Brideshead Re-revisited

Evelyn Waugh first visited Madresfield, the Worcestershire seat of the Earls Beauchamp, in October 1931, shortly before his twenty-eighth birthday. He had been a friend of the heir, Lord Elmley, at Oxford and, according to Paula Byrne's new book, was also, briefly, lover of a younger son, the attractive, alcoholic Hugh Lygon. But Waugh's first visit to the house was not on the invitation of either of these two: it followed from a recommendation of Teresa 'Baby' Jungman to enlist at Captain Jack Hance's famous Riding Academy in Malvern. At a dinner in London, he was introduced to a Lygon sister and through this connection was brought several times to Madresfield during his week-long stay at a nearby hotel. The Lygon paterfamilias, Lord Beauchamp, was abroad, exiled on threat of arrest for homosexuality, and Lady Beauchamp, from whom he was divorced, no longer lived in the house. This left the younger generation in giddy command of an enormous, well-run, moated treasure palace. It is well known that Waugh was entranced by 'Mad' (as the house was known) and by the lively siblings who lived there, forming deep, lifelong friendships with two of the Lygon sisters, Ladies Mary and Dorothy. It is also well known that the family and the spirit of the house inspired the story of Brideshead Revisited.
Waugh hated it when readers tried to identify real people behind the masks of his fictional characters. 'Fuck you,' he wrote to his friend Ann Fleming in 1961 when she guessed that Brigadier Bob Laycock was the model for Captain Ivor Claire in Unconditional Surrender. 'For Christ's sake lay off the idea of Bob=Claire ... Just shut up about Laycock.' 'If she breathes a suspicion of this cruel fact,' he wrote in his diary, 'it will be the end of our friendship.' An 'author's note' at the beginning of Brideshead reads, 'I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they. EW', and to Dorothy Lygon he said at the time of his writing Brideshead:
It's all about a family whose father lives abroad, as it might be Boom [your father] - but it's not Boom - and a younger son: people will say he is like Hughie, but you'll see he's not really Hughie - and there's a house as it might be Mad, but it isn't really Mad.
Few have taken Waugh at his word, though Dorothy Lygon (clearly the model for Cordelia Flyte) loyally wrote: 'When I first read it [Brideshead], it did not seem to me he had used us as characters.' Her sister Mary, however, instantly recognised aspects of Hughie in Waugh's portrait of the dissolute aristocrat Sebastian Flyte. The art-deco chapel at Brideshead is indisputably modelled on the private chapel at Madresfield, the park and drive are also Madresfield, and there are hundreds of other connections between real life and the apparently fictional world of Brideshead. If Waugh were still alive and had any 'Fuck You's left in his breath he would be directing them now at Paula Byrne - not because her book is unsympathetic to Waugh (unlike many of his biographers she seems to be entirely on his side), but because her whole thesis is devoted to the unpicking of real history from the intricate shadow of Waugh's fiction.
In her dedication to this singular task Byrne has been exceptionally zealous. I know this because she came several times to rummage through my archive. She was a most welcome guest but it was only with the utmost strength that I succeeded in refusing her entreaties to be shown bundles of letters that had been entrusted to me on the strict understanding that I would not reveal them to anyone. In the end I compromised by summarising a few of them in my own words. The keeper of the National Archives at Kew was less resilient. Somehow Byrne succeeded in persuading him to release to her the divorce petition of Lord and Lady Beauchamp that was supposed to be kept as a closed file until 2032. It is a lurid document that details incidents of fellatio, sodomy and intercrural masturbation, naming eleven men (mostly household servants) with whom Lord Beauchamp had committed 'acts of gross indecency'. She even managed to outperform detectives at the time by uncovering further names of Beauchamp boyfriends including one servant-lover, confusingly called Robert Byron.
Lord Beauchamp's forced exile was precipitated by the jealousy of his brother-in-law, Bendor, Duke of Westminster, whom Waugh later described as of 'mediocre intelligence, liable to aberrations of malevolence ... a man whose restlessness and capricious vanity made him less than universally loved'. An understatement - the Duke was detested by his Lygon nephews and nieces, who never forgave him for his involvement in their father's downfall.
Waugh first met Beauchamp on the occasion of his confirmation in Rome in the summer of 1932. They got on well together and there can be little doubt that the older man was used as one of several models for the exiled father in Brideshead, Lord Marchmain. Another, incidentally, was Hubert Duggan (a onetime boyfriend of Mary Lygon), whose deathbed conversion in October 1943, aided, abetted and witnessed by Waugh, inspired Lord Marchmain's similar final act of Christian acceptance - a sign of the cross.
At the time that Waugh was writing Brideshead, between February and June 1944, his old friend, Hugh, was long dead, killed in an unexplained accident in Germany in August 1936, involving a car, a pavement, a lot of hot sun and, one suspects, a large amount of alcohol. 'A sweet, sweet man ... He was one of the gentlest of them all, very knowledgeable, very quiet,' is how Sir Alexander Glen (who led Waugh and Lygon on a near fatal expedition to Spitsbergen in 1934) remembered him. 'It is the saddest news I ever heard,' Waugh wrote. 'I shall miss him bitterly.' As in Brideshead, where the youthful homosexual love of Charles Ryder for Sebastian Flyte matures into the richer devotion of Charles for Sebastian's sister, Julia, so, in real life, Evelyn's friendship grew away from Hugh towards his younger sister Mary Lygon. There is something ineffably moving about the Evelyn-Mary Lygon relationship - always platonic, sometimes smutty, humorous, loyal, deep and lifelong. In their letters to one another - some of them reproduced here for the first time - an extraordinary bond is revealed, one that I find far more memorable and affecting than the relationships that are revealed in the pages of Waugh's correspondence with his other close female friends, Ann Fleming, Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford.
Paula Byrne's Mad World skilfully traces the bonds not just between Waugh and the Lygons but between all the Lygons themselves - their passion for their father, their ambiguous attitude to their mother, the terrible rift caused by Beauchamp's ignominious exile, the cruelty of Elmley to his younger brother in financial distress, Elmley's marriage to a divorcée Dane (strong echoes here of Bridey's marriage to Mrs Muspratt in Brideshead) and another sister, Sibell's, problematic affair with Max Beaverbrook.
Mad World is full of fascinating anecdotes, many of which will be new, even to the most fanatical amasser of Wavian trivia. Paula Byrne has produced a strong and romantic book that is at once a touching story of deep friendships, an astute piece of literary criticism and an important contribution to the canon of Waugh biography.
Alexander Waugh is working on a scholarly edition of his grandfather's letters and is eager to make contact with anyone who knows the whereabouts of any unpublished Evelyn Waugh correspondence.

LRB at the Beach

		He Roared Hilary Mantel: Danton Danton by David Lawday If you put your head out of the window of the café Procope, almost everyone you needed to overthrow the regime was within shouting distance. The Revolution was dreamed here before it was enacted, beneath the dark corners of Saint-Sulpice. George-Jacques Danton lived here, and Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, Legendre the master-butcher, Fabre d’Eglantine the political playwright, and a dozen others who would make their names through the fall of the old order. Read more

C (for Crisis)
Eric Hobsbawm: Fear and the 1930s

• The Morbid Age by Richard Overy

Such emotions – the extremely widespread dislike of Jews in the West, for instance – were obviously not felt or acted on in the same way by, say, Adolf Hitler and Virginia Woolf. Emotions in history are neither chronologically stable nor socially homogenous, even in the moments when they are universally felt, as in London under the German air-raids, and their intellectual representations even less so. Read more

All Eat All
Jenny Diski: The Cannibal in Me

• An Intellectual History of Cannibalism by Catalin Avramescu translated by Alistair Ian Blyth

Meiwes gave a TV interview and explained: ‘I sautéed the steak of Bernd, with salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg. I had it with Princess croquettes, Brussels sprouts and green pepper sauce.’ You begin to see, as the suburban lace curtain drifts into place, that the reality of cannibalism could be far less interesting than the idea of it. I think it’s the Princess croquettes in particular that cause the disappointment. Read more

