Ezra Pound: "Make it new."

Ezra Pound: "Make it new."


"The artist is always beginning," Ezra Pound once wrote. "Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth. The very name Troubadour means a 'finder,' one who discovers."
In his first published book of poems, A Lume Spento, the Pound of 1908 is still very much a late nineteenth-century poet, steeped in the archaisms of the Pre-Raphaelites. A mere four years later, in Ripostes, he has reinvented himself as a modernist proponent of "Imagism," before moving on, in rapid succession, to the avant-garde aesthetics of Vorticism and translations from the Chinese (Cathay), the Japanese ("Noh" or Accomplishment), the Provençal (Arnaut Daniel), and the Latin ("Homage to Sextus Propertius"). Each of these forays into new identities and new languages constituted, as Pound himself explained, a "search for oneself," which entailed "casting off complete masks of the self in each poem."
The title Pound chose for the first comprehensive collection of his shorter poems in 1926 was, significantly, Personae—Latin for "masks." Whether writing in the form of Browningesque dramatic monologues, medieval canzoni, satirical epigrams, Confucian analects, or Sophoclean tragic choruses, Pound in his poems presents us with a medley of masks whose multiple and contradictory features helped shape the face of American poetry in the 20th century.
In his dedication of The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot paid homage to Ezra Pound as "il miglior fabbro"—that is, "the better craftsman"—Dante's term for the Troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel. Pound remains a vital ancestral presence in the lineage of American modernist and post-modernist poetry. The list of his descendants includes not only William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Charles Olson, but also the Beats and, more recently, the Language Poets—all of whom in their own fashion learned their craft from his work while observing his central imperative: "Make it new."

—Richard Sieburth

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La Mousson - Louis Bromfield

La Mousson - Louis Bromfield

 

 

Publié pour la première fois en 1937, «La Mousson» - qui porte en anglais le titre, infiniment plus poétique, de «The Rain Came» - est probablement, avec «Mrs Parkington», le roman le plus connu et aussi le plus lu de Louis Bromfield. Il a d'ailleurs donné lieu à une adaptation cinématographique mémorable avec la sculpturale Lana Turner dans le rôle de lady Esketh, Tom Ewell – le voisin de Marilyn dans « Sept Ans de Réflexion » - dans celui de Tom Ransome et un Richard Burton somme toute assez convainquant dans celui du Major Safti. 

    

   L'argument de base est le suivant : dans une petite principauté indienne, l'Etat de Ranchipur, que gouvernent de façon éclairée le Vieux Maharadjah et son épouse, l'impressionnante Maharani, la saison Sèche touche à sa fin et tout le monde attend désespérément le début de la saison des Pluies. Lorsque celles-ci arrivent, elles sont si violentes qu'elles provoquent la crue du fleuve et la rupture d'un barrage édifié par un escroc. La ville se retrouve alors inondée et le choléra se déclare. A la fin de ce roman-fleuve – six-cent quatre-vingt-quinze pages en édition de Poche – tout rentrera dans l'ordre non sans que certains des personnages campés par Bromfield n'aient trouvé dans la catastrophe une mort navrante ou héroïque. 

    

   Derrière ce thème, les buts poursuivis par le romancier s'avèrent multiples. Avant tout, bien entendu, l'éternelle opposition entre l'Orient et l'Occident – au bénéfice de l'Orient puisque Bromfield penchait fortement vers le Communisme et rejetait avec violence toute idée colonisatrice qui ne fût pas originaire d'URSS. (En ce qui concerne la colonisation des Etats-Unis, ce petit-fils de pionniers débarqués en Ohio au XVIIIème siècle n'en parle toujours qu'en termes héroïques pour les Blancs et je ne connais aucun ouvrage de lui où il ait pris position pour les Indiens d'Amérique.). Les considérations enthousiastes qu'émet aussi Bromfield sur l'Islam en évoquant la personnalité au demeurant des plus énergiques de Rashid Ali Khan, le Chef de la Police de Ranchipur, sonnent tout aussi étrangement et ne trouveraient certainement pas d'écho de nos jours chez la majeure partie des Américains. 

    

   C'est que Bromfield a cette implacable naïveté des «compagnons de route» et qu'il avance obstinément, pas à pas s'il le faut mais sans reculer d'un pouce et en se cramponnant à ses idées toutes faites et aux oeillères qui le protègent. Soyons juste : cela ne remet pas en cause son talent dont il fait ici l'une de ses meilleures démonstrations en nous peignant toute une galerie de personnages qui, Indiens comme Britanniques, valent largement le détour. 

    

   Principal héros et observateur : Thomas Ransome, fils cadet d'un comte britannique et d'une héritière américaine, qui endort son désenchantement et son cynisme dans l'abrutissement de l'alcool. Après une jeunesse où il a brûlé la chandelle par les deux bouts, il a atterri à Ranchipur où il s'est fixé parce que tout, dans ces Indes immémoriales, le fascine. Depuis lors, il alimente par sa présence et son passé, supposé ou réel, les fantasmes de la petite communauté américano-britannique du coin. 

    

   A la tête de la communauté en question, Mr et Mrs Simon, des missionnaires protestants expédiés à Ranchipur pour y accomplir tout le bien possible mais qui y ont évidemment amené ces a-priori bizarres et incompréhensibles pour le commun des Européens que les Etats-Unis ont toujours nourris envers tout ce qui n'est pas américain à 100%. Dans le couple, c'est la blonde Mrs Simon, ancienne "belle" sur le retour, qui dirige, d'une main d'acier, non seulement sa marionnette d'époux mais aussi ses deux filles, Hazel l'Effacée et Fern la Rebelle. Outre ses obligations de tyran familial, Mrs Simon consacre son temps à cancaner avec Lily Hoggett-Eggbury, l'épouse de l'Administrateur britannique du coin (lequel Administrateur a préféré se réfugier à Calcutta, loin de l'incroyable vulgarité de sa femme) et à rédiger les textes de nombreuses lettres, toutes destinées à perdre définitivement ses voisins, Mr et Mrs Smiley – autre ménage de missionnaires mais présenté, celui-là, par Bromfield comme la parfaite antithèse des Simon – dans l'esprit des responsables fédéraux de la Mission Evangélique.

    

   L'un des grands rêves de Mrs Simon – pour ne pas dire son fantasme le plus acharné – est de voir Tom Ransome – un aristocrate anglais, tout de même ! – assister à l'une des petites parties qu'elle donne régulièrement. Et voilà que, alors que les pluies commencent à peine, le miracle se produit : poussé par l'ennui, Ransome y fait une brève apparition. Juste le temps pour lui de nouer une relation amusée et un peu paternelle avec la jeune Fern, en qui il sera assez surpris de découvrir par la suite un point de stabilité qui lui deviendra vite indispensable. 

    

   Mais n'anticipons pas … 

    

   Dans le même temps, débarquent à Ranchipur lord et lady Esketh. Le premier est un nouveau riche absolument infect même si, selon la formule consacrée, il s'est fait tout seul. Grand amateur de chevaux de race, il vient acquérir deux étalons de grand prix auprès du Maharadjah. La seconde est, tout comme Ransome avec qui elle eut jadis une liaison, un pur produit de l'authentique aristocratie anglaise. Et, toujours comme Ransome, elle traîne un fantôme d'existence, à la seule différence que, pour elle, le sexe y remplace l'alcool. 

    

   Mais les pluies s'abattent et tout se met à bouillonner.En quelques heures, tout ou presque est submergé et les destins se dénouent. 

   Car « La Mousson », c'est aussi un roman sur la renaissance morale d'individus qui, jusque là, s'étaient comportés soit en parfait égoïstes, soit en fripouilles absolues. Certes, les personnages y sont parfois crayonnés de façon un peu trop manichéenne, voire caricaturale mais, pour une raison ou pour une autre, ils n'en tiennent pas moins bien la route même si l'ensemble a vieilli. On peut regretter également les longueurs inévitables à ce genre de romans. Toutefois, si vous n'avez rien à vous mettre sous la dent et si vous aimez les analyses minutieuses des petites communautés, que celles-ci soient indiennes, américaines, européennes ou martiennes, allez-y de confiance. «La Mousson» n'est pas ce que l'on nomme de «la grande littérature» mais c'est un livre qui a le mérite d'avoir été écrit par quelqu'un de sincère et, tout compte fait, son ingénuité présente quelque chose de rafraîchissant. 

   

critique par Masques de Venise

http://www.lecture-ecriture.com/fiche_membre.php?membre=11

 

                   http://www.lecture-ecriture.com/critique_livre?livre=823

 

 

 

 Film: The Rains Came Myrna Loy; Tyrone Power; Geroge Brent; Clarence Brown, director,

 

 

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Van Morrison-Moondance -Rolling Stone Review

Van Morrison-Moondance -Rolling Stone Review

Long ago, Van Morrison reached that point where the influences on his music no longer mattered. It is as pointless to attempt to detect those influences as it would be for any musician to try to imitate him.

Van Morrison's music cannot really be imitated, because, as with Dylan's music, what one hears is not style, but personality. With each record--Them Again, Astral Weeks, or Moondance--one gets a sense that Van has achieved some ancient familiarity with his band and with his songs; no matter how the music changes, the long inventions of Van's singing, his full command of the musicians that play with him, and the striking imagination of a consciousness that is visionary in the strongest sense of the word create an atmosphere that instantly sets its own terms. Morrison's powers are clear: his strong gift for melody, his ability to move freely within virtually any sort of contemporary instrumentation, his verbal magic as inventive and literate as Dylan's, and most of all, the authenticity of his spirit.

Moondance is his first album in over a year. Unlike Van's masterful Astral Weeks, this one will be immensely popular; Van's picture already fills the windows of record stores and his new music is getting more airplay on FM stations than anything in recent memory.

Van's new album might send one back to the bright enthusiasm of "Brown-Eyed Girl" and the magic blues of Them Again; Van now sings with a magnetically full electric band, complete with piano, organ, vibes, and intricately controlled saxophones and flute. The band's performance has a stately brilliance; and if it recaptures some of the feeling of the earlier music, the past is serving as a rite of passage toward the celebrations of Moondance.

Van opens with "And It Stoned Me," a tale of boys out for a day's freedom, standing in the rain with eyes and mouths open, heads bent back: "Oh, the water, let it run all over me ..." The sensuality of this song is overpowering, communicated with a classical sort of grace. "And it stoned me/To my soul/Stoned me just like jelly roll ..." There is no strain for meaning in Van's words or in his voice. "Let it run all over me ..."--you feel the exhilaration almost with a sense of astonishment. The band, playing subtle, gentle rock and roll, surrounds the singer; here, as everywhere on Moondance, the horn arrangements are absolutely exquisite, as eloquent as a sermon in a backwoods chapel.

With "Caravan" one might begin to remember the early Impressions: that instantaneous aura of fantasy and desire that Curtis Mayfield created for "Gypsy Woman" tumbles down again as a fanfare on piano and the roll of drums and guitar open a composition of seductive grandeur. "Caravan" is a strange song; the images are easily real and the music is profoundly comforting, yet there's the edge of a story here that fades without ever revealing all it has to tell. "Now the caravan has all friends/Yes, they'll stay with me until the end ... Gypsies ... tell me all I need to know ..." Woven between the fragments and framed by the textures of the horn section is a love tale, drawn with blazing imagination: "Turn up your radio/And let me/Hear the song/Turn on your electric light/So we can get down/To what is really wrong." The singer moves from the gypsy campfire to his lover and back again, with a lovely sort of affection. Van's singing is pure expression, pure sound; the band moves off and then forward again. A graceful soprano saxophone holds notes behind Van's words: "Now, the caravan is painted red and white/That means everyone is staying overnight ..."

"It's a good thing he doesn't have much stage presence," said a friend after watching Van perform this song. "Otherwise it'd be too much to take."

"Into the Mystic" is the heart of Moondance; the music unfolds with a classic sense of timing, guitar strums fading into watery notes on a piano, the bass counting off the pace. The lines of the song and Morrison's delivery of them are gorgeous: "I want to rock your gypsy soul/Just like in the days of old/And magnificently we will fold/Into the mystic." The transcendent purity of the imagery seems to turn endlessly, giving back one's own reflection. Van's more abstract songs are mosiacs of brilliantly chosen metaphors--ambiguous and instantly recognizable. Morrison communicates directly even when he is most obscure; his visions have power, and the ambiguity of that vision is always unified by the sympathy of the music--there is no "back-up band" on Moondance anymore than there is on "Lay Lady Lay." Something's been made; it stands, it won't be broken down.

Perhaps "Glad Tidings," which ends Moondance, is the song that most makes one want to come back to this album without even thinking about it. "Glad Tidings" is a vital, leaping promenade through the streets of the town; fast, clean rock and roll moves it along as striking horns guide the song, until they cue the chorus into an explosion of real joy: "Yeah, we'll send you glad tidings/From New York/Do Do Do Doot Do Do/ Open up your eyes that you may see/ Do Do Do Doot Do Do/Ask you not to read between the lines/Hoping that you come right in on time."

Moondance is an album of musical invention and lyrical confidence; the strong moods of "Into the Mystic" and the fine, epic brilliance of "Caravan" will carry it past many good records we'll forget in the next few years. Van Morrison plays on.

 

GREIL MARCUS and LESTER BANGS

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What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting

What Carriers Aren't Eager to Tell You About Texting




 

 

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers' costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.




Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.

So, in September, Mr. Kohl sent a letter to Verizon Wireless,AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, inviting them to answer some basic questions about their text messaging costs and pricing.

All four of the major carriers decided during the last three years to increase the pay-per-use price for messages to 20 cents from 10 cents. The decision could not have come from a dearth of business: the 2.5 trillion sent messages this year, the estimate of the Gartner Group, is up 32 percent from 2007. Gartner expects 3.3 trillion messages to be sent in 2009.

The written responses to Senator Kohl from AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile speak at length about pricing plans without getting around to the costs of conveying text messages. My attempts to speak with representatives of all three about their costs and pricing were unsuccessful. (Verizon Wireless would not speak with me, either, nor would it allow Mr.Kohl's office to release publicly its written response.)

The carriers will have other opportunities to tell us more about their pricing decisions: 20 class-action lawsuits have been filed around the country against AT&T and the other carriers, alleging price-fixing for text messaging services. Timothy P. McKone, AT&T's executive vice president for federal relations, told the senator that the suits had been filed "since your letter was made public" and said that he was "eager to clear up any misunderstanding."

T-Mobile and AT&T contended in their responses to Mr. Kohl that the pay-per-use price of a message is relatively unimportant because most messaging is done as part of a package. With a $10 or $15 monthly plan for text messaging, customers of T-Mobile, AT&T and Sprint can effectively bring the per-message price down to a penny, if they fully use their monthly allotment.

T-Mobile called Mr. Kohl's attention to the fact that its "average revenue per text message, which takes into account the revenue for all text messages, has declined by more than 50 percent since 2005."

This statement seems like good news for customers. But consider what is left out: In the past three years, the volume of text messaging in the United States has grown tenfold, according to CTIA — the Wireless Association, a trade group based in Washington. If T-Mobile enjoyed growth that was typical, its text messaging revenue grew fivefold, even with the steep drop in per-message revenue.

The lucrative nature of that revenue increase cannot be appreciated without doing something that T-Mobile chose not to do, which is to talk about whether its costs rose as the industry's messaging volume grew tenfold. Mr. Kohl's letter of inquiry noted that "text messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit."

A better description might be "cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit."

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential. Srinivasan Keshav, a professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, said: "Messages are small. Even though a trillion seems like a lot to carry, it isn't."

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it. But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what's called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That's why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. "Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume," he said. "It doesn't cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million."

UNTIL Mr. Kohl began his inquiries, the public had no reason to think of the text-messaging business as anything but an ordinary one, whose operational costs rose in tandem with message volume. The carriers had no reason to correct such an impression.

Professor Keshav, whose academic research received financial support from one of the four major American carriers, discovered just how secretive the carriers are when it comes to this business. Two years ago, when he requested information from his sponsor about its network operations in the past so that his students could study a real-world text-messaging network, he was turned down. He said the company liaison told him, "Even our own researchers are not permitted to see that data."

Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers' pricing plans in an entirely new light. The most profitable plan for the carriers will be the one that collects the most revenue from the customer: unlimited messaging, for which AT&T and Sprint charge $20 a month and T-Mobile, $15.

Customers with unlimited plans, like diners bringing a healthy appetite to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, might think they're getting the best out of the arrangement. But the carriers, unlike the cafeteria owners, can provide unlimited quantities of "food" at virtually no cost to themselves — so long as it is served in bite-sized portions.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University. E-mail: stross@nytimes.com.

 

By RANDALL STROSS

Published: December 26, 2008

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/28digi.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

 

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Italian Makers of Prosecco Seek Recognition

Italian Makers of Prosecco Seek Recognition

Sergio Mionetto and other northern Italian winemakers have seen a wave of popularity for prosecco, a sparkling wine.

The Bisol family’s vineyards, where prosecco grapes are grown. The grape has been grown for 300 years in northern Italy, originally for still wines.

IN 1984, Fabio Zardetto, chief winemaker at his family-run vineyard in northern Italy, leapt at the chance to become one of the first bottlers to export prosecco, the sparkling wine, to the United States.

At first, his efforts on behalf of his bubbly fizzled. “I had to push people to taste the prosecco,” recalled Mr. Zardetto, now 50. “I would run behind them with a glass saying, ‘Please, taste this.’ ”

When they did try it, he said, they were pleasantly surprised. Sales of Zardetto prosecco grew to 100,000 cases in the United States in 2007, from 50 cases in 1984.

With its fresh flavor, pleasing bubbles and gentle price tag — it typically sells for $10 to $20 a bottle — prosecco has gained many fans worldwide. Global sales have been growing by double-digit percentages for 10 years, to more than 150 million bottles last year. And with consumers in an economizing mood this holiday season, prosecco is an increasingly popular alternative to Champagne, which has been soaring in price.

But prosecco is also encountering some growing pains. From its traditional home in northern Italy, it is now waging a war against outsiders, just as Champagne, its more elite cousin in France, has done for so many years.

A host of producers elsewhere in Italy and as far away as Brazil are trying to cash in on the drink’s newfound popularity. Because prosecco is the name of a grape, likechardonnay or cabernet, anyone can use the name.

Today, about 60 percent of all prosecco — some eight million cases — comes from producers outside the traditional prosecco-growing region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, a cluster of villages about a half-hour’s drive north of Venice. The newcomers are not held to the same strict production standards as the traditional producers, which are tightly governed under Italian wine laws.

One product, Rich Prosecco, is made by an Austrian company whose ads feature Paris Hilton. In some, she is naked and spray-painted gold. What’s worse to some producers, the product is sold in a 6.8-ounce can, in gas stations as well as stores, for around $3.

“It’s absolutely vulgar,” says Vittorio Zoppi, marketing manager for the prosecco consortium.

Claus Jahnke, a sales and marketing executive at Rich, says he is puzzled by the reaction to the product, which uses Italian grapes. “We have invested a lot of money in advertising and P.R. to launch Rich and promote prosecco,” he says. “We gave this famous grape a helping hand in conquering the world.”

The Italian winemakers worry that upstarts will weaken prosecco’s image just as it is taking off.

“If everyone around the world plants prosecco, we will lose the value of the name,” says Ludovico Giustiniani, vice president of a consortium that represents about 150 wineries in the traditional prosecco-producing region.

Over months of discussions, the consortium, along with a broader group of growers and producers, has hammered out a plan that would create an official prosecco production zone tied exclusively to northern Italy. Only wine produced in that region could be labeled as prosecco. If the plan is approved by the Italian government — a decision is expected by early 2009 — prosecco would then be eligible for “protected designation of origin” status under European laws intended to protect regional products from Champagne and port to Serrano ham.

“It will let prosecco be an Italian product — and nothing else,” says Giancarlo Moretti Polegato, the owner of Villa Sandi, one of the area’s prominent wineries.

That is the theory, at least. Protection from the European Union would extend only across its 27 member countries, and, as Champagne producers have discovered, a lot of policing is still required.

The Champagne region of France has been officially designated since 1927 as the authentic home of the wine that bears its name, but its trade organization still spends millions of dollars battling producers of items as varied as sparkling wine, bubble bath and bottled water that also use the word.

“We have to spend a lot of money and energy protecting our product,” says Sam Heitner, director of the Office of Champagne USA, a trade group that represents the interests of Champagne producers.

That spending is on display in Times Square, where a giant screen flashes an ad by Mr. Heitner’s group for holiday revelers. A bottle, labeled “American Champagne,” is covered by a red, Venetian-style carnival mask. It’s part of the group’s “Unmask the truth” campaign, which notes its opposition to the name’s use by United States producers.

Producers of prosecco may also be in for a long fight.

PROSECCO’S success can be seen in the steep-hilled villages surrounding Conegliano and Valdobbiadene.

The area has grown from a sleepy agricultural area to one of Italy’s wealthiest enclaves, dotted with shiny new wineries and farmhouses that have been transformed into rustic inns to support a growing wine tourism trade.

Prosecco sales from this area alone were 370 million euros last year. And a hectare (2.47 acres) of vineyard in the most coveted spots, like Cartizze, sells for more than $1 million. Prosecco from Cartizze, a panettone-shaped hill in Valdobbiadene where 140 growers farm about 250 acres, fetches about $40 a bottle.

The vines are tended and harvested by hand. Machines cannot navigate the vertical angles, although helicopters are occasionally used when a vineyard needs to be sprayed. The soil and the mix of warm days and cool nights make for an especially flavorful prosecco — an affinity given official weight in 1969, when the region was awarded the status of denominazione di origine controllata, or D.O.C., Italy’s version of a wine appellation.

