Intro to Sartor Resartus by Kerry McSweeney and Peter Sabor

While Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus has little in common with the realistic tradition of verisimilar representation of human situations in their social and moral contexts, it does have affinities with another fictional tradition, one that is well described by Robert Alter. This tradition includes the kind of prose fiction that 'expresses its seriousness through playfulness, that is acutely aware of itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of going beyond words to the experiences which words seem to indicate'. The fully conscious novel is 'one in which from beginning to end, through the style, the handling of the narrative viewpoint, the names and words imposed on the characters, the patterning of the narration, the nature of the characters and what befalls them, there is a consistent effort to convey to us a sense of a fictional world as an authorial construct set up against a background of literary tradition and convention'. ( Partial Magic, Berkeley, 1975) For Alter, prime examples of fully achieve self-conscious novels include Cervantes' Don Quixote, Fielding's “Tom Jones”, Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, Sterne's Tristam Shandy, and Nabokov's Pale Fire; and others would want to add works like Melville's Moby-Dick. . .



The key feature of Carlyle's 'modus operandi' is that the text is about both itself and the experience of reading it. Sartor its own commentary and has within itself a fully developed model of a reader grappling with a difficult text. . . On behalf of the reader, the Editor attempts to find useful meanings in materials that fascinate him and compel his attention even while he suspects their authenticity, doubts the intentions and sincerity of their author, and comes to realize that none of his doubts can ever be settled with certainty.

In her English Romantic Irony (Cambridge, MA, 1980), Anne Mellor presents Sartor as a 'self- consuming artifact' that does not preach the truth, but asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves'. Sartor Resartus is a fictional work 'designed to consume itself by revealing the limitations of both its symbolic language and of language as such. It is not intended as a monument of truth but as a goad to action.'

Janice L Hanley has argued that the last three chapters of Sartor show a turning away from an outmoded Romantic vision towards a Victorian social actuality, 'an emerging Victorian mode of making meaning which pits 'an empirical self' against a metaphysical and aesthetic self; together they compose a book about the quest for meaning.” ( Shadow Hunting, Studies in Romanticism, xvii (1978).

In Sartus Resartus it is important to realize that Teufelsdrockh's philosophical belief's are essentially a simplified version of the leading themes of eighteenth-century German Idealist philosophy, especially as it contrasts with an equally simplified version of eighteenth-century British empirical philosophy, the nineteenth-century name for which was Utilitarianism. The fundamental premise of Teufelsdrockh's thought is the epistomological distinction between the understanding (Verstand) and Reason ( Vernunft). The former mental faculty is essentially passive, containing impressions ultimately derived from sense experience. Such empirical knowledge is strictly bounded by the containers of time and space, by WHERE, with its brother, WHEN, as Teufelsdrockh ( aka 'The Devil's Shit') puts it, and can supply knowledge only of the appearance of things, never of things in themselves. Such knowledge can be objective and accurate, even scientific; and it can certainly be useful; but can never tell anyone about the noumenal ( as opposed to phenomenal) objects of thought. The existence of God, an after-life, or the soul can never be established by the empirical understanding.

Noumenal knowledge is supplied by the intuitive faculty of Reason ( or the Fantasy, as Teufelsdrockh sometimes calls it). Reason, the organ of spiritual and imaginative insight, can reveal to man supersensible realities undetectable by the understanding. 'To the eye of vulgar Logic', Teufelsdruckh asks, 'what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and a Divine Apparition... Reason can pierce through the Where and When to the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER, to the universal HERE and the everlasting NOW'.

According to Teufelsdrockh [ sounding remarkably like Kierkegaard-J.S.] the progress of science, that is, the increasing power and dominance of the faculty of understanding, has led to the destruction of wonder and its replacement by mensuration and numeration. The more this power waxes, the more the intuitive power of Reason wanes. In the wintry light of understanding, the soul has become synonymous with the stomach, and happiness has become the aim of man, who, in the hedonistic calculus of the Utilitarians ( the Motive-Millwrights), has become 'a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on.' What is needed is a restoration to its rightful kingly place in the human personality of Reason, Fantasy, Intuition, and Wonder. Love, Duty, and a sense of the sacred nature of social bonds can only flourish in the light of Reason, which can give a saving sense of the infinite within the finite, of the religious nature of human life, and of the miraculous potential of any aspect of creation.

There are certain features of Teufelsdruckh's thought, however, which are bound to give careful readers pause. One of them concerns the extraordinary number of Christian and biblical allusions embedded in his utterances. This suggests a deliberate attempt to blur the differences between traditional Christian beliefs and the subjectivity of Romantic regeneration. A second trouble spot is Teufelsdruckh's insistence on the moral imperative of duty: 'Do the Duty which lies nearest thee', which he says cannot be grounded in Speculation, only 'felt' in experience. But in the highly schematized and rhetorical account of Teufelsdruckh's conversion experience in Book II, one is only told about, never convincingly shown, his inner transformation. As a result the reader cannot feel with Teufelsdrockh. At best he can give only a notional assent to the professor's moral injunctions, at worse he may come to find them factitious.

