scapegrace: Pierrot’s white make-up covers the mark of Cain.

A WONDERFUL OLD BOY ON TRIAL

   It is impossible to know exactly when Raymond Weaver wrote the curious document that we now examine; like “Pierrot Philosophique,” it is undated. However, given his sense of drama and his identification with Melville, it is possible that Weaver wrote it very late in life, perhaps during the “two-year illness” which preceded his death in 1948.  Weaver’s memoir is hand-written in black ink on thirteen white leaves of heavy paper, hand-cut, 5 7/8″ by 6 7/8″. Affixed to some of the pages are letters, cards and envelopes that document his assertions. There are no page numbers.

   A letter from Carl Van Doren written on Nation stationery and dated July 1, 1919,begins the story: it is an indication of the lack of respect the “real” father of the Melville revival had for the difficulties of writing a competent essay on a challenging artist.

 Dear Mr. Weaver: I find we shall have to ask you for a short article on Melville–not more than 2500 words. As the article must fit exactly into four columns, please try to make it come out 2400-2500 as nearly as possible. As to time, why the sooner the better, tooter the sweeter. His anniversary is August 1. Our  issue nearest that is August 2. How about July 20?

      As you will see, and as I’ve said before, you will have to confine yourself to some special phase of Melville’s achievement or character or art. Sincerely, Carl Van Doren.

   Weaver’s text begins:

A letter from Carl Van Doren [underlined]. Some days previous be [sic] had been seated besides each other at an English Department Dinner.–It was this that started it all. He had said to me: “You know, there will soon be a centenary of Herman Melville. He was a wonderful old boy–and I’d like to do him myself. But if you’d try him, I’m willing.”

   I knew almost nothing of Melville–beyond the fact that Brander Matthews had mentioned him in course. I’d begun Typee–and stopped at the beginning. So, with Carl Van Doren’s offer, being unhampered with information, I feel [sic] in with his request. I thought: “I’ll read a few South Sea travel books, examine Melville’s official biographies, and turn out an adequate article.” The following day, I visited Columbia library, to find books and books by Melville–an indecent spawning–and no “official” biographies at all. So I consulted Poole’s index–to learn, by the references, that Melville had started off well enough, but went wrong, somehow–living to an incredible forty years of sedulous obscurity.

   I read him–with gaping wonderment and incredulity. I also bought him. A first edition of Moby-Dick, in 1918 [sic], could be had for less than a dollar. I picked up easily enough a complete set of him. Duplicates, when they were offered me as pleading gifts, I charitably bought: in my excitement they seemed incredibly inexpensive gifts of an excitement I feared to credit, to unconverted friends. Moby-Dick’s that now are unpurchasable at $200 I scorned at the piracy of anything over a dollar. [This could date the memoir; records of auction prices for Moby-Dick first editions confirmed my surmise that it was written between 1946 and 1948, however, in his review of Mumford's Melville study, 1929, Weaver also mentions a $200 price for a first edition.] Evidently, I did not view Melville as an investment. He was an excitement, rather–a kind of indulgent madness vastly interesting to myself, but not trusted to wholesale consumption.

   I went to the Faculty Club for Sunday Lunch. A ruddy stranger sat at my table. Who this intruder was I had no idea. “I’ll talk of something remote” I resolved. So I mentioned Martin Luther’s preference for polygamy; I’d the day before chanced upon it in some reading. My rosy dining companion grew rosier, “I took a dissertation on that in Germany” he said. He started to lecture me with Teutonic endurance. I wanted to change the subject.

  “I’m working on Herman Melville,” I said.

  “Melville?’–he repeated. He brighted [sic] hatefully. “Didn’t he live in Pittsfield?”

   I had to admit that in so far as I knew Melville had.

   “My uncle’s librarian in Pittsfield” he said. ‘If you want to get in touch with what survives of Melville’s family, he might tell you. Here’s my card.–

   A card printed with the name of Mr. William Walker Rockwell, and addressed “To Mr. H.H. Ballard [,] The Berkshire Athenaeum” introducing Weaver is pasted on the bottom of this page. The following page contains a letter from Robert C. Rockwell headed by the statement “Mr Ballard (who turned out to be no Ballard at all) answered as follows:….” Only the first page is included and is dated June 24, 1919; it describes the holdings of the library. We may surmise then, that the English Department dinner took place  earlier in June, and a longer article was originally planned.

   [Weaver continues:] “So I wrote to Mrs. Morewood. To my surprise, the answer came from Melville’s daughter. This is it: [The envelope and letter are attached.]

My dear Mr. Weaver, I have just received a letter of yours written to my cousin Mrs. Morewood, and this is merely in acknowledgement of it. You were evidently misinformed as to my proper address. I enclose card for  

correction. I am quite willing to have you write a life of my father, Herman Melville, but fear I can not help you very much. I shall be obliged to put the matter in my daughter’s hands, as I am in ill health, and have serious trouble with my eyes. I shall be above address for the summer. Very sincerely yours, Frances Melville Thomas. [On a small card]: My daughter to whom I refer it. Mrs. Henry K. Metcalf[,] Wellesley Hills[,] Massachusetts [,] Woodlawn Ave.” [Dated July 9, 1919]

   Weaver’s text continues:

    Mrs. Morewood, evidently, wanted to keep her hands clean of Melville. And Melville’s daughter, in her turn, was passing the buck.

   I wrote to Mrs. Metcalf. I have no record of the initial correspondence. But I vividly remember urging her (evidently against provocation) of the importance of getting recorded all that was known of Melville: that a man who has published a dozen volumes had thereby ceased to be a private personality–a public character, rather, at the mercy of anyone who drew his own conclusions from the published books–and the loquacity of the Hawthorne family and friends: that Julian had imputed against Melville a clean-gone madness: that I[']d read Melville and lost my own mind: that I needed a little anchorage in fact for my own insanity.

   Mrs. Metcalf lived out of Boston. I went to Boston to call. We neither of us knew the other–so I was happy to be accepted for tea. This left both of us without involvement (it sounds, in retrospect, as if the ghost of Hawthorne were presiding!). Either of us might hate the other: and meeting at tea made the meeting merely experimental.

   It rained when I left Boston. On the train I naturally wondered what I was coming to. When I came to Wellesley Hills, it was still dismally raining. A suburban station–but not absolutely deserted. Mrs Metcalf herself was there. And [sic] English-looking woman, with flat-heels, a rain-coat, and a bad breath. She had a taxi.

   “This weather is enough to provoke conversation” she said at once on the way to her home; “but you don’t want to talk about the weather. So I’ll tell you at once the worst–though I trust you as a gentleman as to what you’ll ever publish.”

   She said: “You say in your Nation article, that Melville was happily married. He wasn’t.”

   And before the short ride to her house was over, I felt that Melville was a man of even deeper secrets than I had expected.

   We opened the trunk of manuscript–as I’ve recounted in an article that follows.

