BIOGRAPHIES: 'G-Z'

U.S. Grant, Memoirs of U.S. Grant –

It is well known that virtually the last thing U.S. Grant did with his life was to write these memoirs: the last courageous act of a simple man of duty. In Liddell-Hart’s biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, he quotes "Uncle Billy" in respect to his friend Grant: Grant is "not himself a brilliant man, . . . but he is a good and brave soldier . . . sober, very industrious and kind as a child. Yet he has been held up as careless, criminal, a drunkard, tyrant and everything horrible." Elsewhere, Sherman wrote that Grant "has honesty, simplicity of character, singleness of purpose and no hope or claim to usurp civil power. His character, more than his genius will reconcile armies and attach the people." To this assessment, Liddell-Hart adds his own: "Grant had more inspiration than precision of thought."

As a Grant partisan myself, I include these observations, if for no other reason than as an antidote to the sneers he drew from better born men like Henry Adams and Winston Churchill. Grant’s prosaic achievements in a noble cause stand up where others failed,. Years later, under duress, he gave this unadorned retelling of his role in terms which are only deceptively prosaic. His words are simple and direct and remarkably comforting. It may not be Homeric, but Grant’s language recall Montaigne’s comment about Vergil’s abjuration of "verbal artifices":

"[T]here was no need of keen and subtle conceits; [his] language is full and forcible, with natural and unfailing vigor . . . .There is nothing that signifies effort, nothing that drags; every part moves on at the same pace. [His] writing is of a manly texture; [he was] not concerned about florid ornaments. It is not an effeminate eloquence and merely faultless: it is sinewy and solid, and does not so much please as it fills and entrances the mind, and entrances most the strongest minds. When I behold those noble modes of expression, so vivid, so profound, I do not say this is speaking rightly, I say it is thinking rightly. It is the vivacity of the imagination which exalts and inflates the words. It is the understanding that makes a man eloquent. To these, mere insight was one with language, and large conceptions with appropriate words."

Robert Graves, Good-By To All That –  Insofar as war is the dominant topic, my reading of its literature is pretty much confined to the Iliad, The Red Badge of Courage, and maybe War and Peace – all three works of fiction. Not much else occurs to me beyond broader histories like Churchill’s and Grant’s Memoirs. This book, Good-Bye to All That, does not seem any more enlightening. Beyond its obvious “historical document” value[1], its literary merit is not extraordinary and does not strive to be. With chronological detail it fortifies the author’s encounters as a young man with the familiar lies, cowardice, vanity, duplicity, and the courage (those “morally compelled to go on until . . . killed”) -- and the unspeakably forlorn and gruesome.   I have read this biography twice and I still think that the best thing about it is its title. And even that’s because it suggests the disillusionment which one would expect from a much older man. Graves, however, says that he wrote this “autobiography” at the age of 33, an arrogance that we would waive for an Alexander, a Churchill, or a Napoleon. It’s not all that becoming to a minor poet of World War I[2].   And yet insofar as it dwells chiefly on his time in that war, that is the book’s chief merit – though not so much as to justify the title. For his war service, of course, I give Graves full credit, but it is also hard for him to get past the family pedigree and connections which he elaborates in the first third of the book. He also takes un-convincing pains to shrug them off (to do so he has to mention them, of course), but nevertheless I had to smile with some envy at the mention of the family’s “Shakespeare reading circle” which he admits to having joined at the age of 16.    Graves also reveals both Irish (Protestant) and German family ties and confesses a greater fondness for the German side of the family[3]. He speaks with fondness about annual visits to his grandfather’s house near Munich and visits to his aunt’s remote 9th Century castle in the mountains.   As a teenager, for a variety of reasons he seems to have attended several schools. Getting past his oblique score-settling (in which he abjures the satisfaction of giving names), his broader observations are interesting, although in this case familiar:   . . . . “[P]reparatory schoolboys live in a world completely dissociated from home life. They have a different vocabulary, different moral system, different voice, and on their return to school from the holidays the change over from home-self to school-self is almost instantaneous, the reverse process takes a fortnight at least. . . . In England the parents of the governing classes virtually finish all intimate life with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempt on their part to insinuate home feeling into school life is resented.”   Otherwise, what value there may be to these long-ago recollections is the detail of quotidian incidents of life at an English public school in the early parts of the 20th Century. That, and the foreshadowing of the cataclysm to come: “At least one in three of my generation at school was killed.”               Upon the outbreak of the war, surrendering his pacifist principles, he takes a commission and is eventually sent to the front – where he continues to meet and reflect on men of renown and good family. There is more name-dropping[4], but generally the tone is as before – insights, a bit world-weary, of a precocious young man. This is catnip to publishers, of course, but it would go nowhere without the precocity and the occasional revealing detail. Thus we glimpse an inside contention about the difference between “Welsh” and Welch” (a distinction subtly adhered to thereafter in spelling alone, but with implicit meaning), rats, telephone wires sagging in the slimy trenches, the greater fear of silent rifle bullets over screaming shells, and the hope for a “cushy one,” an injury sufficient to leave a soldier alive but incapable of fighting further. Old timers “look forward to a battle because a battle gives more chances of a cushy one, in the legs or arms, than trench warfare. In trench warfare the proportion of head wounds is much greater.”               And then there was this:   “The best time to get wounded was at night and in the open, because a wound in a vital spot was less likely. Fire was more or less unaimed at night and the whole body was exposed. It was also convenient to be wounded when there was no rush on the dressing–station services, and when the back areas were not being heavily shelled. It was most convenient to be wounded, therefore, on a night patrol in a quiet sector.”            There are horrible passages of routine life in the trenches—too horrible to believe they went on for years.   “From the morning of September 24th to the night of October 3rd I had in all eight  hours of sleep. . . .  We had no blankets, greatcoats, or waterproof sheets. We had no time or material to build new shelter, and the rain continued. Every night we went out to get in the dead of the other battalions. . . . . After the first day or two the bodies swelled and stank. I vomited more than once while super-intending the carrying. . . . The color of the dead faces changed from white to yellow-grey, to red, to purple, to green, to black, to slimy.”   Graves also retails stories of the English reaction to the French – a “thoroughly unlikable people. . . . It is worse than inhospitality here, for we are all fighting for their dirty little lives.” The French even charged the British hospital train for using its rails in transporting the wounded[5]. He mentions the inestimable value of morale: trench foot was caused by depression in bad, “don’t care” battalions. Company survival on the battlefield and smart parade ground drill are interrelated. Patriotism is irrelevant, for one’s country, after all, is a mixed affair, it even contains civilians down to the “detested grades of journalists.”[6] He inserts an unexpected commendation of the dedication of Roman Catholic chaplains.               Personally I think it is worthwhile also to record an observation he makes without cynicism, one repeating almost 100 years later. Among the best divisions were the Seventh, the Twenty-ninth, Guards’, and First Canadians.   “The mess agreed that the most dependable British troops were the Midland county regiments, industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire troops, and the Londoners. The Ulstermen, Lowland Scots and Northern English were pretty good. . . . English southern country regiments varied from good to very bad. All overseas troops were good.”   He dismisses accounts of German atrocities as “ridiculous” and then generally adopts a tu quoque attitude. But most of this account is anecdotal on both sides. He gives a brief but diverting account of his marriage to 18-year-old Nancy Nicholson while in England on recovery.               His service was genuine. He was wounded and also suffered neurasthenia (shell shock). And so when at war’s end he became a pacifist and (joined by his wife) a Bolshevist sympathizer, I do not hold it against him -- not even the egocentric artistic Bohemianism[7]. But the overall theme of the book then becomes threadbare. More names are dropped, but little is revealed: John Masefield, T.E. Lawrence, Osbert Sitwell[8]. There are random recollections, probably chronological. He mentions hard times with his growing family living on almost no income, a failed adventure into small business, and poetry volumes that do not sell. These are diverting enough for later readers like me, but not sufficiently vivid or insightful to make an essential historical document[9].               The last act (of the book, not Graves’s much longer life) is set in Egypt, where he took a job lecturing at the university at Cairo. There is no reason to have expected (as I found myself doing) that here would be a wonderful mixing of the ambiguous miasma of Durrell with hilarious/sad Nabokovian professors obliviously soldiering on in an unfamiliar element. But for the quoting of some earnest student essays, there is no such thing.   Then the book ends, trailing off as he acknowledges.   1. I will skip over Graves’s passages on the eventual decision by his comrade Siegfried Sassoon to become a conscientious objector. Sassoon was obviously a brave soldier. His explanation for his CO status that the British mission had become one of “aggression and conquest” does not withstand the historical record. Graves’s defense of him is no more than special pleading for a friend. 2. According to Graves, “poets of importance” killed in the war were Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. 3. He even seems to have used the family Von Ranke name during the war without embarrassment. 4. “I looked around to see who could possibly be called Siegfried Sassoon . . . . He was obvious.” There is also a swipe at Longfellow: “I have always been sorry for English books stranded in France, whatever their demerits; so I accepted [Evangeline] and later brought it home.” 5. After the war, anti-French feeling among ex-soldiers amounted to an obsession, he says. 6. Count me in 7. Except in the epilogue (the book’s best written section), he never mentions his mistress, Laura Riding. 8. Actually the pages on Thomas Hardy were diverting – particularly Hardy’s irritation at being called “pessimistic,” which is certainly what I have thought about him. 9. I do not wish to be misunderstood. His war experiences could not have been more vivid. He was a poet and a soldier and I salute him. The connection between his years in the trenches and “Beowulf lying wrapped in a blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet” is perfect.