The region’s turn of fortunes, though, is relatively recent. Although prosecco grapes have been cultivated here for three centuries, in the early days they were made mostly into still wine for local consumption. The vines shared the steep hillsides with more valuable cows and sheep.

It was only after a new method for producing sparkling wine became widespread in the mid-1900s that things began to change.

Champagne and other sparkling wines typically get their bubbles when they are fermented a second time, with added sugar and yeast. The yeast feeds on the sugar and converts into alcohol and carbon dioxide. When the bottle is opened, the escaping gas gives the wine its bubbles and characteristic “pop.”

Champagne re-ferments in bottles, an expensive and labor-intensive process. But the new production methods allowed prosecco makers to re-ferment their wine in large tanks, a process that kept prices down. That, and prosecco’s light, delicate flavor and low alcohol content, made it an especially versatile wine.

IN Italy, prosecco is enjoyed year-round — and practically around the clock. “The only moment we don’t drink it is for breakfast,” Mr. Giustiniani says.

That approachability has helped propel the popularity of prosecco — in the 1960s throughout Italy, in the ’80s in Germany and neighboring countries and in the ’90s in the United States, which today is prosecco’s No. 1 market outside of Italy.

Perhaps no one pushed harder to establish prosecco in the United States than Mionetto, a winery founded in Valdobbiadene in 1886 and now one of the area’s largest, with sales of 40 million euros a year.

Seeing the tremendous growth potential in the 1990s, this winery began expanding aggressively. It established Mionetto USA to control distribution in North America and has spent millions of dollars promoting prosecco and the Mionetto brand. Today, the company has the leading market share, roughly 33 percent, in the United States, with 168,000 cases a year of its D.O.C. and non-D.O.C. prosecco.

Still, says Sergio Mionetto, who took over as chief winemaker from his grandfather in 1956, “we believe we’re just at the tip of the iceberg.”

At the bustling Union Square Cafe in Manhattan, where the house prosecco is Mr. Mionetto’s top-of-the-line Sergio (named after himself), prosecco by the glass outsells Champagne two to one, says Stephen Paul Mancini, director of wine and spirits at the restaurant. “Prosecco is an extremely popular product for us,” he adds. And some retailers report that prosecco is flying off shelves this holiday season.

Prosecco is also catching on in new markets, like China, India and Vietnam, causing producers to think even bigger.

“Prosecco can be the best-selling sparkling wine of the world,” says Gianluca Bisol, a 21st-generation winemaker and general manager of the Bisol winery, in Valdobbiadene. He figures that prosecco can overtake Champagne in sales volume in the next 25 years or so.

The problem is that others saw the potential, too. It started with the relative newcomers in the plains of northern Italy. Growers there are less regulated than their D.O.C. kin; they were granted the Italian wine system’s least-stringent designation, known as I.G.T., in 1995. They can produce almost double the volume of wine per hectare, and quality can vary.

In the flatlands, winemakers can use machines to harvest and tend to their vines, at about a tenth of the cost, Mr. Bisol and others say. “For these reasons,” Mr. Bisol says, “this area that didn’t exist 25 years ago now accounts for 60 percent of prosecco production.”

A more recent worry for the consortium and newer growers is that countries like Brazil, Romania, Argentina and Australia have begun to plant prosecco. Brazil, in particular, has embraced the grape, perhaps not surprisingly, given that its main wine region is populated by northern Italian immigrants.

Close to 2,000 acres of prosecco are planted in Brazil, Mr. Bisol says.

“The Brazilians like parties,” Mr. Bisol says. “They drink a lot of prosecco.” The homegrown prosecco could cut into Italian sales there: Brazil is already the fifth-largest export market for Italian prosecco.

Closer to home, German and Austrian producers have taken to buying tanks of Italian prosecco produced in the plains and shipping it to their countries to be bottled. Or canned, in the case of Rich Prosecco.

When Ms. Hilton traveled to northern Italy to promote Rich Prosecco two years ago, “it was a big scandal for the area,” Mr. Bisol says. “The winegrowers were very angry.” She has not returned, he says.

Günther Aloys, a hotelier and entrepreneur in the Austrian resort town of Ischgl who introduced Rich Prosecco in 2006, plans to take it to the United States next year. And Mr. Jahnke, the sales and marketing executive at Rich, said the company was following the developments with the Italian producers’ proposal to the Italian government.

THE threat of foreign-brand prosecco has prompted northern Italian producers, of both D.O.C. and I.G.T. prosecco, to work together to protect their turf. They say they believe that their proposal will raise quality and prevent others from calling their products prosecco.

The plan would create a broad new D.O.C. designation to govern the hundreds of I.G.T. prosecco producers that have sprung up across eight northern Italian provinces in the plains from Treviso to Trieste. The producers would have to comply with strict quality controls, including lower yields per hectare and stronger oversight.

The region of Conegliano-Valdobbiadene, meanwhile, would be elevated to Italy’s highest designation for wine regions, known as D.O.C.G.

The key is to link prosecco to its traditional home.

“We don’t want to end up with something like pinot grigio,” says Primo Franco, owner of the Nino Franco winery in Valdobbiadene, referring to another white wine grape from the Veneto region that today is grown around the world.

Because prosecco is also the name of a northern Italian village where the grape is believed to have originated, the consortium can make an argument, too, that prosecco is a place name that can be protected just like Chianti, Champagne and others.

By bringing all of northern Italy’s prosecco makers into the fold, the winemakers hope to do more than give prosecco a territorial identity. They also want the muscle power to meet growing demand and achieve their goal of matching or even besting Champagne, which today produces some 300 million bottles a year. About 150 million bottles of Italian prosecco are produced a year.

Prosecco producers say they believe that with the new plan, they can double their output to 300 million or even 400 million bottles a year, while providing consumers with a guarantee of quality.

“Champagne is the king of the bubble,” Mr. Bisol says. “But prosecco maybe can be considered the small prince.”

In recent weeks, the winemakers have been scrambling to nail down a final proposal to the Italian government before a year-end deadline. The producers hope to be eligible for a streamlined European Union system that goes into effect in August. If all goes well, the new prosecco protections will be in place for the 2009 harvest.

But that is just a start. European Union regulations are valid only for members, and deals have to be struck with countries outside of the union, like the United States or Brazil, on an, ahem, case-by-case basis. For now, says Mr. Moretti Polegato of Villa Sandi, “everybody involved in prosecco production is happy.”

You can almost hear the corks popping.

 

By AMY CORTESE

Published: December 26, 2008

 

 

 

Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/business/worldbusiness/28prosecco.html?em=&pagewanted=all>

 

 

 

 

 

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French Unions Losing Influence in Downturn

SOCHAUX, France — When the financial crisis in the United States washed up on Europe's shores and pushed the economy into recession, the workers at the Peugeot car plant in this village in eastern France were afraid — and angry.

Michel David, 61, a former worker at the Peugeot plant, says workers now "have long holidays and a lot of protection."

Waving the red banners of the biggest French labor union, the CGT, they staged prolonged strikes to demand not only an end to unemployment but also shorter workweeks and longer vacations. With millions of other strikers nationwide, they extracted a host of new benefits for French workers, even as the economy continued to drag.

That was in the 1930s.

Today, with the global economy once again in a tailspin, European workers have remained conspicuously quiet. Germany's most powerful union, IG Metall, reached a modest wage deal with employers in record time last month, avoiding crippling strikes and reflecting, perhaps, a national predilection for caution. Yet even in France, where there have been scattered protests over factory closings and job cuts, there is little evidence of a unified labor reaction. Tellingly, efforts by the CGT to organize a nationwide protest before Christmas fizzled, prompting union leaders to postpone the initiative until next year.

In part, that suggests that the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, has had some success in taming his country's notoriously rebellious unions, even if he made some tactical retreats this month. But it also shows how fragmented the labor movement has become and how much heavier the pressures of globalization and competition from low-cost countries weigh on the European economy.

Indeed, as some of the biggest French multinationals, including PSA Peugeot Citroën, the country's No. 1 carmaker, have temporarily halted production in dozens of factories across the country, the most powerful weapon of the unions has become increasingly impotent.

"Striking is hardly a threat when management doesn't want you to work," Bruno Lemerle, the head of the CGT at Sochaux, said gloomily. "It's difficult to imagine a 1930s-style mobilization today."

With its 12,500 workers and 56 kilometers, or 35 miles, of roads and railways inside its confines, the Sochaux plant is the biggest factory in France and has almost mythical status in the country's industrial lore. It is also in many ways a microcosm of corporate France and its complex labor relations.

There are eight unions vying for members at the plant, mirroring the national fragmentation. Membership here is even less than the national rate of 8 percent — which itself is lower than in the United States.

But unions in Sochaux and elsewhere in France still negotiate on behalf of all employees at a company. When they win a raise, all workers benefit, not just their members. Add to that a tradition of street protest that dates back to the French Revolution, and organized labor has traditionally enjoyed far more influence than the numbers suggest.

That appears to be changing, though.

On the deserted Sochaux factory floor one recent afternoon, Nadège Taesch explained why she had not joined a union and would not support protests. "This crisis is frightening, and I don't see how the unions can change that," said Ms. Taesch, 32, as she pulled a light-blue plastic cover over one of hundreds of half-finished Peugeot models stretching along the motionless two-story assembly line.

"I'm not scared of management," she said. "I'm scared of how bad the economy will be in 2009."

Like Ms. Taesch, many here remember hearing Mr. Sarkozy's promise to save a steel plant from shutting down in March, only to find that six months later it was closing anyway. And few trust the president's ability long term to stop bosses from moving production to low-cost countries, as he again demanded last week at a meeting with auto industry executives.

In part, unions have become a victim of their own success.

"In the 1930s the situation was very different; workers did not have many rights," said Michel David, 61, a former Peugeot worker whose father worked at Sochaux during the Great Depression and whose 29-year-old daughter is employed there today. "These days we have long holidays and a lot of protection. How much further can you go?"

Generous benefits, like the 35-hour workweek and a minimum of five weeks of paid annual leave in France, have certainly helped to keep a lid on union mobilization.

The 6,000-odd Peugeot workers who have been sent home for the next month are still paid their full salaries, losing a maximum of 150 euros ($210), in transport and meal subsidies a month, thanks to an agreement with the unions that allows the company to compensate overtime with down time and vice versa.

Employees of Peugeot's many suppliers are less fortunate. But even they get half their pay for staying at home up to four months a year, with the state covering at least 2.13 euros of the hourly rate under a provision known here as "technical unemployment."

By contrast, there was no statutory workweek or paid vacation at all in the 1930s. A single union — the CGT — dominated the landscape, manpower was in short supply after the carnage of World War I and leftist parties were gaining strength, winning power in 1936. One of their first acts was the law establishing a 40-hour workweek and 15 days of paid annual leave.

But as more unions have popped up, and with the opposition Socialist Party mired in disarray, organized labor has increasingly been on the defensive, said Guy Groux, a specialist on the union movement at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris and co-author of "The Strike," a book on the history of worker revolts published this year.

"The only way the microprotests we are seeing today could develop into a mass protest would be either mobilizing the public sector or the student movement," both groups that are less immediately affected by economic pressures and have played an important role in past rebellions, Mr. Groux said.

Union membership in the public sector is three times as high as in the private sector. In 1995, train drivers shut down the country with a prolonged strike that led to the withdrawal of a curb in their retirement benefits.

Students, meanwhile, have repeatedly achieved the withdrawal of proposals and hastened the end of some political careers, most recently in 2006 with a two-month street rebellion against a youth employment law put forward by the prime minister at the time, Dominique de Villepin.

With one eye on that history and another on the recent youth riots in Greece, the Sarkozy government postponed plans to revamp the secondary school curriculum, which had been the target of weeks of student protests.

But since Mr. Sarkozy took office last year, unions have consistently failed to muster a critical mass on the street.

New laws establishing minimum service during transport strikes, and obliging unions to garner the backing of at least 10 percent of employees inside a company before being allowed to sign deals on their behalf, proved popular with voters.

Not that the unions have become completely powerless: they secured significant concessions in return for accepting tightening of public sector retirement benefits last year, and this month helped pressure the government into drastically weakening a proposal that would allow stores to open on Sundays.

And if economic conditions worsen and more jobs are lost, some predict that workers could begin to stir, especially when the partial unemployment benefits start to run out.

Nearly 75 percent of French people now fear for their job, a proportion that rises to 80 percent for private sector employees, according to an opinion poll published recently by the TNS Sofres institute.

After meeting fellow union leaders last week, the head of the CGT, Bernard Thibault, announced plans for a "big day of mobilization" on Jan. 29. Even the head of the less militant CFDT union, François Chérèque, suggested recently that today's dispersed discontent could still develop into a "national movement."

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

Published: December 25, 2008

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The Paranoid Style in American Politics By Richard Hofstadter

The Paranoid Style in American Politics

By Richard Hofstadter†

 

 

It had been around a long time before the Radical Right discovered it—and its targets have ranged from "the international bankers" to Masons, Jesuits, and munitions makers.

    American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression "paranoid style" I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics., In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

    Of course this term is pejorative, and it is meant to be; the paranoid style has a greater affinity for bad causes than good. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way in which ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content. I am interested here in getting at our political psychology through our political rhetoric. The paranoid style is an old and recurrent phenomenon in our public life which has been frequently linked with movements of suspicious discontent.

Here is Senator McCarthy, speaking in June 1951 about the parlous situation of the United States:

How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, which it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.…What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence.…The laws of probability would dictate that part of…[the] decisions would serve the country's interest.

Now turn back fifty years to a manifesto signed in 1895 by a number of leaders of the Populist party:

As early as 1865-66 a conspiracy was entered into between the gold gamblers of Europe and America.…For nearly thirty years these conspirators have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose.…Every device of treachery, every resource of statecraft, and every artifice known to the secret cabals of the international gold ring are being used to deal a blow to the prosperity of the people and the financial and commercial independence of the country.

Next, a Texas newspaper article of 1855:

…It is a notorious fact that the Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome are at this very moment plotting our destruction and threatening the extinction of our political, civil, and religious institutions. We have the best reasons for believing that corruption has found its way into our Executive Chamber, and that our Executive head is tainted with the infectious venom of Catholicism.…The Pope has recently sent his ambassador of state to this country on a secret commission, the effect of which is an extraordinary boldness of the Catholic church throughout the United States.…These minions of the Pope are boldly insulting our Senators; reprimanding our Statesmen; propagating the adulterous union of Church and State; abusing with foul calumny all governments but Catholic, and spewing out the bitterest execrations on all Protestantism. The Catholics in the United States receive from abroad more than $200,000 annually for the propagation of their creed. Add to this the vast revenues collected here.…

These quotations give the keynote of the style. In the history of the United States one find it, for example, in the anti-Masonic movement, the nativist and anti-Catholic movement, in certain spokesmen of abolitionism who regarded the United States as being in the grip of a slaveholders' conspiracy, in many alarmists about the Mormons, in some Greenback and Populist writers who constructed a great conspiracy of international bankers, in the exposure of a munitions makers' conspiracy of World War I, in the popular left-wing press, in the contemporary American right wing, and on both sides of the race controversy today, among White Citizens' Councils and Black Muslims. I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

Illuminism and Masonry

    I begin with a particularly revealing episode—the panic that broke out in some quarters at the end of the eighteenth century over the allegedly subversive activities of the Bavarian Illuminati. This panic was a part of the general reaction to the French Revolution. In the United States it was heightened by the response of certain men, mostly in New England and among the established clergy, to the rise of Jeffersonian democracy. Illuminism had been started in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt, a professor of law at the University of Ingolstadt. Its teachings today seem to be no more than another version of Enlightenment rationalism, spiced with the anticlerical atmosphere of eighteenth-century Bavaria. It was a somewhat naïve and utopian movement which aspired ultimately to bring the human race under the rules of reason. Its humanitarian rationalism appears to have acquired a fairly wide influence in Masonic lodges.

    Americans first learned of Illumism in 1797, from a volume published in Edinburgh (later reprinted in New York) under the title, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. Its author was a well-known Scottish scientist, John Robison, who had himself been a somewhat casual adherent of Masonry in Britain, but whose imagination had been inflamed by what he considered to be the far less innocent Masonic movement on the Continent. Robison seems to have made his work as factual as he could, but when he came to estimating the moral character and the political influence of Illuminism, he made the characteristic paranoid leap into fantasy. The association, he thought, was formed "for the express purpose of rooting out all religious establishments, and overturning all the existing governments of europe." It had become "one great and wicked project fermenting and working all over Europe." And to it he attributed a central role in bringing about the French Revolution. He saw it as a libertine, anti-Christian movement, given to the corruption of women, the cultivation of sensual pleasures, and the violation of property rights. Its members had plans for making a tea that caused abortion—a secret substance that "blinds or kills when spurted in the face," and a device that sounds like a stench bomb—a "method for filling a bedchamber with pestilential vapours."

    These notions were quick to make themselves felt in America. In May 1798, a minister of the Massachusetts Congregational establishment in Boston, Jedidiah Morse, delivered a timely sermon to the young country, which was then sharply divided between Jeffersonians and Federalists, Francophiles and Anglomen. Having read Robison, Morse was convinced of a Jacobinical plot touched off by Illuminism, and that the country should be rallied to defend itself. His warnings were heeded throughout New England wherever Federalists brooded about the rising tide of religious infidelity or Jeffersonian democracy. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, followed Morse's sermon with a Fourth-of-July discourse on The Duty of Americans in the Present Crisis, in which he held forth against the Antichrist in his own glowing rhetoric. Soon the pulpits of New England were ringing with denunciations of the Illuminati, as though the country were swarming with them.

    The anti-Masonic movement of the late 1820s and the 1830s took up and extended the obsession with conspiracy. At first, this movement may seem to be no more than an extension or repetition of the anti-Masonic theme sounded in the outcry against the Bavarian Illuminati. But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism. Although anti-Masonry happened to be anti-Jacksonian (Jackson was a Mason), it manifested the same animus against the closure of opportunity for the common man and against aristocratic institutions that one finds in the Jacksonian crusade against the Bank of the United States.

    The anti-Masonic movement was a product not merely of natural enthusiasm but also of the vicissitudes of party politics. It was joined and used by a great many men who did not fully share its original anti-Masonic feelings. It attracted the support of several reputable statement who had only mild sympathy with its fundamental bias, but who as politicians could not afford to ignore it. Still, it was a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.

    As a secret society, Masonry was considered to be a standing conspiracy against republican government. It was held to be particularly liable to treason—for example, Aaron Burr's famous conspiracy was alleged to have been conducted by Masons. Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperium within the framework of federal and state governments, which was inconsistent with loyalty to them. Quite plausibly it was argued that the Masons had set up a jurisdiction of their own, with their own obligations and punishments, liable to enforcement even by the penalty of death. So basic was the conflict felt to be between secrecy and democracy that other, more innocent societies such as Phi Beta Kappa came under attack.

    Since Masons were pledged to come to each other's aid under circumstances of distress, and to extend fraternal indulgence at all times, is was held that the order nullified the enforcement of regular law. Masonic constables, sheriffs, juries, and judges must all be in league with Masonic criminals and fugitives. The press was believed to have been so "muzzled" by Masonic editors and proprietors that news of Masonic malfeasance could be suppressed. At a moment when almost every alleged citadel of privilege in America was under democratic assault, Masonry was attacked as a fraternity of the privileged, closing business opportunities and nearly monopolizing political offices.

    Certain elements of truth and reality there may have been in these views of Masonry. What must be emphasized here, however, is the apocalyptic and absolutistic framework in which this hostility was commonly expressed. Anti-Masons were not content simply to say that secret societies were rather a bad idea. The author of the standard exposition of anti-Masonry declared that Freemasonry was "not only the most abominable but also the most dangerous institution that ever was imposed on man.…It may truly be said to be hell's master piece."

The Jesuit Threat

    Fear of a Masonic plot had hardly been quieted when the rumors arose of a Catholic plot against American values. One meets here again the same frame of mind, but a different villain. The anti-Catholic movement converged with a growing nativism, and while they were not identical, together they cut such a wide swath in American life that they were bound to embrace many moderates to whom the paranoid style, in its full glory, did not appeal. Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society nor the particular Protestant commitments to individualism and freedom that were brought into play. But the movement had a large paranoid infusion, and the most influential anti-Catholic militants certainly had a strong affinity for the paranoid style.

    Two books which appeared in 1835 described the new danger to the ?American way of life and may be taken as expressions of the anti-Catholic mentality. One, Foreign Conspiracies against the Liberties of the United States, was from the hand of the celebrated painter and inventor of the telegraph, S.F.B. Morse. "A conspiracy exists," Morse proclaimed , and "its plans are already in operation…we are attacked in a vulnerable quarter which cannot be defended by our ships, our forts, or our armies." The main source of the conspiracy Morse found in Metternich's government: "Austria is now acting in this country. She has devised a grand scheme. She has organized a great plan for doing something here.…She has her Jesuit missionaries traveling through the land; she has supplied them with money, and has furnished a fountain for a regular supply." Were the plot successful, Morse said, some scion of the House of Hapsburg would soon be installed as Emperor of the United States.

"It is an ascertained fact," wrote another Protestant militant,

that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Popery. A minister of the Gospel from Ohio has informed us that he discovered one carrying on his devices in his congregation; and he says that the western country swarms with them under the name of puppet show men, dancing masters, music teachers, peddlers of images and ornaments, barrel organ players, and similar practitioners.