An overemphasis on moral conduct, triggered by the breakdown of traditional religious beliefs, was a leading feature of the Victorian temper. The syndrome was memorably encapsulated in George Eliot's solemn observation that while God was inconceivable and immortality unbelievable, Duty was 'peremptory and absolute'. What Nietzsche said apropos of George Eliot in Twilight of the Idols could be well applied to Teufelsdruckh: 'They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all he more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality...We other hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident... it stands and falls with faith in God.”

Teufelsdrockh also tries to finesse the question that was to become of pre-eminent concern to many Victorian writers: the question of immortality, of life after death. His answer is that only the 'Time-shadows' have perished and that 'the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever. . . believe thou must; understand it thou canst not.' It is hard not to regard this passage as rhetoric in the pejorative sense of the term, as an attempt to substitute the wish for the deed. Why must we believe? Not because one is assured of a life after death; but precisely because one is not. One must believe because it is to demoralizing not to. “Better an ignis fatuus/ Than no illume at all' as Emily Dickinson wryly remarked in her little poem on the breakdown of traditional Christian beliefs. In this passage, as in other utterances of Teufelsdrockh, one is once again reminded of Twilight of the Idols, this time what Nietzsche said about Teufelsdruck's creator:

"Carlyle: a man of strong words and attitudes, a rhetor from need, constantly lured by the craving for a strong faith and the feeling of his incapacity for it (in this respect, a typical romantic!). The craving for a strong faith is no proof of a strong faith, but quite the contrary. If one has such a faith, then one can afford the beautiful luxury of scepticism: one is sure enough, firm enough, has ties enough for that. . . (Carlyle) requires noise. A constant passionate dishonesty against himself – that is his proprium; in this respect he is and remains interesting. Of course, in England he is admired precisely for his honesty. Well, that is English. . . at bottom, Carlyle is an English atheist who makes a point of honor not to be one.”

Recent critical reorientation to Sartor Resartus is a welcome reminder that when he wrote it Carlyle had not yet become Carlylean, had not yet successfully substituted biography, history, and social prophesy for imaginative fiction. It was perhaps for this reason that John Stuart Mill always regarded Sartor Resartus as Carlyle's 'best and greatest work'. It's distinction, however, was not immediately apparent to Mill any more than to most first-time readers, who may take heart from Mill's experience. When first shown the manuscript by Carlyle, he 'made little of it'; but by the time it appeared in Fraser's Magazine two years later he had grown sufficiently advanced in 'new modes of thought' to read Sartor Resartus 'with enthusiastic admiration and the keenest delight'.

Robert Alter on Style by Stephen Miller

Beginning With the Word
How the cadences and diction of the King James Bible affected the prose style of American writers.
By STEPHEN MILLER; WSJ, MARCH 7, 2010

Once upon a time critics spoke of the pleasure they derived from reading a work of literature. They talked of an author's descriptive gifts or insight into human nature—even about a distinctive literary voice or prose style. But a generation ago many scholars, besotted by French theorists, concluded that this way of discussing literature was naïve, if not wrong. They argued that one should instead scrutinize novels—now called "texts"—for the self-subversive qualities of language itself or for hidden authorial bias.

Robert Alter would like us to return to the earlier view. These days, he says, teachers "look right through" literary style in their effort to ground texts "in one ideology or another." But style is valuable in itself. It is not only a source of "deep pleasure"; it is, he says, "the vehicle of a particular vision of reality." In "Pen of Iron," Mr. Alter—best known for his translations and close readings of the Hebrew Bible—looks in particular at how the King James Bible has influenced the prose style and literary voice of several American writers.

The first work he discusses, as it happens, is not a novel; it is the Gettysburg Address. Why does Lincoln say "four score and seven years ago" rather than 87? The locution alludes to "three score and ten," a phrase that appears in the King James Bible more than 100 times. Like other Bible-derived phrases from Lincoln's public speaking—"a house divided against itself cannot stand" is perhaps the most famous—the biblical cadences of the Gettysburg Address confer "weight and solemnity."


The King James Bible, Mr. Alter observes, has two major stylistic traits. It generally uses words of Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin origin, and its sentences often have a paratactic structure—that is, they juxtapose a series of short elements, sometimes joining them with a simple conjunction (usually "and"). Mr. Alter hears biblical diction and rhythms in several 20th-century novels, including Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" (1926), Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" (2004) and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" (2007). Not that biblical echoes, by themselves, make for great literature. "After the passage of eight decades," Mr. Alter writes of Hemingway's book, "much of the novel looks rather flat—its characters sketchy, lacking psychological or moral complexity." Mr. McCarthy's "mesmerizing power as a stylist," he says, "often seems to exceed his range and insights as a novelist."

Mr. Alter prefers novels that offer a range of styles, like Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick." The Bible is a "strong thread" in that novel's prose and themes. There is the thundering sermon to the whalers in New Bedford, for instance, before the voyage begins. Ahab's name (like Ishmael's) comes from the Bible, and Ahab's war with the whale has an apocalyptic quality to it, as if aimed at vanquishing evil itself. The grog onboard the Pequod, Ahab says to his men, is "hot as Satan's hoof" and "forks out at the serpent-snapping eye." Ishmael, serving as Melville's narrator, can be paratactic, too: "Lank Bildad, as pilot, headed the first watch, and ever and anon, as the old craft dived deep in the green seas, and sent the shivering frost all over her, and the winds howled, and the cordage rang, his steady notes were heard."