Diary
R.W. Johnson: ‘Author Loses Leg in Lagoon’

They had amputated the toes on my left foot and then, when the leg continued to swell, amputated my leg at the knee. But the poison had already invaded other parts of my body and all my systems – kidneys, lungs, heart etc – began to switch off. Multiple organ failure: that is, I began to die – that’s what dying is. I came close to fulfilling one of Woody Allen’s ambitions: ‘I don’t mind dying,’ he once said, ‘I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ Read more

Also in this issue

Short Cuts
Michael Dobson: Deutschland ist Hamlet

At the Movies
Michael Wood: ‘The Taking of Pelham 123’

Europe

Is there such a thing as the European Union? In Washington, the State Department has been seeking the phone number for such an entity since the days of Henry Kissinger. In Moscow, the EU is nothing but a television prop. Since the days of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, regimes have come and gone, but the conviction endures that only classical powers matter: the United Kingdom, France, and above all Germany, long a political dwarf but always an economic giant. As for the historians, they’re uncertain: the De Gaulle–Adenauer and Mitterrand-Kohl relationships did not work for long, and London’s tiffs with Paris and Bonn (and then Berlin) were all the talk for decades. In the face of a global crisis, European disunity is evident.

The original, six-nation European Economic Community was able to overcome atavistic and ideological divergences only by focusing on limited but crucial stakes, of which two were most important: resistance to Stalinist expansion, and the will to have done with the economic warfare that led to global conflicts. Have such ventures now come to an end? Europe’s cherished “common values” are seriously damaged when a former Social-Democratic German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is named to head the Russian natural-gas company Gazprom hardly a month after leaving office. This past January, half of Europe froze because of the Kremlin’s energy blackmail. But there’s no evidence that Schröder protested when his new bosses threatened to cut off the gas (via Ukraine) to his fellow citizens; he was too busy amassing his millions.

Does Schröder represent corruption or conviction? No doubt both lead him to revile independent Georgia, while the Kremlin dismembers her through a barely disguised annexation of her provinces, in blatant contempt of cease-fire agreements signed with Nicolas Sarkozy, the enterprising president of Europe. One might object that the ordinary greed of the former German chancellor in no way stigmatizes the whole EU—except that he remains a moral authority of the Left among Germans, who respect their new friend Vladimir Putin and consider the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, unstable and dangerous because he continues to resist Big Brother’s decrees.

At the end of a short stay in Georgia (imagine Tuscany, a sea that is black in name only, and snow-covered mountains year-round, a favorite refuge of persecuted Russian poets such as Lermontov, if memory serves), I told myself that if it is a sign of mental illness not to give in to the Putin-Medvedev team, then 4 million Georgians must be as crazy as their president. They are too proud of their newfound freedom and too fond of their culture to surrender to an empire of 140 million souls. They retain searing memories of massive purges organized by Stalin and Beria—Georgians themselves, or Ordjonikidze, “shameful Caucasians”—who liquidated more than one of every ten citizens. Under 70 years of Soviet rule, the gardens, the commerce, and the black market of the Caucasus fed starving Moscow and Leningrad. So it’s not hard to understand why the aggressive advice Russia offers on economics and democracy is met with irony.

Beset by a vehement and fragmented opposition—probably all the more vehement because it is so fragmented—whose only agenda is the unconditional dismissal of the president, Saakashvili holds his ground. He was democratically elected under the supervision of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), and he has worked to build a republic free of corruption, as international observers have attested. Such a state is a novelty in former Soviet lands, and in particular in the Caucasus. Why should Saakashvili give in to the minority? Why shouldn’t he complete his term, as presidents do in democracies? He allows protests, tries to negotiate, and outlasts his opponents. In recent months, his favorable ratings have varied between 53 and 65 percent, according to independent and international pollsters. This does not mean that there is nothing to be said for the opposition, which plays a necessary role in every true democracy; but its intolerance reflects badly on it, and the Russian media exploit it and carry it further, demonizing Saakashvili as the Hitler of the Caucasus (in Dmitry Medvedev’s phrase).

The charge is absurd. If only such a vibrant opposition could exist under Putin’s regime—with newspapers, two television channels, and the privilege of blocking major arteries and access to official buildings by setting up political protests. In Georgia, I saw a protest take place for two months, while the police refrained from opening up traffic in order not to offend the demonstrators. How many minutes would it take to arrest someone so bold as to set up a protest in front of the Elysée Palace? And who would imagine for an instant that such a thing could be attempted in Red Square?

Independent Georgia must survive through this summer. Last year, the Russian army positioned itself just 20 miles from Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi—one hour on the highway by tank. Clouds are gathering: large military maneuvers, inflammatory media rhetoric, and a Russian veto in the UN Security Council that interrupted the work of neutral observers. The UN and the OSCE have packed their bags, leaving 200 observers, restricted to the Russian side. Pavel Felgenhauer, a military specialist based in Moscow, fears that the Russian military command will take advantage of the absence of observers in Georgia to concoct some pretext to invade and fulfill their fondest wish—to “hang Saakashvili by the balls,” as Putin threatened in 2008. (After all, didn’t Germany invade Poland in 1939 by trotting out two unfortunate Polish border guards, whom the Germans accused of “invading” the Third Reich?) Andrei Illarionov, Putin’s special advisor until 2006, shares similar apprehensions. It’s hard to know what to expect. Sergei Kovalev, an activist and a friend of the late Andrei Sakharov, dissuades me from trying to read the signs of the times. The Russian rulers are not strategists, he says; they settle their accounts day by day, attend to their own interests, and plan their gangsters’ business month by month and year by year. But the current heads of the Kremlin will never forgive the young Georgian leader his crime of pro-Western sympathies.

Can President Obama and the European Union contain Moscow’s ambitions and whims? Or will they purchase a fallacious and precarious tranquility by sacrificing Georgia’s independence? At stake is the very sovereignty of Europe: its energy independence. Energy has become decisive because for Putin, gas is now a weapon as powerful as a deterrent arsenal. Consider a popular song performed by a military choir in Moscow. Its chorus depicts the “radiant future” that Gazprom is preparing: “Europe has a problem with us? We will cut off its gas; a big smile will rise in our eyes and happiness will leave us no more.” Similar sentiments are expressed toward the Ukraine and its desire to join NATO, as well as toward American forces all over the world. The Russian public loves the song.

If Tbilisi falls, there will be no way to get around Gazprom and guarantee autonomous access to the gas and petroleum wealth of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. As for the global credibility of President Obama, it will amount to no more than the empty-sleeved gestures of someone whose arms have been amputated.

André Glucksmann is a French philosopher. Translated from the French by Alexis Cornel.

Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions by Robert Hass It is morning because the sun has risen. I wake slowly in the early heat, pick berries from the thorny vines. They are deep red, sugar-heavy, fuzzed with dust. The eucalyptus casts a feathered shadow on the house which gradually withdraws. After breakfast you will swim and I am going to read that hard man Thomas Hobbes on the causes of the English civil wars. There are no women in his world, Hobbes, brothers fighting brothers over goods. I see you in the later afternoon Your hair dry-yellow, plaited from the waves, a faint salt sheen across your belly and along your arms. The kids bring from the sea intricate calcium gifts— black turbans, angular green whelks, the whorled opalescent unicorn. We may or may not feel some irritation at the dinner hour. The first stars, and after dark Vega hangs in the lyre, the Dipper tilts above the hill. Traveling in Europe Hobbes was haunted by motion. Sailing or riding, he was suddenly aware That all things move. We will lie down, finally, in our heaviness and touch and drift toward morning. "Concerning the Afterlife, the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions" by Robert Hass, from Field Guide. © Yale University Press, 1973. Reprinted with permission.

Law Lords R.I.P.

