Leaves Clem marries Laurence

My interest in Partisan Review led me, in a roundabout way, to its somewhat equivalent in the U.K., Cyril Connolly's Horizon Magazine. I had read that Clem Greenberg had had an affair with Connolly's wife, (She was American and had returned at the onset of war), after she had left her husband. In my post about Greenberg, "Dancing with Greenberg", I quoted him writing to his college buddy Harold Lazarus*; Greenberg said of Mrs. Connolly that she left him  ..."most thoroughly fucked-out and emptied - she takes her sex like a man." That goofy sexist remark makes little sense unless perhaps he felt he could treat Jean Connolly as an equal.   

I felt the need for a closer look. In keeping with my state of mind I thought that rather than fleshing out my knowledge of Cyril Connolly and his times I would go straight to the heart of the matter which I found in a review in the Guardian of The Lost Girls, Love, War and Literature, 1939-1951 by D.J. Taylor, published in the U.K. by Constable. It was Mrs. Connolly I was interested in first. I read The Lost Girls, and as I was finishing it, not having sated my appetite for wife number one, I ordered The Wonton Chase, [not about Chinese restaurants], by Peter Quennell, merely because the review of Lost Girls said that the latter book owed it's concept to the Quennell book. (You'd think I was getting paid for this!) 

The Quennell book added little info about the Greenberg affair other than that it had lasted about two years, and that Greenberg was somewhat broken up when it ended and that she had ended the affair because she had fallen in love with Laurence Vail. Vail, it so happened was someone I wrote about in my book The White Fence. He was once married to Peggy Guggenheim and was father to her two children Sinbad and Pegeen.    

 

 

I enjoyed the Taylor book; thought it was well done. (He's written a ton of books.) The title though is misleading in that the "girls" were probably no more lost than anyone who has their youth interrupted by a World War; but, that's how a certain type of single woman was referred to in those days, in war-time London. 

You have to discover the girls bit by bit as you read through a short bio of Connolly's youth and the history of his great magazine, which begins just a little before the start of WWll and ends in 1950. To simplify that, the girls are, in something like order of appearance, Jean Bakewell, Lys Lubbock, Janetta Wooley, Barbara Skelton, Sonia Orwell, Glur, (Joyce Warwick Evens), Angela, (Janetta's half-sister), Diana Witherby, Joan, daughter of Viscount Eyres-Monsell), Anna Kavan, (pseudonym of the writer Helen Emily Woods), and a few lesser mortals.    

Before I go any farther, though, and before we enter the world of Cyril himself, which it seems I've decided we must do, it should be understood that in those days particularly, on the other side of the great pond and in the neighborhood of London, and outside the lower classes of Great Britain, homosexuality, (although it was illegal), was thought of in a different way than it ever was in the United States, up to and including the present time. Starting in the public schools, which, [for those of you in Petaluma], are what Americans call private schools, and which had a more rigid social hierarchy than anything known in the U.S., with Eton, [along with Harrow], being at the very tip-top of the pyramid, public school boys had flirtations, crushes and romances with each other in a way that was both accepted and, if closeted, kept only from the lower classes, that including the entire bourgeoisie. 

The extensive Wikipedia entry for Cyril Connolly broadened my sense of the impact that Connolly had on his times. I learned that his father was a retired British Army officer and that his parents had separated early in their relationship; they lived for a time in South Africa, and his father undertook, as an amateur scholar, a study of Mollusks. The parents weren't wealthy but both sent him the occasional small check which combined with the income from an occasional review enabled him to travel almost continually. If you are really interested in his complete meanderings I suggest the Wikipedia Post, which is remarkable in its length and depth.   

 

When exactly it was that he jumped the rail to hetero isn't quite clear, but he had done well by his Eton and Oxford youth in terms of the social connections he made. Actually his fortunate friendships began at St. Ciprian's, the private boarding school he attended before Eton, the "Public" version of a private grammar school in the States. It was there that he became friends with George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. Connolly excelled academically all through Eton while making many friends that were helpful to him later on, although most are people I'm not familiar with, not being a full-fledged Anglo-phile, but I'll drop a few names anyway; Denis Dannreuther, Bobbie Longden, Roger Mynors, Anthony Knebworth. He also, in his last year, was elected to the most exclusive club at Eton, Pop. (Perhaps I should look up where that name came from?) At Oxford he did equally well making friends, including Nico Davies, about who's family I've written a bit; Teddy Jessel, Lord Dunglass and Brian Howard.  

He left Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in history and went for a vacation in the French Alps with friends. He took another trip in the autumn to Spain and Portugal. In April of '26 he took a job tutoring a boy in Jamaica, and set sail in November. He returned the following Spring, and found a post, (something slightly different then a job), as secretary/companion to Logan Pearsall Smith, a successful writer and discrete homosexual. Smith, born in the U.S., was the son of Robert Pearsall Smith, a prominent Quaker and glass manufacturer in New Jersey. Robert and his social prominent wife Hannah, it was her family that owned the glass business that Robert became manager of, had become involved in a movement within the Methodist church called the "Holiness" movement, and had risen to become internationally famous speakers and teachers. In 1875 though, Robert was accused of some sort of inappropriate behavior by a female American writer that had been part of an initiation ceremony he was conducting. An evangelical tribunal followed, and though details were not revealed, Mr. Smith was finished as a speaker. After that, he "lost his faith, withdrew from public gaze and spent most of the rest of his life as an invalid."  [Wikipedia] Why an invalid I haven't discovered, however, in 1888 the Smith family moved to England to be with their daughter who had married an Irish Barrister. (The same daughter later married Bernard Berenson.) Another daughter, Alys, married Bertrand Russell, and Logan, as mentioned, became a writer. 

Logan gave Cyril eight pounds per week for his secretary-companionship services even if one or the other was off visiting a third party. Much of his time was spent at Smith's Hampshire home, "Big Chilling", which was a gathering place for kindred spirits, including Desmond MacCarthy, the literary editor of the New Statesman. At Big Chilling Cyril continued to broaden his growing friends-of-influence list.* In June of 1927 he submitted his first signed work for the New Statesman, a review of the work of Lawrence Sterne, and in August he was invited to join the staff. In September he wrote a review of The Hotel, by Elizabeth Bowen. Now, with a possibly regular income, he was able to afford a share in a flat, and moved in with a friend, Patrick Balfour.* Through Balfour he met more friends (Bobby Boothby* and Gladwyn Jebb)* who were helpful in introducing him around London and Paris. And, at around this time, he began taking an interest in women, with a couple of minor infatuations, and then, in Paris, (this is from Wikipedia), "...he met Mara Andrews, a poetic lesbian who was in love with an absent American girl called Jean Bakewell." 

 

He stayed in touch with Mara, (the poetic Lesbian), and some months later he arranged to meet her and the returned American girl, and they had some discussions, and fairly quickly decided to marry. A bit seems to be missing here, for which I searched fruitlessly; how he switched his sexual attraction from men to women and jumped into a marriage with a heretofore practicing lesbian, but, it does seem to have worked for both of them for a decade at least and they continued to love each other even after they were long separated.       

Having come from the New York State Public School system in the post-war period, it's hard for me to imagine Eton, or Oxford, or any of the types of friendships Cyril had, (although I did have as a friend my Godmother's nephew Julien, who had gone to Eton; discussed in another post.) I began to wish I was more prepared for what seemed to be turning into a study of the man and his times. I had read The Lost Girls, and the Peter Quenelle book, the Wanton Chase, and so I picked up Cyril's Enemies of Promise and read it, and one of several biographies of Cyril that are available, Michael Shelden's Friends of Promise. 

There is just no substantial record of the courtship between Jean and Cyril, so it gets put down in Wikipedia and the couple of reviews I've read as sort of a wam-bam thing. But they must have gotten to know each other a little more leisuredly than that. Cyril did in fact get to know Jean and Mara as a couple. And they introduced him to their bohemian friends in Montparnass. It was through them that he met Alfred Perles and Henry Miller as well as James Joyce, who he later wrote a piece about, titled The Position of Joyce, which appeared in Life and Letters. Then, abruptly, Connolly and Bakewell went off alone to Spain together and met up with Peter Quennell. Perhaps this is when the transfer of affections took place. But there is no record of any hurt feelings on the part of Mara.  

 

They were married in April of 1930 in the U.S. They were both 26 years old. With financial help from Jean's parents they immediately began traveling in comfortable style, mostly along the Mediterranean coast. When in London they lived at various places and were even welcomed for short stays at Big Chilling. After a few months they settled, for awhile, near Toulon, where their neighbors were Edith Wharton and Aldous Huxley.  

They were a messy pair though, very poor housekeepers and encumbered with a number of exotic pets; ferrets, lemurs, an African genet. Neither Huxley nor Wharton warmed up to the couple, nor did Virginia Wolfe, when they briefly stayed with her; she found Cyril uncouth and coined the name Smarty-boots for him, which led Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford to refer to him as "Boots", in the many funny letters they wrote to each other over the years.  