      Always. it rained.[8]

      Of all people, Eleanor Melville Metcalf turns out to be an Isabel: she has shattered the myth of the happy family; she must be exposed and punished. We may now see the dynamic that links good mothers, bad mothers, and two kinds of bad Jews: the commercial Jew (Mammon) and the radical (scientific) Jew. Weaver’s narratives begin to tell a coherent story, one that links the attempt to dump Trilling in 1936 with the exposé of the Melville women and the insanity they have generated.

THE KEY TO IT ALL

    Mother’s sin lay in her creation of the blissful connection with the infant, only to sever and withdraw herself in moments of separation (birth, weaning, expression of difference, critical judgment delivered as disapproval); in withdrawal, she becomes a killer; the bad mother has replaced the good. The powerful Jew (enslaving Mammon) could be a projection of the indignant abandoned child’s desire to control and punish mother for wandering off.[9] Disguised as Knight, the cleansed and innocent (cupid) may now rescue the good nurturing mother from her persecutor (Mammon, who is a projection of the child’s forbidden wishes and filthy facts), to reinstate the lost Eden. But along comes the scientific Jew, a regular Freud, a cover for the uninhibited and blabby “modern woman”: s/he peers and probes into the cupid’s mind and flesh, spots him as a greedy parricide.[10] The happy family is revealed as fraud, but so is the rescue: the Knight masked Dragon. Consequently, he may justly be annihilated for his crimes against the family/state. Baby dons the black and white costume of Pierrot and mocks brains, “dreams,” “crusaders,” and facts, i.e., history, materialism and the search for truth.

…My mother [Sophia Hawthorne], in talking of former times, spoke of Melville as most interesting & fascinating, but as if he had a wild Spring in him, like all untamed creatures, and he could not always be followed. Perhaps he did not like the mise en scene so well in England, as that of the little red cottage in Lenox. But I do not remember any remarks in that regard. [From Mother M. Alphonsa Lathrop to RW, August 27, 1920; attached to the Weaver memoir at Columbia]

[Weaver:]   The greatest of all dreamers conquer their dreams; others, who are great, but not of the greatest, are mastered by them and Melville was one of these. There is a passage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe that Melville may have pondered when he awoke at the helm of the Acushnet after looking too long at the glare of the fire: “There are moments when, even to the sober eye of reason, the world of our sad humanity may assume the semblance of a hell; but the imagination of man is Carathes to explore with impunity its every cavern. All the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful; but like the demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep or they will devour us–they must be suffered to slumber or we perish. [Weaver, M & M, 152, marked in my library copy.]

 …It all ended one day when Mendon had Janice on the rack. He had taken her to a deep-hidden torture room and locked a great succession of doors behind him. At last he was ready to kill her and take her secrets that had made her mistress of all conceivable universes. At his order she willingly stripped and stretched herself on the rack. Mendon began heating the irons. If she told quickly, he would keep her alive for a while, for as long as was convenient to him, she could live here in the dungeons which she now seemed to love. If she was stubborn, she would die here at once and painfully.

      He was all wound up with excitement and he was about to begin by ramming a red hot iron up into her sexual parts when he found himself suddenly grabbed from behind. Two factors held him while a third released Janice Orr who donned a long modest (and concealing) grey robe that he had brought.

   “My power is subject to one limit,” she told the foaming Mendon,” a very paradoxical limit. Its only limit is that I cannot limit my power. I cannot tie myself down with any “now and forever”, the words have no meaning. Half of the secret of my power,” she smiled at the shivering man, “is my knowledge of telepathy which enablem [sic] me and my advisors to know what you were planning all along and only to accept what we willed of it.” Mendon, slavering, writhing in fear threw himself prostrate at her feet but she merely raised a hand in signal to a factor who blew his brains out with a single shot from a heavy caliber piston [sic].

   Janice told the good news to a happily sobbing Fluerry and consoled her poor mad sister whom she still did not trust out of her cage. As she turned away to go back to the little room under the eaves, Fluerry trembled as she heard her sigh and say, “Ah, me! Now I shall have to find another man to torture me.” [S.T., a middle-manager? at Armstrong Cork Company, 12-31-46, Sadomasochism Collection, UCLA Special Collections.]

                                                                   IN A LITTLE ROOM UNDER THE WINTRY EAVES

      There is a grayness to Eleanor’s character in Weaver’s rendition: “Always. it rained.” Eleanor was both the loyal nurturer and  the frank and feisty modern woman, a woman who does not hesitate to take charge of a delicate situation. When Hildegarde Hawthorne expressed her “astonishment and disgust at seeing the Hawthornes (in Weaver’s account) accused of being the evil geniuses of Melville’s career, and the intimacy between the two men derided as ‘ironical’,” Eleanor staunchly defended Weaver.[11] Eleanor’s memoir of 1953, Herman Melville: Cycle and Epicycle, tended to stand with Melville and Weaver against the women in the family (including Augusta, who admired Jesus’s rod, and her own mother, Frances Thomas). 

    But in Weaver’s testament, Eleanor has “flat-shoes, a rain-coat, and a bad breath”: she is the poisonous and poisoned modern woman he obsesses about in all his writings, and with whom he is fused: the double who does his dirty work by choking off emotion, disconnecting him from the experience of his body. “On the train naturally I wondered what I was coming to” degenerating Weaver muses as he heads toward his first encounter with Eleanor, hoping for “a little anchorage in fact for my own insanity.” Is it “we” or is it  “she” who has opened the trunk of manuscript, which along with her confidential “secrets” is as menacing as Pandora’s box; as disastrous as the blackened valley left by (the dwarf) Weaver’s insight into the hypocrisy of the sentimental  family; undoubtedly the myth that Weaver hated swallowing as a boy, and which he partly coughed up in the Gnostic black masses of a homosexual rebellion (but not in his essay of 1919 for the Nation). 

      Eleanor’s crime was probably her ambiguity: what was she and what did she want from Weaver? How could he please her? From Weaver’s side (and assuming the story is not a fantasy) it sounds as if Eleanor wanted to unburden herself of her anger, but without blemishing her family’s reputation and her idealized memory of her grandfather (whose eyes followed her in his portrait, and who pretended to be a jolly cop in her reminiscences). Melville’s lecture on the statues of Rome is only one example of his family’s dedication to pristine character and self-control, to the stoicism that buttresses its respectability, class identity and authority (as managers and intellectuals: the right to command the labor of others, to formulate social goals, to describe social reality). But “stoicism” may cover the systematic suppression of feeling, cultivating impassibility in families when authority appears to be unfair, contradictory, indefinite and unreliable. For rage denies the reasonableness, happiness, purity and closeness of the lovely family which keeps them afloat; expressing rage drowns them in failure and loss of status; holding it in is equally damaging. It seems as if the family reproduced both its exasperation and fear of exposure generation after generation. Eleanor could hardly wait to tell Weaver about the difficulties in her family, but then she pledged him to secrecy, joining him to her family’s crazy-making insistence on both truth and order.  But in demolishing the myth of Melville’s happy marriage (Weaver’s defense against his own aggression: how could Weaver have read Melville and thought he was happily married?), Eleanor may also have been the emblem of  (Jewish) divisiveness in the same way as that confusing intellectual Jew, the anti-aesthete but art-loving Lionel Trilling, who had once taught that art is made in a context of class conflict (Marx) and ongoing struggle between individual desire and social welfare (Freud): a critical methodology opposed to organicist idealizations and painless conformity.