But there are other threads in "Moby-Dick," Mr. Alter says: "Shakespeare, Milton, the English Baroque prose writers of the seventeenth century, sailors' argot . . . and the colloquial Yankee speech of antebellum New England." He argues that "extravagant stylistic hybridity" in "Moby-Dick" is an appropriate vehicle for what Melville wants to convey—"the unfathomability of human nature" and "the inscrutability and blind power of the natural world."

Mr. Alter sees admirable stylistic variety of Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day" (1956), too. Bellow, who confessed to reading the King James Bible all his life, drew on its "stylistic spareness" as a counterweight to "the exuberant side of his writing." At one point the novel's hapless protagonist, Tommy Wilhelm, remembers a time in his life when he was at peace with himself. The language is strongly indebted to Psalms: "He breathed in the sugar of the pure morning. He heard the long phrases of the birds. No enemy wanted his life."

Mr. Alter discusses Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936), but his argument centers less on style than on theme, since Faulkner's prose is not especially biblical. Rather, Mr. Alter writes, the King James Bible serves as a "thematic lexicon" for Faulkner. Certain key words give "Absalom, Absalom!" a scriptural quality even beyond its retelling of the King David story. Faulkner pulls together into "a catastrophic climax" a cluster of terms that are "drawn from the Bible—land, curse, son, birthright, inheritance, house." As for Faulkner's style, it is not entirely to Mr. Alter's liking. He speaks disapprovingly of Faulkner's "often bewildering abstractions," his "fondness for arcane and flamboyant terms" and his "convoluted syntax." These qualities, it should be said, have attracted readers as much as repelled them over the years.

Will 21st-century American novelists be influenced by the King James Bible—or any other version? Mr. Alter notes that "the Pilgrims, and their descendants for many generations, were Bible-steeped, Bible-quoting folk," but the popularity of the Bible waned by the end of the nineteenth century. Though of course it looms large in the lives of church-going Americans, "we no longer have a culture pervaded by Scripture, where . . . the active memories of ordinary people are stocked with many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of phrases and verses from the canonical texts." It looks as if, to keep this classic work of English prose alive, it will have to be read in school.

The Hearings of Robert Bork

I spent a lot of time watching the hearing. Bork approached the Committee in his role as a Professor of the Law and was not unwilling to engage in a highly theoretical discussion and provided very candid views of where he stood on the various issues like original intent, which, since it is based on historical interpretation and all the complexity involved in the relative weight of the evidences that history itself provides, turns out to be a sort of quicksand. A quicksand- a moving target subject to the vagaries of time and circumstance- that the authors of the Constitution themselves had to deal with and were not able to resolve in an entirely satisfactory manner. So how could Bork presume to do so himself?


There is rarely an "absolute" answer to any of the really difficult questions which, especially in the atmosphere generated by party politics ( as the 'Founding Fathers' clearly recognized) and special- interest pressure groups using the instruments of mass media, quickly take on the aspect of " a can of worms". An additional difficulty was that Bork himself was not a particularly attractive person. Today, nominees try not to "lecture" Senators on Constitutional Law but every decision they end up making involves taking a stand on the questions raised by Bork in those hearings and many have views very similar to those he expressed at the time.

The above being the reason I would prefer a Judge ( and a President for that matter) who is broadly educated in the Humanities- History, Literature, Art- in which the formal study of the Law is a part- but not perhaps not the whole parcel. A Justice who has a personal sense of the pain, human misery- perpetrator and victim alike- of those who find themselves exposed to the necessity of bringing their problems and frustrations before a Court and the great difficulty of obtaining justice- blind and impartial- in such circumstances these or on any of the days in our brief lives on this planet. It ought to be remembered more often that, at the end, regardless of any degree of guilt or innocence, the final verdict for each and everyone of us is a capital one, and, at least as far as anyone really knows with scientific certainty, of the exact same character and duration.

All Souls College Election by Hugh Trevor-Roper

6 July, 1951

Of the election in University College there is little to say. This was partly, of course, because no one is much interested in what goes on there, so the usual system of espionage has not been developed. The University College is a sort of Oxford Tibet, with primitive inhabitants, strange superstitions, and few economic attractions for colonizing powers. Consequently the election was enveloped in that secrecy which customarily shrouds ( it is said) the election in Lhasa of the Dalai Lama. Quite the opposite, of course, was the election of a warden of All Souls. That should rather be compared with a Presidential Election in America....

You must understand that there is in this university, as in all institutions (see the Bible, passim) a Party of Light (to which the writer belongs) and a Party of Darkness (consisting of those who hold different views). Our party of Light regards a University as a place of Learning and Pleasure, to be controlled by us; their party of Darkness regards it as a place of administrative efficiency and Dullness to be controlled by them. These two parties are nearly always locked in apparently insoluble deadlock; which, however, is ultimately solved by the existence, at a far lower level, of a third party, conveniently described as the Jellies, or party of compromise.