 

 In 1932 he got a rare paying assignment from John Betjeman at the Architectural Review to write some art criticism. (It was through Betjeman he met Waugh, with whom he developed the funny teasing back and forth that they maintained for years.) Later that year though, Jean fell ill and had what must have been a hysterectomy, though no specific operation is given that I could find.

On a recuperative trip to Athens, there was a coup d'etat, which Cyril wrote up for the New Statesman with the title "Spring Revolution". While in Greece they met up with a gay couple, Brian Howard (another Eton contemporary), and his boyfriend, and took a side trip to Spain, where the four were involved in a fight in a bar and were arrested. They were bailed out by the British Embassy. ...That summer, on the advice of Enid Bagnold, (author of National Velvet and former lover of Frank Harris), they rented a house at Rottingdean. 

 

During 1934 Connolly worked on Humane Killer, The English Malady and The Rock Pool, a trilogy of novels of which only The Rock Pool was finished. By 1935 Connolly's father was no longer to help him out financially, but Jean's mother continued to do so, paying for a trip to Paris, Juan-les-Pins, Venice, Yugoslavia and Budapest. In Paris he again met with Henry Miller and his publisher Jack Kahane and developed a strong rapport with Miller. (Kahane published The Rock Pool, the following year, to no appreciable acclaim.)  

By 1936 he had had a couple of brief affairs, (or flirtations), and then in late 1937 he became involved with Diana Whitbey, and it became serious. Jean seemed quite tolerant about it, she was after all a determined Bohemian, and she began to spend time in the South of France without Cyril but in the company of their mutual friend, a wealthy heir to a margarine fortune and a respected collector of modern art, Peter Watson, who lived with his homosexual lover, an American named Denham Fouts. This is where Cyril began to develop his style of playing lovers, (and friends), off each other. He explained to Jean that he was suffering low self-esteem, (perhaps using other terminology), from being supported by her, that he wasn't able to write his novel, (he was blocked), and that he felt horribly guilty and needed Jean to beg and plead for him to come back. (He needed to be needed.) Here is a bit about Diana from Michael Shelden's insightful biography. 

"Like Jean in 1929, she [Diana] was a bright, attractive student with boundless curiosity about anything connected with the arts.  She was twenty-two, twelve years younger than Connolly, and when he met her she was preparing to enter the Chelsea School of Art as a student of painting. ...she came from a conservative, upper-middle-class English family which had operated a printing firm in London for many years.  She had been brought up at her parents' country home in Hampshire and had received a conventional education at a fashionable boarding school in Kent. Connolly was charmed not only by her beauty and intelligence but by her innocent enthusiasm for art. Her dream of becoming a painter inspired him to think of her as both a muse and a fellow artist with whom he could share his life. ..."

 

In 1938, Connolly followed up The Rock Pool with a book of non-fiction, Enemies of Promise. The first part of the  book is a brilliant dissertation on the difficulties of maintaining popularity in the literature-as-art market place. Following that is a short autobiography, covering mostly his school days. In it he attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece that he and others believed that he should have been capable of writing. The book was a surprise hit. 

In the meantime, with himself in the middle, he played off the emotions of Jean, Diana, and Peter Watson. When Enemies of Promise came out, he had persuaded Jean to come back, she was living with him, and he was deeply involved with Diana.Then Jean went back to Paris, and he pleaded again for her to come back. She told him that Watson thought they should maintain their separation for a while for the good of both of them. 

In September The War began. Jean realized that if she was ever going to see the States again she'd better go back soon. Watson realized that he couldn't stay in Paris and collect art, that he'd have to return to his own country; that his options were running out. Eventually, Denham Fouts and Jean took the same boat back to the U.S. The next time Cyril asked Watson about funding the magazine, he said yes. Horizon was born.

 

Watson insisted that Stephen Spender be brought on as an associate editor, sort of as a back-up for Cyril in case he lost interest or in some other way fell short. Watson would be financial backer and de facto art editor. Cyril remained as head of Horizon until it folded in 1950.

Jean spent some time in California and then settled in New York. She fell in with the Ex-Pat group that centered around Peggy Guggenheim and became Peggy's friend. She wrote some reviews for The Nation. (Did she write a good review of a Pollock before Clem ever did? Why don't I know that? Well, I'd need more support to consider it vetted.) She met Clem Greenberg who had been dating her sister. (How that came about has yet to be revealed to me.) She began dating Clem, (even after she learned that he had smacked her sister Annie in the face), and it developed into a love affair which lasted about two years, until Clem got drafted. The separation from her, combined with the poor ambiance of the Army threw Clem into what must have been a complete nervous breakdown, though one from which he recovered quickly when discharged. Jean however was no longer available, having by then fallen in love with Lawrence Vail, all the while she was still on chummy terms with his ex-wife Peggy. 

After the War Jean and Vail married and went back to Paris. Jean died of a stroke in Paris in 1950. Vail never remarried and died in 1968. Even stranger is how Jean lived with Peggy in NYC in 1943 while she was Laurence’s lover. Jean’s sister Anne would go on to marry Nathan "Bill" Davis, a former lover of Peggy and fellow early collector with Guggenheim of Jackson Pollock’s work.

 

*Concerning the friends of influence list, and for those who enjoy footnotes: [All from Wikipedia]........ 

*Cecil Beaton and George Orwell he had known since childhood, at St. Cyprian's. .....Bobby Boothby he knew from Eton. .....

*Boothby went from stockbroker to member of Parliament in 1924, where he represented the county of Aberdeen and Kincardine East, in the Scottish Highlands, and was there till 1958.....
.....He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill from 1926 to 1929.....From 1930 he began a long affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Conservative politician Harold Macmillan, and rumored to be the father of their youngest daughter, Sarah. He was married twice. His first wife (married 1935) was Diana Cavendish, daughter of Lord Richard Cavendish, and Lady Dorothy's first cousin; he married her after concluding his relationship with the married Lady Dorothy to be "on the wane".  ....Then, swiftly realizing the marriage had been a mistake, (it went on to be a source of long-lasting guilt for him), it was dissolved in 1937. His second wife (married 1967) was Wanda Sanna, a Sardinian woman 33 years his junior. His second cousin, writer and broadcaster Sir Ludovic Kennedy asserted that Boothby fathered at least three children by the wives of other men, "Two by one woman, one by another."

Throughout his career he held many important positions on many important government committees, was at one time Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic, was given many awards and a KBE in 1953.

He was a consistent supporter of homosexual law reform. While there were rumors about his sexuality he denied he was a homosexual. He did though speculate about the possibility of a homosexual relationship in the drowning of his friend Michel Llewelyn Davies, (one of the models for Peter Pan), and another fellow Oxonian Rupert Buxton.  

And then there is the following which I'll lift straight form Wikipedia: 

In 1963, Boothby began an affair with East End cat burglar Leslie Holt (d. 1979), a younger man he met at a gambling club. Holt introduced him to the gangster Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray twins, who allegedly supplied Boothby with young men, and arranged orgies in Cedra Court (the apartment block in Hackney where the Kray twins lived), receiving favors from Boothby in return. When Boothby's underworld associations came to the attention of the Sunday Express, the Conservative supporting newspaper opted not to publish the damaging story. The matter was eventually reported in 1964 in the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror  tabloid, and the parties were subsequently named by the German magazine Stern.

Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue the Mirror. His close friend Tom Drieberg—a senior Labor MP, and also homosexual—also associated with the Krays; hence, neither of the major political parties had an interest in publicity, and the newspaper's owner Cecil King came under pressure from the Labor leadership to drop the matter. The Mirror backed down, sacked its editor, apologized and paid Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Other newspapers became less willing to cover the Krays' criminal activities, which continued for three more years. The police investigation received no support from Scotland Yard while Boothby embarrassed his fellow peers by campaigning on behalf of the Krays in the Lords, until their increasing violence made association impossible. It has been claimed that journalists who investigated Boothby were subjected to legal threats and break-ins, and that much of that suppression was directed by Arnold Goodman. [Whoever he was.] 

  

*Born in 1900 in Yorkshire, Gladwyn Jebb was educated at Sandroyd School, Eton College, and then Magdalen College, Oxford.  In 1929 he married Cynthia Noble, daughter of Sir Saxton Noble, 3rd Baronet. Cynthia was granddaughter of Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet and the and the great-granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. ( A  versatile and audacious 19th century engineer who created the Great Western Railway).

The couple had three children, one son and two daughters: Miles, Vanessa, who married the historian Hugh Thomas, and Stella, who married the scientist Joel de Rosnay. Jebb's granddaughter is the international best selling author Tatiana de Rosnay. 

 

In 1924 Jebb entered the Diplomatic Service and served in Tehran where he became known to Harold Nicolson and to Vita Sackville-West.  Later he served in Rome and at the Foreign Office in London where he served in such positions as Private Secretary to the Head of the Diplomatic Service. 

In 1940, he was appointed to the Ministry of Economic Warfare with temporary rank of Assistant Under-Secretary.  Later, he was     Later, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Special Operations Executive. In February 1942, with a change of Minister of Economic Warfare, Jebb was relieved of this appointment and returned to the Foreign Office. He was appointed Head of the Reconstruction Department and in 1943 was made a Counsellor. In this capacity he attended numerous international conferences, including those held at Tehran, Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and Potsdam. 