Today the law lords sit to give judgment for the last time in the House of Lords and, as Lord Hope of Craighead said there last week, the upper chamber will be “losing part of itself”. From October the law lords will become Justices of the Supreme Court, created under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. As the law lords give judgments for the last time, we should celebrate the institution whose life is coming to an end.
The judicial role of the House of Lords had its origins in the wish of early monarchs to delegate responsibilities to trusted advisers. But by the 19th century the appellate jurisdiction of the House of Lords was the subject of ridicule. To reduce the substantial backlog of appeals, a daily rota was imposed on lay peers in 1824 to sit and hear cases.
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, cynically observed how astonishing it was that peers “looking fresh and lively, excused themselves” on the ground that there might be “fatal consequences” if they were forced to endure “three or four hours’ confinement — unless it was confinement for five or six hours at White’s or Boodle’s at night”. In 1830, Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and jurist, pointed out that the vast majority of the peers who heard appeals were “ignorant of the law” and “destitute of judicial aptitude, by indolence and carelessness”.
Reform was needed in two respects. First, the Appellate Jurisdiction Act 1876 created a new class of salaried and professional law lords, appointed as life peers, to hear and determine appeals in an efficient manner.
The second reform was that non-judicial participation in appeals was removed. In 1883 Lord Denman, an elderly barrister, tried to vote at the end of a hearing. He was ignored by Lord Chancellor Selborne and by the official law reports. No lay peer has since attempted to vote on a judicial appeal.
Further changes in practice confirmed the distinction between the judicial and other functions of the House of Lords. In 1948 repairs to the building caused by war damage forced the law lords to move their business out of the chamber into a committee room. The temporarily created Appellate Committee became permanent, although the law lords have occasionally sat, as this week, in the chamber, with leading counsel wearing full-bottomed wigs.
By 2005 the law lords had given up any political role. They rarely contributed to debates in the House of Lords and did not vote. Judges no longer gave judgments comparable to the observations of Lord Denning, then Master of the Rolls, in the Court of Appeal in a case in 1976 that “in 1959 Parliament passed the Obscene Publications Act. I remember it well. I attended the debates, and took part.”
In recent years advocates appearing before the Appellate Committee no longer had the experience, which I recall from the 1997 appeal in Thompson and Venables (the young boys who murdered the toddler James Bulger), of being told by the presiding law lord that the hearing would end early that afternoon because one of the judges wished to participate in a debate on an amendment to a criminal justice Bill. In March, however, in the case about whether control orders for those suspected of involvement in terrorism comply with the European Convention on Human Rights, counsel did have the bizarre experience of hearing the division bell summon peers to vote on whether the control order regime should be continued.
For many observers, recognition that the law lords should have no political role was the culmination of the process of transformation of the final court of appeal into an independent institution. But for others, acknowledgement that the law lords were judges whose functions are distinct from those of the legislature was the prelude to the last stage of maturity: the creation of a supreme court outside Parliament.
The matter was resolved by the 2005 Act, which accepted the argument advanced in 1867 in Walter Bagehot’s great work The English Constitution: “The supreme court of the English people ought to be a great conspicuous tribunal” and “ought not to be hidden beneath the robes of a legislative assembly”.
In the past 40 years the judgments delivered by the law lords have placed them in the premier league of world courts with the High Court of Australia and the Supreme Court of Canada. Lords Reid, Wilberforce and Bingham of Cornhill, among others, have commanded respect and admiration for the intellectual force, constitutional perspective and good sense of their speeches.
Not all customers are satisfied: I was once asked by a disappointed client if he could sue the presiding law lord, Lord Keith of Kinkel, for negligence for dismissing his appeal. But in England and Wales (views may differ in Scotland) there is now no serious suggestion — as there certainly was in the early 1960s — that it is an unnecessary extravagance to have a further appeal after the Court of Appeal has given judgment.
I will miss the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. Its unique atmosphere, a mixture of academic seminar, comfortable club and all-in wrestling match, normally brought out the best in advocates. Its rituals (such as starting at 11am on Mondays, rather than 10.30, so the law lords have time to return from the country) are bizarre but harmless. Who could resist a smile as the presiding law lord leads his colleagues along the corridor, each pausing to exchange bows with counsel before entering the Committee Room?
The death of the Appellate Committee was inevitable, and necessary to give life to a modern supreme court. But for many lawyers, the Committee Room Corridor in Parliament will long echo with the voices heard there: Lord Diplock impatiently asking counsel if that was his best point; Lord Ackner being told by Gordon Pollock, QC, that he should not be sitting to hear contempt proceedings against Tiny Rowland and Lonrho plc because Lord Ackner’s father had been Mr Rowland’s dentist; and Lord Bingham courteously telling counsel at 1pm each day, however feeble their efforts that morning, that their lordships “very much look forward to hearing you again at 2 o’clock”.
The cry of the doorkeepers, John Dryden and Jackie Mouzouros, of “Clear the Bar”, so the law lords can deliberate at the end of the argument, will be heard no more. The Bar and the judges will be cleared out across Parliament Square to the Supreme Court.
As Lord Mance described it, in one of the final speeches by a law lord in Parliament, they will be moving from the Palace of Westminster to the new “Palais de Justice”. But before we lawyers pick up our papers and leave, we should pause to reflect on the end of an era.

Appassionata

It seemed at first like a quiet novel, but lovely and honest, about a concert pianist beginning a tour. All the music she plays is old music (the standard piano repertoire), and all the feelings she has about it seem inward-turning, emotions not strongly connected to the world outside. Of course that's one of the things I don't like about classical music now, but still I was drawn to the book, because, as I said, it's so honest. And the honesty is both emotional and musical. This is one of the few novels I've read that -- in its scenes of concert life, in its account of what the pianist thinks when she's playing, and in its scenes from the pianist's long-ago student life -- really convey how classical music works. Hoffman herself was a pianist, and she's both observant and wonderfully sensitive. But then the story grows in a new direction. For those who don't want any spoilers, I'll simply say that the outside world starts to press in on the pianist. Classical music doesn't seem adequate, any more, though this point is in no way underlined. It's just something we can assume, from how the pianist reacts. In the end, she has to find an accommodation, and she does, in a small but serious way that I greatly admire. But for those who don't mind spoilers, or want to know more, here's what happens. (Mild spoilers first, than more serious ones.) The pianist -- whose life is in some ways empty -- starts an affair with a man who goes to her concerts in Europe, and who turns out to be a Chechen political activist, someone in contact with Chechens who might be terrorists, and who might be a terrorist himself. Now she's caught up in discussions of what really matters in life. Classical music, by implication (nothing in this book is heavily done, or in any way obvious), is part of a culture that seems weak to the Chechen (though still he loves it; life, as Hoffman knows, is rarely simple). And then -- more serious spoilers coming -- there's a terrorist bomb that touches the pianist almost directly. Her lover disappears. Maybe he's responsible. It's too much for the pianist. She has a quiet, undramatic breakdown, cancels her concerts, disappears. In the end, she pulls herself together, and here's how she does it, how she crosses the gulf between classical music and the rest of life: She starts to compose. And her first composition, Hoffman says, draws on both Liszt and Jimi Hendrix. I can't stress enough how quiet this is. Hoffman never draws a moral, never says, or even comes close to saying, "See, by bringing together rock and classical music..." She's far too good for that (which means that in many ways she's better than I am). She simply shows her pianist starting to make a new life, and this is one part of it. We never hear more about the music, never see it premiered, never see a new audience show up, ready to bring classical music into their larger world. The book is too honest for that. Maybe (this is me talking here, not Hoffman) these grand things could happen, but Hoffman hasn't seen them. She writes what she knows. And so this small step toward a future seems all the more real because it's not underlined. Appassionata is an honest book, and well worth reading.