Whereas the Parties of Light and Darkness are distinguished by the enlightenment or blackness of their views, the Jellies or perhaps I should say Jellyfish– are distinguished by their complete absence of any views. They float now this way, now that, as the tide ebbs or flows, sucked helplessly into the wake of ships passing this way now that, sometimes stranded on the beach by the advancing tide, and left to dissolve in the sun, sometimes carried away by the receding tide, quavering, into the strange and terrifying currents of the uncomprehended Ocean.

In spite of their general helplessness the Jellies have, however, two important qualities: first, though sometimes submerged, they never sink; second, though unable to control the direction of their movements, some of them can, if touched, sting. In periods of violent storm ( naturalists observe) these Jellies appear in large numbers around our otherwise placid academic coasts; and the results of their intervention in our elections ( I must now return from metaphor to the world of plain fact) is almost always the same: a compromise candidate is discovered who, in the exhaustion of both parties, is found acceptable by all...he appeals to the Party of Light by being thoroughly inefficient at administration; he appeals to the Party of Darkness by showing no interest in either Learning or Pleasure. Thus, although nobody positively wants him, each party prefers him to the candidate of the other, and he is elected.

Of course the late Warden of All Souls had hardly been buried, and the black hatchment had hardly been hung out, like a somewhat tipsy pub-sign, over the college gate, before the preparations and speculations about the succession had begun. There are in All Souls 51 voting Fellows, and a candidate, to be elected Warden, must obtain at least 26 votes at the formal meeting, but before this formal meeting there are preliminary meetings at which those candidates who are thought to be worth running are selected b a straw vote. Our candidate was, of course, Isaiah Berlin. Theirs was, of course, a professional administrator. At the first straw vote they obtained a majority for their candidate, Sir Edward Bridges, head of the civil service; but Bridges declined the offer, and from this moment the battle can be said to have begun.

The most determined advocate of Darkness in All Souls – A.L. Rowse – happened, at this crucial juncture, to be in California, and ever since airplanes were invented he has loudly declared that his neurosis would never allow him to travel in such a vessel; but when the fate of Darkness in Oxford hung thus precariously in the balance, he at once disinterestedly jettisoned his long and carefully sustained neurosis and appeared with a few days in the surprised cloisters of All Souls. For a week every alcove hummed; then at the next meeting 26 Fellows, with apparent unanimity, supported the proposal of Rowse of a hitherto quite unknown figure: Sir Eric Beckett. Such support, if repeated at the official meeting would infallibly bring Beckett in. The question which everybody naturally asked (including some who had already voted for him) was, Who is Sir Eric Beckett?

Deep research has been devoted to this problem. So far the only clear facts that have emerged are that Sir Eric Beckett is (thanks to an airplane crash which killed his superior) legal adviser to the Foreign Office; that he was once struck in the face by Douglas Jay who, though himself a well-behaved Wykehamist, was outraged beyond endurance by his pro-Franco views, and has twice been in a lunatic asylum.

Conceive, if you can, the crescendo of buzzing in the alcoves, the feverish motion from staircase to staircase in these normally somnolent quadrangles, the sudden attentiveness towards younger voters of hitherto aloof elderly peers, the carefully timed indiscretions and skilfully calculated chance meetings by which, in the next fortnight, each party sought desperately to detach from the other its floating voters; and having conceived it, transport yourself in imagination to the official meeting at which whosoever obtained 26 votes would thereby become Warden of the College.

The first proposal was was made by Rowse who, as sub-warden, controlled the machinery of debate. He proposed Sir Eric Beckett; and thereupon the carefully oiled mechanism of election began those calculated revolutions which could slide the candidate effortlessly into place. Began – but did not complete. Suddenly strange creaks issued from parts of the equipment, as if saboteurs had secretly inserted sand in some essential aperture. The great engine groaned to a standstill, and certain small but important cogs, rods or pistons had not moved – with disastrous consequences: the candidate was not in place. In spite of his earlier absolute majority, he had now only got 23 votes; and 23 were not enough.

At once the Party of Light advanced to try their hand at the machine. Their candidate was in turn placed on the springboard: Isaiah Berlin; and the Party foremen wound enthusiastically with recalcitrant handles. But once again essential springs failed to respond, and the candidate could not be carried forth into the Warden's lodgings. He had only obtained 21 votes, and 21 votes was not enough either.

And now began a famous scene which will long be remembered in Oxford history and quoted in the manuals of our constitutional procedure. Each party in despair began to put up candidate after candidate in the hope of breaking the deadlock, and every advocate of Light, and every advocate of Darkness, in turn submitted to the test in the hope of detaching either three votes in one direction or five votes in the other in order to achieve a majority. Scenes of indescribable confusion followed. Twice did Isaiah withdraw his candidature amid applause from his adversaries; twice he was dragged back by his supporters. Now one hand, now another, grasped the handle of the obstinate machine, but it failed to turn. The issue was always the same. Whoever stood against Isaiah infallibly obtained 23 votes - - the voting strength of embattled Darkness; whoever stood against Beckett as infallibly obtain 21 votes – the voting strength of mobilized Light. There was total deadlock. What was to be done?