Lyman Beecher, the elder of a famous family and the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote in the same year his Plea for the West, in which he considered the possibility that the Christian millennium might come in the American states. Everything depended, in his judgment, upon what influences dominated the great West, where the future of the country lay. There Protestantism was engaged in a life-or-death struggle with Catholicism. "Whatever we do, it must be done quickly.…" A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by "the potentates of Europe," multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to "lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power."

****************

The Paranoid Style in Action

The John Birch Society is attempting to suppress a television series about the United Nations by means of a mass letter-writing campaign to the sponsor,…The Xerox Corporation. The corporation, however, intends to go ahead with the programs.…

The July issue of the John Birch Society Bulletin…said an "avalanche of mail ought to convince them of the unwisdom of their proposed action—just as United Air Lines was persuaded to back down and take the U.N. insignia off their planes." (A United Air Lines spokesman confirmed that the U.N. emblem was removed from its planes, following "considerable public reaction against it.")

Birch official John Rousselot said, "We hate to see a corporation of this country promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy."

—San Francisco Chronicle, July 31, 1964

****************

    Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan. Whereas the anti-Masons had envisaged drinking bouts and had entertained themselves with sado-masochistic fantasies about the actual enforcement of grisly Masonic oaths,* the anti-Catholics invented an immense lore about libertine priests, the confessional as an opportunity for seduction, licentious convents and monasteries. Probably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom's Cabin was a work supposedly written by one Maria Monk, entitled Awful Disclosures, which appeared in 1836. The author, who purported to have escaped from the Hotel Dieu nunnery in Montreal after five years there as novice and nun, reported her convent life in elaborate and circumstantial detail. She reported having been told by the Mother Superior that she must "obey the priests in all things"; to her "utter astonishment and horror," she soon found what the nature of such obedience was. Infants born of convent liaisons were baptized and then killed, she said, so that they might ascend at once to heaven. Her book, hotly attacked and defended , continued to be read and believed even after her mother gave testimony that Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head. Maria died in prison in 1849, after having been arrested in a brothel as a pickpocket.

    Anti-Catholicism, like anti-Masonry, mixed its fortunes with American party politics, and it became an enduring factor in American politics. The American Protective Association of the 1890s revived it with ideological variations more suitable to the times—the depression of 1893, for example, was alleged to be an international creation of the Catholics who began it by starting a run on the banks. Some spokesmen of the movement circulated a bogus encyclical attributed to Leo XIII instructing American Catholics on a certain date in 1893 to exterminate all heretics, and a great many anti-Catholics daily expected a nationwide uprising. The myth of an impending Catholic war of mutilation and extermination of heretics persisted into the twentieth century.

Why They Feel Dispossessed

    If, after our historically discontinuous examples of the paranoid style, we now take the long jump to the contemporary right wing, we find some rather important differences from the nineteenth-century movements. The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

    Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.

    Events since 1939 have given the contemporary right-wing paranoid a vast theatre for his imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions. The theatre of action is now the entire world, and he can draw not only on the events of World War II, but also on those of the Korean War and the Cold War. Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.

    The basic elements of contemporary right-wing thought can be reduced to three: First, there has been the now-familiar sustained conspiracy, running over more than a generation, and reaching its climax in Roosevelt's New Deal, to undermine free capitalism, to bring the economy under the direction of the federal government, and to pave the way for socialism or communism. A great many right-wingers would agree with Frank Chodorov, the author of The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil, that this campaign began with the passage of the income-tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913.

    The second contention is that top government officialdom has been so infiltrated by Communists that American policy, at least since the days leading up to Pearl Harbor, has been dominated by men who were shrewdly and consistently selling out American national interests.

    Finally, the country is infused with a network of Communist agents, just as in the old days it was infiltrated by Jesuit agents, so that the whole apparatus of education, religion, the press, and the mass media is engaged in a common effort to paralyze the resistance of loyal Americans.

    Perhaps the most representative document of the McCarthyist phase was a long indictment of Secretary of State George C. Marshall, delivered in 1951 in the Senate by senator McCarthy, and later published in a somewhat different form. McCarthy pictured Marshall was the focal figure in a betrayal of American interests stretching in time from the strategic plans for World War II to the formulation of the Marshall Plan. Marshal was associated with practically every American failure or defeat, McCarthy insisted, and none of this was either accident or incompetence. There was a "baffling pattern" of Marshall's interventions in the war, which always conduced to the well-being of the Kremlin. The sharp decline in America's relative strength from 1945 to 1951 did not "just happen"; it was "brought about, step by step, by will and intention," the consequence not of mistakes but of a treasonous conspiracy, "a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man."

    Today, the mantle of McCarthy has fallen on a retired candy manufacturer, Robert H. Welch, Jr., who is less strategically placed and has a much smaller but better organized following than the Senator. A few years ago Welch proclaimed that "Communist influences are now in almost complete control of our government"—note the care and scrupulousness of that "almost." He has offered a full scale interpretation of our recent history n which Communists figure at every turn: They started a run on American banks in 1933 that forced their closure; they contrived the recognition of the Soviet Union by the United States in the same year, just in time to save the Soviets from economic collapse; they have stirred up the fuss over segregation in the South; they have taken over the Supreme Court and made it "one of the most important agencies of Communism."

    Close attention to history wins for Mr. Welch an insight into affairs that is given to few of us. "For many reasons and after a lot of study," he wrote some years ago, "I personally believe [John Foster] Dulles to be a Communist agent." The job of Professor Arthur F. Burns as head of Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors was "merely a cover-up for Burns's liaison work between Eisenhower and some of his Communist bosses." Eisenhower's brother Milton was "actually [his] superior and boss within the Communist party." As for Eisenhower himself, Welch characterized him, in words that have made the candy manufacturer famous, as "a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy"—a conclusion, he added, "based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt."

Emulating the Enemy

    The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. ("Time is running out," said Welch in 1951. "Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.")

    As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

    The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid's interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

    It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through "front" groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.* Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist "crusades" openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

    On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

Renegades and Pedants

    A special significance attaches to the figure of the renegade from the enemy cause. The anti-Masonic movement seemed at times to be the creation of ex-Masons; certainly the highest significance was attributed to their revelations, and every word they said was believed. Anti-Catholicism used the runaway nun and the apostate priest; the place of ex-Communists in the avant-garde anti-Communist movements of our time is well known. In some part, the special authority accorded the renegade derives from the obsession with secrecy so characteristics of such movements: the renegade is the man or woman who has been in the Arcanum, and brings forth with him or her the final verification of suspicions which might otherwise have been doubted by a skeptical world. But I think there is a deeper eschatological significance that attaches to the person of the renegade: in the spiritual wrestling match between good and evil which is the paranoid's archetypal model of the world, the renegade is living proof that all the conversions are not made by the wrong side. He brings with him the promise of redemption and victory.

    A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates :evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.

    Paranoid writing begins with certain broad defensible judgments. There was something to be said for the anti-Masons. After all, a secret society composed of influential men bound by special obligations could conceivable pose some kind of threat to the civil order in which they were suspended. There was also something to be said for the Protestant principles of individuality and freedom, as well as for the nativist desire to develop in North America a homogeneous civilization. Again, in our time an actual laxity in security allowed some Communists to find a place in governmental circles, and innumerable decisions of World War II and the Cold War could be faulted.

    The higher paranoid scholarship is nothing if not coherent—in fact the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world. It is nothing if not scholarly in technique. McCarthy's 96-page pamphlet, McCarthyism, contains no less than 313 footnote references, and Mr. Welch's incredible assault on Eisenhower, The Politician, has one hundred pages of bibliography and notes. The entire right-wing movement of our time is a parade of experts, study groups, monographs, footnotes, and bibliographies. Sometimes the right-wing striving for scholarly depth and an inclusive world view has startling consequences: Mr. Welch, for example, has charged that the popularity of Arnold Toynbee's historical work is the consequence of a plot on the part of Fabians, "Labour party bosses in England," and various members of the Anglo-American "liberal establishment" to overshadow the much more truthful and illuminating work of Oswald Spengler.

The Double Sufferer

    The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: "the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque."

    This glimpse across a long span of time emboldens me to make the conjecture—it is no more than that—that a mentality disposed to see the world in this way may be a persistent psychic phenomenon, more or less constantly affecting a modest minority of the population. But certain religious traditions, certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies, and to situations in which they can more readily be built into mass movements or political parties. In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

    We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

† Richard Hofstadter is DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. His latest book, "Anti-intellectualism in American Life," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction earlier this year. This essay is adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture delivered at Oxford University in November 1963.

* Many anti-Masons had been fascinated by the penalties involved if Masons failed to live up to their obligations. My own favorite is the oath attributed to a royal archmason who invited "having my skull smote off and my brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun."

* In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: "Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village." Shadegg comments: " In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung." "I would suggest," writes senator Goldwater in Why Not Victory? "that we analyze and copy the strategy of the enemy; theirs has worked and ours has not.

Harper's Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.

 

http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html

 

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The Wild Side Blog: The Ten Days of Newton

 

The Wild Side Blog: The Ten Days of Newton









Some years ago, the evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins pointed out to me that Sir Isaac Newton, the founder of modern physics and mathematics, and arguably the greatest scientist of all time, was born on Christmas Day, and that therefore Newton's Birthday could be an alternative, if somewhat nerdy, excuse for a winter holiday.

Sir Isaac Newton in an engraving from 1760 by James McArdell. (Library of Congress)

Think of the merchandise! Newton is said to have discovered the phenomenon of gravity by watching apples fall in an orchard. (His insight came after pondering why they always fall down, rather than upwards or sideways.) Newton's Birthday cards could feature the great man discovering gravity by watching a Christmas decoration fall from a tree. (This is a little anachronistic — Christmas trees didn't come to England until later — but I don't think we should let that get in the way.)

All very jolly — but then, 'tis the season. Yet things are not so simple. It turns out that the date of Newton's birthday is a little contentious. Newton was born in England on Christmas Day 1642 according to the Julian calendar — the calendar in use in England at the time. But by the 1640s, much of the rest of Europe was using the Gregorian calendar (the one in general use today); according to this calendar, Newton was born on Jan. 4, 1643.

Rather than bickering about whether Dec. 25 or Jan. 4 is the better date to observe Newton's Birthday, I think we should embrace the discrepancy and have an extended festival. After all, the festival of Christmas properly continues for a further 12 days, until the feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6. So the festival of Newton could begin on Christmas Day and then continue for an extra 10 days, representing the interval between the calendars.

The reason the interval became necessary is that the Earth, inconveniently, does not orbit the sun in an exact number of days. Instead, the Earth's orbit is 365 days and a bit. The "bit" is just under a quarter of a day.

It wasn't always thus. Some 530 million years ago, when animals like the trilobites were skittering around, days had less time. Back then, a day was only 21 hours, and a year was about 420 days. In another 500 million years, perhaps a day will be 27 hours, and a year fewer than 300 days. Because of the friction exerted by the moon, the Earth is slowing down. Indeed, already the days are a tiny bit longer than they were 100 years ago.

Because the orbit isn't an exact number of days, our calendars get out of sync with the seasons unless we correct for the fractional day. The Julian calendar, which was put in place by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C., was the Romans' best effort at making a systematic correction. Before that, the Roman calendar gave 355 days to the basic year, and every other year was supposed to include an extra month of 22 or 23 days.

But over a period of 24 years, that gave too many days; so in some years, the extra month was supposed to be skipped. This didn't always happen. By the time the Julian calendar was introduced, the Roman calendar was so far out of sync with the seasons that the year before the first Julian year had to include a massive correction; that year, referred to as "the last year of confusion," was 445 days. Talk about a long year.

The Julian calendar, which is broadly similar to the one we have now, divided the year into 365 days and a quarter. To implement this practically, three out of four years were given 365 days, and the fourth, 366. But this still wasn't precise enough: by the 16th century, the calendar had fallen 10 days out of sync with the solar year. By introducing a couple of extra fiddles to do with leap years at the ends of centuries, the Gregorian calendar fixed that. Again, however, changing calendars meant introducing a one-off correction to bring the dates back in line with the seasons. Rather than having a year with an extra 90 days like the Romans, Europeans "lost" 10 days as the calendar skipped forward. Hence the interval between the contending dates of Newton's Birthday.

It's strangely suitable that the length of the festival should be due to human efforts to describe the orbit of our planet. For planetary orbits were the subject of one of Newton's key works, "De Motu Corporum in Gyrum," ("On the Motion of Bodies in an Orbit"), which he sent to the astronomer Edmond Halley (of Halley's comet fame) in November of 1684. The proofs and insights contained here were revolutionary, and allowed the calculation of the orbit of any object, from planet to comet or asteroid, moving through a gravitational field.

Shortly after sending "Motion" to Halley, Newton began work on the treatise for which he is most famous, "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy") usually known simply as the Principia. This is where, among many other insights and discoveries, he articulated his three laws of motion, which students still learn in high school physics. He explained that gravity causes tides, and that the gravitational force of Jupiter perturbs the orbit of Saturn. The basis of many of his insights rested in a kind of mathematics he had invented as a private tool for himself years before: calculus.

Newton was not merely a thinker of abstract and complex thoughts, however. He had a gift with mechanical objects. As a child, he built a miniature working model of a windmill. As an adult, he built the first reflecting telescope.

He was also an experimenter. For example, his experiments with prisms showed that white light is composed of light of other colors. Although it had been known before Newton that shining a beam of sunlight through a prism would produce a rainbow, no one knew why: it was as though the prism created colors. Newton discovered the real reason: light is composed of different wavelengths that are refracted differently by the glass of the prism. The prism doesn't create colors, it reveals them.

Physics was only one of his interests. He was deeply religious, though a heretic — he did not believe in the Holy Trinity — and he wrote more about religion than he did about physics, mathematics or his other great interest, alchemy. Though he never managed to turn base metal into gold in an experiment, later in life he became Warden of the Mint — the man in charge of making the country's money. Here, he oversaw the production of gold and silver coins, and ensured that they were made more exactly than they had ever been made before. He also went after counterfeiters, several of whom were hanged.

Newton does not seem to have been a pleasant man. He feuded with several of his professional colleagues, most famously Robert Hooke and Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz; he was reclusive and secretive and seems to have formed few lasting friendships. But he was also a genius, and his work laid the foundations of our modern understanding of the world. He is a man to celebrate.

In honor of Newton's Birthday festival, I therefore propose the following song, to be sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas." For brevity, I include only the final verse. All together now!

On the tenth day of Newton,

My true love gave to me,

Ten drops of genius,

Nine silver co-oins,

Eight circling planets,

Seven shades of li-ight,

Six counterfeiters,

Cal-Cu-Lus!

Four telescopes,

Three Laws of Motion,

Two awful feuds,

And the discovery of gravity!

Happy Newton, everybody!

**********

NOTES:

I have drawn my account of the Roman calendars from the entry on "calendar" in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. For days having been shorter when the trilobites were about, see Ravilious, K. "Wind-up." New Scientist: 23 November 2002. The details of Newton's discoveries and life can be found in any biography; I drew on two, Berlinski, D. 2001. "Newton's Gift." Duckworth; and Gleick, J. 2003. "Isaac Newton." Fourth Estate.

 

http://judson.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/the-ten-days-of-newton/?ref=opinion

 

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The Grapes Of Wrath (1940) Reviewed by Tim Dirks

The Grapes Of Wrath (1940)  Reviewed by Tim Dirks

 

 

 

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is director John Ford's most famous black and white epic drama - the classic adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning, widely-read 1939 novel. [The sentimental film is much more closely related to Ford's social protest dramas, The Informer (1935) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) than to his magisterial Westerns.] This film was the most popular left-leaning, socialistic-themed film of pre-World War II Hollywood.

The title of the film was taken from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Julia Ward Howe ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on"). On the screen, the film honestly and realistically recreates the socio-economic impact of the Great Depression and a mid-30s drought upon one representative family - the Joads. Its theme of an oppressed people's epic move to a new home parallels the Biblical story of Exodus. Their family name, Joad, also evokes the Biblical character of Job.

Nunnally Johnson's screenplay is remarkably faithful to its Steinbeck source material. Not present in the novel or the screenplay is a tacked-on ending in the film that optimistically and sentimentally affirms the strength and human dignity of the individual spirit. Numerous other times, Hollywood has capitalized on other Steinbeck works and adapted them for the screen: Of Mice and Men (1939), Tortilla Flat (1942), The Moon is Down (1943), The Pearl (1948), The Red Pony (1949), East of Eden (1955), and Cannery Row (1982).

There were a total of seven Academy Award nominations for the film - with two wins: Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell) for her role as the archetypal mother figure, and Best Director (John Ford). The other five nominations were Best Picture (that lost to Hitchcock's Rebecca), Best Actor (Henry Fonda in one of his greatest film roles), Best Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson), Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing. In the same year, when ten Best Pictures were nominated, director Ford had another entry: The Long Voyage Home (1940). A year earlier, Lewis Milestone directed another adaptation of a classic John Steinbeck novel, the tragedy Of Mice and Men (1939), with five Oscar nominations and no wins.

The plight of the Joad family is universalized as a microcosm of the thousands of other tenant farmers during the country's time of crisis, who suffered from oppression imposed by the banks and big mechanized farm interests. The dispossessed, migrant family's departure from their windy and dusty land, and their slow disintegration provides insight into the thousands of Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas Panhandle, and W. Kansas families who were evicted and uprooted from their "Dust Bowl" farm land, and forced to search westward in the inhospitable Eden of California for jobs and survival with thousands of other migrant workers.

Jane Darwell is marvelous (although her accent is inappropriate) as the strong center and backbone of the migratory family that must leave its ancestral land, and Henry Fonda is magnificent as an unmercifully-harrassed Okie who refuses to be beaten and crushed by misfortune. The film's themes include the central importance of the family, the suffering and oppression of the farmers, the hollowness of the American Dream, the display of human dignity and spirit in the face of adversity, and issues of social and economic justice. Original casting for the film called for Beulah Bondi as Ma Joad, James Stewart as Al, and Walter Brennan as Pa Joad.

Filmed in journalistic, documentary-style black and white textures with some low-key lighting and chiaroscuro (often provided by a candle or low light source) - beautifully captured by Gregg Toland's expert cinematography (remarkably un-nominated!), the picture records with astute realism rural America in the 30s. [One year earlier, Toland had been cinematographer for Wuthering Heights (1939), and a year later, he completed the cinematography on Citizen Kane (1941), often regarded as the best film ever made.] Toland's visual images in this film resemble the migrant worker photographs taken by still photographer Dorothea Lange during the Depression. And the musical score by Alfred Newman used variations of "Red River Valley" to give the film added flavor.

It is truly ironic that Peter Fonda, the son of the film's main star, paralleled his father's role in The Grapes of Wrath in his own starring role in Easy Rider (1969) as Wyatt - another independent, heroic, wandering nomad across the Southwest US in a frustrated pursuit of dreams and a better, more idyllic life. However, in pursuit of the 'American dream,' similar to the Joad family's quest, he travels from California (the supposed land of opportunity) to New Orleans - in the opposite direction. 

 

The film begins with an historical prologue:

In the central part of the United States of America lies a limited area called 'The Dust Bowl,' because of its lack of rain. Here drought and poverty combined to deprive many farmers of their land.

This is the story of one farmer's family, driven from their fields by natural disasters and economic changes beyond anyone's control and their great journey in search of peace, security, and another home.

The opening image shows a flat, paved highway road in rural Oklahoma lined by telephone poles. A small figure walks out of the distance toward the camera. At a crossroads (a symbol of America's plight in the late 30s), one of the poles at the left of the frame leans dramatically askew. Outside the Cross Roads restaurant, as the jaunty tune "A Tisket, A Tasket" plays on the soundtrack, the man, wearing a new but ill-fitting suit of clothes, approaches and asks a truck driver (of an "Oklahoma City Transport Company" diesel) for a "lift." Their opening conversation reflects polarized social class differences - the rich are 'heels' and the poor are 'good guys.'

Figure: How about a lift, Mister?

Driver: Can't you see that sticker? [A decal reads NO RIDERS ALLOWED - Instructions of Owner]

Figure: Sure, I see it. But a good guy don't pay no attention to what some heel makes him stick on his truck.

Driver: Well, scrunch down on the running board 'til we get around the bend.

Laconic Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is hitchhiking on his way home to his family's sharecropping farm - he is out on early parole after serving a short prison term for homicide. Becoming short-tempered, Tom tells the suspicious, nervous truck driver about his criminal background during their ride:

You know what I'm talkin' about. You've been goin' over me ever since I got in. Why don't you ask me where I've been?...That big nose of yours been goin' over me like a sheep in a vegetable patch. Well, I ain't keepin' it a secret. I been in the penitentiary. I been there four years. Anything else you wanna know?...I'm just tryin' to get along without shovin' anybody, that's all.

To satisfy the driver's curiosity as he leaves the cab of the truck, a surly Tom shocks and alarms the driver by characterizing himself as a violent killer:

You're about to bust a gut to know what I done, ain't ya? Well, I ain't a guy to let ya down. Homicide!

Tom finds a slightly mad, apostate, itinerant ex-preacher named Jim Casy (John Carradine) sitting under a willow tree by the side of the road. [Casy functions as an allegorical figure in the film, conveying the spiritual yearnings of the working class characters. He also serves as a classic Fordian figure, much like Mose Harper in Ford's The Searchers (1956).] Tom learns that Casy was the preacher who baptized him, but now Casy has "lost the call" and his faith [the preacher used to seduce the girls in his congregation]:

Tom: Ain't you the preacher?