After WWll, Jebb served as Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in August 1945, being appointed Acting United Nations Secretary-General from October 1945 to February 1946, until the appointment of the first Secretary-General Trygve Lie.  Jebb remains the only UN Secretary-General or Acting Secretary-General to come from a permanent member state of the United Nations Security Council.  

 

Returning to London, Jebb served as Deputy to the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin at the Conference of Foreign Ministers before serving as the Foreign Office's United Nations Adviser (1946-1947).  He represented the United Kingdom at the Brussel's Treaty Permanent Commission with personal rank of ambassado

Jebb became the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950 to 1954 and to Paris from 1954 to 1960. He was the UK's first permanent UN representative.  In the latter role, he was angered that secret negotiations between the British, French and Israelis  in advance of the Suez invasion in 1956 took place without his knowledge and, in certain respects, that he was sidelined by Prime Minister Harold Mamillan at the Paris "big power" summit in 1960. His rather "grand" manner caused Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to coin an epigram; "You're a deb, Sir Gladwyn Jebb".

Knighted  in 1949, on 12 April 1960 Jebb was created a hereditary peer as Baron Gladwyn of Bramfield in the County of Suffolk. He became involved in politics as a member of the Liberal Party. He was Deputy Leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords from 1965 to 1988 and spokesman on foreign affairs and defense. An ardent European, he served as a Member of the European Parliament from 1973 to 1976, where he was also the Vice-President of the Parliament's Political Committee. Jebb unsuccessfully contested the Suffolk seat in the European Parliament in 1979.

When asked in the early 1960s why he had joined the Liberal Party, he replied that the Liberals were a party without a general and that he was a general without a party. Like many Liberals, he passionately believed that education was the key to social reform.

Jebb died on 24 October 1996 at the age of 96, and is buried at St Andrew's Church, in Bramfield in Suffolk. 

*Violet Trefusis (nee Keppel; 6 June 1894 – 29 February 1972) was an English socialite and author. Born Violet Keppel, she was the daughter of Alice Keppel, and her husband, the Hon. George Keppel, a son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. (But members of the Keppel family thought her biological father was William Beckett, subsequently 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, a banker and MP for Whitby.) \ Violet lived her early youth in London, where the Keppel family had a house in Portman Square. When she was four years old, her mother became the favorite mistress of Albert Edward ("Bertie") the  Prince of Wales, who succeeded to the throne as King Edward VII on 22 January 1901. Bertie paid visits to the Keppel household in the afternoon around tea-time on a regular basis until the end of his life in 1910. George Keppel, who was aware of the affair, conveniently made himself scarce. 

Violet is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West, which the two women continued after their respective marriages. The affair was featured in novels by both parties; in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, and in many letters and memoirs of the period, roughly 1912–1922. She may have been the inspiration for aspects of the character Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's  Love in a Cold Climate,  and of Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium. Trefusis herself wrote novels and non-fiction works, both in English and in French, with varying success. She had one sibling, born in 1900, Sonia Rosemary. Sonia is the maternal grandmother of  Camilla,  Duchess of Cornwall, and Violet was her great-aunt.

Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson  wrote the non-fiction Portrait of a Marriage, based on material from his mother's letters, and adding extensive "clarifications", including some of his father's point of view. Such works explored other aspects of the affair. Aspects of Trefusis' character also featured in other novels, including Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, and Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium.

Each of the participants left extensive written accounts in surviving letters and diaries. Alice Keppel, (Violet's mother), Victoria Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson, Denys Trefusis and Pat Dansey also left documents that referred to the affair.

Diana Souhami's Mrs Keppel and her Daughter (1997) provides an overview of the affair and of the main actors in the drama. When Violet was 10, she met Vita (who was two years older) for the first time. After that, they attended the same school for several years and soon recognised a bond between them. When Violet was 14, she confessed her love to Vita and gave her a ring. In 1910, after the death of Edward VII, Mrs Keppel made her family observe a "discretion" leave of about two years before re-establishing themselves in British society. When they returned to London, the Keppels moved to a house in Grosvenor Street. At that time, Violet learned that Vita was soon to be engaged to Harold Nicolson and was involved in an affair with Rosamund Grosvenor. Violet made it clear that she still loved Vita, but became engaged to make Vita jealous. This did not stop Vita from marrying Harold (in October 1913), nor did he curtail his own homosexual adventures after marriage.

In April 1918, Violet and Vita refreshed and intensified their bond. By that time Vita had two sons, but she left them in the care of others while she and Violet took a holiday in Cornwall. Meanwhile, Mrs Keppel was busy arranging a marriage for Violet with Denys Robert Trefusis (1890–1929), son of Colonel Hon. John Schomberg Trefusis (son of the 19th Baron Clinton and Eva Louisa Bontein. A few days after the Armistice, Violet and Vita went to France for several months. Because of Vita's exclusive claim, and her own loathing of marriage, Violet made Denys promise never to have sex with her as a condition for marriage. He apparently agreed, for on 16 June 1919 they married. At the end of that year, Violet and Vita made a new two-month excursion to France: ordered to do so by his mother-in-law, Denys retrieved Violet from the south of France when new gossip about her and Sackville-West's loose behaviour began to reach London. The next time they left, in February 1920, was to be the final elopement. Harold and Denys pursued the women, flying to France in a two-seater aeroplane. The couples had heated scenes in Amiens.

The climax came when Harold told Vita that Violet had been unfaithful to her (with Denys). Violet tried to explain, and assured Vita of her innocence. Vita was much too angry and upset to listen, and fled saying she couldn't bear to see Violet for at least two months. Six weeks later Vita returned to France to meet Violet. Mrs Keppel desperately tried to keep the scandal away from London, where Violet's sister, Sonia, was about to be married (to Roland Cubitt). Violet spent much of 1920 abroad, clinging desperately to Vita via continuous letters. In January 1921, Vita and Violet made a final journey to France, where they spent six weeks together. At this time, Harold threatened to break off the marriage if Vita continued her escapades. When Vita returned to England in March, it was practically the end of the affair. Violet was sent to Italy; and, from there she wrote her last desperate letters to their mutual friend Pat Dansey, having been forbidden from writing directly to Vita. At the end of the year, Violet had to face the facts and start to build her life from scratch.

The two former lovers met again in 1940, after the progress of the Second World War forced Trefusis to return to Britain. The women continued to keep in touch and send each other affectionate letters.

During the Second World War in London, Trefusis participated in the broadcasting of "La France Libre" which earned her a after the war; she was also made a Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Trefusis, as she planned.

From 1923 on, Trefusis was one of the many lovers of the Singer sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer, daughter of Isaac Singer and wife of the homosexual Prince Edmond de Polignac, who introduced her to the artistic beau-monde in Paris. Trefusis conceded more and more to her mother's model of being "socially acceptable" but, at the same time, not wavering in her sexuality. Singer, like Sackville-West before her, dominated the relationship, though apparently to mutual satisfaction. The two were together for many years and seem to have been content. Trefusis's mother, Alice Keppel, did not object to this affair, most likely because of Singer's wealth and power, and the fact that Singer carried on the affair in a much more disciplined way. Trefusis seemed to prefer the role of the submissive and therefore fitted well with Singer, who, whip in hand, was typically dominant and in control in her relationships. Neither was completely faithful during their long affair, but, unlike Trefusis's affair with Sackville-West, this seems to have had no negative effect on their understanding.

In 1924, Violet's mother bought L'Ombrellino, a large villa overlooking Florence, where Galileo Galilei  had once lived. When her parents' died in 1947, Violet became, till the end of her life, the chatelaine of L'Ombrellino. After the death of her husband in 1929, Trefusis published several novels, some in English, some in French, that she had written in her medieval "Tour" in Saint-Loup-de-Naud, Seine-et-Marne, France – a gift from Winnaretta.

 

 

Update: When Mercury is in Retrograde

I've lost touch with my astrologer. Some years ago in fact. So you might say I'm at a loss. At a loss to determine what exactly is bothering me. Though I expect it has something to do with the aging process, which, along with profound new levels of wisdom, creates a great deal of ache, pain, and fatigue. When I say great deal, you should understand that I am being hyperbolic, except when I mean it. I'm getting some tests done to see if I have Psoriatic Arthritis, and I'm also looking into a new hip for my still organic left one. I may have already told you the above, if so, take note of my current age; 78.

I'm in the middle of writing a blog post about Horizon magazine and its creator, Cyril Connolly. It turns out that Cyril's life is resistant to any sort of condensation. I was hoping to just concentrate on his first marriage and that period of time. What I've learned is that the social class that Cyril belonged to was very, well social, in a way different than its American equivalent, which seems to have been more like a teenage gang. 

This blog thing has been a very effective way to avoid my other writing, which after falling by the wayside, has fallen from the fall from the wayside.  