     To some conservative Melville scholars, bohemian aesthetes, liberals and socialists are the same: as a “rebel” and anticapitalist, Weaver theoretically should not have objected to another dissenter like Trilling. But Weaver was a scapegrace and a bohemian, not a liberal or a left radical: we remember that Weaver’s Calvinist contrition lingers, it pops out in “Pierrot Philosophique,” as it does in his deathbed confession.[12] Reading his papers, one may infer that Weaver’s hatred of passivity covered over his desire for punishment and atonement: we are confronted with a disturbed imagination, not a political strategist, a point which brings us back to the issue of insanity and the choking, weedy deaths which finish Pierre, Ahab, and Billy Budd.

    It is clear from his resentful and fearful writings that Weaver believed he and Melville were (at times) both “insane” and defiled by duplicitous and potentially ruinous women; yet they must deny it to avoid more persecution from the type of good/bad woman who first makes you crazy and then tries to put you away when you write a book exposing her (the storm after Pierre). In 1919, Weaver made a gentleman’s agreement to keep the Melville family secrets; he might have felt that he had once more sold his soul to get the esteem he illicitly craved: why else would he have hidden salient facts of his academic career?

     Weaver’s memoir, hand-cut to approximately six by seven inches (and not too neatly), is close to the size of the Billy Budd ms. leaves (6″ by 8″) “we” discovered in 1919 when Pandora opened the trunk, the ms. dimensions specified in the essay of 1931. In an episode of graceful failure sometime before his death in 1948,[13] Weaver impersonated Melville (but rectified both the passivity of Billy Budd and his acquiescence in the cover-up) by leaving a “testament of resistance”: his memoir which certainly insults Eleanor but also makes its author look like a sick man, a cad and an opportunist. Perhaps Weaver’s last swipe at Eleanor recouped his manhood (which may have been nibbled away as he ingratiated himself with powerful men), but it may also have been a Melvillean reproach and cry for reform. Weaver pleads to Eleanor (a woman with too much power in the modern world, like another woman who had made him): I wanted facts that are roots and anchors in a world of poseurs. Instead you gave me sensational “secrets” which, if kept, would only further bind me to the confusing family I abhor, the family which imprisoned me behind this degrading white clown mask. Eleanor’s discretion, as he had predicted, put two public characters, Melville and Weaver, “at the mercy of anyone who drew his own conclusions from the published books….” That is, who might spot the overly compliant child aswirl in a vortex of impenitent rebellion.

   But this too perceptive sharp and nosy common reader was always himself: murderer and victim recognize each other, kiss and kill. Weaver and Eleanor/Melville are Ahab; Weaver and Eleanor/Melville are the Whale. Intertwined like Pierre and Isabel, like Billy and the oozy weeds, they live out the whaleness of Narcissus into Eternity: “there are so many secrets curdled/ curled up inside our scrofulous/ scrupulous embrace.” [14]

 [1] Quoted in Thomas Hughes, Memoir of Daniel Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1883), 18-21.

[2] Weaver, BV, 58-61. Murray told me he couldn’t read this book.

[3] “Political and Social Satire in Herman Melville,” n.d. Rein was Columbia ‘33. His quite excellent and accurate paper (although, like Weaver, contemptuous of the female relatives), written from the left and informed about labor history, is in Folder 14, Weaver papers. Rein recognizes throughout Melville’s awareness of social hypocrisy and “the imminent peril of being honest,” views Ahab as the “defiant spirit of man,” and concludes with a critique of Melville’s irrationalism and its harm to Melville himself: “Out of all Melville’s divings he had returned only with doubt. He failed to reach that attitude which sees the universe as a repercussion of cause and effect, which regards every movement and thought, the whole social system, as the conglomerate effect of alterable causes–this, I believe was his greatest weakness, if not as a  writer, at least as a thinker and man. He could become no greater than an Ahab or a Pierre–could do no more than burst forth in a wild spasm of unreasoned emotion, and then, as in Billy Budd, fall prostrate and acquiescent.” Given Weaver’s writings on BB (Introduction to the Short Novels of Herman Melville, Liveright, 1928, then the Macy anthology of 1931, replicating the 1928 analysis), Weaver’s interest in Rein’s critique is crucial to an understanding of his own ambivalence. But both Weaver and Rein suppressed the possibility of Melville’s subterranean radical, materialist identity. Melville was not a “mystic,” unless  Weaver was thinking of radical puritans such as the antinomian Anne Hutchinson or the New Light radical sectaries of the English Civil War period.

 [4] Weaver papers, Folder 19, n.d. The doorknocker at 22 Frances Street, Murray’s Cambridge home, was a whale. (Also the whale image on Murray’s note-paper to me, the smiling whale on envelope to Leyda, almost used in Log.)

[5] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Shocken paperback, 1969), 242.

 [6] Undated; a short but identical description of aestheticism, with a critique, is found Joseph Freeman’s autobiography, unattributed, but obviously the ideas of “Dr. Weaver.” An American Testament, 154, 155.

 [7] Quoted in Hershel Parker’s dissertation which persuasively argued that Melville’s family was conservative, not democratic in the sense that Parker thought liberal Melvilleans were using the term. But Parker views Melville, like Gansevoort (the other debater in the family), as cynical and opportunistic in his stance as democratic reformer, and entirely removed from contemporary politics during the Pittsfield years when he was writing Moby-Dick and Pierre. Parker uses “politics” in a more restrictive sense than do I. As for Melville’s alleged reeking insincerity, the record can be read that way, but it is not my sense of what Melville was doing. Anyway, as Milton said, only God can detect that kind of fraud.

[8] The Weaver article that deals with the contents of “the trunk” is the 1931 essay for the John Macy anthology, described above. Eleanor Metcalf dates her first meeting with Weaver in October 1919.

 [9] Cf. pornography in Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer: the Jew Louis Schloss who whipped, branded and defiled young Aryan girls. The case is described in Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 148-153.

 [10] The evidence supports Erich Fromm’s running critique of Freud’s excessive reliance upon infantile sexuality. In the material that I have examined, the issue is the fear of a sudden turnabout by mother, that the child feels contaminated by rage against domination, or poisons the family when he attempts to resolve dualisms (male vs. female), i.e., blur distinctions maintained by conservative elites. Incest may be associated, not with sex, but either with miscegenation or with a cleansing pain that restores family harmony. I have taken my critique of Freud further than Fromm, however. In the Terror-Gothic classics that I have read, sexuality is linked to the insatiable curiosity of the upstart autodidact. Thus sex is a sub-set of forbidden knowledge; physiologically, it seems to melt defenses and bring up rebellious feelings normally suppressed by veterans of authoritarian families. The material in the sadomasochism collection at UCLA suggests that pain purifies impudence, enabling pleasure to be experienced after the ritual purification. At the same time, the ritual reinforces class identity in the petit-bourgeoisie, and is literally a performance of its social relations with classes above and below, and a promotion to a higher level: i.e., “transcendence.”  