Gaia

For many years, I taught an introductory philosophy class based on Plato's Republic. It is a wonderful work through which to bring students to some of the crucial issues that engage and divide human beings—the nature of knowledge, the desirability of democracy, the place of women in society, mathematics, and God. Above all, there is the Theory of Forms, extrasensory entities that are supposed to inform and determine the objects in this world of sensation and experience. They are Plato's answer to the challenge posed by two earlier thinkers: Heraclitus, who claimed that everything changes ("You cannot step into the same river twice."), and Parmenides, who claimed that nothing changes ("How could what is perish? How could it have come to be?"). The Forms are timeless and yet manifest themselves in this physical world of corruption and decay.
Others intent on the same ends as I was might have chosen different works by Plato, but I suspect that few if any would have seized on Timaeus, a rather odd dialogue (at least to us) in which Plato argues that the world is a giant organism fashioned by a God, the Demiurge. Today it's hard to imagine that in the early Middle Ages, until Thomas Aquinas and others discovered the attractions of Aristotle, Timaeus was the only known work of Plato. And very influential it was, too, as almost everyone in the early centuries of the last millennium agreed that the world was an organism of a kind. Hence, as with all organisms, it was appropriate to think of the world as having sensations and feelings, and also to ask questions about ends and purposes.
The coming of Aristotle did not stop that mode of thought—indeed, he emphasized that such end-directed thinking (what he spoke of as final-cause thinking) is an absolutely vital tool for understanding the world around us. As Carolyn Merchant, a professor of environmental history at the University of California at Berkeley, showed in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (Harper & Row, 1980), even at the beginning of the 16th century, on the verge of great changes in our understanding of the world, it was considered appropriate to give thanks when, in order to extract minerals, miners cut into the earth—cut quite literally into our mother. It was thought necessary to respect the earth for what she was and what she gave. Crass misuse of her bounties was sinful.
At the same time, one could ask questions about the world that were (as with organisms) couched in terms of ends. Just as we might ask about the purpose or function or end of the eye, so we might ask about the purpose or function or end of (let us say) rain. And answers were forthcoming: The eye exists for sight. Rain exists for the growth of crops.
It is not silly to think of the world as an organism. After all, every year it goes through phases of growth, flourishing, yielding its fruits, and then withering and dying. In their fascinating new biography, James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia (Princeton University Press), the science writers John and Mary Gribbin introduce us to a man who endorses this metaphor with much enthusiasm.
The British-born Jim Lovelock (as they call him) is someone with a deservedly high reputation as a scientist. Although trained as a chemist, for many years (thanks primarily to the demands of the Second World War and its aftermath) he worked on biological and medical questions, investigating such matters as the spread of the common cold, a problem which involves the physics and chemistry of small particles as much as anything strictly organic in itself. By the early 1970s, that research had earned him a Fellowship in the Royal Society of London. Around that time, however, Lovelock broke from conventional science, having become convinced that the earth is a living organism. To this hypothesis, drawing on a suggestion by his neighbor—the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding—Lovelock gave the name Gaia, referring to the Greek goddess of the earth.
Gaia has gone through various formations and definitions—in his less-than-enthusiastic book this year The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive? (Princeton University Press), Peter D. Ward, a professor of paleontology at the University of Washington, traces several variations. Unfortunately, Lovelock himself is not always terribly helpful about the precise nature and content of his own claims. His latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Basic Books, 2008), is not the place to start looking for answers, since it seems to be little more than clippings from the floor of a long career. Better to go to some of the earlier works, perhaps the first full declaration, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford University Press), first published in 1979, although Lovelock had gone public with the idea in articles at least five years earlier.
Speaking of the new perspective on ourselves of looking at the planet from outer space, Lovelock writes:
We now see that the air, the ocean and the soil are much more than a mere environment for life; they are a part of life itself. Thus the air is to life just as is the fur to a cat or the nest for a bird. Not living but something made by living things to protect against an otherwise hostile world. For life on Earth the air is our protection against the cold depths and fierce radiations of space.
There is nothing unusual in the idea of life on Earth interacting with the air, sea and rocks, but it took a view from outside to glimpse the possibility that this combination might consist of a single giant living system and one with the capacity to keep the Earth always at a state most favorable for the life upon it.
Things are kept in balance because when something occurs to shift the natural order of things, then other things occur to compensate, bringing one back to the original state. Seizing on the fact that the earth's temperature remains pretty constant, despite the increase over the years of heat from the sun (25 percent, the Gribbins tell us, from the beginning of life on earth), Lovelock looked for, and found, the necessary feedback mechanisms. For instance, volcanoes produce carbon dioxide; as carbonic acid, it becomes part of the rock-weathering process and eventually ends up on the sea floor; in turn it is taken up by primitive organisms like algae; through evaporation it gets whipped up into the clouds, giving the earth cover from the sun; and so the earth cools; and on we go, cycle after cycle.
What we have here is a homeostatic system a notion that was popularized in the 1930s by the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon, although those with longer historical memories will find the idea remarkably reminiscent of the Victorian man of science Herbert Spencer's concept of dynamic equilibrium. The Gribbins claim Charles Darwin as a precursor to that kind of thinking, but I find their argument most unconvincing. Darwin was never into balances of nature and that sort of thing. He saw change as continuing and profound. To go back to our Greeks, whereas Gaia is Parmenidean, Darwinism is Heraclitean.
Of course, it is not only in that sense that Lovelock is out of tune with modern science. Picking up the story at the end of the Middle Ages, in the time span from Copernicus, at the beginning of the 16th century, to Newton, at the end of the 17th century, something major happened in what was then known as natural philosophy. The idea (the metaphor, if you like) of the world as an organism was increasingly rejected in favor of the idea or metaphor of the world as a machine. To cite the title of one of the greatest histories written about the period, by the Dutch historian E.J. Dijksterhuis in 1950, minds turned to The Mechanization of the World Picture.
Why did the new perspective triumph? Why did people want to drop all of that organiclike, end-directed thinking and focus instead on blind law, working with undeviating regularity? There is no great mystery here. It was not some violent repudiation of God. Copernicus was a minor cleric who died in good standing, and Newton, for all that he may privately have doubted the divinity of Christ, was an ardent—one might say obsessive—believer in a deity. The machine metaphor triumphed because it led to a science that more readily exhibited the values that scientists hold dear—Newtonian physics was more predictively fertile, more consistent, more unifying, more everything than Aristotelian physics. With the new physics you could explain and do things simply impossible with the old. A weapon maker could calculate the trajectory of a cannonball; a lens maker could work out the best kind of optical apparatus; a chemist could start to understand why certain combinations of elements work and others do not, saving valuable time and materials when making alloys.
The machine metaphor may have been regarded by the Aristotelians as akin to an Egyptian plague—there are those today who think likewise, especially the so-called "ecofeminists" who argue that we abuse and rape our dwelling place—but the current of thought did not sweep through overnight. At the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant notoriously declared that there would never be a Newton of a blade of grass, meaning that a machine-based picture could never fully capture the organic world. But in the 19th century, Darwin, thanks to his mechanism of natural selection, showed how organisms are subject to unbroken, unbending laws. Richard Dawkins, who has a gift for these sorts of phrases, spoke of organisms as "survival machines." And then, as the 20th century drew to an end, many believed that cognitive scientists had finally extended the machine metaphor to the human brain and its thinking abilities. We were invited to think of brains as the hard drives behind our thoughts—computers made of meat, said the computer scientist Marvin L. Minsky.
There have long been attempts to resuscitate the claim that the world is an organism. The most ardent were those by the German Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century—known as the Nature Philosophers, or Naturphilosophen—who included the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the anatomist Lorenz Oken, and the greatest advocate of all, the philosopher F.W.J. von Schelling. But generally, although those people often did good science, however you judge it, such attempts came to naught. The organic metaphor did not work as well as the machine metaphor. Indeed, the enthusiasm of the Naturphilosophen, and more particularly of their modern-day successors, does show why it was as well that, before Lovelock took up the organic metaphor, his fellowship at the Royal Society was already in hand.
To say the least, initial reaction to the Gaia hypothesis was not overly enthusiastic. Or rather, in respects, initial reaction was even worse than that, because the theory was enthusiastically embraced by the wrong people—joss-stick-burning, Eastern-religion-embracing, herb-consuming (eaten and smoked), Birkenstock-wearing, now-aging hippies and New Agers. Respectable scientists shunned Gaia. The notable exception was the American biologist Lynn Margulis, a professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, author of a brilliant hypothesis about the hybrid nature of complex cells (eukaryotes) from simple cells (prokaryotes). She is the exception that proves the rule. Not only is she someone with her own well-merited reputation for going against the mainstream—initially her cell hypothesis was derided and denied—but her thinking is deeply holistic in an organic way, seeing parts coming together to make living wholes that function only as complete systems and not as blind mechanisms built out of disparate bits and pieces.
Although I don't think of Gaia as in any sense a religious hypothesis—neither Lovelock nor Margolis promotes that cause—I can see the attractions for someone who thinks that a good God designed this earth of ours. Lovelock was for a time close to Quakerism, and, although he has moved on, he certainly has the holistic reverence for creation that one finds in that religion: "that of God in every person."
In science, unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), niceness is not enough. There were some telling hits on the Gaia hypothesis. Scourge of all things sloppy—especially those with the odor of the quasi-spiritual—Dawkins, in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype: The Gene as the Unit of Selection, argued that organisms are produced by natural selection, which requires reproduction, variation, and a struggle for existence. There is no reason to think that the earth has been produced that way, hence no reason to think of it as an organism. To which Lovelock (who did, to his credit, take the criticism seriously) responded (in books like The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, first published in 1988) that, on the one hand, he meant the organism talk in only a loose, metaphorical sense (which may have gotten him off the hook but made his claims rather less interesting), and on the other hand, for him the chief mark of life is homeostasis (which may have satisfied the physiologists and Spencerians but left the evolutionists and Darwinians a lot less than happy).
In major part, however, the objections to Gaia were more philosophical than scientific, echoing the earlier critics of Aristotelian thought, like Francis Bacon and Descartes. Thinking of the world as having ends, of volcanoes as having functions (spewing out carbon dioxide), goes against the spirit of modern science and is not very helpful. The argument that Gaia is unfalsifiable was also trotted out, starting with a letter published in Nature in 1990 from James W. Kirchner, an earth scientist at Berkeley, who has leveled this charge repeatedly. Again to his credit, Lovelock took his critics seriously. (Whatever you might say, this is a man who gives science the respect it deserves.) He came up with the "Daisyworld" model. Suppose you have a planet covered in flowers: black daisies that absorb the sun's rays but that like the cool, and white daisies that reflect the rays but that thrive in the heat. As the sun warms up, thanks to the black daisies, the planet gets warmer. Then the white daisies increase in number and reflect more rays back into space; the planet starts to cool. Eventually a kind of equilibrium is achieved. There is no strange teleology; no weird forces bringing the end about; all is mechanical. Yet there is homeostasis.
Critics have not been convinced. Ward, in The Medea Hypothesis, argues bluntly that our planet is not a Daisyworld. Drawing on his experience as a paleontologist, he says the history of the earth and its life suggests that there are violent fluctuations—especially mass-extinction episodes—and no evidence that the earth then returns to anything like equilibrium. Indeed, he argues (and that gives him his rather overly cute title, which refers to the character in the Euripides play who killed her children) that life is, in a sense, poisonous and carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For instance, again and again microbes in the sea have produced vast quantities of carbon dioxide, leading to violent changes of temperature here on earth, a consequent lack of oxygen, and mass deaths. There is nothing particularly homeostatic about any of that, even though there may have been rebounds to eras of very different flora and fauna.
I was surprised not to find some discussion by Ward of the work of the late J. John Sepkoski Jr. A paleontologist with sophisticated computer skills, Sepkoski spent much of his career mapping the rise and fall of groups of organisms, suggesting that it was less the external environmental influences that led to, say, the rise of flowering plants, or angiosperms, and more the ecological dynamics caused by the inventive exhaustion of certain organic forms and the arising of different forms that could create and take advantage of new niches. (The point being that there is only so much you can do with four legs. You need a new adaptation, like wings, which now let you exploit the air.) In a sense, Sepkoski's work seems not to fit comfortably into either a simple homeostatic model or one of violent death and destruction. Although he was well attuned to the brutal episodes in life's history, Sepkoski saw organisms as the ultimate determinants of this history. All of that, at a minimum, suggests that the true, overall picture may be more complex than either Lovelock or Ward suggests.
Lovelock and his critics agree that we cannot just go on as we are going on. The world in which we live is changing in a dramatic fashion, warming at a frightening speed. That is true whether because we have upset Gaia and taken her beyond her abilities to regenerate naturally, or because a Medea effect has kicked in and we are on the way naturally to another crash of the earth's life forms. We must do something.
Ever the discomfiting maverick, Lovelock himself is scathing about many of the proposals to replace our dependence on fossil fuels. Windmills in particular make him scornful; even with nonstop gales, we can achieve but modest gains. For him it is nuclear power or nothing. James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia has a jolly picture of him and his wife, in white coveralls, touring a French nuclear station. Ward is more inclined toward orbiting sunshades that would cut down on the amount of sunlight hitting the planet. Positioned over the oceans, they would reduce the growth of gas-producing micro-organisms. All a bit gloomy for sailors, one would think.
My sense is that Gaia has made an important contribution to our thinking about the planet, if only by virtue of the fact that it makes us think seriously about such issues as global warming and pollution of the oceans. As a historian and philosopher of science, I find that both Lovelock's theory and those of his critics inspire me to go back to the foundations of science and consider the root metaphors of empirical inquiry and why we prefer one set of models and ideas over another. It is true that as Gaia has been tamed (by Lovelock himself) into a more respectable notion in the light of modern science, it has lost some of its original dramatic appeal. No doubt those earnest Californians seeking spiritual backing for their enthusiasms will find other outlets.
As a Darwinian and a Heraclitean (and an ex-Quaker shunning his childhood roots), I confess that I am uncomfortable with balance and equilibrium, those Parmenidean conjectures. Although books like Ward's The Medea Hypothesis—so obviously written for the trade market, so selective in the evidence they use to make their case —make me no less uneasy. Perhaps in the end, Plato had it right: We need both perspectives, Heraclitean and Parmenidean, to get the whole picture. At our peril, and at our children's peril, we ignore the messages of those seminal Greek thinkers.