At this point the watchers on the academic cliffs began to espy, out at sea, the familiar phenomena of the storm: great shoals of Jellies drifting slowly toward the shore; and within the conclave, by a natural consequence of this news, the cry for a compromise candidate began to be heard. The question was, who could that compromise candidate be? You will have observed that the full toll of voters was 52, but also that the united strength of the two parties amounts only to 44; and whereas we can account for one of the omissions by the fact that the candidate of the moment was always out of the room at the time of the voting, and for a second by the fact that one voter - -Professor Wheare – overcome by the strain of the conclave, had to be carried out on a stretcher, there are still other abstainers to be accounted for. Naturally it was among these abstainers that a compromise candidate would be sought. Who among them was the most appropriate candidate?

Sir Hubert Henderson, Drummond Professor of Political Economy, is a respectable elderly gentleman who is generally known in Oxford for one reason only: in 1949 he made, before the largest Convocation ever remembered at Oxford, the most boring speech that has ever been heard in that assembly. Had there been any votes to lose on that occasion it is universally agreed that Henderson's speech would indubitably have lost them all. ( in fact his speech made no difference at all: everyone came to that meeting with his mind firmly made up that no oratory, however plausible, could have altered it: for we were voting an increase in our own salaries.)

When the first straw vote for the Wardenship of All Souls was taken, Sir Hubert Henderson had only obtained one vote; and it was perhaps this fact (by rendering the whole business academic to him) had caused him to sleep, and thereby abstain, throughout the long struggle of the parties. At all events, when the deadlock within the college walls was complete, and the swish of Jellies in the tide had become audible, the double fact that nobody seemed to want Hubert Henderson and that Sir Hubert Henderson did not seem to want anyone, naturally made him the man of the hour. And thus it was that suddenly, at the crucial moment, when Sir Hubert Henderson was placed in the machine, the handle at last turned effortlessly in its socket; the wheels revolved, the rods and cams, ratchets and pinions all slid with lubricated ease on their intended courses, and the candidate was at last, by 36 votes, carried effortlessly forward into the Warden's Lodgings of All Souls.

It only remains to add that Sir Hubert Henderson, overcome by the excitement of the election, has retired to the hospital with a heart-attack; so a spare hatchment has been commissioned and discrete preparations are already, but I hope wrongly, being made for the resumption of the struggle.



My dear BB, I had meant to touch but briefly on the All Souls election, which concerned your friend Isaiah Berlin, in order thereafter to describe at greater length the even more protracted election - it lasted more than two months – to the Chair of History, which concerned me; but I have already written too much, and perhaps on more personal matters it is more prudent to be brief. Suffice it then that this election ran true to form. For two months there was a total deadlock between those who insisted that they would impose their dead bodies between that candidate and that chair. (The objection is that I write history; and that, they say, should never be done: it is certainly not done by them.) Then, at the usual moment, the Jellies advanced; and the leisure that I had hoped to achieve for study and writing has been awarded instead to a last-minute candidate whose historical studies, confined to one branch of the State Papers during the reign of Elizabeth, have so far yielded, in 25 years, two slender articles. I am sure they are exact and competent articles; but since the author of them touches nothing that he does not desiccate, I cannot find anyone who has read them. However, I must not make any uncivil comment on this election, so I will only say that the standards of Oxford professors of history have been maintained....

In Requiem by Hugh Trevor Roper

In 1942 Logan Pearsall Smith* made the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper the chief heir in his will, which was, however, revoked shortly before his death. Characteristically, Trevor-Roper did not mind forfeiting the money, but was exasperated by his difficulties in obtaining the books that he had been bequeathed under the new will. Smith's greatest gift to his protege had, anyway, been given in his lifetime: he passed on his literary precepts, which were evident in everything that Trevor-Roper wrote – books, essays, reviews and his supremely private letters – after 1940.

Partly because Trevor-Roper was in Germany, researching The Last Days of Hitler, and partly because Smith had suffered a nervous breakdown and was forbidden visitors, the two men seldom met in the nine months before Smith died on 2 March 1946. ' A great section of my life seems to me to have ended with his death. No one else has had such an effect on my personal life. It is ineradicable,' Trevor-Roper wrote in requiem. 'What did I learn from him? When I ask myself this question, I do not know how to answer it, for I learned everything. My whole philosophy seems, now that I consider it retrospectively, to have come from him, and what I would have been without him I cannot envisage, cannot imagine.

From that day when, walking alone around the Christ Church Meadow, I had resolved to trifle no more among the twigs of matter but to try to understand the root of it, I had, for two years, forsaken all literary and artistic interests. I neglected poetry & prose; cared nothing for music or pictures, read neither Gibbon nor Homer, but only studied, and studied only essential monographs and laborious theses; and in the book that I was myself writing, Archbishop Laud, I consciously ignored the temptation of style. I only sought to understand, & to this extent, though I understood imperfectly, it is at least an honest book. But neither humanity nor divinity touched it, & therefore it is also incomplete & a narrow book. I cannot now think why Logan thought so highly of it.

' For it was Logan who afterward re-interested me, in a time when the war had separated me from desperate academic study, in style & the world of sensation,& enabled me thus to fill in the hard structural pattern of thought I had thus evolved; and how can I express gratitude for such an experience?

Who showed me that life is short, and three parts routine, & most of it comedy, & can only be saved from triviality & given significance by some ideal to which all else, or at least much else […] including human pleasures and meritorious aims, and especially power and success, must be sacrificed, as by a merchant who sold out to reinvest all in one pearl of great price; and that style is worthy of this sacrifice.