Should I mention my "friend" group?  I'm involved with some friends that I meet regularly, almost daily, through Zoom. You may know about that. I can't say anything negative about it, since it happens to be the best therapy available for people of my kind. That's all your getting out of me on that one.  

I'm having a Dog Jones. Should Jones be capitalized? (I won't be acquiring a dog though, I'm afraid the poor animal might out-live me, which might end him, or her, in some sort of dog orphanage. I can't do that.  If I were to get a dog though, it would have to be a truck-cab dog rather than a back-of-the-pickup dog, (Lab, Rotty, Shepard), because I have a small apartment and smaller fits better with the old man thing. Perhaps a Norfolk or Norwich, or a Miniature Schnauzer. I'd have to think about it. Then again, Martha has shown some interest in an exotic cat called the Miniature Panther. Very cool animal, but would it eat you in the middle of the night?  

This post by the way is in lieu of this year's annual report which has been down-graded due to Covid, for no real, or honest reason, similar to much we have experienced recently.  

 

I've been married now for six months, that is to say, my wife and I together have been so hitched. Nothing feels very different. I would, though, advise anyone who has an ongoing relationship and has reached the age of 76 to consider it. It does give one a bit of a feeling of stability, as false as that sense would have to be at 76.

Did I mention that I'm taking Alopurinol for my gout?  Just another addition to my long list of meds. 

Oh, here's something that bares confessing. As I was closing the blinds the other night, before settling in, in front of the tube, I was saying goodnight to the birds and found myself telling myself I'm blessed. At which time my super-ego held up a big sign which read, "Cornball!"  It was a little unsettling. The fact is, though, that I've long ago, quietly so as not to disturb the ancestors, accepted that there is a God and that I'm not IT.  And with the help of a long list of esoteric teachers including the two most recent, Ingo Swann and Chris Langan, I've come to understand that I have a soul, which I think of as my manifold gasket.    

 

Current Reading: 

Cyril Connolly; Enemies of Promise; Revised Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 2008. 

Secret Teachings of the Western World; Gary Lachman; Tarcher/Penguin; 2015

Jesus and the Lost Goddess; Freke and Gandy; 2001 

Finished Reading: 

Auto-da-Fe;  by Elias Canetti. ..........about which I hope to have something to say after I mull it over for some time. It is unlike anything I've ever read; comes from darkest Europe about which I know little if anything.  

 

 

  

 

 

       

The Hard Problem* and Language

The field of consciousness research seems to be coming into it's own. I've been interested in it for years, even before I took acid. (more than fifty years ago.) As a subject though, it is illusive. It always seems to be on the other side of the coin. Or underneath another layer. (Or under the rug.) But common sense seems to say that if you peel an onion for a hundred years, eventually you'll have to come to a point where you're done peeling, where the substance is no longer a peel but a central core. Use any metaphor you choose, you still aren't there. 

I suppose it started with Freud, who in turn started with dreams. Dreams are little off-Broadway plays that we produce solely for ourselves while we are asleep, supposedly resting. We are conscious of these dreams while we're having them, but often they slip away as we wake. O.K. sometimes I have dreams that are more like movies than plays. Noir, Horror; even, my favorite, Westerns. Some people, from what I understand, never dream; I dream alot, often dreams that are very similar to previous ones. 

 

We construct these scenarios while we are asleep, which seems somewhat paradoxical because the creation of a dream is a creative act, therefore an energetic activity, and yet we are supposed to be unconscious. We aren't conscious of the world around us; the bedroom, the park bench, wherever we happen to be when we fall asleep. But we are engaged in the activity of telling a story, often in color and with sound, and utilizing various techniques; condensation, deletion, displacement, considerations of representability or figurability; revision, (re-writing), recursion, division, copying, modeling, force, (ie; pushing an idea aside), syntax.  We are unconsciously conscious.                                   

Being unconsciously conscious is, I suspect, the door we use when we lift consciousness out of the sticky mass of the brain and externalize it; place it in "inanimate" matter and/or in absolute vacuum space. (In that absolute vacuum by the way, consciousness seems to have something in common with dreaming while you sleep.) This externalizing, it is interesting to know, is something we did long before we discovered quantum mechanics, or at least before we put it in what we refer to as scientific language. That was called Animism.

When quantum mechanics came along in the early 20th century, wise men had the courage to face it, so, before the century was over, its revolution of thought was trickling down to those of us who live comfortably in the middle-brow level of consciousness. I suppose it was about 1975 that I first read what for me was the first of several popularizations of quantum physics, or mechanics, (not sure how it's supposed to be referred to in the nominal sense); The Tao of Physics. Then, maybe a year or so later, I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a similar Quantum for Dummies. Around that time I also signed up for Transcendental Meditation, got my mantra, started meditating, and on weekends went to hear taped lectures of its Guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, it was said, was a yogi and a nuclear physicist. At that point, of course, I was going around with a little knowledge in my head, and we know how that is.    

No little thing. Now it's not just "What is consciousness?", but, "Why are there two realities?" While science has been using the quantum reality to create more and more stuff, and more and more proofs of its existence, the rest of us are still stuck with Science's empirical observations and measurements.     

 In fact in some cases we are not just stuck but imprisoned. To be unscientific is to be almost an outlaw, so we'd better review what science really is, in the vernacular as it were........., 

 

Science is structured in the scientific method, which goes like this;   

Make an observation.
    Ask a question.
    Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation.
    Make a prediction based on the hypothesis.
    Test the prediction.
    Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions. 

The problem here is that consciousness is always left outside, waiting to get in. Whether you say; I make an observation; or you make an observation, or one makes an observation; the I, you, or one is still not in the hypotheses or prediction, it's outside, like the horse you left tied up to the hitching post.  

[Science thinks of the observer as an innocent bystander, but that way of thinking is in the process of being eroded by something like metaphysical creep, as in; many aspects of Lacan's thought, etc. etc. ...Wittgenstein, Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach; all of whom imply that the observer can't be trusted!] 

[Here is where I can't leave off mentioning Chris Langan. The problem is, or the problems are, that he speaks the language of higher mathematics and advanced logic, which I have absolutely no competency in. So, any reference I make to his theory has to be based only on that part of his thinking that I can understand, the simpler elucidations; statements that just seem right. [As for instance, what I "grok" concerning his ideas about the Scientific method. All I can do is share my understanding from my own intellectual level, one where I have, at least, more company than Mr. Langan has.]  

I mention Langan because he has in his possession a Theory of the Universe, and it's the only one I know anything about, and that is, again, taking into consideration my limited academic and intellectual resources. I've read as much as I can of The Portable Chris Langan and find his simpler explanation of his theory just amazingly intellectually seductive and will probably spend the rest of my golden years struggling to further my understanding. Since I don't feel qualified to "select out" any quotes of his, I'll leave it to you to listen to one of his many interviews on-line. I'll just say this; that I'm a believer that the universe is an intelligent entity.  

Is that entity the same as God? Well, there are still multitudes of intellectuals that would shoot down that idea quickly, but then, as we head in to this new millennium that group seems more and more vulnerable. My money is on Langan. ...O.K., I'm going to cheat; here's a little quote; 

"By the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility, reality is a language. Because it is self-contained with respect to processing as well as configuration, it is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL whose general spatio-temporal structure is hologically replicated everywhere within it as self-transductive syntax."

 

That's from a chapter almost all of which is clearly, distinctly over my head; [though the beauty of his thinking is revealed repeatedly.] So, why do I have so much faith in him? I throw myself on the mercy of the court. All I can say is that I have a long history of working with faith and belief to the occasional benefit of myself and my friends. 

 There are lots, potentially an infinite number of languages. There are sign languages, smoke signals, body languages, pidgens of various ilk, complex broad-based languages like English and German that have lots of words and meanings; languages that have more borrowed words than some, like Serbo-Croatian; and of course there are the language aspects of Math..., and computer languages.  And to some extent, we might say, the languages of animals; like horses and African Grey Parrots.  

There are also, they tell me, meta-languages, as in below, from Wikipedia:    

In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line. The structure of sentences and phrases in a metalanguage can be described by a metasyntax.  Wikipedia

 

A meta-language can refer to the mental version of a sentence you have in your mind when you see a sentence that is grammatically incorrect; as in, "I saw you at the mall last Tuesday." When you are reading,  "I seen youz at the mall las Tuesday."

The following is lifted from Wikipedia with all do credit:

There are a variety of recognized metalanguages, including embedded, ordered, and nested (or hierarchical) metalanguages.

An embedded metalanguage is a language formally, naturally and firmly fixed in an object language. This idea is found in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a discussion of the relationship between formal languages and number theory: "... it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embedded within it."^[3]

It occurs in natural, or informal, languages, as well—such as in English, where words such as noun, verb, or even word describe features and concepts pertaining to the English language itself.

Ordered 

An ordered metalanguage is analogous to an ordered logic. An example of an ordered metalanguage is the construction of one metalanguage to discuss an object language, followed by the creation of another metalanguage to discuss the first, etc.

Nested

A nested (or hierarchical) metalanguage is similar to an ordered metalanguage in that each level represents a greater degree of abstraction. However, a nested metalanguage differs from an ordered one in that each level includes the one below.