Helen Keller, The Autobiography of Hellen Keller –

If it weren’t true, if the author’s personality, intelligence, and abilities were not genuine and overwhelming, these recollections by the indomitable Keller would be no of more interest that one of those endless “New Yorker” articles. Indeed, I confess that when many years ago I first read Dickens’s American Notes, I was struck by the possibility that the story of Laura Bridgman (or possibly that of Keller) might have been fictional. They seemed so similar. But both stories, though true, are not quite enough to constitute a biography.

In Keller’s case, the people who later decided to focus on the drama of Anne Sullivan may have had the better idea. Keller herself – who seems to have written this autobiography at a young age – leaves her teacher far in the background, albeit with respect and possibly love. But it is this teacher whose constancy must have been as remarkable in its own way as the persistent pertinacity of Keller herself.

Apart from this, there is not much more to write about this short piece of work except the author’s obvious love and debt to Alexander Graham Bell. Today we know him only as the inventor of the telephone. Keller knew him as a kind and interested man who had the humanity to care for a child. What is missing from this callow biography is an understanding of how others made her life possible.

Alvin Kernan, In Plato’s Cave –

Kernan is a retired professor of literature, chiefly associated with Yale. He would surely not claim that his life itself was full of historical incident, and nothing in the narrative suggests otherwise. If the book has any transcendent value, it is the author’s not unfamiliar history in university life during a time of intellectual transition.

`To position himself for his steady snobbery once he has made it in academia, Kernan gives a few self-disparaging anecdotes from his early life: a tawdry affair with a Bennington co-ed while he was in college (did we really have to know?), his supposedly solid but second-rate education at Williams (the smear is clearly more directed to the college than the student), a disappointing third while at Oxford (but did you go to Oxford?). On the other hand, for those like me who really do find themselves interested in the trivia of literary gossip, the narrative is engaging, while stylishly wistful and occasionally bitter.

Kernan apparently began teaching at Yale in the late 1950s and retired (having passed through Princeton and Harvard on the journey) in the 1990s. From his vantage point, he saw the rise of "The New Criticism" to the current triumph (I doubt this) of deconstructionism and feminism.

I remember Clinton Rossiter saying in a seminar, with some obvious regret, that it is almost impossible to end a book on contemporary affairs without being a bit optimistic about the future. And so Kernan too ends with an attempt at peacemaking. He repeatedly reflects that a democratic system of education is both unattainable and foolish, "and a few elite universities and colleges continue to occupy the top of an educational hierarchy that stubbornly will not altogether level out." But he is a beaten man and he eventually concludes with the banality of a Los Angeles Times editorial:

"Absolute and universal truth does seem increasingly a will-o’-the wisp, and certainly there is no such thing as one, exactly right, way to interpret a text. Words are tricky, and good sense requires that each of us question their authority and the motives of those who use them to construct ideologies that masquerade as truth. Increased availability of information by electronic means can only contribute to the development of an informed citizenry."

At least he left out the butt-end of such pablum: "Only time will tell."