[11] The Literary Review, Feb. 4, 1922, 406, carried the Hawthorne letter; Eleanor’s unpublished response is in the Weaver papers (I could not find it in the LR). As she would in her memoir of 1953, Eleanor criticized her relatives for insensitivity: “Most frequently [the artists'] descendants are less capable of patient inquiry and true critical judgment than others. Families per se have not intrinsically better understanding of the souls of their members than others. Is not the reverse more often true? It seems to me this is just where Miss Hawthorne has made her initial mistake. She has allowed her perfectly natural pride in her precious heritage to obscure her critical faculty, even to the length of imputing “bad taste, spitefulness and sneering scorn” to one who has in my judgment written a most delightful and illuminating chapter on the two men…There is no more an “attack” on her grandmother than there is on my own, Herman Melville’s wife. They are both shown in what the author believes to be their true relationship to the subject of his biography.”…[Weaver papers, Columbia University] 

 [12] The deathbed confession is my fantasy of the memoir. More significant is Weaver’s tragic letter to Mark Van Doren from Payne Whitney Clinic, strongly suggesting that nurture terrified Weaver, in my opinion, because he felt unworthy and therefore expected probingly maternal doctors and nurses to turn on him. The Van Doren letters were read after I wrote the first drafts of this dissertation; I had not discovered  Weaver’s history of mental illness until spring, 1989.

 [13] Or anytime after 1931 when the Macy anthology appeared, see 203-204.

 [14] From an excavated draft of unpublished poem, signed C. Augusta Dupinstein, defective detective et juif errant.

Ottobre 2009. Esce oggi il nuovo numero di Pierròt. Attesa lunga, ma questo ci ha consentito di definire meglio il nostro progetto. Si perché il progetto si evolve, e ci stiamo lavorando.

A tutti i lettori, accogliete questa raccolta di pensieri che ancora una volta gli autori offrono, con l’augurio che possano stimolare alla riflessione, al confronto, al dialogo.

Ricordo che troverete Pierròt nelle librerie “Ambarabacicicocò” e “Anima Mundi” di Corato, “Il Ghigno” di Molfetta, “Diderot” di Andria, “La Maria del Porto” di Trani, “Le città invisibili” di Terlizzi.

Continuo a ricordarvi che potrete sempre sfogliare Pierròt sul web. Questo ci ha consentito e ci consente di poter far giungere i pensieri raccolti, a quante più persone possibili, oltre a consentirvi la “rilettura” dei numeri più vecchi.

Buona lettura.

Danilo Macina

Threepenny Pierrot.
Columbine.
The Mirror.
The Mask.

For a time, during the tail end of the ’60s, David Bowie became a professional mime who occasionally sang on stage. His label wanted to be rid of him, every record that he had released had flopped, he didn’t have a band, and often his only regular work came from mime shows, whether in stage productions or even (disastrously) opening for rock bands like Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Mime, like it or loathe it, is essential to Bowie’s art—it’s as important an influence as Bowie’s love of R&B and jazz, or science fiction, or Buddhism, or Lou Reed. It lies behind everything that he did after 1968: Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke, even the wan extraterrestrial figure of his “Berlin” trilogy are basically all mimetic interpretations of rock musicians. Coming full circle, Bowie dressed as Pierrot in his 1980 video for “Ashes to Ashes,” winding down his most creative period.

Bowie had followed the path of a typical British would-be rock star—leaving school early, playing in beat groups, getting a manager, cutting singles, making a moderately psychedelic LP. His mime years broke this frame; it marked him with a different aesthetic than the typical rocker. It’s in part why Bowie is hard to fit into the standard “’70s rock star” slot, though radio stations and retrospectives try, and why some critics have considered him a poseur, a campy thief, a heartless vampire figure. Was Bowie really only a mime who “played” a rock musician? Or was he someone who considered mime to be an aesthetic equivalent to rock & roll, thus denying one of the music’s core myths—that its purity and simplicity made it superior to more elaborate, ‘higher” forms of art? When a mime can do rock as well as a “real” rock & roll singer, what does it say about the latter?

[Bowie] in class would drink up my words and do exactly as I asked of him. And a few years later, when he invited me to stage Ziggy Stardust for him at the Rainbow, he was still a joy to direct. I would keep encouraging him to simplify his performance, which he did, and we never had any artistic disagreements. He was an ideal student.

Lindsay Kemp, quoted in The Bowie Companion.

It was everything I thought Bohemia probably was. I joined the circus.

David Bowie, 1997, on working with Kemp.

Bowie met the mime Lindsay Kemp in mid-1967 and by the fall was taking dance lessons from him. Kemp later claimed, deliberately creating a legend, that he had saved Bowie from becoming a Buddhist monk, as Bowie had visited a Buddhist monastery in Scotland and allegedly was considering taking vows. Kemp asked Bowie to perform and write songs for a new production he was mounting, Pierrot in Turquoise. (Bowie suggested “turquoise” as it was the Buddhist symbol of eternity.) The play featured Pierrot, the sad, ever-trusting cuckold, his love Columbine and her lover Harlequin, variations on classic Commedia dell’arte types. The production became a traveling soap opera: Bowie was having simultaneous affairs with Kemp and the costume designer Natasha Korniloff, and once Kemp found out, he lived up to the role of the betrayed Pierrot and slashed his wrists before a show. When he reopened the wounds while performing that night, blood stained his Pierrot costume and the audience roared at the audacious realism.

For Pierrot in Turquoise, Bowie wrote “Threepenny Pierrot,” “Columbine” and “The Mirror” and revived, yet again, “When I Live My Dream.” While the jaunty “Threepenny Pierrot” (soon to be rewritten as “London Bye Ta-Ta“) could have fit on Bowie’s debut LP, “Columbine” and “The Mirror” show a new, emerging compositional style for Bowie—somber folk-esque songs, in which an elaborate lyric is countered by a basic, repetitive acoustic guitar figure. The type would dominate the Space Oddity LP. Bowie quarried from “Columbine” in particular—its guitar line is reused in “Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed” and a variation turns up at the end of “Width of a Circle.”

Bowie continued to work as a mime and dancer throughout 1968 and 1969, dancing in a Kemp-choreographed version of Pushkin’s The Pistol Shot and performing his own Tibetan-inspired production Yet-San and The Eagle. When Bowie’s manager Ken Pitt, seeking to revive his client’s career, arranged for Bowie to record a promo film, Bowie included in the mix a mime piece (with narration) he had written entitled “The Mask.” During its five minute span, Bowie calmly and ominously depicts his future stardom and the subsequent near-madness it caused him. He acted out his future, then endured it.

“Threepenny Pierrot,” “Columbine” and “The Mirror” were debuted at the premiere of Pierrot in Turquoise in Oxford on 28 December 1967; their only recordings are from a 1970 production of the show, The Looking Glass Murders, that aired on the BBC. “The Mask” was recorded for Bowie’s promo film Love You Till Tuesday on 5 February 1969.

Top: David Bowie at the Middle Earth Club, 19 May 1968.

dreamboats. each and every one. pretty pretty outfits by Vivetta.