Booze & Writing

John Cheever was most unhappy to be picked up for vagrancy by the cops. “My name is John Cheever!” he bellowed. “Are you out of your mind?” Found sharing some hooch with the down-and-outs in downtown Boston, he was promptly admitted to Smithers Alcoholism Treatment Centre on Manhattan’s East 93rd Street, where he shared a room with a failed male ballet dancer, a delicatessen owner and a smelly ex-sailor. “The ballerina is up to his neck in bubble bath reading a biography of Edith Piaf,” he noted in his journal. He spent most of his time in group therapy correcting his counsellor’s grammar. “Displaying much grandiosity and pride,” they wrote in their notes. “Very impressed with self.” Eventually he fell silent. Four weeks later he emerged, shaky, fragile and subdued. “Listen, Truman,” he told Truman Capote. “It’s the most terrible, glum place you can conceivably imagine. It’s really really, really grim. But I did come out of there sober.”

He was the first American author of his rank to do so. Much ink has been spilled on the question of why so many writers are alcoholics. Of America’s seven Nobel laureates, five were lushes—to whom we can add an equally drunk-and-disorderly line of Brits: Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Brendan Behan, Patrick Hamilton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, all doing the conga to (in most cases) an early grave. According to Donald Goodwin in his book “Alcohol and the Writer”:

Writing involves fantasy; alcohol promotes fantasy. Writing requires self-confidence; alcohol bolsters confidence. Writing is lonely work; alcohol assuages loneliness. Writing demands intense concentration; alcohol relaxes.

There is good reason to be suspicious of this: one could as easily come up with a similar list for firefighters, or nannies, the only real difference being that writers are more vocal about it—their denial more pithily expressed. As Philip Amis said of his father’s bottle-of-whisky-a-day habit: “He was Kingsley Amis and he could drink whenever he wanted because he bought it with his money, because he was Kingsley Amis and he was so famous.”