Casy: Used to be. Not no more. I lost the call. But boy, I sure used to have it. Oh, I used to get an irrigation ditch so squirmin' full of repentant sinners I pretty near drowned half of 'em. Not no more. I lost the spirit. I got nothin' to preach about no more, that's all. I ain't so sure of things.

Like a religious madman, the gaunt-faced Casy represents religious principles, but functions as a secular saint. After Tom offers Casy a drink, the ex-preacher's eyes glow as he moralizes about his beliefs:

I asked myself, what is this here call(ed) Holy Spirit? Maybe that's love. Why, I love everybody so much, I'm fit to bust sometimes. So - maybe there ain't no sin, and there ain't no virtue. There's just what people does. Some things folks do is nice, and some ain't so nice. And that's all any man's got a right to say. 'Course I'll say a grace if somebody sets out the food, but ma heart ain't in it.

Isolated from events and absent from his sharecropping family for a few years, things have changed considerably during Tom's prison term. He explains his past crime and his early parole from prison after being convicted of self-defense manslaughter in a drunken, bar-room brawl:

I've been in the penitentiary for four years...I'd do what I'd done again. Killed a guy in a dance hall. We was drunk - he got a knife in me and I laid him out with a shovel. Knocked his head plum to squash...He had a knife in me, that's why they only give me seven years. I got out in four - paroled.

They leisurely walk together to the Joad family tenant farm. Along the way, Casy describes Pa Joad's behavior during a baptizing. To imitate Pa Joad's "run at that bush," the eccentric preacher howls and jumps a fence:

Last time I seen him was at a baptizin'. He had one of the biggest doses of the Holy Spirit I ever seen. Got to jumpin' over bushes, howlin' like a dog-wolf at moon-time. Finally, he picks hisself out a bush big as a pianah, and he lets out a squawk and takes a run at that bush.

In the dark, deserted, abandoned, wind-blown Joad cabin [clearly a studio set], Tom cries out: "Ma!? Pa!? Ma!? Nobody here. Somethin's happened...They're all gone or dead." Thinking that his folks are dead because no one is there in the semi-haunted farmhouse, Tom fears the worst. From the shadows emerges a crazy, "touched," dispossessed tenant farmer, a former neighbor named Muley Graves (John Qualen) who became deranged after surrendering his land.

Tom learns that his own family, two weeks earlier, was forcibly evicted to the farm of Uncle John, "but they can't stay there either. Cause John's got his notice to get off." In the spooky light of a candle, the half-crazed fugitive Muley tells them about the many "notices" of eviction that have been driving farmers off their land. He also blames "the dusters" - the extreme, unending 1930s dust storms, fearful weather conditions, and the ravages of a merciless drought, for making tenant farmers penniless:

Tom: What happened? How come they got to get off? We lived here fifty years, same place.

Muley: Everybody's got to get off. Everybody's leavin', goin' out to California. Your folks, my folks, everybody's folks. Everybody except me. I ain't gettin' off.

Tom: Who done it?

Muley: Listen. (Muley gestures toward the howling wind.) That's some of what done it. The dusters. They start it anyways. Blowin' like this year after year. Blowin' the land away. Blowin' the crops away. And blowin' us away now.

Tom: You crazy?

Muley: Some say that I am.

In the first of two flashbacks that emphasize the wide gap between the rich and poor classes and the failure of the tenant system, Muley remembers how he, one of the dispossessed, was driven off the land by the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company. The coming of mechanized farming, combined with severe weather conditions, caused landlords to notify homes of possession and force hundreds of tenant farmer families off their lands. An agent (Adrian Morris) of the impersonal company, seated in his automobile, speaks to Muley as he stands and learns with his family that they must leave their homeland. Unconvincingly, Muley learns that there's no-one to blame - not even the bureaucratic companies, banks, and their powerless officers. As the flashback concludes, the half-mad ("touched"), lost Muley speaks movingly, eloquently and poignantly about what the land means to him and his family:

Agent: The fact of the matter, Muley, after what them dusters done to the land, the tenant system don't work no more. You don't even break even, much less show a profit. Why, one man and a tractor can handle twelve or fourteen of these places. You just pay him a wage and take all the crop.

Muley: Yeah, but uh, we couldn't do on any less than what our share is now. Why, the children ain't gettin' enough to eat as it is, and they're so ragged. We'd be ashamed if everybody else's children wasn't the same way. 

Agent: I can't help that. All I know is, I got my orders. They told me to tell you to get off, and that's what I'm tellin' ya.

Muley: You mean get off of my own land?

Agent: Now don't go to blamin' me! It ain't my fault. 

Muley's son (Hollis Jewell): Who's fault is it?

Agent: You know who owns the land. The Shawnee Land and Cattle Company.

Muley: And who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company

Agent: It ain't nobody. It's a company.

Muley's son: They got a President, ain't they? They got somebody who knows what a shotgun's for, ain't they?

Agent: Oh son, it ain't his fault, because the bank tells him what to do. 

Muley's son: All right, where's the bank?

Agent: Tulsa. What's the use of pickin' on him? He ain't nothin' but the manager. And he's half-crazy hisself tryin' to keep up with his orders from the East. 

Muley: Then who do we shoot?

Agent: Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell ya. I just don't know who's to blame.

Muley: I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody gonna push me off my land! My grandpaw took up this land seventy years ago. My paw was born here. We was all born on it. An' some of us was killed on it. (Muley squats down and fingers the dust of the farm he has just lost.) An' some of us died on it. That's what makes it arn. Bein' born on it and workin' on it and dyin', dyin' on it. An' not no piece of paper with writin' on it.

With terse, illustrative shots accompanying his tale, Muley explains his futile resistance when the re-possessing bank moved in with mechanized, farm machinery and ruthlessly evicted and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their lands and homes:

They come. They come and pushed me off. They come with the cats...the cats, the caterpillar tractors. (A series of dissolving montages illustrate how the land company's tractors and farm equipment invade the farmland.) And for every one of 'em, there was ten, fifteen families thrown right out of their homes. A hundred folks and no place to live but on the road....One right after the other, they got throw'd out. Half the folks you and me know throw'd right out into the road. The one that got me come oh, about a month ago.

In a second flashback scene, Muley - with his shotgun - futily confronts a house-demolishing caterpillar driven by another sharecropper's son. The tractor driver is a traitorous sell-out to the rich - he works for "three dollars a day," and rationalizes contemptuously: "I got two little kids at home, my wife, my wife's mother. Them folks gotta eat. First and only, I think about my own folks. What happens to other people is their own look-out." The driver warns Muley that if he is shot, another guy would show up in two days to take his place. The bulldozer moves in and knocks down the dilapidated shack in its path. The cat's tire tracks in the dust cut across the shadows cast by the family.

Although his family has already moved west, Muley has stubbornly vowed to stay (as "an old graveyard ghost") and virtuously defend his lost land even though he is hopelessly beaten:

What was the use? He was right, and there wasn't a thing in the world I could do about it....There wasn't nothin' to eat, but I couldn't leave. Somethin' just wouldn't let me. So now I just wander around and sleep wherever I am. I used to tell myself that I was lookin' out for things, so that when the folks come back everything'd be all right. But I know'd it wasn't true. There ain't nothin' to look out fer. There ain't nobody ever comin' back. They're gone! And me, I'm just an old graveyard ghost. That's all in the world I am.

When Muley hears a night patrol conducted by the agents of the owners, he teaches Tom and Casy to furtively hide out to avoid detection. Tom laments how he must hide out on his "own place" from armed watchmen ("a superintendent with a gun"), agents of the rich:

Muley: Come on, come on, we gotta hide out.

Tom: Hide out for what? We ain't doin' nothin'.

Muley: Well, you're trespassin', Tom. This ain't your land no more. And that's a superintendent with a gun. Come on! 

Casy: Come on, Tom. You're on parole...(The superintendent needlessly smashes one of the windows of the deserted cabin with a rock.)

Tom is exasperated by the plight he finds himself in, after the patrol car drives off: "Anybody ever tol' me I'd be hidin' out on my own place...!"

Tiny figures silhouetted against the cloudy horizon the next day, Tom and Casy continue on to Uncle John's farm where everyone in the extended Joad family is at breakfast, gathered to prepare for a trip westward to California. During the meal, Uncle John (Frank Darien) enthusiastically shows off a handbill advertising high wages for workers in California to harvest fruits and vegetables. He is encouraged about the prospects of work in the vineyards and orchards:

It says, 'Plenty of work in California. Eight hundred pickers wanted.'

800 PICKERS WANTED

Work in California

Good Wages.

Tents and Cabins Furnished Free.

Store on Camp Ground.

Busy From October to February.

COME AT ONCE!

Bill Macey, Labor Contractor

Grampa (Charley Grapewin) bubbles over, excitedly exclaiming to Granma (Zeffie Tilbury) about how easy it will be to pick oranges and grapes in California: "Wait til I get to Californey. I'm gonna reach up and pick me an orange whenever I want it. With some grapes. Now there's somethin' I ain't never had enough of."

In a tender reunion scene, Tom's mother Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) comes out to greet her son in the yard. She is worried about her boy's experiences in prison - thinking that he may have been hardened:

I was so scared we was goin' away without ya and we'd never see each other again...Did they hurt ya, son? Did they hurt ya and make ya mean mad?...Sometimes they do somethin' to ya. They hurt ya and ya get mad and then ya get mean. Then they hurt ya again and ya get meaner and meaner til you ain't no boy nor man anymore, just a walkin' chunk of mean mad. Did they hurt ya that way son?...Why, I don't want no mean son.

Pa Joad (Russell Simpson) and other members of the family greet Tom, naively sorry to learn that "the jailbird" hasn't broken out of jail but has only been paroled: "What did ya do son, bust out?" The contemptible Shawnee Company agent drives up in a convertible to remind sharecropper Uncle John: "We'll be comin' through here tomorrow, ya know." The large, extended Joad family of twelve prepares to leave at daybreak, packing everything into an old, dilapidated, rickety and lurching truck for a long journey westward to the 'Promised Land' of California:

• Grampa (Charley Grapewin)
• Granma (Zeffie Tilbury)
• Pa Joad (father of ...)
• Ma Joad (mother of ...)
• Noah (Frank Sully), eldest son
• Tom (Henry Fonda)
• Rosasharn (aka Rose of Sharon) (Dorris Bowdon), pregnant
• Al (O. Z. Whitehead), teenaged
• Winfield (Darryl Hickman), young
• Ruthie (Shirley Mills), young

• Uncle John (Frank Darien), widowed
• Connie Rivers (Eddie Quillan), Rosasharn's new husband

 

In a memorable, powerful candle-lit scene (without dialogue) during the pre-dawn hours, accompanied by the plaintive strains of "Red River Valley" on an accordion, Ma Joad must decide which of her seemingly worthless possessions to keep from her hope chest and which to leave behind before vacating her farm for the last time. Wordlessly and nostalgically, she moons, reminisces and sorts through a small box of momentos and souvenirs she has acquired over the years. She burns a postcard and a newspaper clipping of Tom's imprisonment ("Joad Gets Seven Years") and other valuable keepsakes which she cannot take with her, giving up parts of her past that are now irretrievably lost. With pathos in a scene of tremendous, sharp-edged visual power, she holds up two earrings to her ears and wistfully looks at her reflection, thinking back to some unforgotten moments of pleasure.

In the early morning light, she resolutely tells Tom: "I'm ready." As the family boards the overloaded, unbalanced truck, Old Grampa Joad suddenly resists leaving for California (but earlier, he couldn't wait to leave). He stubbornly revolts and balks to leave his land at the last moment. The family subdues him and gets him sleepy drunk by pouring a large dose of the children's soothing syrup down his throat:

Grampa: I ain't goin' to California. This is my country and I belong here. (He scoops up and clutches a lifeless handful of Oklahoma dirt) This is my dirt. It's no good, but it's mine, all mine.

Tom: Either we got to tie him up and throw him in the truck or somethin'. He can't stay here.

Pa: We can't tie him. Either we'll hurt him or he'll get so mad, he'll hurt hisself. Reckon we could get him drunk?

Tom: Ain't no whiskey, is there?

Ma Joad: Now wait, there's a half a bottle of soothin' syrup here. Here. Used to put the children to sleep.

At the last minute, Casy (who has expressed an interest in going: "There's somethin' goin' on out there in the West and I'd like to try and learn what it is") is invited by the family to join them, even though they have already hurriedly calculated that the truck is dangerously overloaded. In the cab of the truck as they depart, Ma Joad is indomitable and refuses to look back at the dust storm rising over the deserted house. Resigned to forces beyond her control, she gripes to Al the driver:

We're goin' to California, ain't we? All right then, let's go to California...I never had my house pushed over before. Never had my family stuck out on the road. Never had to lose everything I had in life.

Along Highway 66 (conveyed in a short montage of images of road signs in Oklahoma) - "the Mother Road", the trip soon takes its toll on the family. Tired and weak after being wrenched away from his land, elderly Grampa is the first to die on their journey. He expires after they pull over to the side of the road and unload him. Tom writes (and reads outloud) a grave marker for him, torn out of the flyleaf of the family Bible:

This here is William James Joad, dyed of a stroke, old, old man. His fokes bured him because they got no money to pay for funerls. Nobody kilt him. Jus a stroke and he dyed.

He puts the paper in a fruit jar to be buried with his grandfather by the roadside, to prevent the government from thinking it's a murder: "It looks like a lotta times, the gov'ment got more interest in a dead man than a live one." Casy eulogizes the old patriarch with a "few words" over the grave - a brief but dignified funeral oration to plea for the salvation of the living:

This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' jus' died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, an' it don't matter much. Heard a fella say a poem once, an' he says, 'All that lives is holy.' But I wouldn't pray jus' for an ol' man that's dead, cause he's awright. If I was to pray, I'd pray for folks that's alive an' don't know which way to turn. Grampa here, he ain't got no more trouble like that. He's got his job all cut out for 'im - so cover 'im up an' let 'im get to it.

More montages of signs appear along the way, e.g., "Water 15¢" and "Camp 50¢". In a migrant campground, possibly in the Texas panhandle, the Joads camp for the night and are entertained in the flickering light by Connie, Rosasharn's husband, who accompanies himself on a guitar and sings I Ain't A-Gonna Be A-Treated This A-way. During the song, Pa Joad strikes up a conversation with another fellow migrant from Arkansas who had to give up "a kind of a general notions store." The man speaks nostalgically about his lost store: "I had as nice of a little store as you ever saw. I sure did hate to give it up."

Another man in the group, a returning migrant from California, laughs scornfully at Pa's delusionary optimism about conditions in the West and speaks bitterly about his tragic experience. He foreshadows what the Joads and others will soon find out for themselves, that the California growers, who have printed more handbills than they need, are hoping to attract a glut of workers that they can then exploit (with the laws of supply and demand):

Migrant: I've been and seen it. I'm goin' back and starve, because I'd rather starve all over at once.

Pa: Say, what do you think you're talkin' about? I've got a handbill here says they're payin' good wages. And I seen in the papers that they need pickers.

Migrant: All right, go on, nobody's stoppin' ya. 

Pa: Yeah, but what about this? 

Migrant: I ain't gonna rile ya, go on. 

Tom: (challenging) Wait a minute, buddy, you just done some jack-assin'. You can't shut up now! The handbill say they need 800 pickers. You laugh and say they don't. Which one's a liar?

Migrant: Now, how many of you all got them handbills?...(The men respond that they all have them) There you are, same yellow handbill. 800 Pickers Wanted. All right, the man wants 800 men, so he prints 5,000 handbills and maybe 20,000 people see 'em. And maybe two or three thousand people start West on account of that handbill. Two or three thousand people that are crazy with worry headin' out for 800 jobs. Now does that make sense? 

One of the men: Say, what are you, a trouble-maker? You sure you ain't one of them labor finks?

Migrant: I swear I ain't, mister. 

One of the men: Now don't you go around here tryin' to stir up any trouble. 

Migrant: I tried to tell you folks what it took me a year to fin' out. Took two kids dead, took my wife dead, to show me. But nobody could tell me neither. I can't tell ya about them little fellas layin' in the tent with their bellies swelled out and just skin over their bones. A-shiverin' and a-whinin' like pups. And me a-runnin' around lookin' for work. Not for money, not for wages, just for a cup of flour and a spoon of lard. Then the coroner come. 'Them children died of heart failure,' he said. He put it down in his paper. Heart failure! And their little bellies stuck out like a pig bladder.

The migrant's sobering words and experience shake the group, and the distressed campers breaks up for the night. Pa asks Casy and Tom whether they think the man was telling the truth. The Joad's future is still ambiguous and in question:

Casy: He's tellin' the truth, the truth for him. He wasn't makin' it up.

Tom: Is it the truth for us?

Casy: I don't know.

The Joad truck overheats and steams up as it pulls into a New Mexico filling station. There, the service station owner asks contemptuously whether they have money to pay for the gas. Tom responds sharply and with pride to the animosity: "Well, ask right. You ain't talkin' to bums, you know." In the truckstop diner, in one of the film's most upbeat, hopeful scenes displaying good folks who compassionately help the poor, a waitress is joshing around with two truck drivers at the counter. Pa Joad enters with the two young Joad kids and asks to purchase a loaf of bread for a dime. The condescending waitress replies: "This ain't a grocery store. We got bread to make sandwiches with...Why don't you buy a sandwich? We got nice sandwiches...You can't buy no loaf of bread for a dime. We only got fifteen cent loafs." Charitably, the short-order cook Bert (Harry Tyler) behind the counter gruffly suggests selling Pa a day-old loaf for a dime. After the waitress generously and kindly obliges the two migrant kids with cheap candy, the two drivers leave her a big tip to 'repay' her:

Pa: It may sound funny bein' so tight, but we got a thousand miles to go and we don't know if we'll make it. (As he goes to pay for the loaf) Is them penny candies, m'am? 

Waitress: Which ones?

Pa: There, them stripey ones.

Waitress: Oh, them, well, uh, no. Them's two for a penny.

Pa: Give us two then, m'am. (To the children) Go on, take 'em, take 'em. Thank ya, m'am.

Truck driver: (After the Joads have left) Them ain't two for a cent candy.

Waitress: What's it to you?

Truck driver: Them's a nickel a piece candy...(Both truck drivers leave her hefty tips, a half-dollar coin, when they pay for their meals)

Waitress: Hey wait a minute, you got change comin'!

Truck driver: What's it to ya?

Waitress: (While holding the coins in her hand) Bert, look! (reverently looking after her customers) Truck drivers.

As the Joads drive further and cross the state border into Arizona, Tom explains to the state agricultural inspection officer how long they will be in the state: "No longer than to get across." On the Will Rogers Highway in Arizona, they pass by herds of sheep and the adobe-mud hunts of an Indian village - past other land-dispossessed families and individuals. At the Colorado River, the border between Arizona and California, they pull over and are awed by a view of California in the distance - "the land of milk and honey." Connie is frightened by the desolate desert that they are forced to cross: "Well, if that's what we came out here for!..." They swim, cavort, and refresh themselves in the Colorado River.

At another service station, one of the disdainful white-uniformed attendants criticizes the Joad's trip - one of many being taken by indigent Okies who are streaming toward California. He ominously mentions the obstacles that are facing them across the desert, but Tom replies with practicality and strength:

Attendant: You people got a lot of nerve...crossing the desert in a jalopy like this.

Pa: You been across?

Attendant One: Sure, plenty but never in no wreck like that.

Tom: If we break down, maybe somebody'll give us a hand.

Attendant One: Well, I'm glad. Even I'd hate to be doin' it. It takes more nerve than I got.

Tom: It take no nerve to do somethin' ain't nothin' else you can do.

Delirious (calling for her dead husband) and near death, Granma is comforted by Ma Joad, who strokes her brow. As the Joads pull away from the Last Chance service station, the two insensitive and cruel uniformed attendants inhumanly despise the migrant Okies as they chew gum and carry on a casual conversation:

Attendant Two: You and me got sense. Them Okies got no sense and no feelings. They ain't human. A human being wouldn't live the way they do. A human being couldn't stand to be so miserable. 

Attendant One: Just don't know any better, I guess.

As they pass through the desert, the three riders in the truck's cab are seen through the windshield upon which the desert is reflected:

Al: What a place! How'd ya like to walk across it?

Tom: People done it. They could. We could.

Al: Lots must have died too.

The youngest Joad children fantasize about finding the bones of those who crossed the desert and died. Ma Joad encourages Granma: "We got to get across, Granma. The family's got to get across." Connie complains to Rosasharn about his disappointment that he didn't become a radio mechanic ("nice clean work") instead of moving and taking the trip. At another agricultural inspection station, the California officers want the Joads to unload their truck, but Ma protests that Granma is a "sick old lady" and must be rushed to a doctor: "I swear we ain't got anything, I swear it." They are allowed to proceed when an ever-resourceful Ma Joad convinces the caring officers that Granma is deathly ill. In reality, she has lied to them because the old lady has already died in her lap.

The Joads push the truck up a long hill to bring the family to a scenic overlook, where they gaze at the natural beauty of the Tehachapi Valley of California at dawn. Pa exclaims, "Thar she is." In contrast to the climactic, joyous, glowing end of their trip, Ma quietly announces that Granma has died earlier in her arms in the back of the truck during the night, even before the inspectors had stopped them en route: "Oh, thank God, and we're still together, most of us...Granma's dead...since before they stopped us last night...So it's all right. She'll get buried where it's nice and green and trees and flowers all around, and she got to lay her head down in California after all."