Georges LeFebvre, Napoleon -- LeFebvre, a French scholar, published this book in the 1930s. (It is actually in two volumes.) What I read was a translation, which may account for the irritating aloof, summary style. On the other hand, what are the French if not aloof and irritating?

From the outset, the author is at pains to explain that the book is not intended to be a biography, which it certainly is not. Instead Napoleon appears to be a continuation of LeFebvre’s earlier history of the French Revolution (also in two volumes), but given a more pertinent title considering the time frame covered. The merits of this book totally elude me. Considering the length of the period covered and the depth of detail provided, it is remarkably uninformative. Only rarely does LeFebvre rise above the facts to furnish anything resembling an insight. He does venture at one point that notwithstanding Napoleon's well-deserved reputation for innovation, he was nevertheless a "Mediterranean" general, meaning that he refined his style in his early Italian campaigns (rich countryside, geographical features on a manageable scale) but applied them with less success on the broad expanses of the northern German plains, and with eventual disaster in Russia. (LeFebvre later applies the same analysis to the French performance in Spain.)

There also appears a helpful passage describing Napoleon's army and management style. Giving some content to the aphorism that every French soldier carried a marshall's baton in his knapsack, LeFebvre writes,

"Drilling was regarded as useless and was consequently neglected during periods of respite. The Napoleonic soldier bore no resemblance to the soldier of the garrison: he was a warrior who improvised in the revolutionary tradition, and he retained that same quality of independence. Since the officers, risen from the ranks, were his comrades of yesterday, and since he might himself be promoted tomorrow, he took little notice of rank; for him, formal and mechanical discipline was unbearable; he would come and go as he pleased, and he obeyed only under fire. Few armies have ever tolerated insubordination to such a degree, where mass demonstrations, isolated rebellions, and mutinies were common currency. Napoleon thundered, but always proved more indulgent than the government; he regarded the soldier basically as a fighting man, and his great concern was that his men be eager for battle and plunge themselves into it desperately."

I also learned a bit about Wellington here, though obviously more is available elsewhere.

"He was a sober character and blessed with an iron constitution. Like the Emperor, he could work long hours and do with little sleep. He had a clear and precise mind of a positive cast, with good organizing ability. He was a man of cool and tenacious will-power, though this did not exclude an ability to take bold and calculated risks. . . . [W]hen he came to power he proved extremely authoritarian, never allowing his officers -- who were incidentally of rather mediocre calibre -- any initiative whatsoever. . . . He treated his officers with a haughty disdain, and had an unlimited contempt for the common people, and for his own soldiers who were of the people . . . [H]e was essentially an infantry leader, hardly making any use of the cavalry, and very rarely pursuing the enemy. . . . [O]f all the Emperor's enemies he was the one who enjoyed the pre-eminent advantage of having given mature thought to the tactics to be adopted in his encounters with the French."

Basil Liddell-Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, Statesman --

Although this biography of William Tecumseh Sherman is useful in several particulars, surely it was only on the strength of Liddell-Hart’s reputation as a clear-sighted analyst of military men and events that it was even brought before the public in 1929. The subtitle to the book, for example, is more jejune than accurate -- and to the extent that it is accurate, is beside the point. The purpose should have been no broader than to throw a light on Sherman’s strategic view as the key to the Union’s victory. As such, the subject -- which the author calls "the working of a man’s mind" -- would have made a useful chapter in Great Captains Unveiled (q.v.) and the author would have been at liberty to illustrate his chief thesis by example (and by a shorter book). This would have been sufficient and, as an apology for that strategic view, the book would still be a reliable resource.

For all that Liddell-Hart means to say is that Sherman took Napoleonic methods into modern warfare, applying in the bargain his own unique and not altogether unattractive personality. By the time of the Vicksburg campaign -- at which point he had been in the field slightly more than a year -- Sherman had arrived at the conclusion that "the way to decide wars and win battles was ‘more by the movement of troops than by fighting.’" Strategy, in other words, is the "master" of the tactics and its purpose is "to minimize fighting . . . by playing on the mind of the opponent." Thus Liddell-Hart, the chronicler of wars, finds it remarkable that during the march through Georgia, "violence to property was accompanied by so little personal violence, and that homicide and rape were almost unknown." This is not to discount the suffering it caused, merely to note that the march’s destruction was less horrible than its memory and its objective largely psychological. As Liddell-Hart puts it, if an opponent is to admit that his might did not prove right, "it must be wrung from living men who can pass on the lesson."

Hence Sherman wrote at the time of the Atlanta siege,

"If people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty I will answer that war is war, and not popularity seeking. If they want peace they and their relatives [!] must stop war."

And although the author has succeeded in making and illustrating this point, my chief cavil is with the subject being offered in the guise of a full biography, which it is not, even as it tries to be.

Three-quarters or more of the book dwells almost entirely on Sherman’s three active years at war, with only sketchy views of the remainder of his life, which was not otherwise punctuated by significant incidents or event insights. After all, Sherman’s private life was conducted in banking and railroads, in which he did not stand out in the rogue’s gallery of that time.

But it is true that early in the war Sherman did get the reputation of being mentally unstable. Liddell-Hart explains this as the work of a vengeful reporter to whom Sherman had refused a pass to cross the lines. The general having that day been rebuffed at a personal meeting with the Secretary of War for an "insane request" for more troops, the reporter simply made hay with the phrase. In fact, however, but for the bitter (and just) resentment he held toward the press, Sherman seems to have been uncommonly steady. One of his generals recalled that like great men in all times Sherman became even calmer in times of excitement and general alarm because his plans had already been laid "based on full study of contingencies." It was that close attention to supply, topography, and the enemy’s state of mind (not to mention his own "logical ruthlessness") that was the basis of Sherman’s success. It was his plan alone -- agreed to readily enough by Grant, but without overt exuberance -- to cut himself off from his base and set out with his army for Atlanta, opposed by Joseph Johnston, one of the South’s very best generals.

Liddell-Hart is almost lyrical on the qualities of the "army of athletes" which Sherman created for this move. And once he has described this campaign day by day, the author then details the second stage, less well known but even more rigorous, in which Sherman wheeled north from Savannah and proceeded through the Carolinas across numerous rivers and swamps, to Johnston’s final surrender at a rail station in North Carolina.