In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with ‘Tender is the Night’,” said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends’ decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway’s liver protruded from his belly “like a long fat leech”.

In fact none of these authors would write much that was any good beyond the age of 40, Faulkner’s prose seizing up with sclerosis, Hemingway sinking into unbudgeable mawkishness. When Fitzgerald went public about his creative decline in Esquire, in a piece entitled “The Crack Up”—a prototype for all the misery memoirs we have today—Hemingway was disgusted, inviting him to cast his “balls into the sea—if you have any balls left”. Today, of course, “The Crack Up” would be shooting up the besteller lists, and Fitzgerald would be sat perched on Oprah’s couch talking about his struggle and his co-dependent relationship with Ernest, proudly wearing his 90-day sobriety chip, but in the 1930s, the recovery industry, then in its infancy, was regarded by most with the enthusiasm of a cat approaching a bathtub.

“AA can only help weak people because their ego is strengthened by the group,” said Fitzgerald. “I was never a joiner.” Certainly, if what you’re used to is rolling champagne bottles down Fifth Avenue beneath the light of a wanton moon or getting into the kind of barfights that make a man feel alive, truly alive, the basic facts of recovered life—the endless meetings, the rote ingestion of the sort of clichés the writer has spent his entire life avoiding—are below prosaic. Richard Yates professed to find AA meetings impossibly maudlin: “Is just functioning living at all?” he moped, claiming he could not write a single sentence sober. His fall was even more vertiginous, and emblematic of the 1950s; like Kerouac, he was to write one masterpiece (“Revolutionary Road"), then nothing.

Only the advent of rehab, in the 1960s, interrupted this fall—enforced incarceration flattering the writer’s sense of drama, the Kafkaesque me-versus-the-system fable playing out in his head. John Berryman sat in rehab looking like a “dishevelled Moses”, his shins black and blue, his liver palpitating, reciting Japanese and Greek poets and quoting Immanuel Kant. When he found out the doctors around him were serious he buckled under, declaring himself “a new man in 50 ways!” and affecting an ostentatious “religious conversion” which he proceeded to pour into a series of poems to his Higher Power (“Under new governance your majesty”). Ten days after leaving he found he needed a quick stiff one to get the creative juices flowing again and downed a quart of whisky. “Christ,” was all he could say the next morning.

Second time around he got himself a sponsor named Ken, and tried prose, writing a novel about his recovery, called “Recovery”, which goes some way to explaining why the recent spate of bestsellers on the subject have been non-fiction. Pretentious and opaque, including “a bloody philosophy of both history and Existens, almost as heavy as Tolstoy”, Berryman’s book remains an object lesson in how not to recover, as Donald Newlove has pointed out:

First you hang on to all your old romances about your illness, then you suck your old grandiosity for every drop that’s still in it, you vigorously emphasise your uniqueness among the clods who might be recovering with you, and then you defend to the death your right to self-destruction…Starting afresh meant that a massive part of his work so far was self-pity and breast-beating. That was the last mask he couldn’t rip off. It was like tearing the beard from his cheeks.

The book remained unfinished; within weeks of leaving Berryman threw himself from Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue bridge, his body splitting like a melon upon impact with the ground.

It may seem a little impertinent to gauge the literary merits of sobriety—you cannot write books of any discernible quality if you are dead—but clearly, sobering up is one of the more devastating acts of literary criticism an author can face. John Cheever’s alcohol counsellors noted: “He dislikes seeing self negatively and seems to have internalised many rather imperious upper-class Boston attitudes which he ridicules and embraces at the same time”—which must rank among the sternest reviews he ever got.

Cheever emerged from rehab a different man, 20 pounds lighter, feeling 20 years younger. “I am changed violently,” he said, and so too was his work. After years of squeezing toothpaste out of an ever tighter tube, he powered his way through a new novel, finishing it within a year. “It is as if our Chekhov had tucked into a telephone booth and reappeared wearing a cape and leotard of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man’,” wrote the New York Times of the resulting book, “Falconer”, a “dark radiant fable” about a man’s escape from prison, whose frank depictions of homosexuality and addiction shocked the Book of the Month crowd expecting Cheever’s usual martini-hour melancholy. It was a work of liberation in every sense.

We don’t know how this would have played out, over time—Cheever was to die of kidney cancer within a few years—but for the effects of long-term sobriety we can turn to Raymond Carver, who, after the usual pile-up of emergency rooms, courtrooms, detox centres and drying-out clinics, got sober in 1977. For a year he wrote nothing (“I can’t convince myself it’s worth doing”), just played bingo and got fat on doughnuts, but then he remarried, and he went on to write some of his best work—he was nominated for a Pulitzer prize for his story collection, “Cathedral”, illuminating the downtrodden blue-collar lives he had written about before with unexpected moments of revelation and connection. He addressed this “new opening up” in his work in a poem entitled “Gravy”:

No other word will do. For that’s what it was.
Gravy.
Gravy, these past ten years.
Alive, sober, working, loving, and
being loved by a good woman. Eleven years
ago he was told he had six months to live
at the rate he was going. And he was going
nowhere but down. So he changed his ways
somehow. He quit drinking! And the rest?
After that it was all gravy, every minute
of it…

The radiance of late Carver is so marked as to make you wonder how much the imperturbable gloom of late Faulkner, or the unyielding nihilism of late Becket—like the cramped black canvases with which Rothko ended his career—were dictated by their creators’ vision, and how much they were simply symptoms of late-stage alcoholism. This suspicion is open to the counter-charge: this contentment and bliss is all very well, but readers may simply prefer the earlier, messed-up work. Charles Bukowski teased himself along similar lines when the old whore-monger found himself writing poems about his cats and “little Bluebird in my heart”:

I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

Certainly, for those who trade a little too heavily on darkness, the Ozzy Osbournes of the literary world, the transition can be a rocky one. Stephen King says he cannot remember writing “Cujo”, he was so loaded; but after his family staged an intervention in 1987, emptying the contents of his garbage onto his living-room floor—cocaine, beer cans, Xanax, NyQuil, Valium, marijuana—he quit, and the result was a marked slackening of tension in his work. One of the things that made “The Shining” such a great novel about falling off the wagon was that King didn’t know that was what it was about—it was written from inside the belly of an obsession. Once he worked out what the real monster in the closet was, his work took on a therapeutic air, more concerned with the exorcising of internal demons than supernatural ones; it became baggier too, as if the elimination of one indulgence had forced a sideways move into another: the writing became drinking by other means.

From which we can conclude that the writer who can be most grateful he never has to get sober is Salman Rushdie. Minimalists tend to do better than maximalists. Flinty and workmanlike seem to win the day. (Elmore Leonard said that attending AA meetings had made him a “better listener”.) It is the self-proclaimed geniuses who suffer. Writers of long sentences seem to do worse than the writers of short ones—Faulkner’s and Hemingway’s endless clauses being the epitome of the drunken style. Comparing yourself to Tolstoy is a bad sign. (If it has to be a Russian, Chekhov is a much better bet.) Americans do much better than Brits (a recent biography of Kingsley Amis lists drinking under “Activities and Interests”). Americans from the north seem to do better than Americans from the South. Prose-writers fare better than poets. If you are an American poet from the South, you might as well walk into a bar right now. And don’t, whatever you do, write a novel about recovery.

Picture Credit: Kathryn Rathke

(Tom Shone is a former film critic of the Sunday Times. His novel about recovery, “In the Rooms”, was published on July 7th by Hutchinson.)