After pushing their dysfunctional, out-of-gas, anguished jalopy [a symbol of their exhausting trip] into Plainview, California, a friendly policeman (Ward Bond) (an Oklahoma native himself) greets them with a weary defensiveness when shown their handbill. The working conditions are unlike what the handbills had advertised:

Policeman: If I've seen one of them things, I've seen ten thousand of 'em.

Pa: Ain't it no good?

Policeman: Not here, not now. There was some pickin' around here about a month ago, but it's all moved south...What I gotta tell ya is this, don't try to park in town tonight. Just go right on out to that camp. If I catch ya in town after dark, I gotta lock ya up.

Pa: But what are we gonna do?

Policeman: Well pop, that just ain't up to me. I don't mind tellin' ya the guy they ought to lock up is the guy that sent them things out.

[Almost one-half of the film's 128 minutes (the second half of the film) are the sequences at three contrasting camps in California - the Hooverville (14 minutes), the Keene Ranch (22 minutes), and the Wheat Patch government camp (25 minutes). For the remainder of the film, the Joads are forced to move through different kinds of communal life, from squalid transient camps to labor camps, searching for decent wages and scarce jobs.]

The Hooverville Transient-Migrant Camp:

They arrive at the first, transient migrant camp two miles from the city limits (a sign reads "City Limit" - both literally and figuratively). In a memorably effective subjective camera view through the Joad's windshield from the cab, they realize that the camp is crowded with other hungry, starving, jobless and desperate travelers. The jalopy slowly and uneasily makes its careful way through the rutted dirt road between the huts and around the camp's haunted-faced inhabitants, who move in slow-motion and size up the new arrivals. Their first exposure to the human junkyard is truly despairing, as Tom ironically observes: "Sure don't look none too prosperous." With only a gallon of gas, they are forced to join the utterly hopeless scene of anarchy, confusion, squalor and disillusionment.

After setting up the tent, Ma Joad finds starving children surrounding and besieging her when they gather around her campfire and watch or offer to help, in order to get a handout of stew. She is overwhelmed but willing to share the family's meager leftovers with them: "Well, I don't know what to do. I've got to feed the family and what are we gonna do about all these here?" The Joads are disturbed by the face of poverty - shown by a lingering view of the children's faces, but willing to help care for them.

In a contrasting scene, one of the land contractors who hires migrant laborers drives into the camp in a shiny convertible and offers employment picking fruit. One of the disgruntled migrants named Floyd (Paul Guilfoyle) asks to see the contractor's license and credentials. "Then you make out an order, where and when and how much you're gonna pay, and you sign it and we'll go." Knowledge about the unfair laws of supply and demand, Floyd accuses the employer of cheating the desperate men with his solicitation:

Twice now I fell for that line. Maybe he needs a thousand men. So he gets five thousand there and he'll pay fifteen cents an hour. Then you guys will have to take it, cause you'll be hungry. If he wants to hire men, let him ride it out and say what he's gonna pay. Ask to see his license. He ain't allowed by law to contract men without a license.

In one of the film's most powerful examples of man's inhumanity to man, the contractor identifies and labels Floyd as an "agitator" to a gun-toting sheriff's deputy who accompanies him. The officer falsely accuses the man with trumped-up charges - of "hangin' around that used car lot that was busted into. Yep, that's the fella!" Floyd is ordered into custody, but he resists arrest and slugs the deputy in the mouth - and then flees during the scuffle. The brutish sheriff shoots and mistakenly wounds (mortally) an innocent bystander - a mother in the camp - in a bungled effort to stop his flight.

As he pursues Floyd, Tom and Casy intervene. Tom tackles the sheriff and Casy kicks him in the head to knock him unconscious. Casy forces Tom, because he is violating his parole by migrating, to hide out in the willows and return only if signaled with "four high whistles." When a carload of hostile deputies pulls up, Casy takes the blame for the entire incident: "This man of yours, he got tough so I hit him. Then he started shootin' and hit that woman there so I hit him again." He is subsequently handcuffed (after offering his two wrists) and driven away. One of the law-enforcement deputies is dismayed by the shooting, but is little concerned about the dying woman:

Boy, what a mess them .45s make.

That evening, Tom sneaks back into the camp with word that the family must hurriedly pack and move out because a mob is planning to burn down the camp:

A guy down at the willows was just tellin' me some of them poolroom fellas figgerin' on burnin' the whole camp out tonight. We gotta get the truck loaded.

Tom learns that Rosasharn's husband Connie has deserted them and his pregnant wife:

Ma Joad: He lit out this evenin'. Said he didn't know it was gonna be like this.

Pa Joad: Glad to get shet of him. Never was no good, never will be.

Tom tries to console Rosesharn who is distraught and feeling abandoned: "I just don't feel like nothin' at all. Without him, I just don't wanna live." As they leave, Rosasharn speculates: "Maybe Connie go and get some books to study up with. He gonna be a radio expert, you know. Maybe he figgured to surprise us." Ma Joad encourages her delusionary rationalization.

His smoldering frustration now heated up, Tom is angered by the senseless, arbitrary violence, exploitation of the migrant workers, and the degradation of his spirit by human selfishness and cruelty:

Tom: Ma, there comes a time when a man gets mad.

Ma: You told me, you promised me...

Tom: I know, Ma, I'm tryin' to. If there was a law they was workin' with, maybe we could take it but it ain't the law. They're workin' away on our spirits, tryin' to make us cringe and crawl, workin' on our decency.

Ma: You promised Tom.

Tom: I know, I'm a-tryin' to, Ma...

Ma: You gotta keep clear. The family's a-breakin' up. You gotta keep clear.

Their truck is halted by a roadblock composed of a mob of angry vigilantes. Although Tom is ready to strike back with a jackhandle, Ma begs him to be subservient and let the danger pass. With a flashlight shining in their faces, the Okie family is confronted and ordered by the prejudiced mob to disperse or face destruction: "We don't want no more Okies in this town. There ain't enough work here for them that's already here...Turn right around and head north, and don't you come back until the cotton's ready."

The next day, the Joad vehicle pulls over to fix a flat tire. As they work on the repair, another man named Spencer (Robert Homans) in a shiny open convertible drives by, stops, and offers them work picking peaches "about forty miles up here just this side of Pixley." As they approach the Keene fruit ranch and pass through an assembled gauntlet outside the gates - a murmuring mob of motorcycle police, striking farmers, and migrant trucks - they are waved through without being told what's wrong. They are apprehensive and confused by the apparent conspiracy of silence.

 

 

The Keene Fruit Ranch:

As the Joads drive into the second camp, they are confronted with shot-gun armed, authoritarian rule (enforced by "tin-shield men" called guards). They are offered work, but not told that some of the workers are on-strike and are attempting to organize a union:

Ranch official: Wanna work?

Tom: Sure, but what is this?

Ranch official: None of your business. Name?

Tom: Joad.

Ranch official: How many men?

Tom: Four.

Ranch official: Women?

Tom: Two.

Ranch official: Kids?

Tom: Two.

Ranch official: Can you all work?

Tom: Sure, I guess so. House 63. Wages five cents a box. No bruised fruit. Move along. You can go to work right away.

At their cabin, more questions are asked by a nasty, surly bookkeeper who checks their name and car license number on a clipboard list to ensure that they aren't agitators:

Ranch deputy: Name?

Tom: Joad. Say, what is all this here?

Ranch bookkeeper: Joad. Not here.

Ranch deputy: License?

Ranch bookkeeper: Oklahoma EL 204. Don't check. (To Tom) Now you look here. We don't want no trouble with ya. Jes' do your own work and mind your business and you'll be all right.

Tom: (muttering to himself) You sure do wanna make ya feel at home here, all right.

While Ma Joad and Rosesharn fix up the inside of the cabin during the afternoon, the rest of the family joins a bucket-carrying procession of 'scab' workers moving trance-like to the fruit groves.

During the family's sparse evening meal, Ma Joad complains about the high food prices in the company store for meat: "Well, they charge extra at that company store and there ain't no other place." Tom leaves to "find out what all that fuss outside the gate was," as Ma warns him to mind his own business: "Don't you go stickin' your nose in anything." Al wants to wander around: "I think I'll look around and see if I can't meet me a girl." Outside, Tom hasn't walked more than a few yards before he is stopped by a flashlight-wielding guard who despotically warns that walks are not allowed that evening: "Now, do you want to walk back or shall I whistle up some help and have you taken back?" As the contemptuous warning is made, the cocky, bullying bookkeeper/deputy shines the bright light of his flashlight into Tom's face.

When he finds an opportunity, Tom ducks away and leaves the ranch, coming upon tents next to a river bank. There, he is reunited with Casy, who was not jailed but run out of town. Tom is informed that there's a striking group of migrants at the Keene Ranch, protesting lowered, starvation wages. Casy predicts that once the strike is over, the fruit pickers' salaries will be reduced by the greedy employers from five cents to two and one-half cents: "One ton of peaches picked and carried for a dollar. That way, you can't even buy enough food to keep ya alive." The striking workers plead with Tom to help organize the ranch's pickers and join the strike against their exploitation, but Tom is content to not get involved with the protest movement:

Tom: They won't. They're gettin' five now. That's all they care about.

Casy: But the moment they ain't strike-breakin', they won't get no five...

Tom: The five they're gettin' now. That's all they're interested in. I know exactly what Pa'd say. He'd say it's none of his business.

Casy: Guess that's right. You'll have to take a beatin' before you'll know.

Tom: Take a beatin'? We was out of food. Tonight we had meat, not much, but we had it. You think Pa's gonna give up his meat on account of some other fellas? Rosasharn needs milk. You think Ma's gonna starve that baby just on account of fellas yellin' outside a gate?

Casy: Tom, you gotta learn like I'm learnin'. I don't know what's right yet, myself, but I'm tryin' to find out. That's why I can't ever be a Preacher again. Preacher's gotta know. I don't know. I gotta ask.

Casy's main justification for getting involved, taking risks, and making sacrifices is simple: "I gotta ask." Outside the tent, they hear approaching noises in the brush - the sounds of sirens and dogs barking. Casy, already identified as the primitive leader of the unified strikers (Casy is amused by his designated role: "They figgured that I'm the leader cause I talk so much"), wades with the other men through the shallow river to hide under the span of a bridge archway. They are spotted in the darkness and in a dramatic, violent sequence, an unarmed Casy defenselessly pleads for common sense from the club-wielding thugs:

Casy: Listen, you fellas. You don't know what you're doin'. You're helpin' to starve kids.

Guard: Aw, shut up, you dirty...

The guard mortally wounds the ex-preacher with a sharp blow to the head from his club. Enraged and filled with moral wrath at the injustice of the act, Tom defends Casy from the vicious attack and kills the attacking "tin-shield" guard in retaliation. During the altercation, Tom suffers a serious face wound on his cheek. The guard realizes it won't be difficult to identify him: "He'll have a trademark he won't be able to get rid of in a hurry."

Tom is hidden and cared for in the Joad cabin. Ma has learned about the incendiary incident, and is fearful:

Ma: They say they got posses out. Talkin' about a lynchin' when they catch the fella.

Tom: They killed Casy first.

Ma: That isn't the way they're tellin' it. They're sayin' you done it first.

Tom: Do they know what the fella looks like?

Ma: They know he got hit in the face.

Ma is resigned and blamelessly accepts Tom's accidental killing of Casy's assailant:

I wished ya didn't do it, but ya done what ya had to do.

[This line paraphrased Steinbeck's quote in the novel, "A man got to do what he got to do."]

Understanding that he will eventually be identified, Tom wishes to bid farewell to sensitive and compassionate Ma Joad. She bemoans the fact that they are no longer a real family, hoping that he can stay and help. In a moving monologue, she convinces him to remain, seeing the preservation of the family as the key to its survival. She laments the dissolution of the family ("We're crackin' up"):

Tom, there's a whole lot I don't understand. But goin' away ain't gonna ease us. There was a time we was on the land. There was a boundary to us then. Old folks died off and little fellars come. We was always one thing. We was the family. Kind of whole and clear. But now we ain't clear no more. There ain't nothin' that keeps us clear. Al - he's a-hankerin' to be off on his own and Uncle John's just draggin' around. Your Pa's lost his place, he ain't the head no more. We're crackin' up, Tom. We ain't no family now. And Rosesharn - she's gonna have her baby, but it won't have no family. I've been a-tryin' to keep her goin' but (she sighs)...and Winfield, what's he gonna be this a-way? Grown up wild, and Ruthie too! Just like animals. Got nothin' to trust. (Tearfully) Don't go, Tom. Stay and help! Help me!

Reluctantly, Tom agrees to stay with the family:

OK, Ma. I shouldn't, I know I shouldn't, but OK.

And then from outside, they overhear a new family that's moving in being told that the wages are now two and one-half cents - just as Casy had predicted would happen after the strike was broken. Tom reflects back on what Casy has taught him. He instinctively begins to sense the mission he will carry on in Casy's absence:

That Casy. He might have been a preacher, but he seen things clear. He was like a lantern. He helped me to see things, too.

That evening, in one of the film's more suspenseful scenes, the family buries Tom under mattresses in the truck just as guards arrive to question them and search for the killer of one of the guards. They avoid spotting him when Al explains to guards about the other fellow in their party: "You mean that hitchhiker? The little short fella with a pale-face?...We just picked him up on the way in. He left this morning when the rate dropped."

The family successfully leaves the Keene Ranch without further incident - escaping detection. At the top of a hill, the car runs out of gas, and they are able to coast into a third type of camp - a clean, democratically-run, self-governing Department of Agriculture camp.

The Farmworkers' Wheat Patch Government Camp (Run by the Department of Agriculture):

[Note: In Steinbeck's novel, the camp is referred to as Weedpatch.]

The old jalopy rattles and clatters over a speed bump at the government-sponsored camp's entrance. The friendly, benign caretaker (Grant Mitchell) at the gate explains the purpose of the bump: "A lot of children play in here. You can tell people to drive slow and they're liable to forget, but once they hit that hump, they don't forget." [The camp's director, dressed in white pants and sweater, deliberately resembles President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He is actually modeled after Tom Collins, the director of the government-run Weedpatch camp in California, and technical advisor for the film.]

To their astonishment, the Joads have found an idyllic-sounding paradise, in contrast to their previous camp experiences. They are told about the clean facilities: "Number Four Sanitary Unit....Toilet, showers, washtubs." The caretaker also describes to a wary Ma Joad and family how the government camp is democratic and self-governing:

No cops, no, people here elect their own cops. The ladies' committee will call on you, m'am, to tell ya about the children, the schools, and sanitary unit, and who takes care of 'em.

In the office, Tom is told about the rules and regulations of the populist camp. It is one of the few places that provides a "decent" safety blanket for poor migrants, and it is run by "just fellas":

Caretaker: Campsite costs a dollar a week, but you can work that out - carrying garbage, keeping the camp clean, things like that.

Tom: We'll work it out. Uhmm, what's the committee you're talkin' about?

Caretaker: We have five sanitary units. Each one elects a central committee man. They make the laws and what they say goes. 

Tom (incredulously): You aimin' to tell me the fellas that are runnin' the camp are just fellas that are campin' here? 

Caretaker: (He nods) That's the way it is.

Tom: And you say 'No cops'?

Caretaker: No cop can come in here without a warrant.

Tom: I can't hardly believe it. In the camp I was in before, they'd burn it out - the deputies and some of them poolroom fellas.

Caretaker: They don't get in here. Sometimes the boys patrol the fences, especially on dance nights.

Tom: You got dances too?

Caretaker: They have the best dances in the county, every Saturday night.

Tom: Who runs this place?

Caretaker: Government.

Tom: Why ain't there more like it?

Caretaker: You find out. I can't.

As Tom walks to his campsite, he turns off a water spigot that is wastefully spilling water on the ground (next to a sign which reads: "Turn Off Water Help Keep Our Camp Ground Clean"). Ruthie and Winfield Joad explore the camp washhouse (Sanitary Unit) in a scene which exploits the humor of the situation - their naivete about the camp's flush toilet. The next day, Tom is pick-axing in a ditch (and laying pipe) when the neighboring farmer who has hired them to work, a kindly man named Mr. Thomas, tells them about the plot to disrupt the camp, scheduled for the next Saturday night's dance. Tom's political question about Reds is dismissed and goes unanswered:

Mr. Thomas: Citizens angered at Red agitators burn another squatters' camp and order agitators to leave the county. 

Tom: What is these 'Reds' anyway? Every time ya turn around, somebody callin' somebody else a Red. What is these 'Reds' anyway?

Mr. Thomas: Oh, I ain't talkin' about that, one way or the other. All I'm sayin' is that there's gonna be a fight at the camp Saturday night. And there'll be deputies ready to go in.

In an extended sequence of the Saturday night Rodeo Dance at the well-run camp, the migrant workers show their joyous zest for living. Couples whirl their partners around to the fiddle playing of "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain." Four suspicious-looking citizens are identified as potential trouble-makers by the camp's committee. Their plot to disrupt the camp is frustrated and neutralized. Tom sings "Red River Valley" while dancing with Ma Joad. Deputies who arrive to raid the camp and ostensibly break up a "riot" (without a warrant) are turned away, because there is no evidence of a disturbance.

During the night while the camp sleeps, a pair of deputies are ushered into the camp with the caretaker to check the Joad family's car license. Tom witnesses their search and quickly dresses and begins to pack. He realizes the inevitable alienation that he faces - that they will be back with a search warrant - he will be pursued as a fugitive who has also violated his parole. He knows that his time is short and is now determined to leave the family permanently. A melancholy hoot of a train whistle sounds in the distance.

In the famous, final farewell scene with his mother, as the sad tune of "Red River Valley" plays in the background again on an accordion, Tom speaks to his mother on the empty dance floor of the government camp. In the pre-dawn light as Tom cuts his attachment to the symbols of stability in his life, he has some final reflections on his people, on Casy's life and mission, and the meaning of his death ("about what he said, about what he done, about how he died"). He also speaks about situations that he doesn't fully understand, but still wishes to address. He doesn't want to kill anyone, but do something and find out "what it is that's wrong":

Ma: Tommy, ain't ya gonna tell me goodbye?

Tom: I didn't know, Ma. I didn't know if I ought to...Come outside. There was some cops here tonight. They was takin' down license numbers. I guess somebody knows somethin'.

Ma: I guess it had to come, sooner or later. (They move from the tent to the dance floor) Sit down for a minute.

Tom: I'd like to stay, Ma. I'd like to be with ya and see your face when Pa gets settled in some nice place. I'd sure like to see ya then. But I won't never get that chance, I guess, now.

Ma: I would hide ya, Tommy.

Tom: I know you would, Ma, but I ain't gonna let ya. Ya hide somebody that's killed a guy and you're in trouble too. 

Ma: All right, Tommy, but what do ya figur you're gonna do?

Tom: You know what I've been thinkin' about? About Casy, about what he said, about what he done, about how he died. I remember all of it.

Ma: He was a good man.

Tom: I've been thinkin' about us too. About our people livin' like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Well, maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin', and I've been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...

Ma: Oh, Tommy. They'd drag you out and cut ya down just like they done to Casy.

Tom: They're gonna drive me anyways. Sooner or later, they'd get me for one thing if not for another. Till then...

Ma: Tommy, you're not aimin' to kill nobody?

Tom: No, Ma, not that. It's just, well, as long as I'm an outlaw anyways, maybe I can do somethin'. Maybe I can just find out somethin', just scrounge around and maybe find out what it is that's wrong and see if ain't somethin' can be done about it. I ain't thought it all out clear in my mind, I can't. I don't know enough.

Ma: How am I gonna know about ya, Tommy? Why, they could kill ya and I'd never know. They could hurt ya. How am I gonna know?

After becoming idealistically radicalized by what he has witnessed, Tom - in a famous monologue - describes how he will carry on Casy's mission in the world - by fighting for social reform. Going off to seek a new world in a place unknown, he must leave his family to join the unspecified movement ("the one big soul") committed to struggling for social justice. In a more optimistic ending than the one in the novel, he has benefited from Casy's wisdom about the sanctity of all life, and a belief in universal love which comes from respecting all of humanity. He also has intelligently realized the unified power of working people speaking up for their rights - a revolution that people must adjust to:

Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A fella ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul - the one big soul that belongs to ever'body. Then...then, it don't matter. I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.

Sadly, Ma doesn't understand Tommy's eloquent decision in his soliloquy. Tom doesn't understand things completely either: "Me neither, Ma, but just somethin' I've been thinkin' about." And then with a few more final words of goodbye, Ma Joad says to Tom: "Tom, we - we ain't the kissin' kind, but..." and they kiss, and then Tom walks away - they may never see each other again. She watches him go with a tiny bundle of possessions rolled up in a bundle swung over his back. "Red River Valley" plays again.

Tom Joad strikes out, seen as a tiny image walking up a distant hill, silhouetted against the morning sky. An outcast, he has rebelliously abandoned the dream of the land that has sustained the Joad family for so many generations. He disappears into the morning light - forever.

In contrast to her son is the monumental image of the enduring Ma. Her famous last, meditative lines are delivered inside a truck at dusk as the family moves on in search for "twenty days work" near Fresno, California. A long string of ramshackle trucks winds between groves of fruit trees.