The negotiations were conducted in the immediate wake of the Lincoln assassination. Sherman and Johnston were almost as outsized as Lee and Grant. Liddell-Hart, however, is unable to convey even a hint of the poignancy that we remember from Appomattox. Perhaps it was not present, and that may account for the scene not being widely recalled. There was also, I admit, a tincture of the opera bouffe as the Confederate Cabinet member Breckenridge showed up and tried to jockey for terms, and in Washington Stanton pressed for blood. But the author even misses this quality because the fact is that Liddell-Hart is not a very good writer, ironic in one who so values clarity. A sample:

"You think, perchance, rugged reader, that the picture [of West Point] is too blackly shaded? You would argue that this Spartan training makes men and that the system of an institution which produced so many great leaders is above criticism? But much depends upon where one puts the emphasis."

On the other hand, Liddell-Hart’s descriptions of Sherman’s developing strategic views and day-to-day maneuvers also give him a platform for his own comments on strategy and tactics, the subject which he is known for:

"In war as in wrestling the attempt to throw the opponent without loosening [one’s] foothold and balance tends to self-exhaustion, increasing in disproportionate ratio to the strain put upon the opponent’s resistence. For even if at the outset successful, it rolls the enemy back in snowball fashion, towards his reserves, supplies and reinforcement."

"Sherman was a master strategist because he was a born quartermaster."

"This habit of gambling contrary to reasonable calculations [specifically, Albert Sidney Johnston’s choice to attack at Shiloh, though the element of surprise had been lost, so as not to forfeit the confidence of the troops] is a military vice which, as the pages of history reveal, has ruined more armies than any other cause. Cromwell was one of the rare generals who had the strength of will to resist the temptation; even Marlborough succumbed once and Malplaquet[1] was the apple which preceded his fall."

"The conception of a single objective, and its unswerving pursuit are contrary to the very nature of war, and lead commonly to the impalement of oneself. In contrast, a duality of objective assures the essential elasticity whereby a commander can not only confuse and deceive his opponent but assure himself the opportunity of penetrating the opponent’s guard and achieving at least one of his alternative ends."

Endnotes

1. I believe Malplaquet is still considered a Marlborough victory, however.

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill –

This is not gripping reading. When I was in college, it was considered a useful text to introduce freshmen to the liberal tradition. I didn’t read it then, and thank God because I would have been bored. Reading it now is somewhat more engaging, but only after a lifetime of hearing and reading about similar English men of letters and their (apparently very small) circle.

The text is devoid of humor. I thought we had a joke at one point when he described his feelings as similar to those of a Methodist discovering sin; alas, on second reading it turned out that he was entirely serious. Moreover, much of the book is of the "and then I read" variety (followed by the longer "and then I wrote" section), and the first quarter of it is a blizzard of titles unfamiliar to me.

I will say that Mills’s admiration and respect for his father is remarkable. His father was obviously no Johnson, but the portrait of him is detailed and deferential; any father would be grateful for such memories. The reason that the overall effort is so dull, however, is that Mill is an obvious narcissist who genuinely believes that his intellectual history and method of thought will be instructional to others. And yet, to give him credit, Mill is not at all condescending toward his peers. He analyzes, for example, his lengthy and initially sympathetic correspondence with Compte, including its decline and cessation, without any snide or "more in sadness than anger" conclusions. He also dilates at some length on the virtues of his wife, the widow of a close friend – although I must say that while the words were all correct, the expression was no more personal than his account of the corn laws.

But to return to Mill’s methodology of thought, I imagine that this book continues to be read chiefly for that now stale purpose, but the impression left is that of a smart kid grown old who can’t really enjoy himself. Indeed there are several passages in which the author describes a youthful period of depression during which everything looked bleak until he read the poetry of Wordsworth. (True to form, he is quick to point out that Wordsworth really doesn’t qualify as a great poet, but oh well.) There have been great biographies and autobiographies, but this is not one of them.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory —

Once I recall reading the observation of a police detective that children are often excessively accurate when it comes to details. A child, for example, might remember a table as "the one with a scratch like a J in the leg." Without the adult impulse to take a larger perspective, a child’s world is uncluttered, sensual and intense — and of course innocent and non-judgmental.

It seems to me that poets never quite surrender the first three of these qualities, indeed that they strive to retain them. Nabokov (whose poetry I have not read) is a sublime example of this. From his childhood, he recalls, each letter of the alphabet has been assigned (by whom?) a color, and it is as important as any other effort in the rest of his life to define and refine with more and more exactitude the tint, the intensity, the subtle nature of each of those colors. As with Faulkner’s "past," Nabokov’s childhood isn’t simply childhood and it isn’t even past.

And this introduces another of the author’s idiosyncrasies. As though anyone who has read his fiction ever doubted it, he reveals that he is not a "believer" in time. By this he means chronological time, of course, for otherwise time is the warp and woof of this so-called autobiography called, after all, Speak, Memory. A poet’s interest in time, if he is interested in it at all, is secondary. Often it is irrelevant. A poet is interested in position. And so this work is not really an autobiography; it is the author’s reminiscence which gives him his unique sense of position.

As a writer, Nabokov’s position (this is my observation, not his) transcends two centuries. He is a 20th Century writer in the Conrad, Joyce, Faulkner tradition, entertaining himself with elaborate tricks, more elusive and illusive than allusive. But his unembarrassed use of language is a complete repudiation of the century’s second-rate writers, Hemingway, Maughm, et al. In this, Nabokov is in the tradition of Hardy, the poet-novelist for whom the details make the meaning. Once, in a different Nabokovian work, I recall him comparing a work of literature to a tapestry; on the first view one admires the picture, thereafter, the stitching. No author that I have every read has the vocabulary of Nabokov. He is not afraid of adjectives, he owns them, embraces them, manipulates them.

Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander --

Novelists make good -- and reliable -- popular historians because they are not only sensitive to the rules that oblige them to distinguish between fact and conjecture, but because they also know how to tell a story. In the case of Alexander, the story is so rich that Mary Renault has told it in both idioms. This is her non-fiction effort, an engaging retelling of a famous history. Renault explores Alexander’s unusual situation with his parents, his equally curious (and praiseworthy) relationship with the captured family of the defeated Darius, his impulsive marriage to Roxanne, and his ambiguous relationships with Hephaestion and Bagoas, the Persian slave boy. She also comments with insight on Alexander’s political calculations, both large and small. One matter that I was unfamiliar with was the enormous funeral train that was devised to carry the dead king from the place of his death in Persia to Alexandria, the city he had founded several years before in Egypt at the outset of his march of conquest. This event is also illustrated by an elaborate drawing (from a much later period) based on the contemporary descriptions of the cortege. And this leads me to recall that the book has an additional feature that commends it: it is chockablock with wonderful photographs of the scenes discussed in the book as well as the statuary, architecture, and pottery that survives from the times.

