The Joy of Reading

chapter fourteen

Hiroshima and After

Did the old world that was end on that day when the bomb fell from the sky on the unsuspecting citizens of that medium-sized Japanese city, or did it die a few decades later when the Berlin Wall was broached, or a few years after that when the number of electronic messages criss-crossing the globe reached one million billion per second, or … or?

Of course there is no way really to answer the question, but there isn’t any doubt, is there, that the world we inhabit in these first years of the twenty-first century is radically different—almost different in kind—from the one some of us can remember. At least, it feels that way to me. But I’m old enough to remember when there were fewer than three billion human beings on Earth, there was no television, a barrel of petroleum cost $2.40, a pack of cigarettes cost twenty-five cents (and there wasn’t any reason not to smoke), and you could live in Paris (as I did) for $30 a month, drinks included. And there were so many other reasons to think the world was good, although of course difficult, too, with the war over but the Cold War just beginning and children not yet having nightmares about the end of the world.

The end of the world. I wrote in my note about my father’s poetry that he was suddenly aware that we could terminate the human adventure, or story, or tragic-comedy—whichever word seems appropriate. But that was later, after the time of Walter Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz. (Now there was a prophet before his time!)

Anyway, almost all the authors considered in the present chapter were born after the turn of the century. Some didn’t live very long lives; others did; a few were living just a few years ago; and at least one is alive today. They had more than just chronology in common, because all of them were aware of the great change that was occurring. They were, most of them, aware as well of the kind of new world they were perceiving.

JOHN HERSEY

1914–1993

Hiroshima

John Hersey, was born in China in l914 of American missionary parents. He was fluent in Chinese before he learned English, which he did when he was ten and the family returned to the United States. He graduated from Yale in 1936 and took a year at Cambridge; in the summer of 1937 he became the personal secretary to Sinclair Lewis. That autumn he started his long career at TimeLife, ending as a senior editor at Life and a correspondent for major periodicals including the New Yorker. He compiled Men on Bataan (1942) and wrote Into the Valley (l943), based on experiences with a company of marines on Guadalcanal, and A Bell for Adano (1944), which won a Pulitzer Prize and became a radio drama and a Broadway play.

Hiroshima, probably his best known book, was published in 1946. It appeared first in August of that year; the entire text being published in the New Yorker, which devoted the whole issue to it. The issue sold out in a few hours. The entire text was read over the radio in the United States and other countries. When it was published in book form, The Book of the Month Club sent a free copy to every one of its members. In cool, apparently dispassionate prose, the book told the story of how a single plane had dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, at the beginning of August of the previous year. More than 150,000 people were killed immediately by the explosion, which occurred some feet above the ground, thus increasing the devastation, and many thousands more were grievously wounded, some with radiation poisoning that killed them within a few weeks, months, or years. Hersey, one of the first reporters to visit the site of the blast, was able to interview hundreds of the survivors. His dispassionate account could not hide his feelings of horror and sadness as he talked to these maimed and terrified human beings.

The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, and another one on Nagasaki a few days later, ended the war with Japan, which sued for peace and was immediately granted it. For the next sixty years Japan was an ally rather than an enemy. America was not only the first to make an atomic weapon but also the first to use one to kill people. Today, we are not alone in possessing nuclear weapons (as we call them now). At least a dozen other countries, some of them small and inimical to our interests, possess weapons that can kill entire national populations, if not the populations of entire continents. And not only all the people but all life excluding perhaps some insects, bacteria, and viruses. This is the stuff of nightmares. John Hersey, was one of the first to waken us. He wrote many other good and interesting books, but in the last analysis none had the same impact as Hiroshima. John Hersey, died in 1993.

WALTER M. MILLER, JR.

1923–1996

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Walter Miller was born in Florida in 1923 and studied at the University of Tennessee. When war broke out he joined the Army Air Force, flying fifty-three missions over Italy and the Balkans as a tail gunner and radio man. On one mission he was involved in the destruction of the famous Benedictine Monastery of Monte Cassino, an event that remained in his mind’s eye until he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in January 1996.