The indomitable matriarch tells Pa of her optimistic faith - a romantic, uplifting notion that they will overcome the oppressiveness and cruelty of the economic system even after the beatings that they have endured and the wrongs they have suffered. No force can destroy the 'people's' will or resilient determination - ever-moving in search of work. She notes that as a strong woman, she can hold the family together as it follows other paths and streams ("with a woman, it's all in one flow like a stream"):

Ma: Scared, ha! I ain't never gonna be scared no more. I was though, for a while it looked as though we was beat, good and beat. Looked like we didn't have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like nobody was friendly no more. Made me feel kind of bad, and scared too. Like we was lost and nobody cared. 

Pa: You're the one that keeps us goin', Ma. I ain't no good no more, and I know it. Seems like I spend all my time these days thinkin' how it used to be. Thinkin' of home. I ain't never gonna see it no more.

Ma: Well, Pa. A woman can change better'n a man. A man lives, sorta, well, in jerks. Baby's born and somebody dies, and that's a jerk. He gets a farm or loses it, and that's a jerk. With a woman, it's all in one flow like a stream. Little eddies and waterfalls, but the river it goes right on. A woman looks at it that way. 

Pa: Well, maybe, but we sure taken a beatin'.

Ma: I know. That's what makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. And we'll go on forever, Pa... 'cause... we're the people.

[Note: In Steinbeck's original novel, this scene was located at the 2/3rds point in Chapter 20, and was spoken to Tom, not to Pa. The final scene in the novel was a disastrous strike-breaking episode in which Tom was clubbed and beaten, and Casy was killed.]

With a steely look of courage, faith, and unbowed strength, having survived a tough "beatin'," strong-willed Ma Joad vows that she will never be afraid again. As the key figure in the film, the matriarch has optimistically faced the challenges of almost-certain destruction, and led the family with dignity through life's situations with a transcendent attitude and feminine life force.

[Note: The film ends on a more hopeful and upbeat note than Steinbeck's novel. In the melodramatic novel, there is a bleak and shocking ending unlike the film. After the loss of her stillborn baby, Joad daughter Rosasharn offers her maternal breast, filled with milk, to be suckled by a starving man in a railroad car.]

The film's final wide-shot shows a long procession of migrant trucks and jalopies moving along through the countryside. 

 

 

 http://www.filmsite.org/grap.html 

 

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A Brief History of Synaesthesia and Music

A Brief History of Synaesthesia and Music

by Sean A. Day February 21, 2001 

 

 

Hooked on Mandelbrot - for Funda


 

Synaesthesia is the general name for a related set of various cognitive states having in common that stimuli to one sense, such as smell, are involuntarily simultaneously perceived as if by one or more other senses, such as sight or / and hearing (see Cytowic 1989; Baron-Cohen & Harrison 1993). For example, the sounds of musical instruments might make you see certain colors, each color specific and consistent with the particular instrument playing; a piano, for example, might produces a sky-blue cloud, and a tenor saxophone produce an image of electric purple neon lights. One highly documented case of synaesthesia involved Michael O. Watson, who felt at or within his right hand different flavors -- the flavor of spearmint, for example, felt like cool smooth glass columns (see Cytowic 1989, 1993). 

 

Synaesthesia is additive; that is, it adds to the initial (primary) sensory perception, rather than replacing one perceptual mode for another. For example, with synaesthetically colored musical instruments, you both hear and "see" the sounds; the visual images do not replace the audial sensations. Both sensory perceptions may thus become affected and altered in the ways they function and integrate with other senses. Synaesthesia is generally "one-way"; that is, for example, for a given synaesthete, tastes may produce synaesthetic sounds, but sounds will not produce synaesthetic. However, there have been a few rare cases of «bi-directional» synaesthesia, in which, for example, music induces (synaesthetic) colors and seeing colors induces (synaesthetic) sounds -- the correspondences, however, are not the same in both directions! 

 

Synaesthesia may be divided into two general, somewhat overlapping types. The first, "synaesthesia proper", is as described above, in which stimuli to a sensory input will also trigger sensations in one or more other sensory modes. With the second form of synaesthesia, certain sets of things which our individual cultures teach us to put together and categorize in some specific way -- like letters, numbers, or people's names -- also get some kind of sensory addition, such as a smell, color or flavor. The most common forms of cognitive synaesthesia involve such things as colored written letter characters (graphemes), numbers, time units, and musical notes or keys. For example, the synaesthete might see, about a foot or two before her (the majority of synaesthetes – about 70% -- are female), different colors for different spoken vowel and consonant sounds, or perceive numbers and letters, whether conceptualized or before her in print, as colored. 

 

 Let us now explore a little bit of the history of synesthesia in music: 

 

It might seem an odd thing to start such a history with a look at ancient mathematicians and astronomers, but some of them offered important initial cornerstones to later theories on synaesthesia. Around the year 550 B.C., to begin with, the Pythagoreans offered mathematical equations for the musical scales, showing that musical notes could be seen as relationships between numbers. A musical scale, for example, could be divided into eight notes, an "octave" scale, which repeats its sequence as the musical notes proceeded higher or lower. To use a basic example, this could be the C-Major scale on the piano, consisting of just the white keys: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. This is also the basic "do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do". 

 

Almost 200 years later, around 370 B.C. or so, Plato wroteTimaeus, in which the soul of the world is described as having these same musical ratios. A cosmology was emerging in which the planets' radii (the planets' order actually varied, depending upon the author) were set with a ratio sequence of 1:2:3:4:8:9. Later, ratios would emerge with the following ratio sequence: Moon = 1; Venus = 2; Earth = 3; Mars = 4; Jupiter = 14; Saturn = 25. This sequence approximated the Greek diatonic musical scale's ratios, thus the planets were tied to music, and a concept of "the music of the spheres" was initiated. 

 

Shortly after Plato, around 350 B.C., Aristotle wrote to maintain that the harmony of colors were like the harmony of sounds. This set the stage for a later equating of specific light and sound frequencies, as Aristotle's works were translated and incorporated into European sciences. At about this same time, Archytas of Tarentus (c. 428 – 350 B.C.) introduced the «chromatic» (12-tone) scale to Greece. This was seen as a compliment to the two main scales: the diatonic (a whole-note or full-tone scale); and the enharmonic (quarter-tones). Around 1492, Franchino Gaffurio was re-introducing colorized Greek modal music to Europe, with the following system: Dorian = «crystalline» color; Phrygian = orange; Lydian = red; and Mixolydian = an «undefined mixed color» (which is, admittedly, somewhat vague). By the late 1580's, the painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo was formally equating «dark» with high pitches and white with low pitches (see Dann 1998) – which is the reverse of the more «normal» trend of low being dark and high being white. Athanasius Kircher, around 1646, developed a system of correspondences between musical intervals and colors, based basically upon complex traditional symbolisms, as follows: 

 

 

 

octave	green
seventh	blue-violet
major sixth	fire red
minor sixth	red-violet
augmented fifth	dark brown
fifth	gold
diminished fifth	blue
fourth	brown-yellow
major third	bright red
minor third	gold
major wholetone	black
major wholetone	black
minor second	white
minor wholetone	grey

 

Likewise, Marin Cureau de la Chambre, in 1650, proposed a scheme of colored musical intervals, based on Aristotle: 

 

 

 

double-octave	black
twelfth	purple
eleventh	blue
octave	green
fifth	red
fourth	yellow
base	white

 

In 1704, Sir Isaac Newton's treatise Optics (Newton 1952 (1704)) was first published, which dealt, among other things, with the parallel between colors of the spectrum and notes of the musical scale. 

 

In a sense, this was a revival of Aristotle's theories of the resemblances between light and sound; but Newton's efforts were far more elaborate and mathematical. Newton mathematically but quite arbitrarily divided the visible light spectrum into seven colors. He then noted that the mathematical relationships of these seven colors was similar to those of the musical scale, with the following concordances: 

 

 

 

red	= tonic
orange	= minor third
yellow	= fourth
green	= fifth
blue	= major sixth
indigo	= seventh
violet	= eighth (octave)

 

Although Newton himself basically only held these concordances as an analogy, and later discarded notions that there was any true connection between colors and the musical scale, by around 1742, the French Jesuit monk Louis Bertrand Castel, the well-known mathematician and physicist, was a firm advocate of there being direct solid relationships between the seven colors and the seven units of the scale, as per Newton's Optics. Castel proposed the construction of a clavecin oculaire, a light-keyboard, as a new musical instrument which would simultaneously produce both sound and the "correct" associated color for each note (see Galeyev 1988; Dann 1998; Riccò 1999). This theme was returned to in 1790, whenErasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin's grandfather) wrote about the parallel between colors and musical notes. 

 

Relations Between sounds and colors according to L. B. Castel: 

 

 

 

B	= (dark) violet
Bb	= agate
A	= violet
Ab	= crimson
G	= red
F#	= orange
F	= golden yellow
E	= yellow
Eb	= olive green
D	= green
C#	= pale green
C	= blue

 

 

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov is said to have had synaesthetically colored musical keys: 

 

 

 

B major	gloomy, dark blue with steel shine
Bb major	darkish
A major	clear, pink
Ab major	greysh-vioket
G major	brownish-gold, light
F# major	green, clear (color of greenery)
F major	green, clear (color of greenery)
E major	blue, sapphire, bright
Eb major	dark, gloomy, grey-bluish
D major	daylight, yellowish, royal
Db major	darkish, warm
C major	white

 

This is according to an article in the Russian press (Yastrebtsev 1908), cited by Galeyev & Vanechkina (2000). 

 

In 1875, Bainbridge Bishop began building a color-organ in America. In 1893, Alexander Wallace Rimington began building his color-organ, in England. Rimington's first concerts were in 1895, and saw high popularity both in Europe and the U.S. 

 

 

 

Alexander Scriabin probably was not a synesthete, but, rather, was highly influenced by the French and Russian salon fashions. Most noticeably, Scriabin seems to have been strongly influenced by the writings and talks of the Russian mystic, Helena P. Blavatsky, founder of The Theosophical Society and author of such works as Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine(see Dann 1998). The synesthetic motifs found in Scriabin's compositions – most noticeably in Prometheus, composed in 1911 – are developed off of ideas from Newton, and follow a basic mathematical musical algorithm, called a circle of fifths (see ???; ???; and, of course, ???). The score of ??? contains a line designated «Luce»; this was for a light organ, playing two lines: one to correspond to Scriabin's concepts of the «correct» colors for each musical key, as he modulated from key to key; the other, to counter the first lines colors. Scriabin and others were unable to realize a light-music performance of Prometheus until its premier performance in New York, in 1915, where, rather than using a color organ, colored light was projected onto a screen set above the orchestra performers' heads, using a system designed by Preston S. Millar, W.F. Little, and William McKay (see ???). 

 

Scriabin's system of colored musical keys: 

 

 

 

C#	Purple
F#	Bright Blue/Violet
B	Blue
E	Sky Blue
A	Green
D	Yellow
G	Orange
C	Red
F	Deep Red
Bb	Rose/Steel
Eb	Flesh
Ab	Violet
Db	Purple (same as C#)
Gb	Bright Blue/Violet (same as F#)

 

 

 

Amy Beach (1867-1944), American pianist and composer, who flourished c. 1900 - 1920's, was unquestionably a true synesthete. It turns out that Beach had both perfect pitch and a set of colors for musical keys. 

 

"Other interesting stories about Amy's musical personality and her astounding abilities as a prodigy are recounted in almost all previous biographical writings. One such story is Amy's association of certain colors with certain keys. For instance, Amy might ask her mother to play the 'purple music' or the 'green music.' The most popular story, however, seems to be the one about Amy's going on a trip to California and notating on staff paper the exact pitches of bird calls she heard" (Brown 1994: 16). 

 

"Amy's mother encouraged her to relate melodies to the colors blue, pink, or purple, but before long Amy had a wider range of colors, which she associated with certain major keys. Thus C was white, F-sharp black, E yellow, G red, A green, A-flat blue, D-flat violet or purple, and E-flat pink. Until the end of her life she associated these colors with those keys" (Jenkins 1994: 5-6). 

 

In 1911, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti penned his Manifesto of Futurism. In my opinion, if there was ever a group of non-synesthete artists who pushed the boundaries of synesthetic arts, it was Marinetti and his Futurist colleagues such as Luigi Colombo Fillìa, Enrico Prampolini, and Giacomo Balla. They were known chiefly for staging grand banquets (seeMarinetti 1989 (1932)). Marinetti's intent was to have all the senses (he counted five) employed in interactive synesthetic ecstasy. 

 

 

The Futurists composed a manifesto regarding painting: 

 

«We Futurists therefore claim that in bringing the elements of sound, noise and smell to painting we are opening fresh paths. We have already taught artists to love our essentially dynamic modern life with its sounds, noises and smells, thereby destroying the stupid passion for values which are solemn, academic, serene, hieratic and mummified: everything purely intellectual, in fact. Imagination without strings, words-in-freedom, the systematic use of onomatopoeia, antigraceful music without rhythmic quadrature, and the art of noises—these were created by the same Futurist sensibility that has given birth to the painting of sounds, noises and smells. 

 

«It is indisputably true that (1) silence is static and sounds, noises and smells are dynamic; (2) sounds, noises and smells are nothing but different forms and intensities of vibration; and (3) any succession of sounds, noises and smells impresses on the mind an arabesque of form and color. We must measure this intensity and perceive these arabesques. 

 

«The painting of sounds, noises and smells rejects: 

1. All muted colors, even those obtained directly and without using tricks like patinas and glazes.
2. The banality of those velvets, silks and flesh tints which are too human, too refined, too soft, and flowers which are too pale and drooping.
3. Greys, browns and all muddy colors.
4. The use of pure horizontal and vertical lines, and all other dead lines.
5. The right angle, which we consider passionless.
6. The cube, the pyramid and all other static shapes.
7. The unities of time and place.

«The painting of sounds, noises and smells calls for: 

1. Reds, rrrrreds, the rrrrrreddest rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuut.
2. Greens, that can never be greener, greeeeeeeeeeeens that screeeeeeam, yellows, as violent as can be: polenta yellows, saffron yellows, brass yellows.
3. All the colors of speed, of joy, of carousings and fantastic carnivals, of fireworks, cafe-chantants and music-halls; all colors seen in movement, colors experienced in time and not in space.
4. The dynamic arabesque, which is the sole reality created by the artist in the depths of his feeling.
5. The clash of all the acute angles, which we have already called the angles of will.
6. Oblique lines which fall on the observer like so many bolts from the blue, along with lines of depth.
7. The sphere, the ellipse that spins, the upside-down cone, the spiral and all the dynamic forms which the infinite powers of an artist's genius are able to uncover.
8. Perspective obtained not as the objectivity of distances but as a subjective interpenetration of hard and soft, sharp and dull forms.
9. As a universal subject and as the sole reason for a painting's existence: the significance of its dynamic construction (polyphonic architectural whole). Architecture is usually thought of as something static; this is wrong. What we have in mind is an architecture similar to the dynamic musical architecture achieved by the Futurist musician Pratella. Architecture is found in the movement of colors, of smoke from a chimney, and in metallic structures, when they are experienced in a violent, chaotic state of mind.
10. The inverted cone (the natural shape of an explosion), the slanting cylinder and cone.
11. The collision of two cones at their apexes (the natural shape of a water spout) with flexible or curving lines (a clown jumping, dancers).
12. The zig-zag and the wavy line.
13. Ellipsoidal curves considered as straight lines in movement.
14. Lines and volumes seen as plastic transcendentalism, that is, according to their characteristic degree of curvature or obliqueness, determined by the painter's state of mind.
15. Echoes of lines and volumes in movement.
16. Plastic complementarism (for both forms and colors), based on the law of equivalent contrasts and on the opposite poles of the spectrum. This complementarism derives from an imbalance of forms (which are hence forced to move) The consequent elimination of the complements of volumes. We must reject these because like a pair of crutches they allow only a single movement, forward and backward, and not the total movement that we call spherical expansion in space.
17. The continuity and simultaneity of the plastic transcendency of the animal mineral, vegetable and mechanical kingdoms.
18. Abstract plastic wholes, corresponding not to our sight but to the sensations which derive from sounds, noises, smells and all the unknown forces that surround us» (Carrà: 1913).

 

Kandinsky, working in the 1920's, was also not a synesthete, despite his fame for his synesthetic artwork. Many of his paintings and stage pieces were based upon a set and established system of correspondences between colors and the timbres of specific musical instruments. Kandinsky himself, however, stated that his correspondences between colors and musical timbres has no «scientific» basis, but was founded upon a combination of his own personal feelings, current prevailing cultural biases, and mysticism (see Kandinsky 1994; see also Dann 1998; Riccò 1999: 138-142). 

 

Schematization of the correspondences between colors and musical timbres according to Kandinsky: 

 

 

 

Colors	Musical timbres
Yellow	Trumpet; Sound of the fanfare
Azure	Flute
Blue	Deep sounds from the organ
Dark blue	Cello
Very dark blue	Bass
Green	Middle tones of the violin
White	Temporary pause
Black	Conclusive pause
Gray	Lack of sound
Bright red	Fanfare; Tuba/Horn
Crimson red	Drum-roll; Tuba/Horn
Cool red	Medium and deep tones of the cello
Bright cool red	Other tones of the violin
Orange	Middle bells of the church; Strong contralto voice; Viola
Violet	English horn; Bagpipe
Deep purple	Deep tones of the woodwinds; Bassoon

Sir Arthur Bliss, who wrote his Colour Symphony in 1922, was not a synesthete. He was simply yet another influenced by the ideas of «color music», although, for him, it did not come with the trappings of mystic religions, but, rather, with British traditions. The symphony features four movements: Purple; Red; Blue; and Green. Bliss based this work upon the symbolism generally associated with the colors in traditional English heraldry, along the following lines: «Purple – Amethysts, Pageantry, Royalty – and Death; Red – Rubies, Wine, Furnaces, Magic, …; Blue – Sapphires, Deep Water, Skies, Loyalty, Melancholy; Green – Emeralds, Hope, Youth, Joy, Spring, and Victory» (Dannatt 1991). 

 

Around 1925, Alexander László, Hungarian musician and composer (born in 1895) composed a small set of Lichtmusik (light-music) pieces, including Eleven preludes (opus 10). Eleven preludes had the following scheme: 1. ultramarine; 2. yellow; 3. violet; 4. leaf-green; 5. grey; 6. red; 7. ice-blue; 8. white; 9. sea-green; 10. cress; 11. black. It is quite questionable as to whether László was a synaesthete; my current guess is that he probably was not. 

 

Also in the 1920's, Danish-born Thomas Wilfred came to the United States, became involved with the Theosophist movement, and designed and built a «color organ» which he named the Clavilux. He named the art-form produced «Lumia». He toured the U.S. and Europe, giving concerts. Likewise, Mary Hallock Greenewalt developed a color-organ which she named the Sarabet, on which she also gave concerts (see Moritz 2000).

 

Composer Olivier Messiaen, who flourished in the 1940's, on the other hand, was more likely a synesthete; the question is raised quite well in his own writings and in interviews (see Samuel 1994). Many of his compositions, such as Couleurs de la cité céleste, L'ascension, and Des canyons aux étoiles, are directly based upon his, in a sense, trying to "produce pictures» via sound, writing specific notes to produce specific color sequences and blends. 

 

In 1940, Walt Disney studios presentedFantasia. One of the main themes of this animation film was to put pictures to pieces of orchestral music – in a sense, an early version ofMTV. The results, however, did not produce much in the way of synesthetically motivated art – with the noticeable exceptions of the opening piece, the abstract colors accompanying J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in d-minor. More direct to synesthesia, but constantly overlooked in the movie Fantasia, is the short divertissement section featuring an animated oscilloscope-like «sound track» which presented shapes and colors for various instruments. These colors and shapes bear some similarities to the types of actual perceptions colored-music synesthetes experience. 

 

In the late 1940's, Oskar Fischinger developed a color-organ which he named the Lumigraph, on which he gave a few performances (see Moritz 2000). 

 

In 1989, Miles Davis presented his album, Aura, which is a suite of 10 modern jazz pieces each set upon a color. Aura was composed by Palle Mikkelborg, who was not a synesthete. The composer was aware of the concept of synesthesia, but only slightly. The correspondences made between the musical styles and particular colors is basically based upon western-European – and more so, on North American – culture. Furthermore, the associations are fairly «loose»; the colors are arranged in a certain sequence, and the musical pieces of the suite flow in a certain arrangement, but there is not strong attempt to have the two sequences correspond. 

 

In 1990, Russian composer Sofia Gubaidulina composed Alleluja, which includes an optional part for color keyboard. 

 

Composer Michael Torke, on the other hand, is definitely a synesthete, reporting that one of his types is colored time units (days of the week, years, and such). Torke composed Color Music in 1991. He is currently on contract with Walt Disney studios to write music for films. 

 

French drummer Manu Katché is a synesthete who synesthetically sees things to music and sound stimulation. He has performed with such musicians as Peter Gabriel, Joe Satriani, Tori Amos. As I currently write, he is on tour with Sting. 

 

Currently world-famous oboist Jennifer Paull wrote to me: "I am a musician and publisher. I have been motivated my entire life by a rainbow of colours which do not belong to the limited, conventional rainbow -- but are totally real for me. I cannot put them into words. There are rainbows of textures, rainbows of moods and feelings too. The first moment I heard the timbre of the oboe d'amore, I knew that I had to play it and I have spent my life doing so. . . . I found out that I saw things differently when I was 11. My best friend was totally bored by my saying letters and numbers represented colours. She noted everything I said and tried to trip me up. Of course, she couldn't. «[Regarding the sound of the oboe d'amore], I cannot put into words. I can feel it, see it, but I can't put it into words. This sound -- this colour -- took me over. I had no choice.» 