Ian Skidmore, Owain Glyndwr --

Unless one has an interest in either the history of Wales or minor Shakespearean characters, he would have no particular reason to read this biography. But as I fall into the latter category, I selected Skidmore’s book to learn what else was to be known about the "magician" of Henry IV who claimed to be able to call forth the "spirits from the vasty deep."

What I learned is that Glyndwr, a touchy but wealthy country gentleman of Wales, had been in dispute with a rival English border baron, Lord Grey of Ruthin. This was manageable when Richard II was king, because he generally sided with the Welshman. But everything changed after Henry of Lancaster, piqued at a Welsh raid on Richard’s stolen baggage train which was being forwarded to him, became king. He and his counsels came to favor Grey, disastrously in the case of a land dispute the outcome of which eventually put Glyndwyr in the field with other Welsh nationalists. Unlike roughly simultaneous agitations elsewhere on the Celtic fringe, "[o]nly in Wales had there been a conception, and that faint and uncertain, of a wider strategy than mere robbery and reprisal." In the event, the revolt was only successful for a few years and ultimately came to grief at the seige of Harlech Castle, Glyndwyr fortunate to escape with his life.

Skidmore, however, will have none of the legend that Glyndwyr was a "bluff wild man of the hills," describing him instead as "a cultivated courier [courtier?], a patron of the arts, a lawyer, a poet of talent and a soldier with a long record of service to the crown." Although this may be true, it seems odd that this wealthiest and most cultivated of men simply disappeared from view when his rebellion had failed, his death lost to history, his burial place unknown. Indeed, like the peasant tales of Russian czars (and like rumors about Richard himself), Glyndwyr was said for years to be living as a hermit or under disguise.

In any event, the book itself delivers the narrative in a rather choppy fashion and gives unmistakable indication of being padded with lengthy quotations from contemporary documents. (The hard data on Glyndwyr is evidently somewhat thin.) I will say this about the documents, however. Assuming that they are not translated from Latin, and there is no indication that they were, Skidmore brings their spellings up to current forms. (I have read a version of Canterbury Tales which also used this same method to marvelous success.) The result is that the English is entirely recognizable to the modern reader, even in its most formal delivery. Not all of these documents are from the court archives, by the way. Skidmore has located and made use of the chronicles of Adam of Usk, a minor Welsh lawyer of the period, whose observations Skidmore uses throughout the book to give his often revealing glimpses of the action and characters.

I should also add that some of Skidmore’s digressions are enlightening. I learned that the parchment service contracts issued by the English crown to its soldiers were then torn roughly down the middle, one half going to the soldier, the other to the clerks. If they did not fit together on pay day, a forgery was detected. And "because the edges resembled a bite, the parchment contracts were called in the army ‘indentures.’"

Finally, there are the glimpses of the more prominent historical characters. For example, except for his (fictional) confrontation with Hotspur at Shrewsbury, Young Prince Hal appears in the Henry IV plays chiefly as the youthful wastrel with a brain; but then in Henry V we hear him tell the French princess that he is nothing more than a "plain soldier." The years in Wales explain the transformation. Skidmore calls him

"a just if narrow man. He was considerate and an engaging warmth emerges from his letters. A dutiful and loving son, he was still capable of engaging in a power-struggle with his father when politics demanded it. He had had no childhood and it showed. He had been a fighting soldier since he was twelve."

He was also evidently known as the "Prince of Priests," because his friends (including John Oldcastle) were Lollards. His father the king is described by Skidmore as "endlessly forgiving" (recasting Hotspur’s contemptuous dismissal of him as a "politician" in Henry IV). And there is this satisfying description of the actual end of Shakespeare’s villain Northumberland, who tormented the cornered Richard and later abandoned his own son at Shrewsbury:

"At 66, despite the precautions he had always taken against just such an eventuality the Earl fell in battle.. . . [His] body was parboiled in a pickle of cloves, cummin and anise, quartered and set up in spikes in York, Newcastle, Berwick and Lincoln where he was as offensive in death as he had been in life."

C.P. Snow, Variety of Men –

As a published writer, C.P. Snow is known for his sequence of novels called Strangers and Brothers. But he was also a practicing scientist of some eminence, and during World War II he held a prominent position which also exposed him to a third circle of experiences.

I am in no position to judge his quality in any of these career areas, not even as an author, since Strangers and Brothers still lies in my future. But I have read Variety of Men, an idiosyncratic series of personality sketches of men of his time and acquaintance. It would make sense to say that these are all men whose measure Snow was able to take on close inspection, and for the most part they are. But he never met Stalin, the last of those he discusses, and that odd inclusion detracts from the balance of the book. The Stalin sketch, however, adds to the book’s modest length – which even then is achieved with a little extra white space between the lines. I get the impression that Snow might have had difficulty finding a publisher had he submitted a shorter manuscript.

In any event, even leaving out Stalin, the men whom Snow selected for discussion make a somewhat unlikely fraternity. This is not immediately apparent, since the first two contributions are based on his Cambridge intercourse with Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel physicist, and the mathematician G.H. Hardy. Like all of the men covered here, both of them were at least a generation older than Snow, thus contributing to a certain pedagogical awe in the writer’s tone.

But as the essays continue it becomes increasingly obvious that the subjects are more and more remote to the experiences of the author. His association with Lloyd George, it is true, was by all means worth the effort to describe. (If the account is accurate, Snow was essentially summoned to the great man’s table in a hotel dining room during an otherwise lonely holiday season, a gesture that occasioned a genuine lasting relationship.) But as we go on, the subjects appear to have been less and less intimate with the author. He seems to have spent one pleasant afternoon with Robert Frost in Berkeley during Nobel Prize season and had a similar experience with Einstein on a muggy summer day on Long Island. During World War II he attended some business meetings where Churchill was present and he also participated an interview with Dag Hammerskjold at the United Nations.

Had it been I, of course, even the briefest encounter with such famous men would have given me a lifetime of pretense and anecdotes. But no book. But mixed with Snow’s own personal accomplishments, these recollections certainly qualify him to publish his recollections without apology. In fact, I stand in admiration of his ability to produce a full essay about these men. Each of them is insightful and revealing of the man under discussion, even when the information could often have been extracted from other sources.