Pierrot’s Tears

삐에로의 눈물은 실제 프랑스의 민화에 바탕을 둔다. 어느 한 작은 마을에 가난하지만 눈물이 없는, 항상 웃음을 머금고 사는 아름다운 여인이 있었다. 이웃의 부자들과 많은 남자들이 아무리 청혼을 해도 거절을 당했다. 왜냐하면 그녀는 사랑하는 남자가 있었기 때문에. 바로 가난하지만 성실한 청년 삐에로. 삐에로의 청혼으로 둘은 결혼해서 행복하게 살았지만..

옛날 꽤나 아주 먼 옛날 옛적이야기

시골 조그만 마을
눈물이 없는 처녀가 살고있었지
가난했지만 항상 미소를 머금은
그녀는 아름다웠고 옆나라에 수많은
부자들과 남자들이 끝없이 청혼을했지만
모두가 거절을 당했고 그녀는 사랑하는 사람이 있었고
그사람은 가난하지만 성실한 청년 피에로
어느 날 그가 찾아와서 청혼을 했어 그녀는 승낙을했고
그 뒤로 그 뒤로 그들은 행복하게 살았데
그러던 어느 날 그녀가 바늘에 손이 찔렷어
한번도 울지않았던 아내가 눈물을 흘렸어
그런데 다르게 눈물이 다이아몬드로 변해버렸어 어 그래
믿기지 않은 상황 그때부터 피에론 아내를 때렷어
다이아몬드를 얻었고 흥청망청 다이아몬드를 다 써버렸지
그리곤 다이아몬드가 다 떨어지면
집으로 돌아와 아내를 때렸어
그녀의 가슴에 상처를 새겼어

두눈 가에 핏물이 흘러와
웃음을 짓거나 춤추네 내 맘 안에
나도 몰래 새겼던 상처가 이렇게 번져가
애타게 너를 찾는데

그렇게 한달이지나 두달이지나 몇년이 흘럿어
다 써버린 다이아몬드를 가지로
집으로 돌아온 날도 술에 취해 아내를 불럿어
그손에 쥔 새빨간 다이아몬드를 보고는
피에론 깜짝 놀랏지
아내의 손에서 빛나는 커다란 다이아몬드에
마냥 기분이 좋앗지
뜨겁게 사랑했던 자신의 피보다 새빨간
그 다이아몬드의 의미를 몰랏지
굳센 사내를 위한 아내의 마지막선물
그리곤 그녀는 목숨을 끊엇지
빨갛게 물드는 양탄자는
활활 타오르던 두 사람의 사랑보다
진하게 바닥을 수놓았어
목놓아서 울어봤자 그녀를 영원히 볼수없어
피에론 자신의 잘못을 깨달앗지만 이미늦엇어
그녀는 떠나갓어 그 뒤로 피에론 자신의 얼굴에
분장을할때 눈물을 그려넣고는 미친듯이 웃었어
슬픔을 잊으려 애써 춤을춰봐도
불타는 지나간 사랑의 후회만큼 미소만큼 더

왜그랫을까 그땐 왜그랫을까
대체 왜그랫을까 나는 왜그랫을까

돌이킬수 없다는걸 알아
이미 지나간 시간을 붙잡을수 없다는걸 알아
떠나간 그녀를 추억하면 그냥살아
꿈에서 그녀가 만약 살아 돌아온다면
두번다시는 너를 놓지 않을께
다짐햇지 텅빈 집안 구석 너의 향기로 가득한데
아득해져만 가는 너의 아름다운 미소
다투기도 햇지 눈물에 감추기도 햇지
두눈을 마주친채 바보같이
밤새도록 바라보기만 했지
왜 그랫을까 그땐 왜그랫을까
가진것 없어도 난 너만 있으면 행복햇는데
대체 왜그랫을까 나는 왜변햇을까
영원히 변치않을꺼라는 약속 계속햇는데
얼마나 힘들었을까 내게는 말도못하고
얼마나 많이 아파햇을까 아무런 힘도없는
그녀를 때리며 웃고있던 나를 영원히 저주할께
용서 하지마 나 제발 부탁할께 눈물흘리지마

PIERROT (LE FOU) ESTE TRIST, SE VEDE CĂ-I PARE RĂU DE NĂZBÂTIILE PARIZIENE SAU ÎI ESTE TEAMĂ DE RĂZBUNARE? RUPE FLORI DIN HÂRTIE AURITĂ, ÎMPRĂȘTIINDU-LE ÎN VÂNTUL REÎNVIAT AL AMURGULUI… BRUSC, DE UNDEVA DIN DEPĂRTARE, UN MUGET PUTERNIC. PĂMÂNTUL SE CUTREMURĂ, MUGETUL SE INTENSIFICĂ, SE TRANSFORMĂ ÎN TUNET, AUZINDU-SE TOT MAI APROAPE- PE UȘA UNUIA DINTRE PAVILIOANELE LATERALE IESE UN LEU HERALDIC, AVÂND COAMA PUDRATĂ CU AUR. PIERROT ARUNCĂ RESTUL FLORILOR DE HÂRTIE ȘI ÎNCEARCĂ, VAL-VÂRTEJ, SĂ SE ASCUNDĂ, DAR, VRÂND SĂ SARĂ PESTE BALUSTRADĂ, RĂMÂNE ATÂRNAT DE EA, ASEMENEA UNUI BRICEAG DESCHIS PE JUMĂTATE. CU O PÂRÂITURĂ INDECENTĂ, I SE RUP PANTALONII ÎN CEL PUȚIN O SUTĂ DE LOCURI. LEUL HERALDIC ÎL CONTEMPLĂ O VREME CU UN ZÂMBET IRONIC, DUPĂ CARE ÎȘI SCOATE PRELUNG MĂNUȘILE ȘI ÎL SILUIEȘTE ÎN CEL MAI RUȘIONS MOD PE PIERROT, CARE SE BALANSEAZĂ NEPUTINCIOS…

PUBLICUL ASISTĂ ULUIT LA ACEASTĂ ÎNDRĂZNEALĂ.

Péter Esterházy, Verbele auxiliare ale inimii

 

progressive psychiatry in SURVEY GRAPHIC, 1947

This is the first of a three part essay on Jung and some of his followers, whose influence in America is probably underestimated; for instance he thrives in “New Age” thinking. The criticisms I lodge against Jung and the Jungians apply to “adjustment”-oriented ego psychology  and describe the eroticism favored by middle-managers I have studied. Since Dr. Henry A. Murray was one of the chief Melville Revivers, and identified personally with Melville, I have added materials taken from Murray’s essays on personology, as edited and collected by the late Edwin S. Shneidman, but also poems and sketches by other practitioners of sadomasochism. (These will appear in the blogs that follow this one.) The picture that finally emerges is fiercely anti-Freudian, misogynistic, and antisemitic.  Teachers and mental health professionals are asked to read these disturbed and disturbing materials, especially as Murray’s sadomasochism has been described in books by Forrest Robinson and Claire Douglas.