 

This is only a most basic of overviews of synesthetic themes in the various arts – barely scratching the surface. Suffice to say that, currently, such concepts abound, and there is no dearth of artists employing such ideas in their work, particularly nowadays. Present day true synesthete artists, however, are quite a bit rarer, and are hard to point out, particularly since the diagnosis is still not common, resulting indirectly in most synesthetes not talking about their special perceptions. 

 

Bibliography:

Baron-Cohen, Simon, and John E. Harrison, editors. 1997. Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. 

 

Brown, Jeanell Wise. 1994. Amy Beach and Her Chamber Music: Biography, Documents, Style. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. 

 

Carrà, Carlo. 1913. «The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells». Cytowic, Richard E. 1993. The Man Who Tasted Shapes. New York: Putnam. 

 

Cytowic, Richard E. 1993. The Man Who Tasted Shapes. New York: Putnam.

 

Cytowic, Richard E. 1989. Synaesthesia: a Union of the Senses. New York: Springer-Verlag. 

 

Dann, Kevin T. 1998. Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge. New Haven and London: Yale UP. 

 

Dannatt, George. 1991. Album notes to Bliss: A Colour Symphony; Metamorphic Variations. BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra; Barry Wordswort, conductor. London: Nimbus Records. 

 

Galeyev, Bulat M. 1988. "The Fire of Prometheus: Music-Kinetic Art Experiments in the USSR." Leonardo; volume 21: 383-396. 

 

Galeyev, Bulat. 1987. Man -- Art -- Technology: The Problem of Synesthesia in Art. Kazan, Russia: Kazan University Press. (In Russian.) 

 

Galeyev, Bulat M., and Irina L. Vanechkina. 2000. «Was Scriabin a Synaesthete?» 

 

Jewanski, Jörg. 1999. Ist C = Rot?: Eine Kultur- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte zum Problem der wechselseitigen Bezeihung zwischen Ton und Farbe. Von Aristoteles bis Goethe. Berliner Musik Studien, Band 17. Sinzig: Studio. 

 

Jenkins, Walter S. 1994. The Remarkable Mrs. Beach, American Composer. Warren, Michigan: Harmonie Park Press. 

 

Kandinsky, Wassily. 1994. Kandinsky, Complete Writings on Art. Kenneth Clement Lindsay and Peter Vergo, editors. New York: Da Capo. 

 

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. 1989 (1932). The Futurist Cookbook. Translated from the Italian by Suzanne Brill. Edited with an introduction by Leslie Chamberlain. San Francisco: Bedford Arts. 

 

Moritz, William. 1997. "The Dream of Color Music, and Machines that Made it Possible." Animation World Magazine; issue 2.1; April. Reproduced here.

 

Newton, Sir Isaac. 1952 (1704). "Optics." In Robert Maynard Hutchins, Ed.; Great Books of the Western World; volume 34; London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Pp. 373-544. 

 

 

Riccò, Dina. 1999. Sinestesie per il design. Le interazioni sensoriali nell'epoca dei multimedia. Milano: Etas, Milano. 

 

Samuel, Claude. 1994 (1986). Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color. Conversations with Claude Samuel. Translated by E. Thomas Glasow. Portland, Oregon: Amadeus Press. 

 

Scriabin, Alexander. 1995 (1911). "Poem of Ecstacy" and "Prometheus: Poem of Fire". New York: Dover. 

 

Yastrebtsev, V. (1908). "On N.A.Rimsky-Korsakov's color sound- contemplation." Russkaya muzykalnaya gazeta, N 39-40: p.842-845.

 

Sean A. Day is a fairly unknown composer, who has written few works in his spare, hobby time. Sean synesthetically "sees" colors corresponding to musical timbres; each instrument has its specific color.

 

http://www.thereminvox.com/story/28/

 

 

 

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Dictionary of Literary Biography: Louis (Brucker) Bromfield

Louis (Brucker) Bromfield 

 

 

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Louis (Brucker) Bromfield

 

Louis Bromfield was one of the many writers of his generation for whom residence in France provided a clearer understanding of his American subject matter. A native of Mansfield, Ohio, Bromfield and his family moved to his grandfather's farm during his last year of high school, and Bromfield contemplated a career as a farmer. He studied agriculture briefly at Cornell, but abandoned it to study journalism at Columbia in 1916. Later that year he went to France, where he served as an ambulance driver for nearly two years until the war ended in 1918. The French government later awarded him the Croix de Guerre for his service during the war. He returned tothe United States late in 1919 and held a variety of writing jobs including that of drama and music critic for the Bookman.

The publication in 1924 of his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, brought him instant acclaim. It was quickly followed byPossession (1925), Early Autumn (1926), and A Good Woman (1927). Bromfield conceived of these four books as panels treating different phases of American lifeand suggested that they might be considered one novel under the general title of Escape. While not closely interrelated, they do have some characters in common and are tied thematically in their presentation of the struggles of individuals against the materialism of the new industrial order. They enjoyed moderate critical success and wide popular success: Early Autumn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 1927.

Bromfield returned to France with his family for a vacation late in 1925. What was to have been a vacation, however, turned into a residence of thirteen years. The Bromfields became prominent expatriates, attending Natalie Barney's salon and visiting Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Bromfield defended the American expatriates in an essay, "Expatriate--Vintage 1927," published in Mirrors of the Year (1927), where he argued that the experience of living in Europe gave him a sharper perspective on his native land and that American culture was no longer in danger of being swallowed by European culture.

The Bromfields soon abandoned Paris itself, however, and took up residence in an old presbytere in Senlis, thirty-five miles to the north. Here Bromfield entertained lavishly, cultivated his interest in gardening, and found peace to maintain his prolific writing. His interest in gardening led to friendships with Edith Wharton, who lived nearby, and with Gertrude Stein, whom Bromfield praised as an "experimenter with words" in his review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). He produced books at the rate of nearly one a year, but his critical reputation did not keep pace with his books' popular appeal. During the thirties, however, he produced his two best books. The Farm (1933) is a fictionalized account of his own family's history and depicts the gradual decline of their agrarian life and its replacement by an industrial one. The Rains Came (1937) deals with the struggle of India to enter the modern world without succumbing totally to the forces of materialism that had engulfed the West.

Bromfield's critical reputation has suffered from both the great quantity of his work and his large readership. In fact he did write easily, and the commercial demand for his work led him to publish much that was inferior. He was charged with writing fiction with the prospect of lucrative film sales in mind. But he also came under fire for his political philosophy, a Jeffersonian individualism which posited a natural aristocracy. Such a position was particularly unpopular in the collectivist-conscious decade of the thirties.

With the knowledge that war was imminent and that he could not remain in his comfortable home north of Paris, Bromfield returned to the United States late in 1938. The following year he bought three adjoining farms in Richland County, Ohio, near his nativeMansfield, and threw himself actively into the scientific farming he had abandoned at the outset of his career. Malabar Farm became famous and provided source material for many of Bromfield's later books. Pleasant Valley (1945), Malabar Farm (1948), Out of the Earth (1950), and From My Experience (1955) record the development of Bromfield's agricultural experiments and offer advice on scientific farming. Farming now took precedence over fiction in Bromfield's life. He lectured widely on agriculture and conservation and published two books espousing his political views: A Few Brass Tacks (1946) and A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954).

At the end of his life Bromfield was nearly as well-known as a farmer as he was as a novelist. Nevertheless he retained a strong hold on the reading public so that even several of his Malabar Farm books were commercial successes. His Jeffersonian agrarianism was classically American, but it was also a philosophy rooted in eighteenth-century French influences.

Bromfield's years of residence in Paris and Senlis did not have much direct influence on his fiction. Still, he was powerfully attracted to the French people and to the simple life still found in the French countryside. His French experiences could only reinforce the independent agrarian spirit which he inherited from his Midwestern ancestors and which he defended in some of his best fiction. It is this clear and forceful presentation of an agrarian point of view for which Louis Bromfield is best remembered.

 

Name:Louis (Brucker) Bromfield
Variant Name:Louis Bromfield|Louis Brucker Bromfiel
Birth Date:December 27, 1896
Death Date:March 18, 1956
Nationality:American
Gender:Male

 

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/louis-brucker-bromfield-dlb/

 

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In From The Cold: The return of Knut Hamsun

In From The Cold: The return of Knut Hamsun

Thanks to Else-Grethe for this lovely article and painting. Very Nice.

bustill

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

I lived for a time in Copenhagen, trying to learn Danish, and that's when I discovered the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, whose career was one of the strangest of the last century. Hamsun is not so well known in America—perhaps the curse of a minor language—but his influence is certainly felt; Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that "the whole modern school of fiction in the twentieth century stems from Hamsun, just as Russian literature in the nineteenth century 'came out of Gogol's greatcoat.' " In Scandinavia, though, Hamsun meant trouble. During those months in Copenhagen, I occasionally walked into one of the antiquarian bookstores that could be found all over the city's Latin Quarter. Several times when I asked about Hamsun's works, the man behind the counter (it was always a man) would shake his head and declare, "He was a traitor!" I'd try to remember the shop so as not to embarrass myself again.

I knew what that was about, of course. During the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War, Hamsun had been a collaborator; he had met Goebbels and Hitler, and was unrepentant to the end. It was baffling: how could the man who wrote "Hunger," "Mysteries," and "Pan"—those surpassingly original books—have had any sympathy for Nazis? Hamsun was not some bitter second-rater. He had won the Nobel Prize in 1920, and, unlike other Fascist sympathizers, such as Céline and Pound, he had a deep and lasting grip on his public, that of an enchanter. Singer admitted to being "hypnotized" by him; Hesse called him his favorite writer; Hemingway recommended his novels to Scott Fitzgerald; Gide compared him to Dostoyevsky, but believed that Hamsun was "perhaps even more subtle." The list of those who loved his sly, anarchic voice is long.

Half a century after Hamsun's death, his politics and, especially, his wartime behavior remain confounding. But, with the recent publication, in Norway, of a two-volume biography by Ingar Sletten Kolloen, of nearly a thousand pages, he no longer seems quite so elusive. And, if there is not yet a Hamsun revival, certainly a Hamsun reëmergence is under way. Books that were never available in English, such as a bizarre journal about a half-imagined journey to the Caucasus ("In Wonderland"), some of the short stories, the "wanderer" novels of middle age, and even some early journalism, have recently appeared in translation, along with new editions of his most famous books. Two competing English versions of both "Hunger" and "Pan" are available, and last month Penguin issued a fresh translation of "Victoria." In Norway and Denmark, early editions of Hamsun are fetching ever-higher prices, though these are mostly the books he wrote long before the rise of Fascism.

The Scandinavian countries, in a period of less than a century, produced an extraordinary body of literature; an abbreviated list includes Hans Christian Andersen, Søren Kierkegaard, Jens Peter Jacobsen, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, and Sigrid Undset. None of them were so beguiling as Hamsun, though, whose works include twenty novels, six plays, two volumes of poetry, and three collections of stories. Most compelling are the early novels, and, in particular, "Hunger"—a sort of hallucinatory "New Grub Street," overheated, half-crazed, and funny.

A hint of the novel's existence came in 1888, when one of its four sections appeared in a short-lived Danish literary journal called Ny Jord("New Ground"). The author was listed as "Anonymous," but the tiny Dano-Norwegian literary community quickly learned his name. Hamsun, not yet thirty, was suddenly a man to be reckoned with, and more so when, a year later, he published his first book, "From the Cultural Life of Modern America," a rude, amusing, and occasionally stupid attack on the New World, which the critic Georg Brandes (Nietzsche's early champion) praised highly. When "Hunger" came out, in 1890, Hamsun informed reviewers that he was trying something different; he was not, he insisted, interested in marriages and balls—the book was not really a novel at all. Rather, as he told a friend, "What interests me are my little soul's endless emotions, the special, strange life of the mind, the mysteries of the nerves in a hungry body."

Hamsun's narrator, a writer, is a careful cataloguer of his own psychological states—no victim but, like Hamsun himself, a subversive, generational voice. Not a great deal happens, and yet from the first line—"It was in that time when I walked around hungry in Kristiania, that strange city no one can leave without being marked by it"—the novel's oddly joyful desperation never flags. Poor, ambitious freelance writers in Western cities may no longer be starving, but certainly they suffer the same humiliations as Hamsun's narrator: editors pay them very little, make them wait endlessly for a reply, and are indifferent to their enormous God-given talents. More than once, Hamsun's famished hero finds that his "nervous state had gotten out of hand," as when, at one point, he is unable to sleep:

Suddenly I snap my fingers several times and laugh. What the hell was this! Ha! I imagined I had found a new word. I sit up in bed and say, It's not found in the language, I have invented it—Kuboå. It does have letters like a word—sweet Jesus, man, you have invented a word . . .Kuboå . . . of enormous grammatical importance. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      The word stood out sharply against the darkness in front of me. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      I sit with open eyes, amazed at my discovery and laughing for joy. Then I start whispering: they might be spying on me and I intended to keep my invention a secret. I had crossed over into the pure madness of hunger. 

The first section ends with the narrator in a state of near-bliss after getting ten kroner for a feuilleton, but his over-all situation does not seem likely to improve. The novel breaks grammatical rules, tenses skip around, and the narrator seems increasingly unhinged. By the end, when the narrator boards a ship, it is as if Hamsun had parted the curtain of the nineteenth century and were peering into the absurdities of the twentieth.

 

 "Hunger" was a literary sensation, although the critical response was mixed. Hamsun naturally hoped that Brandes, a voice of modernism, would become an ally, but Brandes found the book monotonous, a judgment so painful to Hamsun that he wrote to him, saying, "I don't feel completely alone without you—but without your understanding, it's useless for me to continue." He believed that Brandes hadn't read enough of the novel: "If we add it up I don't think you'd find more psychical emotions in 'Raskolnikov' than in my book." Brandes and others, however, were beginning to realize that Hamsun not only was an uncomfortable fit with his time but was in many ways an impossible, perhaps even a dangerous, figure.

 

Knut Hamsun—baptized Knud Pedersen—was born in 1859 in rural central Norway. Three years later, the family moved to Hamarøy, north of the Arctic Circle, to work at Hamsund, a farm that belonged to his uncle. Hamsun did not attend school until he was nine, and then not for very long; his childhood was isolated and miserable. His uncle, whom he later described as "a confirmed bachelor, stingy and hot-tempered," beat him with a ruler and otherwise abused him; but he was also in charge of the local library, and Hamsun more or less taught himself Norwegian, which then, in its written form, was almost identical to Danish. His modest background and his lack of formal education were points of both great sensitivity and pride; in a letter to Brandes many years later, he asked, "What does someone like me know—born a peasant-farmer, without a degree in anything, unable to afford to sit and read philosophy?"

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

In his precocious late teens, Hamsun had two clumsy stories published in very limited editions, and, on the strength of this, he asked a wealthy Norwegian merchant named Erasmus B. K. Zahl for financial backing. He was, he wrote, "no one's favorite, with nothing but ordinary schooling," and yet "I've managed to bring my knowledge-thirsty soul a little higher than my just-as-unprivileged equals." To Hamsun's shock, Zahl sent him sixteen hundred kroner, then worth about four hundred dollars. Still, the money didn't go very far, and Hamsun struggled to survive, mostly in Copenhagen, which at the time was the center of cultural gravity in Scandinavia. In the eighteen-eighties, he twice made his way to America. He stopped in New York, where he was amazed by an elevated railway that went "up in the air, above the people's houses," but he stayed mainly in Wisconsin and Minnesota. He also spent eight months in Chicago as a cable-car conductor, and worked on a large farm in the Dakota Territory, a setting for several early stories. Hamsun's opinion of the country was mixed. He saw it as overwhelmed by materialism and excessive patriotism, and at one point he wore a black ribbon in support of four anarchists sentenced to hang after the Haymarket bombing, in Chicago. But he admired the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And he admired Mark Twain, whom he saw give a lecture in New York, and from whom he certainly learned a great deal about the use of the vernacular. Hamsun went home in the summer of 1888 and never returned.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

A year after the publication of "Hunger," Hamsun set out on the lecture circuit in Norway, brazenly attacking the older literary generation; a particular target was Ibsen, who was then sixty-three and had just returned after twenty-seven years abroad. When Hamsun spoke in Kristiania (now Oslo), Ibsen had a front-row seat, and was joined by, among others, the composer Edvard Grieg, the Polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and a young concert pianist, Hildur Andersen, who had become Ibsen's consort. Half an hour into the talk, as Kolloen describes it, Hamsun let loose, accusing Ibsen of bringing a "coarse and spurious" psychological understanding to the stage. Ibsen, for his part, just sat there, impassively. (He is believed to have had Hamsun in mind when he wrote "The Master Builder," published the following year. The play is about an aging architect who is terrified of being outdone by the new generation. "I've begun to grow afraid—so awfully afraid—of the young," he says.)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Hamsun was by then the very portrait of a young artist, complete with pince-nez; a contemporary described him as "dangerous for all women, interesting and striking." One gets glimpses of this in his second novel, "Mysteries" (1892) —an apt title for one of his oddest and richest books. Everything about it is a little mysterious, from the moment "a stranger appeared in town, a certain Nagel, a remarkable, eccentric charlatan who did a lot of curious things." It's not clear why Nagel is there or what he's getting out of staying. He falls obsessively in love with Dagny Kielland, a clergyman's daughter, and has an affair with an older woman; he carries a violin case, but there's almost certainly no violin inside. He is probably borderline insane, and definitely suicidal; although the novel has a third-person narrator, it is every bit as inflamed as "Hunger." Hamsun's able English-born biographer Robert Ferguson quotes Hamsun's own description of the book: "The hero of 'Mysteries' is a poseur, a pathological phenomenon, who is part madman and part genius"—which sounds very much like the author. The novel is somewhat disjointed; irrational monologues alternate with discussions of Marx or Tolstoy or Ibsen, whose plays, not surprisingly, are dismissed by Nagel as "dramatized wood pulp."

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

The reviews, again, were mixed; one critic said that Hamsun "hadn't given up the sickly hallucinations of 'Hunger,' " and he was labelled an opportunistic copier of modern Russian literature. Today, one can recognize in "Mysteries" the shape and spirit of the modern novel, produced at a time when the modern novel did not yet exist. Hamsun's next two books, "Editor Lynge" and "Shallow Soil," were romans à clef—the first about an unloved newspaper editor and the second a disparaging look at the artistic community in Kristiania—and deserve the obscurity into which they have fallen. But then came "Pan," published in 1894, a short, sexy, lyrical novel filled with hints of the supernatural. Hamsun, in his flawed English, described "Pan" with considerable accuracy in a letter to its German publisher, Albert Langen: "Think of the Nordland in Norway, this regions of the Lapper, the mysteries, the grand superstitions, the midnight-sun, think of J. J. Rousseau in the regions, making acquaintance with a Nordlands girl—that is my book." It's told as a memoir by one Thomas Glahn, who has moved to the northern woods with his dog, Aesop, and becomes romantically entangled with Edvarda, the daughter of a rich local merchant. Glahn, with his "animal eyes," is, like Nagel, drawn to irrational acts.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

At one point, Edvarda compares Glahn unfavorably with a rival, a lame physician. "Even if you were lame, on top of everything, you couldn't hold your own against him," she insists. Glahn later begins to brood:

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

No, even if I was lame on top of everything, I couldn't hold my own against the Doctor, could I? I definitely wouldn't be able to hold my own against him; those were her words. . . . 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Standing in the middle of the floor, I cock my gun, place the muzzle against my left instep, and pull the trigger. The shot pierces the middle of my foot and goes through the floor. Aesop gives a short, frightened yelp. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

"Pan" is like that; Glahn and Edvarda torment themselves as much as they torment each other—Glahn does things like tossing one of Edvarda's shoes into the water "whether for joy at her being so near or from some urge to assert myself and remind her of my existence." Among the surprises of the book is its structure, which includes an epilogue, "Glahn's Death," told by a second narrator, who seems to belong to another novel entirely. No matter; Glahn's narrative and Glahn's death somehow belong together. Hamsun wrote to Langen that "every chapter is a poem, every line worked hard on," and every page, he thought, was "havey of thoughts and fantasi."