The paradigmatic example of a nested metalanguage comes from the Linnean taxonomic system in biology. Each level in the system incorporates the one below it. The language used to discuss genus is also used to discuss species; the one used to discuss orders is also used to discuss genera, etc., up to kingdoms. 

Having established that meta-language exists, what about mega? Is the SPSCL The mega language? Maybe it is for Earthlings, but not for other beings who might exist elsewhere? I don't know. I do believe though, that Langan is right that reality is the metalanguage for humans.   

  

*  The Hard Problem is "What is consciousness?".  

---------------------

 

P.S.  Below is what Chris Langan has to say about metalanguage: 

Question: "Syndiffeonesis stratifies language (perception + cognition), but is the relationship between telesis and language syndiffeonic?"

Answer: Language is relational on the syntactic, semantic, and interpretational levels. Syndiffeonesis is the structure of all coherent relations. Hence, languages are syndiffeonic on the syntactic, semantic, and model-theoretic levels.

Telesis is synetic with respect to reality in general. That is, whereas we see reality as profoundly variegated, all of the variety and even the identities thereby distinguished come from telesis. Thus, telesis is synetic in the vast syndiffeonic relationship called "reality".

Because reality is the most general language of all, namely the Metaformal System in which all coherent natural and formal languages and formal systems are necessarily embedded, telesis is synetic with respect to all languages and all of their diffeonic distinctions.

Equivalently, all of the distinctions are "factorizations of telesis".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Egghead Magazine

 

My being old and crotchety you might expect that the way "Young People" deal with the poor old twentieth century kind-of pisses me off. It seems as if history to the young talking-heads goes only as far back as the sixties. Ben Shapiro for instance. He's "a nice kid". He wrote a well received book,  Primetime Propaganda, which I liked, as far as it went. I kind of wish I could have gotten him to read the chapter in my book that includes an interview with Bob Costello, (an early television producer), in which he talks about the early days of TV. He talks about Playhouse 90, and Omnibus, and Goodson and Todman, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie; television pioneers. It was all out of New York City, and there were only a few dozen people involved; they all came out to my home town, East Hampton, for summer vacation. They were all left-wing, [though I didn't emphasize that enough], some more than others, and they mixed well with the New York Intellectuals and Abstract Expressionists who were also summering in the same township. My point being, that many of the influencers that Ben Shapiro talks about are the children of, or at least the ideological children of, those people who made up that 1950s social grouping. And they laid the groundwork for those Red Diaper Babies who run television today! The most reaction I seem to get when I talk to anyone in Shapiro's age group when I mention the 1950s, is, "Oh, you mean Happy Days," and with that the eyes glaze over. No sense delving into complex issues.  

The answer to the question, "Why do they avoid the 50s?" is simple. The popular culture was too white. It was even too anti-semitic. Oh, the writers of the narrative that made it to the new medium were Jewish, many of them, but they aimed at the Gentile audience. Right now, though, Winter of 2020, the Twentieth Century long over, with our media-controlled culture at a tipping point, and the country ready to split like post-Tito Yugoslavia,  we need to separate ourselves, those of us who want to stay out of the Orwellian Utopia, from the Marxist movement toward Revisionist History. 

 

In the early days of television the medium abounded with Culturati, or as they were known in those days by the man in the street, "Eggheads". Omnibus, with narrator Alistair Cooke, was the premium product. Leonard Bernstein gave lectures on music and conducted excerpts from Handel's Messiah. There were interviews by writers and public figures, including entertainers Jack Benny and Orson Welles, writer William Saroyan, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. There was live drama, with two early programs, first The Philco Television Playhouse, and later Playhouse 90.  Omnibus, by the way, was created by The Ford Foundation, (No relation to the Ford Motor Company), a CIA front organization. The CIA, since 1945, had been working with singular focus on the creation of something they called The Anti-Stalinist Left.     

Of course, television, like radio, can, and therefore must, unless it is government owned, be aimed at a different audience than print, for the simple reason that with electronic media you buy the machine and turn on the switch. You don't have to go to a news-stand and select what you want to read. And since you only need to look and listen, not read, you don't have to be literate. Television and Radio have a much broader reach.  

But early Television was made up of people who wanted to influence other people. "For their own good."  They weren't interested in the broader reach. In those days, they were living off capital investment, not advertisers profit. And where did that crowd of first generation TV writers, actors and producers get their ideas and opinions?  From the theater, the motion pictures, radio, and magazines. But, the most potent medium, the one with the most clout, many, (including myself), believe, was the little magazine. Said like that, with no caps, it doesn't look like much, but if you look it up in The Encyclopedia Britannica Online, under little magazines, it becomes, well, a thing;  

"Little magazine, any of various small periodicals devoted to serious literary writings, usually avant-garde and noncommercial. They were published from about 1880 through much of the 20th century and flourished in the United States and England, though French writers (especially the Symbolist poets and critics, 1880–c. 1900) often had access to a similar type of publication and German literature of the 1920s was also indebted to them. The name signifies most of all a noncommercial manner of editing, managing, and financing. A little magazine usually begins with the object of publishing literary work of some artistic merit that is unacceptable to commercial magazines for any one or all of three reasons—the writer is unknown and therefore not a good risk; the work itself is unconventional or experimental in form; or it violates one of several popular notions of moral, social, or aesthetic behavior.

Foremost in the ranks of such magazines were two American periodicals, Poetry: a Magazine of Verse (founded 1912), especially in its early years under the vigorous guidance of Harriet Monroe, and the more erratic and often more sensational Little Review (1914–29) of Margaret Anderson; a group of English magazines in the second decade of the 20th century, of which the Egoist (1914–19) and Blast (1914–15) were most conspicuous; and Eugene Jolas’ transition (1927–38). [Small t is correct] In all but the last of these, a major guiding spirit was the U.S. poet and critic Ezra Pound; he served as “foreign correspondent” of both Poetry and the Little Review, maneuvered the Egoist from its earlier beginnings as a feminist magazine (The New Freewoman, 1913) to the status of an avant-garde literary review, and, with Wyndham Lewis, jointly sponsored the two issues of Blast. In this case, the little magazines showed the stamp of a single vigorous personality; similar strong and dedicated figures in little magazine history were the U.S. poet William Carlos Williams (whose name appears in scores of little magazines, in one capacity or another); the British critic and novelist Ford Madox Ford, editor of the Transatlantic Review (1924–25) and contributor to many others; and Gustave Kahn, a minor French poet but a very active editor associated with several French Symbolist periodicals.

There were four principal periods in the general history of little magazines. In the first, from 1890 to about 1915, French magazines served mainly to establish and explain a literary movement; British and U.S. magazines served to disseminate information about and encourage acceptance of continental European literature and culture. In the second stage, 1915–30, when other magazines, especially in the United States, were in the vanguard of almost every variation of modern literature, a conspicuous feature was the expatriate magazine, published usually in France but occasionally elsewhere in Europe by young U.S. and British critics and writers. The major emphasis in this period was upon literary and aesthetic form and theory and the publication of fresh and original work, such as that of Ernest Hemingway (in the Little Review, Poetry, This Quarter, and other publications), T.S. Eliot (in Poetry, the Egoist, Blast) James Joyce (in the Egoist, the Little Review, transition), and many others. The third stage, the 1930s, saw the beginnings of many leftist magazines, started with specific doctrinal commitments that were often subjected to considerable editorial change in the career of the magazine. Partisan Review (1934) was perhaps the best known example of these in the United States, as was the Left Review (1934–38) in England.

The fourth period of little magazine history began about 1940. One of the conspicuous features of this period was the critical review supported and sustained by a group of critics, who were in most cases attached to a university or college. Examples of this kind of periodical were, in the United States, The Kenyon Review, founded by John Crowe Ransom in 1939, and in Great Britain, Scrutiny, edited by F.R. Leavis (1932–53). This and related kinds of support, such as that of publishers maintaining their own reviews or miscellanies, represented a form of institutionalism which was radically different from the more spontaneous and erratic nature of the little magazines of earlier years."

 

 

The Truants is a book about the Partisan Review, a left-wing magazine, a little magazine, published from just before WWll until April of 2003. The author is William Barrett, professor at NYU and one of the magazine's principle editors in the Post-War period. I read The Truants when it first came out in 1982 and just finished re-reading it. I think it's a terrific book.

For many Americans and Europeans before WWll the good guys were; Karl Marx, The Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of the United States. I grew up with parents who were working adults throughout the depression, in an environment where things that were written about in P.R. , (and other little magazines), were also being discussed at home; with my parents to each other, and when they were with friends, certain friends, with them. 

The answer to the question "who invented the Partisan Review?" is; The John Reed Club; under the ideological umbrella of The Communist Party U.S.A.  But don't take my word for that. The following is the first paragraph in a good summation of the P.R., from Wikipedia;   

 

Partisan Review (PR) was a small circulation quarterly, "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party, USA–affiliated John Reed Club of New York and was initially part of the Communist political orbit. Growing disaffection on the part of PR's primary editors began to make itself felt, however, and the magazine abruptly suspended publication in the fall of 1936. When the magazine reemerged late in 1937, it came with additional editors and new writers who advanced a political line deeply critical of Stalin's USSR.