And yet this still brings me back to the section on Stalin. First I will say that I was struck by some of Snow’s observations about Trotsky, though they too were not obviously not personally observed. He is described as a gifted orator and snob, incredulous at the rise of the dour, prosaic Stalin. Trotsky was “the sort of man of action intellectuals would like to be, particularly if they don’t know much about the inside of politics.” But . . .

“Trotsky was not a good judge of men: in particular, he hadn’t a nose for danger, which is one of the most essential of the politician’s gifts.”

Let me stipulate to the possible accuracy of Snow’s conclusions about Trotsky – including the chilling insight about his obliviousness to danger. But what an irony that Snow should comment in this particular essay on who is and who is not a “good judge of men.” A writer of a book of character sketches will obviously see himself as such an accomplished judge. But here the evidence of Snow’s own judgment of this man is virtually non-existent. Earlier in the book it was disconcerting to read his opinion that Lenin was a great political genius. Stripped of any notions of the virtues of man, this might have some residual validity.

But Stalin? Yes, it is interesting to learn that Stalin was well read in Russian literature and theater. But the important thing is that he was a murderer, repeatedly, indifferently, and on a colossal scale. The most troubling thing I learned, therefore, was not about Stalin but about Snow himself. This man who was obviously aware of the fact that Stalin was responsible for killing millions of his countrymen was more or less willing to give him a pass because

“[i]t is foolish to think that western societies have reached the only possible plateau of social organization. . . . There are . . . many things which the Soviet system does better than we do. It is the best hope . . . . for the next generation.”

Keeping himself on the polite side of opinion, Snow makes a few obligatory animadversions. Stalin was “harshly realistic” even “brutal.” He had a “paranoid streak.” But he also had a “single-minded strength” and his choices “would have to be made in a similar fashion whoever was making them.” After all, his “maneuvers” were about “nothing less than how to run a great ramshackle, muddled country.” Hence the agricultural starvation and persecution of the kulaks in the oh-so-necessary collectivization of Soviet agriculture is “hard to write about in cool and abstract terms,” but we do have a longer view, don’t we? And the purges, the disappearance and murder of virtually everyone who had contact with him? They are essentially undiscussed or dismissed as the by-product of a “paranoiac” who otherwise successfully turned his country into the second most powerful in the world.

This is completely unforgivable and far too representative of how an intellectual life can take intelligent men in the direction of tyranny and cruelty. The people who died at Stalin’s hands are estimated to be between 20 to 40 million. Is that “cool and abstract”enough?


Alan Villiers, Captain James Cook --

Cook must have been an enormously talented and determined man. Unfortunately for his reputation, his accomplishments were chiefly negative -- viz. he reported authoritatively that the Pacific Ocean is essentially empty of large land masses. If it had been otherwise, Cook would more likely be remembered as the Columbus of the 18th Century. The other problem for Cook's reputation is that his personality has always been a cipher. Villiers has clearly done the best research possible in the available record, but it is apparent that his subject chose never to reveal himself. One has the impression of a quiet but commanding personality, which leaves a biographer little to work with.

A.N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle –

Wilson is obviously a non-believer who seems to entertain some doubts about Paul’s sincerity as well. That is not to say that he questions Paul’s enormous influence or intellect. Indeed, he maintains that the entire idea of the Eucharist was created by Paul out of whole cloth and that it was nothing less than his genius which stamped this idea on the church so completely that Christianity without it is inconceivable although there is nothing to support it in the Gospels themselves. Perhaps Wilson’s most unusual speculation is that as part of High Priest’s guard in the Jerusalem temple, Paul may actually have been played some role in Jesus’s crucifixion. and that he may therefore actually have had some role.

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (tr. by Anthea Bell) -

 Though not well-remembered today, before World War II Stefan Zweig was an extremely well-known European writer and translator. Personally, I had never heard of him until I went looking for a book on Central Europe in preparation for a vacation. I was thinking about a summary of the Hapsburg history, but this idiosyncratic memoir of the first four decades of the 20^th Century suited me just fine.

After about mid-way through the book, however, I realized that Zweig himself didn't suit me just fine. I begin, therefore, with the following specific observation. Within the span of time covered by The World of Yesterday occurred the catastrophe of World War I when Zweig was in his 30s. His recollections of his own peculiar social environment during those years are both vivid and interesting, but viewed in light of what others suffered, it must be said that he lived a life of relative comfort troubled only by the stress of anxiety and the absence of fresh fruit.

It is Zweig's caviling about the shortcomings of others, both at this juncture and even in the later period leading up to World War II, that began to leave me cold. Yes, the first war was a monumental travesty. Zweig was not wrong to see that and to say so. But his picture of wartime Europe is all emotional and self-centered. Except for his condemnation of the ugly and unproductive European nationalism that did not dissipate at Versailles, much of what he writes about this epoch is personal attitudinizing and patting himself on the back for deploring the deplorable. And by 1939 when he began to write this book, Zweig only appears dimly to have suspected that the stakes of a world conflict transcend the perfect tranquility and superiority of his artist community.

Obviously others also were deceived by the initial post-war decade of lies (and murders) of Lenin and Stalin, and Zweig was no different from many others in the 1930s who failed to see that Stalin was no less a beast than Hitler and that there was a death game at hand. But a death game was being played and Zweig, who was smart enough to know it, was also deceptive enough to pretend that he had done what he never did: look it in the eye. Even late in the book when he recounts his viewpoint from his safe Argentinian refuge, he confides that he was "suffer[ing] more than my friends still in the country [Austria] who were deceiving themselves. . . . . They lived happy and carefree, while I saw the situation more clearly . . . ."

Having written that, I now turn to some general impressions of The World of Yesterday, beginning briefly with its second half. Most interesting are the autobiographical parts, not mentioned in much detail in what has gone before. For example, Zweig offers an extended passage about his autograph and document collecting, he recalls a very gratifying result produced by his letter to Mussolini on behalf of the young wife of a condemned man, and he continues to provide several sketches of contemporary personalities, including a personal appreciation of Richard Strauss. Indeed, throughout the book Zweig's observations, when unburdened by his peculiar urge to rhapsodize about lofty things, are sharp and detailed, exactly what I was looking for.