Michael Steinberg

This week at NPR Classical, a fond remembrance ofMichael Steinberg , a man who lived a life in music. His program notes, books, lectures and radio essays are masterful examples of how to explain classical music to both the novice and the expert. Michael had a kind of avuncular warmth and wit in his writing that opened the doors of classical music to countless fans. I fondly remember the times I worked with him, always looking forward to hearing his insights on composers he loved, like Nielsen and Sibelius. Please take a moment to click on this story and listen to Michael’s passionate and personal radio essay on the subject of the symphony. It says a lot about the man who made classical music easier to understand, and a lot more fun. Tom Huizenga, NPR Music

New York 2009

Stefan Kanfer
Booms and Busts
New York has been down this road before—colorfully, memorably, and temporarily.
28 July 2009

These days, Americans—New Yorkers leading the way—are, for obvious reasons, feeling panicky about the nation’s finances. To ease their anxiety, they might want to examine the past. Fiscal emergencies have marked our economic history as a nation. We’ve triumphed over every one of them—a testament to the buoyancy of our dynamic free-market system.

The first major panic occurred in 1792, at the close of George Washington’s first administration. Wall Street was then the unacknowledged seat of government; indeed, Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury, lived at the corner of Wall and Water Streets. His former undersecretary, William Duer, was widely considered the ultimate insider, and when he began to purchase banking stocks, traders, and then the public, followed suit. Buying fever rose to record levels. One newspaper ran a memorable warning in rhyme, though few heeded it:

Touched by the wand of speculation, A frenzy runs throughout the nation; For soon or late, so truth advises, Things must assume their proper sizes.

When they assumed their proper sizes, the creditors who had funded all the speculation moved in. Duer unloaded his shares in the Bank of the United States, hoping to get enough money to cover his own debts, but the market kept dipping, and eventually his creditors would wait no longer. As historian Ron Chernow observes, rather than bail out his former colleague, “Hamilton had the Treasury purchase large amounts of government securities in the marketplace. By doing so, he steadied the market and also bought back public debt at bargain prices.” Hamilton led the bank to prosperity. Duer died in debtors’ prison.

Four decades later, another panic broke out, this one far more severe. President Andrew Jackson, a believer in hard currency, ordered the U.S. Treasury to accept only gold and silver in sales of public lands, not paper money, which at the time was issued by banks. By the time Martin Van Buren replaced Jackson in 1837, gold and silver shortages plagued the nation. Depositors pulled their cash out of banks, throwing the economy into disarray. Unemployment rose, farms failed, and the New York militia was called in to keep order on Wall Street. By early autumn, 90 percent of eastern factories had closed. New York Tribune editor Horace (“Go west, young man”) Greeley estimated that one-fourth of all those in trade were out of business, “with dreary prospects for the coming winter.”

The dreariness spread to almost every town and hamlet in America. There was no point in appealing to foreign bankers. A federal representative received word from a Paris-based member of the Rothschild family: “You may tell your government that you have seen the man who is at the head of the finances of Europe, and that he has told you that they cannot borrow a dollar, not a dollar.” Yet seven years later, thanks to westward expansion and the Polk administration’s banking and tariff reforms, Wall Street bounced back, and with it the nation’s economy. In time, Europeans resumed purchases of American securities.

All was well until September 1857, when the Central America, an American merchant-marine vessel carrying 30,000 pounds of gold bullion, sank in a gale off the Carolinas. A short time before, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company had collapsed, following charges of embezzlement by one of its officers. News of these disasters spread rapidly, thanks to Western Union’s newfangled telegraph system. Jittery investors, domestic and foreign, began to sell off their holdings. To add to this general malaise, the Crimean War ended, and the resultant peace treaty meant that Russians could return to their farms, breaking a three-year dependence on American agriculture. As money became scarce, land expansion ceased. Stocks fell. Railroad companies suffered; some went out of business. Facing the crisis head-on, the government declared a bank holiday and acted to reduce tariffs, thereby encouraging Russia, Britain, and other European nations to increase trade with the United States. By 1859, the worst was over.

Still, the effects of this latest alarm lasted until shots rang out at Fort Sumter. And those led to feverish speculations. During the Civil War, the U.S. Treasury finally began issuing paper money, backing it not with gold but with the “full faith” of the government—credit. After the war, however, it was widely assumed that the government would back the dollars with gold. Figuring that this would require the government to acquire large quantities of gold, two unscrupulous financiers, James Fisk and Jay Gould, set out to corner the gold market. The contrast in their appearances and personalities was vaudevillian. Gould reminded onlookers of a dark, bearded ferret; Fisk gave the impression of a blonde peacock. Gould was a family man; Fisk kept his wife in Boston while he cavorted with high-priced call girls in New York. And as Hofstra University history professor Robert Sobel notes in Panic on Wall Street, “Gould was able to concoct ingenious campaigns; Fisk had the knack of knowing how to carry them out.” It was an ideal partnership.

Several times during the spring of 1869, Gould contrived to run into a speculator named Abel Rathbone Corbin, who happened to be the president’s brother-in-law. Through Corbin, Gould obtained an audience with Ulysses S. Grant and advised him to back the paper money with gold. When Grant gave no guarantees about future money policy, the partners made another contact: Assistant Treasurer Daniel Butterfield. The malleable Butterfield agreed to tip off Gould and Fisk if the government decided against the gold standard after all.

By midsummer, gold was trading at about $135 an ounce, 30 percent higher than usual. Gould began to accumulate large amounts of the precious metal, sending prices skyward. The avaricious partners hoarded their stash, waiting for still-higher prices. But when gold reached $150 per ounce, Grant sensed that something was up. On September 24, “Black Friday,” he secretly instructed the Treasury secretary, George S. Boutwell, to stop the speculation. That day, the government dumped $4 million in gold on the market. Gold briefly peaked at $160—then plunged to $138. Gould and Fisk, fast on their feet, escaped real damage. Many others, including Corbin, were wiped out. E. C. Stedman, a poet as well as a broker, summed up the situation in verse:

One Hundred and Sixty! Can’t be true! What will the bears-at-forty do? How will the merchants pay their dues? How will the country stand the news? What’ll the banks—but listen! hold! In screwing up the price of gold To that dangerous, last, particular peg, They had killed their Goose with the Golden Egg!

Grant’s second administration ran into trouble, too. At first, “prosperity was written over the face of things,” remembered historian James Ford Rhodes, who lived through the period. “Manufacturers were busy, workmen in demand. Streets and shops were crowded and everywhere new buildings going up. Prices of commodities were high, demand pretty good. Everybody seemed to be making money.”

But the Gilded Age was showing signs of tarnish. In 1872, equine influenza had ravaged ranches and farms in the West. The “Great Epizootic” affected foodstuffs, dry goods, metal, lumber, manufacturing—every industry that employed horse-driven transit. Then came the Coinage Act of 1873. Formerly, the U.S. backed its currency with silver as well as gold. Now it went on the gold standard. Silver prices immediately fell off, and western mining slackened, throwing thousands of miners out of work.

In September 1873, a bank with enormous influence on Wall Street went belly-up. Jay Cooke & Company had invested too heavily in the ill-conceived and badly financed Northern Pacific Railway.

Other financial houses, similarly invested in railroads and other overpriced companies, soon began to falter, including Fisk and Hatch, which billed itself as “one of the richest and soundest in New York.” The New York Stock Exchange closed for the first time in its history and remained shut for ten days. In January 1874, hordes of angry unemployed men rioted in Tompkins Square Park, in one of the largest demonstrations in New York City’s history. In the end, 89 of the nation’s 364 railroads went bankrupt. Some 18,000 businesses had failed by 1875. Cotton mills and ironworks closed. Unemployment was rampant. Laborers, many of them Civil War veterans, wandered the countryside. Two words became commonplace: “tramp” and “bum.”

But in 1877, good weather spread across the nation. Crops were bountiful as the decade ended, and exports increased. Looking back in 1911, the New York Times reported: “Stocks began their rise in the spring of 1878, and in 1879, men of means awoke suddenly to the fact that the railroads were of value as investments after all, and a marvelous buying of securities sprang up, which electrified the financial world and led to a boom in prices.”