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Hamsun's next novel, "Victoria," an overwrought, dazzling, painfully class-conscious, and lugubrious romance about a miller's son who loves an aristocrat's daughter, came four years later—just after Hamsun married Bergljot Bech, the daughter of a socially prominent Norwegian family—and was Hamsun's first real financial success. It was six more years before his next novel, the slight "Dreamers," appeared, and after that Hamsun's career began to take a somewhat different path.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Ingar Sletten Kolloen is the first Hamsun biographer to have full access to the Hamsun archive, and in Norway his book set off intense discussion about the writer's collaboration and about his treatment by the authorities after the war. Kolloen is particularly good on Hamsun's personal life: his second marriage, roiled by jealousy and fury, to the actress Marie Andersen, when he was forty-nine and she was twenty-seven; and his relationship with his children, a daughter with Bergljot and two sons and two daughters with Marie. One gets glimpses of Hamsun's interest in world affairs, but it is a rather narrow interest: a belief in the destiny of Germany, and, for reasons that no one has ever quite figured out, a hatred of England. Robert Ferguson notes that Hamsun had nurtured this prejudice from his youth, and one can only suppose that a few personal encounters helped him form a view of an entire nation; as Kolloen and others have remarked, the British were to Hamsun what the Jews were to the Nazis. Englishmen appear in arrogant walk-on roles in several of his books. In the middle of "In Wonderland," Hamsun recalls a Munich streetcar ride: "A little girl . . . falls, gets in between the horses and is trampled, hurt. But we manage to pull her out alive. Meanwhile the Brit is smoking his pipe. When it's all over and the driver delays a moment before going on, the Brit looks at his watch in irritation," and asks for a refund of his fare. In two novels, "Benoni" and "Rosa," a caricatured Englishman meets and then marries Edvarda, the girl from "Pan," and in "The Last Joy," from 1912, Hamsun couldn't contain himself: "England will soon have to establish old folks' homes for its children, most likely. It unsexes its people with sports and fixed ideas; if Germany hadn't kept it in a state of perpetual uneasiness, it would have turned to pederasty in a couple of generations." Possibly, these views became amplified over the years—during the First World War and afterward—for another, more selfish reason: England never really went for Hamsun's books, while the German reading public adored him from the start.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

In the new century, Hamsun seemed to mourn his life in the previous one; in the spring of 1907, he delivered a lecture, "Honor the Young," in which, nearing fifty, he denounced the Fourth Commandment and, with it, his parents' generation. (Kolloen notes that Hamsun was so busy with this lecture that he didn't have time to travel to Hamarøy for his father's funeral.) After "The Last Joy," as if acknowledging that he was no longer a reliably youthful narrator, Hamsun abandoned the first-person voice entirely; with "Segelfoss Town," in 1915, he began to write bloated two-volume novels, set in small towns populated by tramps, peddlers, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats. By far the most successful of these was "Growth of the Soil," published in 1917—an epic saga about the tribulations and joys of Isak, a farmer-settler, and Inger, a woman with a harelip with whom he makes a life.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

"Growth of the Soil" was a worldwide sensation; in Norway, a first printing of eighteen thousand copies sold out in about three weeks—an extraordinary number in a country with a population under three million—and almost from the day of publication there were rumors that Hamsun would win the Nobel Prize in Literature. When no literature prize was awarded in 1918, the betting was that he would get it in 1919, when he turned sixty, but that year the Swedish Academy chose a Swiss, Carl Spitteler, known for his four-volume "Olympian Spring." When Hamsun won, in 1920, it was chiefly because of "Growth of the Soil," which the Academy saw as a lesson of "heroic struggle." The book has its share of darkness—a central event is the murder of an infant—but it was above all a celebration of simple rural virtues. It also may strike readers today as the sort of self-important novel that the young Hamsun would have mocked. "The long, long path over the marshes and into the woods—who has been there?" it begins portentously. "Man, a man, the first one who was there. There was no path before him." Hamsun by then no longer enjoyed public appearances, and he went almost reluctantly to the ceremony, in Stockholm, where, in a curious echo of his "Honor the Young" pronouncements, he said something very sad and very strange: "What I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry—to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave. . . . Today riches and honors have been lavished on me, but one gift has been lacking, the most important one of all, the only one that matters, the gift of youth."

                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

In the nineteen-seventies, a Dane named Thorkild Hansen wrote "Processen mod Hamsun" ("Hamsun's Trial"), a three-volume study that more or less concluded that Hamsun's Nazism was a result of old age (Hamsun was eighty-one in April of 1940, when the Germans invaded); of deafness (even the radio was relatively useless to him); of isolation (he was living at Nørholm, his estate in southern Norway); and of the influence of his wife, Marie, whose enthusiasm for Nazi Germany is well documented. Robert Ferguson's 1987 biography more or less endorsed the idea that Hamsun never fully understood the vileness to which he lent his name, a comforting view to people like me, who not only loved Hamsun but could not believe that his sympathies for the occupiers went very deep. (The excellent 1996 movie "Hamsun," in which Max von Sydow plays the elderly Hamsun, takes this view.) But Kolloen shows that it was more complicated than that.

 

As Hamsun's opinions became all too public during the nineteen-thirties, he seemed to realize that the artist and the polemicist needed to be separated if both were to thrive. In 1936, when Hamsun was seventy-seven, his last novel, "The Ring Is Closed," was published, and reviewers noted with some relief that it was, simply, a novel—that, despite everything, the artist had remained true to his art. But his admirers had watched with some alarm as his politics evolved; many found it unforgivable when, in the mid-thirties, he attacked the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the anti-Nazi journalist Carl von Ossietzky, who had been tortured and imprisoned by his fellow-Germans. Even worse, he supported Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian defense minister who founded the pro-Fascist National Union Party, in 1933. Though that could be tolerated, barely, as a nasty idiosyncrasy, everything changed after the Germans invaded on April 9, 1940, and Hamsun urged his countrymen to throw down their weapons and coöperate.

 

The Nazi occupiers became increasingly pitiless, and increasingly clever at manipulating their trophy, Hamsun, who several times tried to rescue individual countrymen, almost always without success. When Hamsun's publisher, Harald Grieg, asked for his help in winning the release of a writer whom the Gestapo had arrested, Hamsun arranged a meeting with Josef Terboven, the Reich Commissioner in Norway. Terboven shuffled papers and toyed with Hamsun before saying no; they parted with mutual loathing. The Oslo newspapers, though, showed pictures of Hamsun in a seemingly cheerful meeting with the Reich Commissioner, and Hamsun certainly realized that he had been used.

 

Hamsun did not endorse Hitler's racial policies, and, as Kolloen points out, he was in friendly contact with Jews all his life, including Georg Brandes and his favorite publisher, Christian Kønig. Still, he was a man of his time and once suggested, not precisely in the spirit of the Balfour Declaration, that it might benefit everyone if the Jewish people had their own country. Two of Hamsun's children—his son Tore, an artist, and his daughter, Ellinor, who studied acting—lived in Berlin in the late nineteen-thirties, although not, apparently, with much enthusiasm for what was going on. When Hamsun visited them in February of 1938, they were living in a Jewish neighborhood, and had Jewish friends. Tore was particularly close to Max Tau, a publisher, who had met the Hamsuns in Oslo; with Hamsun's help, Tau was rescued from the Nazis.

 

Hamsun's meeting with Hitler—re-created by, among others, Thorkild Hansen, Ferguson, and Kolloen—took place at Berghof on June 26, 1943, a time when the war was going badly for the Germans. Hitler, then fifty-four and heavily medicated, was not in top form. Nor was Hamsun; he had suffered at least one minor stroke and his hearing had worsened. After Hitler asked Hamsun about his writing habits, adding that he personally preferred working in the evening, he took Hamsun to his study, where they were served tea, and it was agreed that Egil Holmboe, a Norwegian, would do the translating. (Hitler's usual interpreter, Ernst Züchner, took notes behind a curtain.) Hitler apparently hoped that the writer would inspire him, cheer him up, and perhaps talk about genius, a theme that always interested him. "I feel, if not entirely connected to you, that my life resembles yours very much in certain ways," Hitler said at one point. But Hamsun had no desire to talk about writing, or art, or genius. He wanted to talk about politics, and about the viciousness of the Occupation. In particular, he wanted Hitler to fire Josef Terboven. He began by complaining that Terboven was clamping down on Norwegian shipping routes, and when Hitler tried to cut off this line of discussion Hamsun went on, "Furthermore, the Reich Commissioner on several occasions has said that in the future there won't be any place called Norway."

 

"Unlike other occupied countries," Hitler told Hamsun, "Norway has got its own government."

 

"Everything that happens in Norway is being decided by the Reich Commissioner!" Hamsun replied, and he tried to explain that Terboven was ruining Hitler's reputation. Eventually, Hamsun did something unheard of: he interrupted Hitler. The Reich Commissioner's methods "don't work with us, we can't stand his Prussianness," Hamsun said. "And then the executions! We've had it!"

 

Züchner, behind the curtain, knew that Holmboe had not translated the last outburst. When Hitler began to speak, Hamsun interrupted again: "Terboven doesn't want a free Norway, but a protectorate—that's the prospect he gives us." Then he had a question: "Will he ever be recalled?"

 

Hitler tried to close the subject, saying, "The Reich Commissioner is a warrior, he's only there for war-related duties."

 

Soon Hamsun began to weep. "It's not that we're against the Occupation," he told Hitler. "We'll need that for a while. But that man is destroying more for us than Hitler can rebuild!" Again, Holmboe didn't translate the riskiest part of the outburst. Rather, he turned away from Hitler and warned Hamsun, "Don't talk about that! We have the Führer's promise."

 

It wasn't over yet. Hitler began to talk about production, more panzer divisions, and new, secret weapons. While he was speaking, Hamsun tried several more times to break in, saying that he hadn't come all this way for the honor of it. When Hitler repeated that one could see Germany's good will in the fact that Norway had its own government, Hamsun, in despair, interrupted and said, "We're talking to a wall!" Holmboe, Kolloen writes, didn't translate that, either.

 

Before leaving, Hamsun said, "We believe in the Führer, but his wishes are being twisted." He added, "It's not the right sort of change in Norway. It will all lead to a new war." That, too, went untranslated, but by now Hamsun had said enough for Hitler to say, "Shut up! You don't understand a thing!" Hitler walked out and Hamsun wept again; he was particularly upset that Hitler hadn't personally said goodbye. Later, Hitler screamed at his aides, "I don't want to see that sort of person here anymore!"

 

Hamsun's reputation was in ruins; not only had he seen Hitler but, in a sickeningly misguided moment earlier that year, he had given Goebbels his Nobel Prize medal. His postwar fate was already under discussion. In November, 1944, in Moscow, Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, discussed Hamsun's case with Terje Wold, the Norwegian justice minister in exile, and Trygve Lie, the foreign minister in exile. The author of "Victoria" and "Pan" was too great an artist to be treated like a common Nazi, Molotov said, and, at such an advanced age, should be allowed to die a natural death. Wold replied, in English, "You are too soft, Mr. Molotov."

 

Norway was liberated in May of 1945, and the Norwegians were unforgiving toward collaborators. Terboven committed suicide before he could be shot; Quisling and other National Union leaders were executed by firing squad in October, and thousands were imprisoned, including Marie Hamsun, who got a three-year sentence and a fine. Hamsun faced treason charges, but no one knew quite what to do with the nation's greatest writer, now almost eighty-six.

 

Hamsun was arrested, and in the next three years he was moved to a nursing home, to the main psychiatric clinic in Oslo, and then back to the nursing home. There are many photographs from this period, and in them Hamsun looks frail, even spectral, and sometimes puzzled. He was examined by doctors and psychiatrists, and many Norwegians took comfort in a psychiatric finding that Hamsun, though sane, was "permanently impaired" mentally. At least one newspaper reported that he was senile. Hamsun himself was offended at the idea that anyone thought his faculties were diminished. "There was nothing the matter with me, I was just old and deaf!" he later insisted. True, his eyesight was failing, and he'd had two cerebral hemorrhages, but so what? His faculties, he said, "had been severely impaired precisely by my stay at the psychiatric clinic."

 

During this period, Hamsun formed an acute hatred for the clinic's chief psychiatrist, Gabriel Langfeldt, who had taken an interest in his case. The psychiatrist, he observed, had come equipped "with his textbooks and his learned tomes," while the novelist "had created several hundred figures—created them internally and externally like living people, in every psychological state and nuance, in dream and action." But Hamsun hated Langfeldt mainly because he was conducting a parallel investigation with Marie Hamsun. Parts of the conversations with Marie, which touched on the most intimate issues of the Hamsuns' marriage, became part of the public court record. For Marie, this was an unconscionable betrayal of privilege; for Hamsun, the ultimate betrayal was Marie's, and he declared that he never wanted to see his wife again.

 

Hamsun, meanwhile, was up to something else: for the first time in years, he was writing—and keeping that a secret even from people he knew. "You've too often suggested to me that I write a book," he wrote to a friend late in 1946. "It won't happen. What can you expect of me now? I'm a wreck, and I'm well into my eighty-eighth year." Hamsun knew that people regarded him as a traitor—he was shunned when he asked a boy to take a postcard to the mailbox. But his manuscript was no apologia, even though he said of his wartime polemics, "No one told me that what I was writing was wrong, no one in the entire country." When a magistrate asked about "the murders, the terror, the torture," Hamsun said that he hadn't been allowed to read newspapers. What about Terboven, "who took direct orders from Hitler, and tortured and butchered the Norwegian people for five years?" Were the Germans a civilized people? "I didn't reply," Hamsun wrote. He challenged the authorities to find "any attack on the Jews" anywhere in his collected writings. Mainly, however, Hamsun had other subjects in mind.

 

The manuscript was published in 1949, when Hamsun was ninety, with the title "On Overgrown Paths," and it accomplished what he most wanted—to demonstrate his artistry and to avenge himself on Langfeldt, who appeared by name in the book, over the objections of Hamsun's longtime publisher. The "overgrown paths" referred to Hamsun's youth, and in returning to that time he did so in a first-person voice he hadn't used for nearly forty years. Hamsun, Robert Bly has said, "has a magnifying glass on his eye, like a jeweler's"; and, as he had done in youthful stories like "A Quite Ordinary Fly of Average Size," Hamsun closely observed his new surroundings, including nurses and patients and a fellow from Hamarøy who "carried his shoes over his shoulder and walked barefoot," and whose sad love story runs through the book. Hamsun recalls talking about homesickness during a visit to Helsinki fifty years earlier; he had learned the word "homesick" in America, and he transports himself to the Dakota Territory: it is the eighteen-eighties, and he has just met a farm girl named Bridget, who calls him Noot, and seems "stuck on me" until an Irishman, Patrick, comes along. Patrick falls for Bridget, but she gets involved with an elderly Austrian baker named Kleist, who makes Bridget his apprentice. And so on, until there is another, abrupt shift of mood. "It's three years since I was arrested, and here I sit," Hamsun writes, adding, "All of us are on a journey to a land that we'll reach soon enough."

 

The Norwegian courts fined Hamsun four hundred and twenty-five thousand kroner (then about eighty-seven thousand dollars), and he was allowed to return to Nørholm, where he went into a slow, steady decline. In the spring of 1950, urged by her children, Marie, who was then sixty-eight, came home, and, after a four-year separation, all that Hamsun said to her was "You've been gone a long time, Marie. All the time you've been gone, I've had no one to talk to but God." Few were willing to forgive him then for his wartime behavior, and it is impossible to do so today. Yet one can still watch, fascinated, as the writer makes his final turn in "On Overgrown Paths." He seems to be reaching for what he had called "the gift of youth," and in those last pages it is as if he had managed, however briefly, to retrieve it.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           KEYWORDS

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       Hamsun, Knut; Writers, Norway, Norwegian, "Hunger", "Pan";Hitler, Adolf, Second    World War (world War II)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

by Jeffrey FrankDECEMBER 26, 2005

                                                                                                                                                             http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/26/051226crat_atlarge?currentPage=all

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                             

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Time Person of the Year 2008 Runners-Up: Nicolas Sarkozy

Time Person of the Year 2008 Runners-Up: Nicolas Sarkozy

By Tony Blair


 

 

 

There are times when Nicolas Sarkozy resembles a force of nature rather than a conventional political leader. He has energy, ideas and vitality in abundance, as he showed in such matters as his handling of the Georgia crisis and the global economic downturn. Of course, as with any new leader, 18 months — Nicolas was elected President of France in May 2007 — is insufficient time to make a final judgment. But certain elements are already clear.

First, Nicolas has the hallmark of any true leader: a capacity to take decisions and implement them. He sees a problem and wants to solve it. What's more, he believes he can.

Second, he is prepared to think outside the box. Reflect for a moment, and the construction of his government in France is a remarkable achievement. His Foreign Minister — the immensely capable Bernard Kouchner — is a Socialist, as are several other ministers. Nicolas has adopted bipartisanship with not only a natural grace but also a wholehearted and sincere embrace. He stands in the modern postideological mold. He wants to get things done, and he wants the best people to do them.

Nicolas recognizes the value of a broad base and of consensus to provide the context for his policies. This is not so that there can be a politics of the lowest common denominator but so as to ensure that no necessary radical step is seen as an act of ideology rather than one of necessity. And we should not omit from the list of his achievements the appointment of France's first black female and Muslim ministers — or, indeed, the feel of a government of youth and vigor.

With such an attitude, Nicolas' political opponents are often surprised and confounded, left uncertain as to how to retain their own bearings in the changing political landscape created by his maneuvers. People can accuse him of acting from lack of political principle. He can just as easily say he is acting with a lack of party prejudice.

Third, he has put France on the map. He has a high profile and a real standing in the world. You agree or disagree with him: you can't ignore him. This is not to be underestimated in modern politics. It gives a country traction, it draws in allies, and it helps create a sense that other countries need to befriend a nation on the rise, one whose view counts. Nicolas' reaching out to the U.S., under President Bush, was not expected except by those who knew him. But it has been effective. The U.S. sees him as an ally. The disputes of the past have not been forgotten, but they have been put to one side.

Today France can play a role in the Israel-Palestine question. In June, Nicolas went to the Knesset and did a typically Sarkozy thing. He exhibited that he understood Israeli anxieties and concerns. He showed himself a friend. He then delivered a sharp and direct message, saying that "there can be no peace without stopping settlement." The message was all the more telling precisely because it was from someone who genuinely came across as a supporter of Israel, not someone indifferent to it.

Fourth, he showed, as President of the European Union, that he knows how to take center stage and get action. The differences within Europe over exactly the right action to stimulate the European economy will remain. But under his leadership, Europe looked as if it were acting in concert. He reached out to Britain, though it is not a member of the euro zone. The G-20 summit in November with President Bush, for which Nicolas had advocated, yielded as much as could be reasonably anticipated in the circumstances. There was a dynamism surrounding the French E.U. presidency that was impressive and important. In the crisis over Georgia, for example, where Nicolas brokered a cease-fire, you felt Europe had a voice, a presence and a policy. It has not always been so when a crisis has occurred.

The economic and financial crises have dominated political coverage in all political systems. They overwhelm preconceived ideas and positions. But we shouldn't forget that Nicolas came to power espousing the politics of la rupture; in other words, advocating a specific break with the past and being up front about the need for radical reform in France. These reforms are still a work in progress. But they provide a clue as to his essential nature as a politician. For Nicolas is determined to do what he believes in or do nothing. He has no interest in occupying the Elysée for the sake of it. It is too early to tell whether he will win through on all fronts. But of his determination, there is no doubt. And that is what makes him a leader of significance and stature.

Blair, former Prime Minister of Britain, is the Middle East envoy for the Quartet

 

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2008/personoftheyear/article/0,31682,1861543_1865103_1866541,00.html

 

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David Foster Wallace on American Fiction

David Foster Wallace

 

The Souped-Up, Knock-Out, Total Fiction Experience

 

 

WHEN it comes to art, we are a nation of extremists. American writing, painting and music have always swung between the minimal and the maximal, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. We believe with equal fervor in artistic self-effacement and artistic self-aggrandizement. We like tiny, well-made stuff and also great sprawling messes; art that is full of feeling and also art that aspires to a kind of icy perfection.

 

The result is a culture that has given us both Audubon and Bierstadt; Dickinson and Whitman; Hemingway and Dreiser; Philip Glass and Leonard Bernstein. The pattern may even extend to politics, with the system yielding up blunt, plain-spoken Harry Truman and sexy, stem-winding Bill Clinton.

All the phases of the culture are not necessarily in sync. At the moment, for example, while a minimalist aesthetic, or the tail end of one, still manifests itself in a lot of painting and music, we are living in age of maximalist novels - books less concerned with le mot juste than with being full-service entertainment centers.

These are long books, for the most part, and not always easy reads; they aspire to a condition of larger-than-lifeness, and frequently come decked out with extra bells and whistles- clever textual devices, say, or over-the-top descriptions and set pieces. They are not, one would think, particularly well-suited to our current moment of collective attention deficit, of sound bites and instant messaging, and yet that's exactly the point; at one level or another the maximalist books are all worried about the ways in which our lives and the printed page fail to match up.

This trend goes back at least to "Infinite Jest," David Foster Wallace's 1996 epic, which at 1,079 pages is also the heavyweight champion of the category - a book so dense and complicated that the critic Sven Birkerts suggested it was powered by an internal computer. (It's set at a moment when time has, in effect, acquired corporate sponsorship, and thus takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.)

Other examples include Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" (1997), a 770-page feat that recapitulates most of the 18th century in a pastiche of 18th-century language, and features a runaway four-ton cheese and both talking clocks and a talking dog; Dave Eggers's 2000 memoir "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (not a novel, but nonetheless an influential text in the maximal movement because of the way it makes fun of all the furniture of bookmaking - the acknowledgements, the dedication, and so on - and also, while at the same time being deeply affecting, includes its own reading guide); and Jonathan Franzen's moving family saga "The Corrections" (2001), which manages to include, instead of a talking dog or a talking clock, talking feces.

The most recent example is Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel, his second, whose title alone announces which end of the minimal-maximal spectrum it's coming from: "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Mr. Foer's first novel, "Everything Is Illuminated," was arguably only semi-maximalist; embedded within itself, it contained another novel, in a completely different style. The framing text was realistic, more or less. The interior text was a sort of shtetl version of magical realism-the kind of thing that might have resulted had Gabriel García Márquez been born in Ukraine instead of Colombia-and included, for example, a bad smell that enters "the mouth of the sleeping for long enough to misdirect their dreams before exiting with the next snore."

In the new novel, the barrier separating one kind of text from another has evaporated, and there are flashes of magical realism all over the place, not to mention every new accessory from the typographer's catalogue: photographs (including one of mating turtles, another of strolling apes), blank pages, pages so densely printed they're an illegible smudge, and at the end a kind of child's flipbook that shows a man falling upwards.

 

"Extremely Loud" is hugely ambitious - one of the first novels to explicitly take on the 9/11 catastrophe - and in keeping with its emotional