This I learned from him and believed, & I still believe it, and shall, I hope, continue, like Gibbon, to value reading above the wealth of India. For in his life and conversation, among the tinkle of coronets and the wild extravagant gossip, and the exquisite relish of high life and la comedie humaine, of which it also witness, he illustrated this philosophy to me so vividly that if it has not become mine, at least mine can never be altogether emancipated from its influence.'

Introduction to Letters From Oxford; Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson edited by Richard Davenport-Hines; Phoenix Paperback, Orion Books, 2006.

On The Waterfront by Nathan Ward

In the 1940s New York Harbor was still the world's greatest port, a collection of bays rimmed with more than nine hundred piers and noisily crowded with hundreds of express liners, freighters, ferries, lighters, garbage scows, car flats, battleships, yachts, floating elevators, coffee barges, and constantly whistling tugs. The Hudson was still known as the North River ( to distinguish it from the Delaware, or South River) along its length from the Battery, to the deep Midtown piers. This book is about that old waterfront, and its “criminal coloration”, where money washed in and out, and graft mingled the longshore Union with racketeers.

Touring the harbor today, it is hard to imagine their quiet frontages of rot and renewal ever knowing such a fearful time that a reporter could write, “It has been said, and with some justification that the waterfront of New York produces more murder to the square foot than does any other section of the country. Most such murders go unsolved." In 1948, the shooting of a young boss stevedore brought reporter Malcolm “Mike” Johnson of the New York Sun to the West Side docks where he soon learned that snaking around the watery edges of his town was a very different city than he had hitherto imagined; “Murder on the waterfront is commonplace”, he wrote, “a logical product of widespread gangsterism”.

When Johnson's 24-part series broke on the front page in 1949 no one greeted them with more disgust, and impervious equanimity, than life-time president of the International Longshoreman's Association, Joe Ryan, whose downfall ( if you could call it that) was still decades in the future (see : http://www.uniondemocracy.com/UDR/97-Battling%20corruption%20in%20the%20ILA.htm ).

N.Y. businessman Wiiliam J. McCormack - "Mr. Big"- also figured prominently in this sad tale, along with William O'Dwyer, the one-hundredth mayor of New York City. (whose exposures in this book might add significant material to their rather bare-bones biographies in Wikepedia.)

The estimated annual 'take' from waterfront rackets ( pay-offs, extortion, loan-sharking, number-games, tax evasion and theft) was $50 million, which might be considered a trifle compared to the OECD estimate of $11 trillion for the global black market (with its tax havens, shell banks,shielded trusts, anonymous foundations, dummy corporations, mispricing schemes and the like all administered by the "pinstripe infrastructure" of mainstream banks, lawyers, and accountants) today, but 'not so bad' considering inflation and the limited scope of dockside operations in N.Y.C. in the 1940s. Neither is there anyone remotely resembling the labor-crusading Jesuit priest John M. Corridan to raise a stink in these times of unlimited corruption.



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Marlon Brando came down to the wintry docks of Hoboken to try out as a longshoreman in late November 1953. For Elia Kazan, he had already played both the combustible brute Stanley Kowalski and the Mexican Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata. Yet Brando refused the new part on first pass without reading the script, irked at his favorite director, he claimed later, for “finking” by cooperating with the Communist hunt in Washington. The lead in Kazan's waterfront movie went briefly to a real son of Hoboken, Frank Sinatra, before producer Sam Spiegal brought Brando on board through some world class flattering. So the film that had begun with Mike Johnson's crime series and survived attacks by Joe Ryan and rejections from nearly every major studio was about to begin filming when Brando asked screenwriter Budd Schulberg ( Arthur Miller refused to purge 'communist sympathies' from his script) to join him for a walk. The Nebraskan movie star was ready to see if he could pass as an ordinary docker.

Brando proposed that he cross Hoboken in character, making a kind of casual audition before the whole city. “I told him he could never walk through Hoboken without being recognized,” Schulberg wrote later in Vanity Fair. “Let's try it,” Brando- well known for his prep work- insisted. “Terry” walked from one end of Hoboken to the other, so convincing in his checkered jacket and shoulder-rolling gait that no one asked for an autograph, not even a group of Catholic schoolgirls whose rooms were no doubt filled with stashes of movie magazines. The two men managed to down beers undisturbed at one of the pubs where Schulberg had studied true Terry Malloys. Once the filming began and Brando was surrounded by working longshoremen and real ex-fighters on the windblown piers, he somehow became even more convincing. The film was shot over thirty-five frigid days, with some dockers ( in Fr. Corridan's group) acting as bodyguards against local hoods who didn't appreciate the film's criminal story line.

It was Joe Ryan himself who first branded the waterfront drama being adapted from Mike Johnson's crime series as Communist propaganda- years before the film opened or even involved Elia Kazan as director. So a cold war argument was soon launched over On The Waterfront's meanings and intentions. ( Some even insisted the movie's murderous dock boss Johnny Friendly was a stand-in for Joseph Stalin.) But audiences in 1954 would have known that the movie's thuggish setting was no metaphor, just as moviegoers of the Watergate era recognized every criminal reference in All The President's Men). On the Waterfront earned eight Oscars overall so Budd Schulberg's gamble, mortgaging his Pennsylvania farm to keep his project going, more than paid off.