SONS AND MOTHERS

     ” Marxism lies in ruins on the ground. It had to die in order that German labor might find its way to freedom, that our nation might again be a nation. Where formerly Marxist songs of hate resounded, there shall we proclaim brotherhood to the workers. Where once the machine guns of the Reds scattered bullets, there we will make a breach for class freedom; where once a spirit of materialism triumphed there we, resting on the eternal right of our nation to freedom, labor and bread, will proclaim the union of all classes, races and callings in a new glowing idealism before our own nation and before all the world.” [Goebbels, quoted Survey Graphic, Nov. 1933, 549, 550]

     “Another dimension of Lasswell’s achievement, and one largely missed by his readers and commentators, is its radical and even revolutionary commitment to democratic goals. Because Lasswell has always used a special vocabulary that most of his political science colleagues have never bothered to understand, and because, further, this vocabulary is notably free of emotive, polemical, and ideological expressions, Lasswell has been frequently misperceived to be an antidemocratic élitist and a reactionary who would do for and to society what B.F. Skinner has done for and to the pigeons….

     ”The Lasswellian conception of democracy has always stressed the widest possible shaping and sharing of those values that promote or exemplify human dignity… To be sure, Lasswell has not identified the particular institutional transformations that would promote such values, but neither did Rousseau indicate the political system required for the operation of the “general will,” nor Marx produce a blueprint for the political economy that would follow the revolution. The fact is, we are so habituated by sloganizing about political and social change that we fail to recognize advocacy of such change unless it is accompanied by a certain barricade rhetoric. Hence the full import has been generally missed of what Lasswell means by political psychiatry and integrative politics. [Arnold A. Rogow, “A Psychiatry of Politics,” (University of Chicago Press: 1969), 141,142]

      ”May Day came, with its processions of boys and girls, men and women, singing as they marched to Tempelhof, where they gathered, the largest single audience ever assembled in Germany, to hear the labor speech of the Leader. We listened to it over the radio with a little group of countrymen, all full of eagerness to know what the Nazi labor program would be, how they would deal with unemployment and with the great trades-unions. We got nothing but what we disrespectful Americans call ballyhoo. It was the sort of speech that would be made before a Civic Federation audience or a Manufacturer’s Association: flowery sentiments about the brotherhood of workers with brawn and workers with brain, about commonweal instead of individual profit, about a united country where employer and employe[e] march hand in hand for the Fatherland. There was nothing that could be called a program, a definite plan, and our little group of Americans marvelled that Hitler would dare to so disappoint his waiting followers.

     ”But the next day his real plan was carried out without warning. The trades-unions were dissolved, a leader of labor was appointed (the Ley whom the labor representatives in Geneva refused to recognize), the “principle of leadership” was substituted for democratic majority rule, the funds and properties of the trades unions were taken over….

     ” I did my best to discover what the policy of the Nazis with regard to labor really was. The whole world has known for years that Hitler’s movement was financed by the great industrialists on his promise to drive out Communism and break up the trades-unions, but on the other hand we were told that many workers had been won to his cause by his promise to make Germany truly Socialistic, a country of equal opportunity, where there should be neither rich nor poor.” [Alice Hamilton, Survey Graphic, 1933, 550. Hamilton, a progressive, worked in industrial medicine. Her analysis of Nazism remains the view of Marxist-Leninists blaming monopoly capitalism, and ignores Hitler's "Third Way" between communism and capitalism, resonant with American progressivism.]   

      “The era of campus violence seems to have passed. Students are no longer locking up administrators, burning buildings, or engaging in strikes. But the crisis in higher education is not over. Many colleges and universities are in financial trouble. Many students are still dissatisfied with some aspects of higher education. Professional pride is not keeping faculty members from joining unions.” [The Management and Financing of Colleges (The Committee for Economic Development: 1973) p.7]

      Throughout my study of the Melville Revival, I have dwelled upon postwar psychological warfare and preventive politics to suggest the relevant context for “the Melville boom” of the 1940s.  Although Ahab’s usefulness to Cold War ideologues has been noted,[1] the iconography of Ahab has not been linked to a particular Tory diagnosis of “romantic” fascism as an excrescence of democracy, of autodidacticism run amok, as the inevitable outcome of forces unleashed in the American and French Revolutions.  Nor has the Melville Revival been viewed as one episode in the perennial struggle within universities and the media to define and circumscribe radicalism in America, to set limits to the wandering Protestant imagination, to the mobility and penetration ascribed to the Romantic Wandering Jew.  Nativist radicals (Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Henry A. Murray, all admirers of Carlyle and Jung) have rejected “Marx” and “Freud”[2] as alien, dogmatic, deterministic, and divisive; the “class hatred” jacobinical Marxism spawns is held to be the product of heartless ratiocination.  Murray, Lasswell, and their circle (Mumford, Walter Langer, et al) have reproduced Melville’s most antimodern attitudes while claiming a vanguard, emancipating identity for themselves.  Murray, for instance, was offended by Melville’s sympathy with Melville’s character Pierre, in my opinion, not because Melville so nakedly attacked his parents, but because he exposed the family double bind: the structural conflict between truth and order suggesting that pluralist remedies could not harmonize classes and other antagonistic groups; that “virtuous expediency” was not an acceptable option for moralists torn up by the contradiction between Christian theory and practice.

     Although “pluralism” was once our official ideology, an exclusionary organicism called “multiculturalism” is enforced by corporatists who define and enforce “mental health”: the repressed alternative is free-thinking liberalism made efficacious through self-knowledge and social knowledge, through the retrieval of an accurate history.  Therefore, in practice, “pluralism” is hegemonic: gender, ethnic, and “racial” (or other “interest-group”) politics are legitimate, while class politics are Jewish and toxic unless populist, in which case the enemy is the International Jewish Mother grinding the face of the poor.  Unmanageable conflicts (today called “stress”) originate within individuals (no longer “victims”), who then are the major locus of reform.  The mind-managers have exploited the findings of depth psychology, co-opting it to diagnose and control potential dissidents.  They replicate Melville’s consciousness at its most defended and paranoid, that is, where he projects forbidden rage onto class enemies who must then be controlled.  These alluring villains are 1. the insatiably demanding and perfectionistic moral mother (usually masked by the scientific Jew: together they represent the Market) and 2. the mob generated or aroused by the hot brain and cold body of the Jewish scientist/moral mother/demagogue.  But this defense (projective identification as termed by object-relations theorists) cannot be acknowledged as such; Melville, a “great American writer,” like American élites should be manly, i.e., finally rational and in control, even as he drowns.  His obvious problems (both artistic and personal) are either delimited and suppressed or attributed to the aggressions and deficiencies of irrational women (who control the family) and other philistines (who control the market).