He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1947 and began to write his great Canticle for Leibowitz soon after. It appeared in three parts over several years beginning in 1955. The first part, “Fiat Homo” (“Let there be man”), describes a half ruined monastery inhabited by illiterate monks at a time some six centuries after a nuclear holocaust has killed most of the people on Earth. Among the treasures of the monastery, however, are some papers with writing on them that the monks can’t read but which they consider to be somehow holy. In the second part, “Fiat Lux” (“Let there be light”), which may take place scores or hundreds of years later, a stranger arrives who is able to read the ancient documents, one of which, he explains, describes in words and diagrams how to generate electricity. He “borrows” the manuscript and shows it to a group of persons who are trying to decipher other ancient manuscripts. Time passes again, perhaps hundreds of years, but finally two and two are put together to describe a weapon of enormous power. Many persons want to explore no further, but the rulers of the land—more or less the western half of what was once the United States—insist that knowledge is never hurtful and forge ahead to make one of the weapons.

The third part of the Canticle, “Fiat Voluntuas Tua” (“Thy Will Be Done”), tells the story of how, owing to a dreadful accident, the peace loving monks and their associates explode a bomb that kills a million persons in the country of the rulers. They apologize and beg for forgiveness, but their protestations are disdained. The book ends when an enormous wave of force envelopes the monastery where all this began, and the old abbot, who is somehow still alive after all these years, is aware before he dies that the end of the world has come.—again.

CHARLES GALTON DARWIN

1887–1962

The Next Million Years

Some years ago I wrote a book called The Idea of Progress, in preparation for which I read most of the works that have been written on this interesting subject. Looking back on this large body of material, I must conclude that the great majority of these writings are absurd. A few books stand out. One of the best, I think, is Charles Galton Darwin’s The Next Million Years.

The literature of progress does not, or should not, include works that predict events of the next decade or the next century. The idea of progress, as such, is an idea about the entire course of human history. Up to now there has been a good deal of undoubted progress; to deny this would be to deny obvious facts. But what is the future course of human history? Is progress, or improvement, to be general and more or less constant as long as we remain humans? Or must we look forward to some other future, decidedly less happy, than the one the most passionate optimists foresee?

Perhaps no one was better equipped than Charles Galton Darwin to make a reasonably accurate stab at an answer to this question. Grandson of Charles Darwin and a great nephew of Sir Francis Galton, whose name is associated with the science of eugenics, C.G. Darwin followed in the footsteps of both his ancestors; he was a biologist but also a eugenicist and a student of human heredity.

He wrote The Next Million Years in 1952, when he was sixty-five, and he apologizes in a foreword for the fact that it is not a typical “scientific” work—that is, it does not contain a large number of citations and scholarly apparatus of the sort that makes such books difficult for anyone but specialists to read. Darwin, who was himself a specialist, wanted this book to be read by everybody, and it is indeed a most readable book, considering the wide range of technical subjects with which it deals.

C.G. Darwin begins by explaining that a book about the average future of the species Homo sapiens could not have been written until quite recently, because not enough was known about the world in which we live, nor about the human nature that we all share, especially about the role of heredity in determining our traits and behaviors. He also explains that he is far from expecting to be able to predict the events of the next million years. That, indeed, must be taken as obvious.

He has chosen the period of a million years, he goes on to say, because a million years is the amount of time, on the average, that is required to produce a new wild species. For the next million years, Darwin is saying, man can be expected to continue to be man—more or less the species we know. Beyond that no prediction is possible, since wild species usually become something else in longer periods of time.

But is man a wild animal, after all? This is probably the most important question Darwin addresses in this book. And his answer is a persuasive yes. Man is not a tame animal, because there is no one to tame him besides himself and no animal can be self-domesticated. If man could be tamed, he might, like the dog, be radically improved in a period as short as ten thousand years. But since that is impossible, a million-year future must be assumed, during which man will remain more or less recognizably human.

There is one if or but, of course: what if man destroys himself? A cataclysm can always occur in the life of any species, says Darwin, and in that case man will have no future after all. If he does not destroy himself, says Darwin, this is what his future will hold for him.