Beyond the academy, the film and Brando's performance even passed scrutiny with many longshoreman. “They got a kick out of the movie”, remembers Artie Piecoro, who still has the broad shoulders and thick fingers from his nearly three decades on the Brooklyn docks. “We all like Brando and accepted him as a regular guy. I guess the Irish guys loved him even more, since he made them seem so tough." But a half century after its premier Jim Longhi still saw Kazan's film as a political betrayal.

Near the end of his life, Longhi was well aware how far he had come from his days doing dock injury cases as a waterfront lawyer in long-ago Red Hook. He cut an elegant, genial figure and could go from cultured conversation into one of his tales from the waterfront, where he had long ago helped Arthur Miller with his unfilmed screenplay about the life of Peter Panto.

“The hero in the story of the waterfront is the longshoremen themselves”, he explained, “whereas in the movie they're a bunch of sheep. The hero of this fight was Pete Panto, but in the movie, instead of writing a story about a young labor leader, a rebel, an uneducated Jesus Christ guy who said, “I'm gonna go out there and do it,' and said 'You gonna go along with this?' and they [the gangsters] said, 'Fuck you!' and they killed him. That's a hero and who did they [Hollywood] make a hero? A punch-drunk prize-fighter who doesn't know shit... it's a travesty of the subject matter.” (If anything might be ascribed to Elia Kazan's own experience as a government witness, it is his insistence that Terry Malloy triumphantly survive his betrayal of the racketeers. It is significant that in Budd Schulberg's novel Waterfront, published after the Award-winning movie, Terry Malloy comes to a more Panto-like end, ice-picked and stuffed in a barrel of lime in a Jersey swamp.)



Dark Harbor; The War for the New York Waterfront by Nathan Ward; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010

Moby-Dick by Philip Hoare

It was here in Western Massachusetts, in the summer of 1850, away from 'the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York', that Herman Melville met a man who would change the course of his life. While staying with his aunt in Pittsfield, he read Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, and was besotted with its wistful evocation of old New England. By coincidence Hawthorne himself was living nearby, drawn to the sublime beauty of the Berkshires – countryside not unlike England's Lake District. It was a romantic setting in the purest sense of the word; and what happened next was a kind of epiphany.

At forty-six years old, Hawthorne was America's most famous writer. He to came from a sea-going family, that much he and Melville had in common. But where the sea was Melville's Harvard and Yale, Nathaniel had attended the grassy campus of Bowdoin College, Maine, before exchanging it for a gloomy house in Salem, where he spent twelve years sequestered in his attic, emerging only at night to walk the streets. 'I have made a captive of myself, and put me into a dungeon,' he confessed 'and now, I cannot find the key to let myself out.'

Hawthorne dwelt on morbid things, although the monsters he summoned were decidedly human - his Puritan ancestors with ' all the Puritanical traits, both good and evil'- a legacy the fictional world Hawthorne inhabited, and the real world he invented. He was, as the poet Mary Oliver would write, 'one of the great imaginers of evil'.

Hawthorne was filled with regret at the way the world had been, and the way it was becoming. 'Here and there and all around us,' he wrote in his story, 'Fire worship...the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.' He once told his wife Sophia that he felt as if he were 'already in the grave, with only enough life to be chilled and benumbed.'

Hawthorne was, in his own words, ' a man not estranged from human life, yet enveloped in the midst of it, with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness. He wrote artful allegories burdened with the weight of history, guilt and revenge, especially in the stories that Melville saw as Hawthorne's masterpieces, and which would influence his own work. In Young Goodman Brown a young man is summoned to the forest at night to find the entire town enslaved to the devil, even his young wife. In the futuristic Earth's Holocaust', a bonfire on the prairie incinerates every example of human excess, from tobacco to the works of literature. Yet one thing will not burn in this reforming pyre: the latent evil in every human heart. Sin, too, was the subject of his novel The Scarlet Letter and it was in the wake of its success that Hawthorne had escaped the clamour of fame by moving to Lenox in the Berkshires.

Hawthorne could not avoid society even in the country, and it was on 5 August he was persuaded to attend a picnic organized by David Dudley Field, a well-connected New York lawyer. The guests included distinguished literary figures: Evert Duyckinck, Oliver Wendell Holmes – coiner of the term, Boston Brahmin, 'several ladies' and Melville. The party set off for Monument Mountain, but before they could reach the summit a sudden shower sent them running for shelter under a rocky ledge, where they drank champagne from a silver mug.

As the sun reappeared, the picnickers struck out for the mountain top. Melville was in high spirits; perhaps the alcohol and the rarefied air had gone to his head. He clambered over a long rock which jutted out like a bowsprit, pretending to haul in an imaginary rigging, and made as if to harpoon a whale-shaped pond in the valley below. The young man's play-acting was a burst of energy in the dog-days of summer- an echo of the scenes in Typee in which the narrator and his fellow deserter Toby climb a tropical peak to escape the tyranny of their ship, and feel the intensity of their new -found freedom.