But his point of view and his evidence are often contradictory. Obviously a bracing memoir will have a point of view, Zweig choosing one of regret and disillusionment, played to a melancholy theme of his loneliness as a soit disant "citizen of the world," who has been bypassed by the accumulation of base current events[1]. But this self-regard — while not suffocating — emerges often enough to interrupt his more worthwhile observations. It ultimately left me with a view of him as being vain, unrealistic, and feckless. There will always be men of action to keep a safe corner in the world for dreamers like himself. Zweig was apparently oblivious to this. He will dilate at length about writers like Hertzl (infra), but would never have understood a man like Ben-Gurion.

Overall, Zweig tells his life chronologically, opening with a chapter on the unreflecting "security" of central European life at the end of the 19^th Century, proceeding then with recollections of his school days[2], society's developing sexual maturity (a Freudian demarche[3] — but delivered with some wit) — , a quick look at the turn of the century university[4] — drunkenness, hauteur, and the mandatory dueling scar —, his discovery of universal truths, etc. But in retrospect, the business about "security" is why I finally found the world citizen malarkey to be so unintentionally pusillanimous and smug.

For Zweig, born in 1881, "security" apparently comes in two flavors. The first turns out to be no more than what he sees as the blindly cautious way that millions of Europeans like him and his family lived their lives in the years before World War I, satisfied with the present and buoyed by a pleasant anticipation of a predictable future. (This hardly seems unusual.) It was a "golden age," he says, where people were "childishly naive and gullible." But as the book moves on chronologically and Zweig looks back, he realizes that this security was just an illusion. Only the gifted, he implies, could have detected the underlying vanity of the masses and sensed the calamity on the horizon. People felt themselves secure only because of a comfortable deception created by their own parochial cultures.

I do not mean to say that the book is a direct attack on cultures, but Zweig clearly believes that those who can do so will transcend such baggage — and that he is one of them. To his credit, he knows that there is no security when men are obliged to live without the security of laws, but by his lights the laws must be universal ones.[5] After noting the distasteful symptom of growing "mass political ideologies," he identifies the "ultimate" pestilence — nationalism — of which he is but "a defenseless, helpless witness."

Zweig's second sense of security is presented as personal to himself. Although he claims to be an introvert, he confides that he was eventually forced by his talent to appear in public just as growing nationalism began to sweep aside the old stability of reliable and impartial laws. In this new world Zweig discovers that he can nevertheless be free through his personal "cunning and evasion." Now it is his inner freedom which is his "one secure possession."

If only he had left it there. But instead, he then generalizes on what he sees as his own embarrassing parochial culture:

"Unconsciously, something in a Jew seeks to escape the morally dubious, mean, petty, and pernicious associations of trade clinging to all that is merely business, and rise to the purer sphere of the intellect where money is not a consideration."

Well, that's Mr. Zweig all over. We wouldn't want to be "morally dubious" when we can rise to a purer sphere. Thankfully, a "world citizen" can shed himself of unwelcome cultural baggage.[6]

Zweig is of the party that holds that when the going gets tough, the tough write pamphlets. He never really seems to realize how fully he and his correspondents deceived themselves and how risible some of his observations are.[7] After all, he was a man "with genuinely humane feelings." He is utterly convinced that during the Great War he and other intellectuals exceeded their moral responsibility simply by publishing antiwar screeds and smuggling them to each other. It was enough to "forge fraternal links internationally. . . . in favor of the ideal of peaceful understanding and intellectual brotherhood crossing linguistic and national borders. . . .These signals of understanding flashed from one side of the border to the other." (And yet world citizens were a sorry lot a generation later when more mettle was required.[8])

But it was for his role as a witness that I consulted Zweig, not his manqué ruminations on nationalism, and not for his pessimistic speculations on the future. In that sense, these memoirs written by a widely-traveled man was a good vantage point for me. Hapsburg history would have to wait.[9] Given his success as a man of letters, Zweig met plenty of prominent people during his life and throughout the book he scatters their names — lots of names. The index to The World of Yesterday is eight pages long and consists of nothing but a listing of the people whom he has mentioned in the text. I was unfamiliar with virtually all of them[10], many of them obviously people of literary and artistic talent, the others notable public officials of varying description. Most of them are referred to in the "and then I said to _____" sense, but with others he obviously had ample contact which he describes in such detail that it was impossible not to get an accurate picture of both the person and the setting for the encounter.

Of these public figures Zweig gives the most extensive praise to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, previously unknown to me. Von Hofmannsthal, only seven years older than Zweig himself, was a poetic prodigy in the German language. If I had ever previously heard his name (but then forgotten it), it was because he was the librettist for Richard Strauss, including Der Rosenkavalier.[11]. Hofmannsthal was also founder of the Salzburg festival. He also provides a nice bridge for Zweig then to address two other subjects intimately associated with the era: the literary press and Theodore Hertzl.

Young Zweig was invited to meet Hertzl, an editor esteemed for his abilities at Neue Freie Presse but not otherwise widely known at the time, who had once conceived (but not circulated) a fantastic plan for a symbolic mass baptism of Christians and Jews. But later, sobered by having witnessed at first hand the humiliation of Dreyfus in Paris, he decided that if segregation of the Jews was to be their lot, they should embrace it by forming their own country, an idea he published in a pamphlet. The immediate result within his own urbane precincts in the west was that Hertzl was mocked even by his fellow Jews. But as Zweig puts it, the answer "came thundering back" from the impoverished masses of eastern Jewry. And it was at this time in 1901 that Hertzl, trying to support his family by working at the Neue Freie Presse while simultaneously managing the tide of interest his pamphlet had aroused in the east, met with the young Zweig, read his proposed essay, and accepted it for publication.

This is a nice anecdote, and so I have summarized it here. For me, such eyewitness scenes are most memorable when they also give a broader sketch of the famous person. Here, he describes Hertzl as resembling a regal but melancholy Bedouin desert sheikh with a repertoire of theatrical gestures. To Zweig, for example, Hertzl delivers the verdict about accepting his submission for publication only after first silently reading the proffered article in full while its author is obliged to wait and then — after letting some additional mysterious time pass — delivering the good news.