Before re-reading The Truants, I read a review of the book written by the noted art critic Hilton Kramer in 1982. Early in his review Kramer points to an article in P.R. published in the magazine in the summer of 1946, and re-published in the appendix of The Truants. The essay, by William Barrett and titled The Liberal Fifth Column, shows, to quote Mr. Kramer, ...[the article makes us realize] ..."how little has actually changed in the thinking of the American left in the last 36 years."  Then, add another 38 years, if you please.   

 

After saying that this is a great book I won't then go and paraphrase Prof. Barrett, the writing is too good for that. You must read this book, or, failing that, at least read the article in the appendix. The article is shocking, not only because it, that same Fifth Column, is still alive today, but because it is ruling our country.  How that can be, with the Soviet Union gone, and Western Europe having survived, is itself staggering. 

   But now it's Chinese Communists who have the adversarial position, and the Liberal Elites are showering them with soft-ball diplomacy while they go about collapsing our economy. (Mao came to power with the help of Stalin and the American Left*, who convinced Congress to betray Chiang.)  

 

By inserting that article in the appendix, is Barrett implying that the work of P.R. was part of the creation of that Fifth Column? Well, perhaps not in so many words. Perhaps that came to him as he was writing the book?  Or while he was himself working at the magazine. I think that's it. I think his thinking evolved. 

 

 

When Rahv and William Phillips made the retreat from Stalinism to Trotsky they were expelled from Communist Party USA. They folded the John Reed Club version of The Partisan Review.  But they were both still committed to Marxism. The Stalin alternative was Trotsky, who was still alive at that time. (Assassination date, August 2, 1940, Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico.)

  The idea of moving from Stalinism to something else, anything else, was dangerous in the extreme though they might not have realized it at that time. For three years, Rahv and Phillips one might say cooled their heels and talked up their ideas, which gravitated toward supporting the ideal of a culture both purer in its Marxism while at the same time being supportive to an inclusive modernist aesthetic incorporating art, literature and the entire cultural world. They needed added brain power for that and they found it in Clem Greenberg, Dwight MacDonald (and his wife Nancy) and Fred Dupee; in today's lingo a trifecta, though they were young and to a large extent, except for MacDonald who had worked at Fortune, un-tried.   

 

The move back and away from Stalin and toward Trotsky and Modernism happened in stages, with the first remove, or perhaps I'd better say stage, being Rahv's and Phillips's move from Stalin to Trotsky. The second stage was, as I go into in some depth in another blog, titled Dancing with Greenberg, the addition of cultural criticism, primarily painting. And then, I may be taking a leap, but I'd like to think of it as a force, or perhaps, the use of force, for which I'll have to offer examples:

1. Piling on...as in adding the MacDonalds and the Trillings!  

2. Using, like any good editor, pressure and manipulation to energize writers; which power takes intellect as well as a check-book.  

3.Putting all the eggs in one basket, or as Stalin might have said, centralizing; contriving to have art and modernism engaged with the Anti-Stalinist Left. Here, there is the question of whether Rahv and and Phillips were on board with the CIA, a probable yes.    

  

Force though, I don't see acknowledged much in the Modernism-joined-to-Marxism world perhaps because it is seen as a fundamental of Capitalism, but of course it is acknowledged in the Freudian world, which world is agreeable and acceptable to most if not all Partisan Review writers, and; to the Left in general...as in Libido, Transference and Counter Transference; as Ego insinuating and Super-ego squelching, but perhaps it, ...[forcefulness] ...is underappreciated in the social organization of Little Magazines and the Art World coterie. For instance, in the cult of personality. You could see it in the Pollock and deKooning worlds but perhaps under-acknowledged in the power extant in influencers*, [Like The New York Times], like Lee Krazner, and Clem Greenberg, Elaine de Kooning, and in other forces pushing these innovators in this or that direction.    

 

Leaving out the lust for power for the moment, let's break that concept of force down into more manageable segments.  Segment; horniness and/or seduction; these too can be broken down.  So many kinds of sexy. Massaging of the painter's or writer's ego; or an editor's ego. The many powers of the muse. The power of money, or as it's known in the painter's world, prices. Prices power myth!  Segment;  political power; the power of the oracle; the power to help selection of candidates and the candidates themselves; the power of spotlighting issues; the power of star-making through prose and poetry. 

 

*The Amerasia Spy Case; Klehr and Radosh, UNC Press, Chapel Hill  

 

**[Below is from an editorial footnote to the Mary McCarthy piece on Rahv in the NYT at the time of his death.]  

"Over the next 30 years Partisan Review became the best literary magazine in America. It would be hard to overestimate the cultural importance of Rahv's and Phillips's decision to break with Stalinism without abandoning the social and political ideals (and analytic techniques) of the Marxist tradition.

But equally important for American culture was their determination to celebrate and define the achievement of the great modernist writers without severing the connections between art and politics, literature and life. Against the art‐for‐art's‐sake “new critics” the editors argued for an understanding of the historical dimension of a literary work; against [sic.] ..the Communists they insisted on the independence of a work of art or literary criticism from any political expedience."

 

 

I am Joe's Liver

 

 

Some of you are old enough to remember that article in The Reader's Digest, I am Joe's liver. It was a good, kind-of-fun layman's description of that important organ; with a personal touch. I suppose my being a magazine buff makes it more likely for me to remember it. I have an informal, (mental), list of "seminal", or "important" articles from various magazines that I've read over the years, and without too much trouble I could increase the list ad infinitum by including those I haven't read but have heard about. I can't say that I've studied journalism so I'm not sure what they teach in college, (I did have one Journalism course in my incomplete college career, and one course that was an Introduction to Television, Motion Pictures, and Radio), but I have heard that Frank Sinatra has a Cold, an Esquire article by  Gay Talese, is "taught" in school, by which I guess they mean used as a model; I can understand that; there is much to admire in it, I've read it several times. My contention here is simply that magazines are important. They represent a very old cultural institution, but today are considered the poor relative of television.    

The Reader Digest's "Liver" piece, (have a piece of liver won't you?) was so well received that they went on and did other organs, though I won't stop here to research which-all ones; could have been Kidney I suppose, but don't let's get carried away, (duodenum, Pineal, Testicle), yada yada.  And the list of great articles from Esquires of the past is almost endless, so I won't go there except to note that someone, back in the 1940s I believe, even wrote a whole article, illustrated, about my father and his painting that referred to his fishing. I remember the first time I read it finding it cringingly fawning, and too gushy. The title was; Ray Prohaska, the poetic seal of Muo.  The writer was Robert Ulrich Godsoe, an art critic and gallery owner. In the 1930s he had a gallery attached to a cultural center, The Continental Club, in a famous building at 249 West End Ave. in Manhattan, a historic landmark noted for it's Romanesque Revival architecture. The article was part of a series that included several of my father's friends and contemporaries, and was published in  Esquire's July, 1947 issue.

Staying with Esquire for a bit longer, if I can here insert columns as being included under the heading of articles, I have to say that I loved and looked forward to Robert Alan Arthur's column "Hangin Out", which I believe appeared mostly in the sixties. And as long as I'm still doing this off the top of my head, (I'll call a time out when I have to stop to look something up), I believe reading Joan Dideon's famous article Slouching Towards Bethlehem in The Saturday Evening Post was important for quite a few people like myself who "discovered" Dideon in that issue.  

 

I sent the archived Esquire article about our father to my sister just to see if she agreed with me and she did. "It's awful", she said, "Was he being paid by the word?"  I dunno. It's one of those twists of fate, when things that could have helped someone's career didn't; could have, for want of a complete and radical re-write. It must be the magazine itself that put together the site, called Esquire Classic. It's very nicely done; attractive, and including so many great writers; Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron; Fitzgerald, Didion, Capote, Mailer, and a dozen more.

 

Now, for that time out.   ...To go on with this post I'll have to start looking things up, like for instance the Jack Alexander article about Alcoholic's Anonymous. It made a large swath of the population newly aware of A.A. and many alcoholics benefited. When was that? ....There! That was easy, Goggle, right at the top of the page, March 1, 1941.  And I'll have to go back to one of my previous posts to pin down the date of an article, actually a series of articles, very important to art history; Clem Greenberg's articles starting with 'Avant-Garde and Kitsch.' It's really hard to believe, but worth remembering, how important Partisan Review was seventy years ago.  

Magazines like Look and Life were everywhere mid-twentieth century and almost as useful, in keeping up with current events, as television is today. There is still something about the photographic image that is very useful and entertaining to humans. And Time-Life is maybe the best example of a magazine company that turned into a corporate giant.

These days it's not at all uncommon to come across a family in who's residence there is not one magazine, unthinkable not too many years ago. Granted I grew up in a household that was dependent on magazines for its bread and butter, but the larger point was that the magazine in all it's variations was ubiquitous. I grew up with Boy's Life, Popular Mechanics, Horse Lovers, Western Horseman, and, because a friend had it, Draft Horse Journal. 