The headiness of the day, the sublimity of the landscape, and, perhaps, Melville's company, were infectious, and they roused Hawthorne to similar antics. That afternoon, as they wandered through the 'Gothic shades' of a gloomy spot known as the Icy Glen – it was said ice was found in its mossy recesses all year round- it was his turn to perform, shouting out in his rich voice, 'warnings of the inevitable destruction of the whole party.'

It was clear that Hawthorne – already an admirer of Typee – found Melville a magnetic figure... that day on the mountain marked an almost alchemical mix: of fire - -Hawthorne's prairie holocaust – and water Melville's whalish romance. Both were men of a brave new republic; both might have looked optimistically towards the future. But in time, the lively and mercurial Melville would descend into the gloom that Hawthorne inhabited, swapping the sun-baked summit for the drank dripping glen.

At Lenox, the two men would sit in the Hawthorne's parlor smoking cigars normally forbidden in the house, talking 'about time and eternity, things of this world and the next...and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night ( a phrase that Sophia inked out when editing her husband's journal for publication). They did not agree on all subjects: on slavery, for instance, for whose victims Hawthorne had not 'the slightest sympathy...or, at least, not half as much for the laboring whites, who, I believe, as a general thing, are ten times worse off.' For all Melville felt for Hawthorne, it seemed he wanted more than his friend could give.

Melville's book- which he had described to Evert Duyckinck as 'a romantic, fanciful & literal & most enjoyable presentment of the Whale Fishery'- was almost finished when he came to the Berkshires. Meeting Hawthorne changed all that. Now he was compelled to see the significance of his experiences, and as if to set them in context, he began to read rapaciously, as though he had never read before: A complete edition of Shakespeare's plays, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, William Scoresby's An Account of the Arctic Regions, Robert Burton's eccentric and digressive Anatomy of Melancholy, essays by Emerson, Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus - imbued with dreams, daemonic possession and self-sacrificing love. It also seems clear that the eerie otherworld of Edgar Allen Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), teetering between travelogue and science fiction, was the birthing-ground for Melville's monster. It is the source of the whiteness that appals Ishmael and on which he expands compendiously, if erratically, like a nineteenth century search engine.

If Moby-Dick owed its metaphysics to Nathaniel Hawthorne, then it owed its facts to Thomas Beale. Entire passages in Melville's book are filched directly- one might say almost brazenly – from Beale's. The Natural History of the Sperm Whale was the archetype for Moby-Dick, not only in its cetological details, but in its other preoccupations, too: the whale's role in the human chain of consumption (see comment), its slavery. Beale criticized the respected French naturalist Baron Cuvier, for instance, for claiming that that the whale struck fear into all the inhabitants of the deep. To Beale this was just so much hogwash; 'for not only does the sperm whale in reality happen to be the most timid and inoffensive animal...readily endeavoring to escape from the slightest thing which bears an unusual appearance, but is also quite incapable of being guilty of the acts of which he is so strongly accused.”

In 1845 and 1846 J.M.W. Turner, the greatest artist of his age, exhibited four scenes of whaling at the Royal Academy, along with a catalogue attribution: “Whalers. Vide Beale's Voyage, p. 175'. They portray the heroic hunt for the whale in luminous, almost abstract forms; the whales themselves are the merest, ghostly suggestions. “ Turner's pictures were suggested by this book” Melville wrote on the title page of his copy of Voyage, and the influence of Turner's sublime vistas, numinous with storms and shadows, emerges in Moby-Dick from the first. The romantic vision that Turner realized in paint, Melville attempted in words.

But Melville would also fill his own book with earthy asides and euphemisms; jokes about chowder and bar-room quips with which Ishmael wryly undermines his creators high-flown words, declaring a one point that he regards the whole dangerous voyage of the Pequod – and life itself – as a 'vast practical joke'.


Something fused into one headlong effort, as great as his quarry, as great as the industry it commemorated. With sprawling ambition and an utter lack of convention, Melville crossed latitudes of time and space, blurring them as he did so, constantly reiterating, 'All this is not without its meaning', laying meaning upon meaning, drawing himself on, writing and rewriting obsessively, creating a kind of exclusion zone to which his own wife could only gain admittance by knocking incessantly on his door until he deigned to answer. He created the conditions on board ship inside his study and in his mind, and in the process Moby-Dick changed from a romance to a fearful, fated work. Parts of the book seem to be written automatically, as if possessed by the spirit of the White Whale, the Shaker God incarnate.

Melville almost dared not to write his book, even as he advised a female friend not to read it. 'Don't you buy it – don't you read it, when it comes out,' he warned her, 'It is not a piece of fine Spitalfields silk – but it is of the horrible texture of a fabric that should be woven of ships' cables and hausers. A Polar wind blows through it, & birds of prey hover over it.' With Mary Shelley's man-made monster at the back of his head, he conjured images of Ahab's ship ploughing through stormy seas as 'the ivory-tusked Pequod sharply bowed to the blast, and gored the dark waves in her madness'. Only half-jokingly, he spoke of his work as though it were some transgression of natural law which ought not to have appeared at all. What began as an exercise in propaganda for the American whaling industry ended up as a warning to all mankind of its own evil.

Ah the world, oh the whale.