     However, Melville’s achievement may have been limited and distorted by his class position; his confusing switches may express the sado-masochistic social relations of middle-managers, of the professionals and intellectuals whose (partial) freedom of expression is contingent upon their willingness to dominate “the lower orders” on behalf of their superiors in the caste/class system; who “excel” by switching off the connection between idea and emotion, art and life, theory and practice, diagnosing Icarus instead.  Such ethereality leads to promotions: the reformed over-reacher enters a higher class as a molten disembodiment, a skylark.  Rescuing the confusing Lover/ Mother/Jew of the Home he has angered and worried, another celebrated poet (Sir John Collings Squire) privately recounted the submission and impassibility that suggests metamorphosis:[3]

 ”Beloved, do not fret or knit your brow,/  Never be feared for me,/  You have forced my heart to red eruption now: I am full of fire and free.

 It hurt me in that shaded room, you were/ So logical and blind,/  It hurt me in the autumn woods, you were/ So lovely and so kind.

 Whatever I see of you hurts me, visions come/ Of you, chameleon-wise,/ Surprising, expected, voluble and dumb-/ Oh, enigmatic eyes!

 Go on as you’ve begun/ With voice and form and face,/ Do what you will with me, for at their height,/ Great joy, great pain embrace.

 Hurt me, oh, hurt me, press the ichor out,/ Torture the thing that’s I,/ Let me but bear my destined fruit, I’ll shout/ With joy, and happy die.

 There was a time when you, with eyes averse,/ Said that I was a fool:/ I was hurt and glad: you’ll never hear me curse,/ Flogged in Apollo’s school!

 I cannot any longer separate/ One prompting from another,/ Or yet distinguish mate from inspiring mate,/ Joy sister, and pain brother.

 Everything pains, and everything exalts,/ The world’s ablaze with light,/ I do not think of merits or of faults,/ Even of wrong or right–

 Only I live for Poetry, only I long/ To fructify; only I cling/ To this conviction, now so sure and strong,/ That I was born to sing. ” [4]  

     For the ultra-conservative poet and critic, J.C. Squire (a British supporter of Italian Fascism), the incestuous intermingling of pain and pleasure produced numbness, then enlightenment: an object (“thing”) became subject (“I”) under “torture”; Squire was uplifted to a realm beyond good and evil, beyond pain, perhaps beyond the scrutiny of the hypercritical and constantly changing parent.  At the poem’s climax he is freed from competitors, blissfully confident of his identity as sole legitimate creator (or is he? there is more than a touch of irony in the strange ending).  Perhaps other fascist sympathizers have felt the same longing to “press the ichor out” to achieve a similar transcendence, but then are equally uneasy with their victories.

     To the extent that middle management refuses to know itself and evolve, it perforce must be either protofascist or ineffectual when faced with authoritarian challenges from the Right.  Refusing painful and embarrassing (because delegitimating) self-explorations, the social thought of the Melville Revivers is situated among Terror-Gothic responses to mass politics; as political Symbolists they may not analyze fascism except as irrational: their anti-intellectualism, revealed in a root-and-branch rejection of “science” is defined as entirely rational.  For the remainder of this section, we will examine the failure of Murray and other authoritarian psychologists (either Jungians or “ego psychologists”) to assess the enemy, protect life, and advance cultural freedom.

     Like Picasso, Murray resorted to primitivist escape, apparently from “civilized” women, but more likely from the rationalism, perseverance, and indignation associated with the working class brain.  Such irrationalism in high places has had consequences for public policy today.  One example was spelled out in my exegesis of the Langer report psychoanalyzing Hitler for the OSS in 1943, and made public in its “original” form in 1972 as a response to the “hippie-fascists” of the 1960s and 1970s, and as a demonstration that psychohistory could prevent errors in managing relations with other recent and future dictators.  The mostly favorable newspaper reviews suggest that antifascist intellectuals will not read a code they should have mastered, for instance that Langer’s portrait of Hitler resembled that of the German agent, George Sylvester Viereck, who, in 1923, imagined the explosive Hitler as Pierrot: androgynous, decadent and a Jew; that is, a mask for the New Woman (or woman with book), breeder of the new Hun (Eve/Cain: Ahab/working class).  The treason of the intellectuals reflects an ideological imperative to explain Nazism as the revolt of the masses, invidiously contrasted to the American people’s community managed by corporatist liberals, for instance, in the Committee for Economic Development.  A comparative structural analysis would have taken the heat off psychopathic Germany, making fascism one common response to economic crisis, and not simply identical with “monopoly capitalism” (the latter a populist or Stalinist formulation). 

    As I have been using the word, fascism is a cultural revolution seeking to reinstate authoritarian social relations and predictable outcomes in open-ended liberal, rationalist, democratic societies moving forward by educating its populace in the ways of critical thought and universalist ethics.  New Leftist critiques of mass culture should be compared to the nativist radicalism of Murray and his circle; there is an intertwined anti-Semitism and misogyny in recent radical scholarship that has not been identified, and which cripples attempts to diagnose structural determinants of cultural pathology.  This study should be contrasted with other analyses of censorship that see cultural pluralism as the norm, repression as aberrant, and invariably produced by extremists of the right and left; extremists whose type is Melville the frontiersman, the desperado defined against impartial liberal élites.

     Bartleby’s mysticism, immobility, and self-exile may express the remorse that followed Melville’s wicked, contaminating identification with the atheistic, materialistic, revolutionary bourgeoisie and their incendiary offspring, the combination whose deadly ambition has caused the absolutist Good Father to disappear: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions in life, and his relations with his kind,” observed Marx and Engels in a provocation of 1848.  “Where dat old man?” Melville asked in the voice of his infant son Malcolm, throughout his European travels of 1849.  But this parent never existed: he was always a phantom, perhaps what the child/apostate fears he demolished, the victim of his little (short Margothian) “gibes.”  Melville presented the type in his portrait of the Indian-hater, Colonel Moredock, an Ahab (or a Pierre, later a Nathan) of the backwoods: self-reliant, instructed by the unmediated contact with nature, and obsessed with avenging the massacre of his family, but unsated, finally killing Indians for the art and craft of it.  The frontiersman Moredock and his disease (monomania) were the predictable outcome of a world deprived of good kings: that is, patriarchs who obeyed God by fulfilling their paternal obligations toward their dependents, in this case enforcing an orderly western, i.e., Whiggish, expansion that would not arm and inflame the people.

      Only a mask can represent the non-existent “moderate man”; Picasso’s seated Pierrot, like Nietzsche’s wanderer, empty, a spectator and a nihilist, drops the mask to beg for “another mask.”  For Dr. Henry A. Murray (1893-1988), a “moderate conservative” strategically masked as a “left-wing democrat,” the longing for a tolerant father to protect him from the perfectionism of his mother represents a broader, equally hopeless, social yearning for a unifying myth to reconcile groups or forces that seem increasingly intent on annihilating one another; it is the imminent disaster that some of Melville’s characters thought they recognized in the class polarizations of the Civil War and the Gilded Age that followed.  For the merchant and proto-Christian Socialist Rolfe in Clarel (1876, and held by many Melvilleans to be Melville’s mouthpiece), the antagonists in one corner were all-too-liberal protestant pluralists who had abandoned the sane children of the vital center and who, like Derwent (a Matthew Arnold type), were fellow-travelling with the irreverent “Hegelised” German-Jewish geologist Margoth (“such a Jew!”); and in the other corner, their opposition: the deceptively reformist but ever tyrannical Catholic Church.  Where was the good father of the Center who would restrain the predatory side of capitalism that was driving workers into suicidal opposition?[5]

    [2] The errors and weaknesses of either figure are pounced upon to discredit institutional analysis, historical memory, and introspection, while what is valuable and original may be annexed to projects at odds with their goals.