By contrast, the picture Zweig gives of Rilke is chiefly remarkable because the poet was, he says, essentially "inconspicuous" – and then goes on for two pages dilating on the man's muted anonymity, apparently extracted from only one or two brief encounters with him. This is followed immediately by the author's description of his unscheduled visit to Rodin's studio where that artist, initially cordial to his flattering unscheduled visitor, is suddenly struck with an idea, leaving Zweig — if one can believe this —standing ignored and forgotten watching the master for a frenzied hour of preoccupied creation.

Although The World of Yesterday offers memories from several European locales — Paris, London, Salzburg, Switzerland — Zweig's original and main point of reference is always Austria, specifically Vienna, a pleasant, open-minded, leisurely city of music — but one which he also describes as "culturally passionate" based on centuries of the country's political lassitude and lack of military success. He certainly paints an attractive picture of the city, one even more inviting than the beautiful metropolis I visited for the first time in 2014. For him it is a compliment to say that Vienna is "a supranational, cosmopolitan city of the world" which melds all national and linguistic opposites into itself, "a synthesis of all Western cultures."[12]

I must say, however, that Zweig also delivers a certain unintentional Dionysian undertone of the city. The Viennese, he says, have a "theatrical mania" where "no quarter [is] given." Four or five hundred people, he recalls, once refused to leave a concert hall that was scheduled to close and he also tells of another audience which actually pulled a venue into pieces when it shut down. "[A] Viennese with no appreciation of art or pleasure in form was unimaginable" even among "the lower classes." He even attributes this irrationality (which he describes as "grotesque") to the city's Jewish population. This having still been a time of security, however, even the anti-Semites were cordial.[13].

I have been hard on Zweig for what I have identified as the flaws of a slight man. His book makes it evident that it was he who sought out prominent people, not the reverse. The story of Rodin has a whiff of that. So does his memory of attaching himself first to the poet Emile Verhaeren and then the author Romain Rolland — for that matter, so does that ostentatious index of names and the autographs Zweig collected throughout his life.[14]. And yet he is hard on himself, albeit disingenuously. He admits his pleasure in having been found "unfit" for service in World War I, but states that he refused identify himself as a conscientious objector because of the penalties, and he agrees that in sum he was simply "unheroic" and "indecisive" (characteristics which then permit him modestly to compare himself to Erasmus[15]).

And so let me say this in mitigation. Zweig was a talented writer, as this book itself demonstrates. I am guessing that his fiction is even better. So it is clear that he was a member of a very narrow creative fraternity, one created by God and not open to most of us. Such people are blessed and so was he.[16].

And yet Stefan Zweig committed suicide in Argentina in 1942. There was a world war underway. In my view he was hors de combat.

ENDNOTES

1. "Citizen of the world" is one of those undergraduate ideas that most intelligent people recover from as they enter the real world. I remember when I was in high school I went with some friends to an evening rally in an unused movie theater in Washington, D.C. sponsored by the United World Federalists. We sang songs, held hands, and invoked Eleanor Roosevelt. We were all highly intelligent.

2. Zweig recalls his Dickensian schooldays in Freudian terms. "The case histories in psychoanalysts' files show us how many inferiority complexes are the result of this method of education." Fortunately he was able to transcend this menace — although he is obliged to confess that as an adolescent his thirst for freedom and art led to such absurd excesses as sneaking backstage into theatres while playing hooky to get patted on the shoulder by Johannes Brahms who was an exemplar of "the world of security." Fortunately "[y]oung people, like certain animals, have an excellent instinct for changes" — by which he means aesthetic changes of the sort demanded by his fellow avant guard.

3. In the 19^th Century, he says, "the question of sexuality was anxiously avoided because of a sense of inner insecurity" (that word again).

4. For himself, Zweig favors the "university of life."

5. There are only fleeting references to Shakespeare in The World of Yesterday and I would not have expected otherwise. But consider the fate of cosmopolitans in Othello and The Merchant of Venice and the uncynical agony of Romeo and Mowbray when facing banishment from what Zweig would think of as their narrow worlds. I'll add my own cynical smile when I found Zweig comparing himself and his small coterie of world citizens as a "band of brothers" — oblivious that the quotation is from Shakespeare's most nationalistic play.

6. Ironically at the end of his book Zweig — who in my view persistently demonstrated a profound confusion about culture and security — offers a third view which emerged from the "insecurity" of having been deprived of his passport owing to by the vagaries of war.

"It has not been any help that for almost half-a-century I trained my heart to beat as a citizen of the world. On the day I lost my passport I discovered . . . that when you lose your native land you are losing more than a patch of territory within set borders."

7. While living in Switzerland during the Great War, Zweig became impressed with a woodcut artist's anti-war efforts. Zweig and his friends— though no one seems to have volunteered — envisioned dropping these drawings from aircraft in the combat zones. "I am sure they would have stopped the war in its tracks."

8. "In 1939 no writer's expression of opinion had any effect at all."

9. He does report one personal near-poignant Hapsburg incident: his recollection of standing on the platform of a Swiss border railroad station after the end of World War I as Emperor Karl and his family passed through on their abdication train.

10. The only American names that I recognized among the several hundred contained in the annotation were Jane Addams, Isadora Duncan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Lunt, Sacco and Vanzetti, Walt Whitman, and Woodrow Wilson, none of them but Whitman given much attention.

11. In later years, Zweig himself wrote the libretto for Strauss's The Silent Woman.

12. Whatever Zweig means by this, he routinely uses the phrase Western culture, as he does here. In recent decades, of course, one using that reference would be condemned as both elitist and narrow-minded. In any event, Zweig died too early to benefit from Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.

13. He gives a remarkably neutral description of the anti-Semite Karl Lueger.

14. Zweig's hero-worship of Rolland ("the most important man of our time'") is almost embarrassing. (Rolland himself felt that Stalin was the world's greatest man.) And this precedes Zweig likening himself and his fellow Switzerland-dwellers to those "fighting in the trenches" because they — sitting the while peacefully around a table in Geneva — were in "personal danger" given that "five hours journey away" a combatant might charge at them.

15. Erasmus is then duly noted in Zweig's index of his famous friends. Later Zweig also compares himself to Cassandra and Jeremiah, neither of whom qualified for the index, however.

16. But — like fraternity or tribal members everywhere — such people are remarkably unwilling or unable to take a more ecumenical view of other similar groupings, even when they praise themselves for being so open-minded. Anyhow, the literary fraternity is not always that fraternal, notwithstanding Zweig's faith in what he calls "the unifying power of art." Musicians seem to be generous to each other, but novelists backbite all the time.