Its not dead. I predict the magazine will live on, probably even thrive. You can see it in the need people have for printing things out.  ...Words on paper are still high tech.  

Here's the last thing I printed out:  'A portrait of Elias Canetti; The Road To The True Book,' By William H. Gass, The New Republic, Nov. 8, 1982.

 

 

 

Semi-Annual Report, 10/17/20

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Presidential campaign is almost over.  I'm sure my lately developed Psoriasis is a result of the political warfare in the fractured public discourse. There is nothing to do but wait it out. It's low-grade PTSD. My bride has it too. (The anxiety, not the skin problem. I've discussed the marriage, somewhere, I think, or will soon write a treatise on it.)

A few months ago I decided it was absolutely necessary that I read Korzybski's book Science and Sanity. I've been reading ten pages a day, early morning before my Zoom meeting. This morning on page 578 I came to a dead halt. Can go no further. Too much math. Calculus!  Didn't I know this would happen? What now? Do I jump into a fit of self anger, or talk myself off the ledge?  .....Off the ledge of course.  

My mother always said about me, that I bite off more than I can chew. That my reach exceeds my grasp. She used to say, "Pity the poor Pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can!"  Dear old mom.  ...But then again she probably planted the Korzybski seed. She had the book. Don't think she read it, but I think she read some Hayakawa.  You remember him.., the Senator.  Anywayz, as they say in Canada, there is a theme developing here that shouldn't be overlooked. Note to self: Take note!  

 

Having done some Zooming with some nice folks up in Prince Edward Island, I decided to read its most famous novel, Ann of Green Gables.  Having read it, I'm beginning to feel an attachment to the people of PEI as it's called. I noticed there's a Kindle book that has all or almost everything she wrote, Lucy Mongomery, Green Gable's author, so I snatched that up and started reading a second of her books. There are at least 100, so we'll have to see....she's no James Joyce, he said looking down his nose.  

Also, re-reading Ashley Montegue's book, Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, which I read back in the seventies. Re-reading it to assuage, if possible, my politically encouraged psycho-somatic Psoriasis. Also re-reading a couple of books about consciousness that are laying around, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of a meta-language with which I could converse with the universe. Have I said that the Politics are getting me down? I mean, if someone were to tell me that the Liberal Media is not a propaganda organ for the Hard Left, I might act out. Let's leave it at that.   

     

Politics, 2.O

Whatever my beliefs are, or my system of beliefs, if that applies, or my preferences, likes, dislikes and ad. infinitum, I'm ego involved. I live and die according to my thoughts.  Thoughts are things, as my friends in New Thought would say. Why do I care about the coming Presidential election?  Being that I'm 77 years old and am destined for a future life in the Forth Dimension; some place in the high frequency world of the non-physical?   

I care because of love. Because all those I love seem so much younger than me. In many cases, so naive. So childlike. Expecting a perfect world. Not allowing for evil, sin, stupidity;  including those who think that I.Q. tests are unfair. .....O.K.  Lets have an I.Q. test that's fair. Everyone do the test. We will judge it according to what each participant thinks is fair. Everyone gets an A. Everyone has an I.Q. of 140. There. Now the test is politically correct, and useless.   

Let's give everyone a free home and a paycheck geared to the cost of living. The cost of living will rise. Those more clever will capitalize on their property and on their mental and physical efforts, while the less clever will flounder and the least clever will need special care. 

How is it that someone who voted for Jimmy Carter has gotten so wise in his old age? Not without a struggle, believe me. (I discuss the aforementioned in my book Hold On, sequel to Hold Still, [renamed The White Fence] so I needn't get into it here. It will be available for posterity, all that really counts when you come down to it.)     

 

I feel there is an awful lot of business in running a country; trade is business; negotiation is business, territorial expansion is business.  And, cut to the chase, a Communist isn't likely to be good at business. In fact, being bad at it probably would be good. And, what is progressivism except moving in a particular direction "progressively".  What's left, after the above, is to decide whether one wants Communism. If not, you are stuck with Capitalism.  In fact, even Communism needs capital, but you can only use it once, because it's not being re-produced!  Now, I know there is a school that says all you need to do to get money is to print it, but I think that dead horse has been flayed.  

The election is about seventeen days away and I'm voting for the Capitalist. He's brought jobs back from China.  He's closed the Mexico wall. That's all I need.  My concerns are for the people who live in pre-fabricated homes, own a pick-up truck and a Harley, (or maybe a backyard horse), and somehow get by, while raising two point five kids. There is no reason these people should be sacrificed to some elitist fantasy.    

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was a Sephardic Jew, born to German-speaking parents in Bulgaria, and raised in Vienna. He was part of the community of exiles taken in by the British in the 1930s during the build-up to World War ll.  

He is best known for his non-fiction book, Crowds and Power, published in German in 1960 and translated into English in 1962, and Die Blendung, a novel written in 1935 and translated to English in 1946, under the title Auto da Fe, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1981. (Auto da Fe does not mean anything similar to Die Blendung, but I don't suppose that matters.)    

I've just finished reading Party in The Blitz, supposed to be the last part of his memoirs, but published after his death. I've been looking forward to reading it for some time, and had a feeling I was going to like the book, (it seemed to be calling me), and so, wanted to get some other reading out of the way and give it my full attention. Possibly, part of it's attraction came from the fact that Iris Murdoch valued him so highly.  Rumor had it she was in love with him.   

Canetti took a long time in getting his words out there. He was an exile to the depth of his non-religious soul: extremely sensitive about being an outsider. He was an atheist but though the Political Left was his faith, he didn't write much about it or refer to it, at least in this part of his memoirs. He was concerned with the environment in which he had lived, feeling that he was at the center of the intellectual ferment. His memoirs are a personal history of his life from Bulgaria where he was born, to Vienna, where he was raised in a Jewish intellectual environment, to London and finally to Zurich.  

If I say that I find Elias endearing, just on account of this one reading that is; I should add that this is the only book of his I've read to date. Mostly I've known him through his fictionalization at the hands of Iris, who has written more than one book in which some part of Canetti is in an important character. (Perhaps I would have liked some woman to write about me in such a way. That is not a question.) His fictional being comes across as powerful, mesmerizing, and usually right about everything. Who would want anything less?   (ie; What's not to like?)   

 

Party in The Blitz is meant to be part of a series but comes out much later and posthumously...perhaps edited too much or not enough to the writer's specs. Is he sadistic to women? Probably. And do I forgive him too much by giving him credit for being self-abasing in his exhibitionism? Probably.  

Though most of the people he writes about were not familiar to me so that the book is an exposure to a wider milieu, I have long been interested in the topic of artists in their social world. The cocktail party is essential to the book, but the British designation leaves out the word "cocktail", unlike the parties I mentioned in another post referring to those occurring among the Partisan Review crowd during a similar historical time frame in New York City.  

Each character is given a short chapter, finely tuned and "off the nose", as someone said; taking you somewhere you didn't expect. There's Herbert Read, Enoch Powell, Veronica Wedgewood, Franz Steiner, Henry Moore, Roland Penrose, people who he often claims not to like but seems quite fascinated with. A street sweeper is one he liked.  

Kathleen Raine was a poet, and not from the aristocracy or even the upper classes. She was raised by a schoolmaster descended from coal miners, in the countryside in Northumberland.  

She had earned her place in the literary world, for which Canetti gave her credit, though he is sure that she didn't like his work, and that he didn't give her's the time of day. He doesn't say if they were lovers but he is fascinated in turn by her fascination with two brothers, themselves aristocrats. He met her at "one of her parties in Chelsea." At the time she was giving lots of parties. He went with one of his mistresses, Friedl.  (His wife was completely tolerant of his mistresses and in fact often befriended them.) But his relationship with Raine failed to deepen until he became friends with the Maxwell brothers, about whom Kathleen seemed to have a serious fixation, at least as Canetti saw it. (He too was, I think, impressed by the history of the two boys, and probably projects some of his thoughts onto the poetess.) 

Blitz; p. 63;

"When they were out walking once, Kathleen's mother pointed out to her a couple of golden, shining-haired boys who were standing together on a small bridge. Their mother was speaking to them in elevated tones, the language was like poetry. This was lady Mary, the daughter of the Duke, with her boys, who if not the sons of a Duke were at least grandsons...   ...The vision of the two golden-haired boys was to accompany Kathleen all her life. Thirty years later, when I knew her, she still spoke about it in visionary terms. ..."

 

Canetti spent years patiently listening to Kathleen pour out her heart concerning her failure to get one of the boys, Aymer, the older one, that had inherited the great estate, to fall in love with her. She seems not to have understood that he, in fact both Aymer and his brother Gavin, were gay. Both were, at least on the surface, manly swashbuckling types. They were also both very bright but unambitious intellectually, and were good listeners, which was Canetti's most important qualification in a companion. In the book, he gives the two boys by far the most generous treatment, which I'm not sure any of the critics has put down to their lack of threat to him in his pursuit of total adoration from women.  Gavin did, eventually, become a writer, though, not a terribly good one we are to understand, but was a monumental success with his book about his pet Otter,  Ring of Bright Water.  