     [3] Here is a montage J. C. Squire preserved in his scrapbook: The headline reads “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame”:  Underneath the romantic photo of the black-haired, suited, pipe-smoking, calmly gazing young Squire, the caption reads: “Because his parodies have been as critical and amusing as any of our generation; because he is one of the best known of the Georgian poets; because as a critic he is the most able young man in England, devoted to upholding conservative standards; because he is the  editor of the London Mercury, which under his direction has become the most successful literary magazine in England: and finally because he is now, happily, on a lecture tour of the United States.” Below, Squire pasted two cartoons: one apparently of G. K. Chesterton heading toward the Statue of Liberty on a miniature ocean liner; the other purporting to be “a study by an American girl of eleven” entitled “Do You Recognize Her?” The woman is a frightening figure whose attributes are literally present: “Raven hair, star-like eyes, arched eyebrows, seashell ears, rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, cherry lips, swan-like neck, and lily-white hands go to make the picture.”  (The eyes are actually represented by stars of David: are they the eyes that detect frauds?) I am certain that Squire did not recognize himself in the laudatory remarks quoted above. His letters and notes, his alcoholism, reveal the same self-loathing and sense of inauthenticity that I have found in all the Symbolists under examination.

            [4] Ms. “They Learn in Suffering,” J.C. Squire.  The last four verses were crossed-out.

           [5] See George Mosse on nationalization of the masses, Lasswell’s technocratic military élites; Murray’s call for an eclectic sacred text to replace the Bible; Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1940s.

Attention, comme toujours Laforet fait dans l’évenementiel ! Peut-être le plus grand temple fashion de Harajuku ( non, je n’oublie pas le 109 mais tout de même … ), cette fois-ci, Laforet organise, aujourd’hui même, le 20/09/09, un show très girly : Laforet Limited Collection, avec au programme :

Un défilé de MULTI-WAYS, la nouvelle griffe très prometteuse sur laquelle je reviendrai plus tard, avec 3 items indéit à gagner.

Un livre spécial de Spontania, un groupe japonais qui vogue sur le genre hip-hop/reggae ( je donne le nom des membres pour le paisir : Massatack et Tarantula ! Hohoho ), featuring AZU, jeune idole parmi tant d’autres avec un style plutôt marrant !

Un défilé Hello Kitty Colors Collection, une griffe par harajuku qui célèbre les 35 ans du fameux petit chat de Sanrio avec 3 items inédit à gagner.

Puis, un petit talk-show et pour finir, la suite du défilé MULTI-WAYS.

Bien-ŝur, pour agrémenter le tout, une floppée de marque parmi lesquelles : OLIVE des OLIVE, mysty Woman, fur fur, Algonquins, Super Lover, Alice and the Pirates, Hellcatpunk, Atelier Pierrot, Angelic Pretty, Metamorphose, Black Peace Now, h.NAOTO, Sexy Dynamite London et Putumayo.

Et une autre floppée de mannequins comme Akina Minami ( en guest ), Amo, Midori, Ikumi, Yumiko Hara, Lillian, Priscilla etc …

Hey

I’m currently working on a project that includes Pierrot clowns, and I’m finding it really fun. It’s so nice to do shots that I normally wouldn’t get to do! Of course this includes a lot of time spent in make up and comparatively short time in front of hte camera, but it gives you time to chat and play around (since I’m not the one doing the make up). On this particular shoot there was two children and their mother and since we ran very simple make up on the kids there was plenty of activity around. The make up was done by MUD by AKR/Ann Kristin Røder and if you wish to see more of her stuff click on the link on the right to check out her group on facebook.

So here’s a couple of samples from today’s shoot. Hope you enjoy!!

A great family portrait

Adorable!

Lisbet

Dur dur de trouver un estaminet ouvert le midi …

12h00, mon ventre crie famine. Je prends la voiture et direction les Monts des Flandres pour manger dans un estaminet, à la condition qu’il dispose d’une terrasse ! Je tente le “De Kauwackers”, j’y avais déjà fait une halte en juillet, mais manque de pot, il n’ouvre que le soir. Tout comme les 3 autres estaminets que j’ai croisé ce midi-là. Je tente un dernier niché au fond d’une route de campagne. Mais le vieux grand barbu ne m’a pas inspiré confiance.

- “Qu’est-il possible de manger ce midi ?”
- ” …” Pas de réponse, un doigt tendu vers un tableau en craie en guise de réponses. Des plats à base de poissons qui ne m’attirent pas vraiment, et les prix ont été exemptés de craie …

Sur les conseils de Flandrapié, je me dirige vers Godewarsvelde, petit village rendu célèbre par Pierrot, un cuisinier type Maïté qui animé une émission de cuisine dans les années 90 sur France 3 Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Il est aussi une figure légendaire de la région, tout comme le musicien Raoul qui est décédé il y a quelques années.

Nous avons déjeuné à l’Estaminet du Centre mis en valeur par le fameux Pierrot ainsi que par son accolyte de femme Bétrice. Il est bien noté sur la carte que ce ne sont pas eux les cuisiniers de cet estaminet – restaurant – brasserie mais un relais de promotion pour la ville et pour eux du même coup !

Qualifié “d’Estaminet des cuisiniers”, l’Estaminet du Centre propose une carte très riche, composée de plats typiques du Nord. Un menu du dimanche midi est également à la carte. A la vue des deux belles Harley Davidson qui trônaient à l’entrée, ainsi qu’au panneau qui autorisait les belles gimbardes à deux roues à stationner, ce restaurant doit-être un repaire des motards qui aiment silloner les belles routes de la région, accélérateur main droite, embrayage pied droit et femme assise derrière !

Flandrapié a opté pour le Potschevleesch, un plat qui contient différents types de viandes froides recouvert de gelée. Baby Po a failli à la tradition Nordiste pour un plat de moules de Bouchot de la Baie du Mont Saint Michel. J’ai pour ma part opté pour une flammiche au maroille. Les frites ont tout naturellement accompagnés ces plats, et une petite Ch’ti blonde en plus pour moi. En apéritif nous avons eu droit à du saucisson de cheval !

Les prix des plats sont un peu plus chers que dans les estaminets classiques de la région, mais la qualité est au rendez-vous. Béatrice a toujours un petit mot attentionné pour ses invités. La terrasse est bien agréable, à l’abri de la rue, pas trop de tables et qui restent éloignées les unes des autres avec chacune leur parasol. Bien agréable !

Pour vous y rendre au départ de Lille, suivre l’A25 direction Dunkerque, sortie Bailleul ou celle d’avant Nieppe, et suivre tout simplement le panneau Godewarsvelde. Côté tourisme, seuls les estaminets valent le coup, Raoul et Pierrot sont bien plus connus que le clocher qui trône au milieu de la Place.

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