By now, it was clear: every boom had its bust, and good times were never forever. Then again, neither were bad times. The stock exchange thrived once more, and lenders became as common as borrowers. The new era of prosperity went on until February 1893, when the Philadelphia and Reading Rail Road abruptly declared bankruptcy. Wall Street grew nervous again, and fretful investors cut back. The economy worsened. Bank runs began. European speculators, fearing the worst, demanded payments in gold, depleting Fort Knox. Three prominent railroads—the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe—all failed.

Once again, the specter of unemployment hovered over the land, and many middle-class families defaulted on their mortgages. Real-estate values dropped precipitously. Great Victorian-style houses, a sign of prosperity only a few years earlier, now stood dark and empty. Labor unrest made things worse, as workers struck in the silver-mining towns of the West and a Pullman strike further weakened the railroads and, in turn, businesses that depended on freight deliveries.

In 1894, Ohio quarrier and labor advocate Jacob Coxey organized a march on Washington, demanding federal intervention in this latest crisis. En route to the capital, “Coxey’s Army” picked up many adherents. It also put President Grover Cleveland on edge, and when the army arrived, the Democrat had it driven from the Capitol’s lawn. Coxey, who tried to read a prepared statement, wound up in jail for trespassing. A sympathizer read his declaration into the Congressional Record, but it was a pyrrhic victory: voters, fearful of social unrest, turned right. The pro-business Republican William McKinley won the 1896 election, and he had the good fortune to be in office when the Klondike Gold Rush began. He let Wall Street go its own way with little interference from Washington, and the economy rebounded again.

McKinley was assassinated in 1901, mourned by conservatives and reviled by radicals. Anarchist Emma Goldman called the fallen leader “president of the money kings and trust magnates,” favorably comparing his assassin, Leon Czolgosz, to Marcus Brutus, Julius Caesar’s murderer. McKinley’s replacement, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, supposedly favored “sound” business practices. But he was also notorious for impulsive decisions. Along Wall Street, a fresh worry arose: What would happen if the unpredictable power of Washington collided with the indisputable might of the world’s greatest financier, J. P. Morgan?

The answer came in 1907. That was the year of the “Bankers’ Panic,” when the New York Stock Exchange lost almost half its value. In the first months of ’07, Americans were occupied with the trial of millionaire Harry Thaw, charged with the murder of Stanford White, America’s leading architect, who had, some years back, taken the virginity of the woman who would become Thaw’s wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit. Few newspaper readers paid attention to the financial page. There, things seemed prosperous enough—except for Jacob Schiff’s quiet warning about the marketplace. “If the currency conditions of this country are not changed,” he told his fellow bankers, “you’ll have such a panic as will make all previous panics look like child’s play.”

Schiff was more aware of global conditions than his colleagues were. Foreign governments desperately needed capital. The Russo-Japanese War had cost Russia some $840 million, and Japan almost $1 billion. Britain had spent nearly $800 million in the Boer War. Even the short Spanish-American War had run up a bill of $165 million for the U.S. Treasury, and the San Francisco earthquake had required more millions for aid and rebuilding. With money in short supply on Wall Street—indeed, all over the world—bankers began to float long-term bonds at what they thought attractive interest rates. But investors showed no enthusiasm for these instruments. On Wall Street, a malaise grew palpable, underlined by Theodore Roosevelt’s continued “trust-busting.” Teddy’s administration went after Standard Oil, for example, indicting the company on 529 counts of illegal acceptance of rebates and fining it $29 million. However justifiable the action, Wall Street viewed it as antibusiness and expected more harsh treatment from the 26th president.

Catastrophe lay in wait. The only thing missing was a push downhill. It occurred in September 1907, when a cabal of investors vainly attempted to corner the copper market. Their covert plan had received backing from the Knickerbocker Trust Company, New York’s third-largest trust; when the plan failed in October, the Knickerbocker did, too. Other trusts followed in its slipstream. Angst ran through the city and then the country, as investors from every social stratum withdrew their savings from every sort of bank. Once again, the troubled NYSE was on the verge of crumpling.

There was no point in looking to Teddy for help; economics wasn’t his strong suit, and, in any case, he would have been suspect. Enter J. P. Morgan. The mighty banker had been semiretired, luxuriating in his great mansion on Madison Avenue and 36th Street. Now this unlikely hero, a red-nosed, scowling 70-year-old in a black three-piece suit, stepped in to rescue the United States. Working the phones, he brought wealthy industrialists into the picture, pooling their funds to bail out the remaining trusts. Morgan personally underwrote municipal bonds to save New York City and induced European bankers to replenish the money supply with foreign gold. At one point, he summoned the presidents of the city’s major trusts to his library and persuaded them to contribute $25 million to keep the stock exchange up and running. The executives had little choice; Morgan had locked them in until he got an agreement.

Roosevelt followed all this with quiet admiration; after all, he wasn’t above a little bullying himself. In the end, both sides felt satisfied. Teddy quietly ended the antitrust phase of his presidency, dropping lawsuits against various large corporations and focusing on international affairs during his remaining years in office. He even invited Morgan to dine at the White House. Meanwhile, Morgan busied himself with Episcopal Church matters and the acquisition of new works for his glorious art collection.

Wall Street took a deep breath before climbing to new altitudes after the victory of the Great War. And that was only the beginning. During the Roaring Twenties, from 1920 to 1929, stocks more than quadrupled in value. Almost everyone bought on margin, convinced that the market knew only one direction: up. A light versifier encapsulated the situation in The Saturday Evening Post:

Oh, hush thee, my babe, granny’s bought some more shares, Daddy’s gone out to play with the bulls and the bears, Mother’s buying on tips and she simply can’t lose, And baby shall have some expensive new shoes!

It was a fatal miscalculation, based on wishful thinking. With shares selling at 20 and 30 times earnings, the hour of reckoning was imminent. It struck in the fall of 1929, when Black Thursday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday left tens of thousands of investors ruined, virtually overnight. Depression quickly spread across the land. President Herbert Hoover, an engineer by training, tried to reverse the downturn with various federal ways and means. All were ineffective, the worst being the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which raised U.S. levies on more than 20,000 imported goods. Foreign countries retaliated, sending American trade with the rest of the world into a nosedive. The Republican Party took the hit for the Depression, and in 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt won the presidency in a 46-state landslide.

The 32nd president assumed office just as the radio became the prime medium of entertainment and information. During a series of “fireside chats” broadcast throughout the country, Roosevelt’s sonorities and memorable phrases reached deep into the American psyche: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”; “I see one-third of a nation ill fed, ill clothed, ill housed”; “When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.” Americans who had watched the market lose some 89 percent of its value needed such assurances.

As everyone knows, FDR’s administration initiated a series of reforms called the New Deal. They were Keynesian in philosophy—vast public spending that saddled the next generation with debt. Slowly, steadily, recovery got under way. But what sparked it? The received wisdom used to be that massive spending saved the day. But the current consensus among professional economists is very different (see “Economics Does Not Lie,” Summer 2008). In her bestselling volume, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, financial journalist Amity Shlaes argues that FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act, an important component of the New Deal, actually prolonged the Depression. By wrapping businesses in red tape, discouraging competition, and subjecting wages and prices to strict control, it forcibly reduced profits. Companies reacted by cutting jobs, throwing more people into the breadlines. At the same time, Roosevelt created new political constituencies—artists and intellectuals funded by the Works Progress Administration, farmers receiving subsidies, consumers promised cheap electric power. These groups, grateful to the New Deal, guaranteed his victory in four straight elections, despite the disappointing results of his policies. It wasn’t until 1940, when the nation’s factories began to retool for the imminent war in Europe and Asia, that the economy truly revived and the U.S. came close to full employment.

Lesser panics continued to strike—the John F. Kennedy recession, the double-digit inflation of the Jimmy Carter years, and the crash of 1987 during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the stock market suffered the largest one-day loss in its history. Wall Street, and the economy as a whole, rebounded every time. So before President Barack Obama completely “remakes” America, as he has promised, he might benefit from a long look in the rearview mirror. Our system has proven remarkably resilient.

Stefan Kanfer, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former editor of Time, is the author, most recently, of a biography of Marlon Brando, Somebody.