Like the two or three critics I investigated in light of this reading, I was most interested in what he had to say about Iris. I can empathize with Canetti's hatefulness toward her, I've been there, that is to say in terms of women with whom I have been in love. It seems to me like a natural reaction, after the love has gone. (Not going for any high moral ground, of course..) I'd rather see him wallow in meanness, after giving her the props of being a real and true and competent artist, someone of standing that he didn't possess, at that time or probably ever; if that is what being her lover made him feel. He grew up in a glamorous Vienna, with no doubt an adolescence full of idyllic visions of tall thin Klimptian womanhood. 

   

After finishing reading "Blitz", I read a criticism of it by the well- known though recently deceased contemporary English critic Clive James which is a fairly savage review. James didn't find much good to say about Canetti either as a writer or as a man. The review is snide, clever and unsympathetic. Though James is Australian, he's more of an Englishman then I am and I suppose he took offense to the not always positive view that Canetti had of his hosts. James is offended by Canetti's seeming lack of interest in The War. But let me just quote a piece from this James review, which I believe was first published in The Guardian and then in The New York Times;  

"...he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority.  Witnessing, from Hampstead Heath, the Battle of Britain taking place above him -- the completeness with which he fails to evoke the scene is breathtaking -- Canetti, unlike many another German-speaking refugee, managed to take no part whatever in the war against Hitler, then or subsequently. He had his own war to fight, against, among others, T.S.Eliot.  Canetti's loathing of Eliot is practically the book's leitmotif: you have to imagine a version of Die Meistersinger: in which Beckmesser keeps coming back on stage a few minutes after he goes off. "I was living in England as its intellect decayed," Canetti recalls. "I was witness to the fame of a T.S.Eliot... A libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante ... thin-lipped, coldhearted, prematurely old ... armed with critical points instead of teeth, tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife ... tormented to such a degree that my "Auto-da-fe" would have shriveled up if he had gone near it." "  

  

Then there's this quote, from Carol Angier, in a review of "Blitz", in The Independent, July, 2005; 

"It can only be love-hate, because for Canetti and his kind the best things in England are also intolerable. He is hot in everything, especially his opinions, while the English are cool and moderate. He admires their moderation immoderately, and knows it is the reason why Britain alone in Europe is non-Fascist and free. But nothing could be more alien to him. He craves attention and praise, while in England praise is embarrassing, and attention-seeking the ultimate sin. His leitmotif is arrogance, but the English are more arrogant than him. He can enslave some of their women; but Englishmen, and Englishness, mock and defeat him as nothing else will ever do but death itself."

 

In the process of finding the James review I became aware of just what a big-shot Canetti was, or is, judging by the space he takes up on Google. It appears that he has been written about by half the Western World.  So, when I say to myself that he must be a big-shot, let me be seen as gesticulating in the manner of Mel Brooks.  "I mean, whoa, such a big shot!" Of course he made his name pre-Mel Brooks, pre-Borscht Belt, but there must have been a little Jewish humor in his persona available to him, to his fellow refugees, and to the local Britishers. He had friends. You could say he was somewhat popular. There were those that loved him and those that didn't but he seems to have been well respected as an intellectual, and managed to get close to some and close enough to others.  

There is something attractive about the exile narrative or it wouldn't be such a big part of literature. It is almost all of Joyce. Homer. Some of Mark Twain. and etc. and of course some of us'ns.  I'll have more to say about Canetti.  

# A note on the illustration.  It is only vaguely related to Canetti in that he considered himself a Balkan, and that his name is most likely a derivative of Elijah. ( But I think it's nice. )     

 

 

The Czech is in The Montenegren

 

 

I've given myself a time out. I'm being treated for Gout and for Psoriasis. The Gout is now somewhat under control with a standard medication; name of which I'll have to get up from my chair here to get the spelling of....Colchicine, not that you care. The Psoriasis is only the last in a series of diagnoses by a series of doctors for a rash on my back that's about five years old. Haven't you had enough of this? 

Yes. Now for the Czech. When I visited the town in Montenegro where my father was born about twenty years ago, I found a cousin, Ivan, with whom I had trouble conversing because I wasn't able to find an available translator and I don't speak what is now called Montenegrin but was then called Serbo-Croatian. But with a small group of people who each knew a few words of English we struggled along, and my cousin, Ivan, who has since passed away, showed me numerous photos of his family.  

From what I could discern, it seemed, from a picture of his mother and his description of her, that she was my father's aunt and Godmother, Baba Jana. Another picture was of an Austro-Hungarian Army Officer, and I've come to the conclusion that he was my father's father's father. My great grandfather. I've forgotten his name now. (That's part of the problem of waiting until you're old to get interested in your genealogy.)  This officer, by the way, everyone agreed looked just like me. 

I don't know for sure, but I think he was born in Czech Bohemia. I believe the Empire's Army sent him to Montenegro, where he married, I'm assuming a Croat, which would have been considered in the family, of the same tribe and race as it were, (Roman Catholic), which allowed him to settle in and become part of the landscape. His son Sima, though, (Simon in Americanese, and my Gramps, who I never met,) married a Montenegren Serb, and was therefore disowned and so had to flee to the U.S., in much the same manner as my mother's maternal grandmother and grandfather, who were Catholic and Protestant and lived in Northern Ireland and came here for the same reason. (This is a story I've told before, so I must think it's interesting.) My Czech part is in the male. My Irish, Scots-Irish part is in the female, with the Catholic being the Grandmother and the Protestant being the male. 

I suppose there is a good case for mine being a bastardized as well as balkanized genealogy, all of which could make a lesser man slide toward an identity crisis.  I, however, for those of you who are along for the ride, must tell you that I am well beyond that. I've been transformed, (I did EST), I've become transcendent, (I did T.M.), I'm sober, (I did that thing), and I've delved into General Semantics, by which I mean I'm on page 206 reading Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. And on that page, or near it, I've come across some interesting information about infinity, which, and I'll end with this, is formulated symbolically as an eight, on its side, which I thought to myself, perhaps channeling my late brother-in-law Burt Glinn, famous photographer, and compulsive punster, can be written as ate lying down.  Badump bump.    

 

 

 

Obituary for a Lost Blog Post

 

 

May it rest in peace!  And may I find peace, about IT.  I lost a blog post in the electronic maze and it won't stop annoying me.  I don't feel I can entirely blame myself. It seems to me that some devil had first off messed with the post.  I was looking through the various posts and noticed this one that seemed to have had several, in fact many sentences removed, including some that were cut with seemingly no selectivity.  I tried to find an original copy and then I noticed that the post was in draft form. Anyway, in the process of trying to retrieve the original, I erased the draft form and all was lost. Of course, I could say it's no big deal. I mean it's only me, mine, and who the F. am I?  But I refuse to think that way.  First off, it was important to me; and second of all it's probably of some interest to someone, I have that much faith in myself.  

 

The post, as usual with me, was about a couple of books I'd read recently, one being a biography of Wilhelm Reich, Fury on Earth, by Myron Sharaf, and the other being the well known book about the Merry Pranksters; Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  The tie-in between the two books, for me was that one of the primary characters in the story of the Merry Pranksters was a woman who's house was the gathering place for the people, the social crowd, which evolved into the Pranksters.  Her name was Chloe Scott, and she had some relationship to Stanford University, which I've forgotten now, and she lived in Palo Alto. She had studied Buddhism and Dance, she was a dance instructor, and she was attractive and kind of a hipster.  She had also, in her earlier days, lived in my hometown, East Hampton, NY, and had been part of the artist's and writer's community there, which included my own parents.  At that time she was married to a guy named Pete Scott, who's best friend was a young writer who would later become famous, by the name of Peter Mathiessen. The two guys had been part of the summer social set as kids, and as adults, after WWll, had come back and gone native.  Mathiessen wrote a great book about that part of his and Pete Scott's life, Men's Lives, a book that describes the world of off-the- beach haulseining fishermen, with whom they worked for some years. I also wrote about the two in relation to another part of their social life at that time which centered around the dynamic, cyclonic life of the artist Jackson Pollock who became world famous almost moments before he killed himself and another person and injured a third in a drunken driving accident.  

The tie-in, if there is one, is based on a rumor that existed at that time, that one of the two couples, Scott and his wife Chloe, or Peter and his wife Patsy, had a Reichian Orgone Box. The rumor was never substantiated though years later Chloe did admit to having "Basted" herself in one such contraption. The reason for the lack of candor no doubt had to do with the fact that all Reichian devices were illegal, owing to the fact that the powers that be had convicted Reich as a fraud, and he had died in prison. Reich, though, had in death retained a loyal following which grew slowly during the fifties, and was greatly helped by his inclusion in The Whole Earth Catalogue, arguably the Holy Bible of the Hippy movement, which was conceived and edited by another of Chloe's friends and part of that same social set, Stewart Brand. There it is, a re-hash, a memory of a lost blog; feel better, me.