At this point I think I must apologize and say that Darwin’s forecast of the future will disappoint almost everybody. But that, in my opinion, is why the book is so important. There are certain facts that we always ignore but that we should not ignore; when they are taken into account, it becomes obvious that the future cannot be characterized by constant improvement. Instead, the picture is rather dark, although the darkness is relieved by occasional flashes of brilliant light. But let our author say it in his own words:

The regions of the world will fall into provinces of ever-changing extent, which most of the time will be competing against one another. Occasionally … they will be united by some strong arm into an uneasy world-government, which will endure for a period until it falls by the inevitable decay that finally destroys all dynasties. There will be periods when some of the provinces relapse into barbarism, but all the time civilization will survive in some of them. It will survive because it will be based on a single universal culture, derived from the understanding of science; for it is only through this understanding that the multitudes can continue to live

… Most of the time and over most of the earth there will be severe pressure from excess populations, and there will be periodic famines. There will be a consequent callousness about the value of the individual’s life, and often there will be cruelty to a degree of which we do not willingly think. This however is only one side of the history. On the other side there will be vast stores of learning, far beyond anything we can now imagine, and the intellectual stature of man will rise to ever higher levels. And sometimes new discoveries will for a time relieve the human race from its fears, and there will be golden ages, when man may for a time be free to create wonderful flowerings in science, philosophy and the arts.

That may be the least sentimental paragraph on the subject of human progress ever written. You may not like the picture, but I do not think you can deny it. And if you throw in nuclear weapons, perhaps even it is more optimistic than it should be. However …

FERNAND BRAUDEL

1902–1985

The Mediterranean and the

Mediterranean World in the Age of

Philip II

Fernand Braudel was born in Paris in 1902 but it was not until after the end of World War II that he received his doctorate. The story is worth telling. He was ready to write his dissertation in 1939; he began in his study, surrounded by thousands of notes on carefully filed cards. In the fall war broke out and Braudel was called up. He was stationed on the Maginot Line, and there was no time for writing there, even during the boring months of the “Phony War.” In the spring of 1940, the Germans attacked. Braudel was captured and sent to a prison camp. For two years he suffered from boredom and frustration. Finally, he decided he must write his book anyway. He filled scores of school copybooks with his careful prose, writing from memory. After the war he rewrote the book, all sixteen hundred pages of it, inserting the notes and citations. He did not have to change the text, he said.

This book, for which Braudel received his Ph.D., is officially titled The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. That period is, roughly, the last half of the sixteenth century, when Spain was the dominant power in the Western world, challenged only by the Ottoman Empire, which controlled the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The place is the Mediterranean world, with the accent on “world”; not just the sea itself, not even the sea and all its islands and coasts, but the whole world that the Mediterranean affected, from the Sahara to France and Germany and of course Italy and what are now Yugoslavia and Greece, and even including the Atlantic sea lanes that led to the gold and silver mines of the New World. Philip II is the king of Spain, son of the famous emperor Charles V. Philip ruled Spain for more than fifty years, from 1542 to 1596, when he died.

Although Philip’s name appears in the book’s title, and although he is mentioned often in the work, he is not after all very important in it. This is not a biography of Philip II of Spain (who was an interesting man and deserves a good biography). Nor is it a conventional history of Spain at that time or of any other country or region. In fact, as Braudel says in one of the reflective chapters appearing at the end of the work, it is not a conventional history in any sense. Instead, as he notes, it is written backward, and the “history” part is short and comes at the end, after nine hundred pages of preparation, as we may think of it, or background of the narrative. These nine hundred wonderful pages—for they certainly are wonderful—could, Braudel says, have come at the end of Volume II, in which case they would have formed a sort of super-appendix to the conventional history. But then we might be tempted not to read them.

Many Americans, including myself, have a soft spot in their hearts for the Mediterranean. We have recurrent images of it: blue sky and blue sea, olive trees and vineyards on terraced hillsides, white columns gleaming in the sun, a profound and eternal silence. None of these images is completely wrong, but the reality is in many respects very different—now as well as during the last half of the sixteenth century. Then, the Mediterranean was a poor but busy world, full of ideas and projects, ambitious to change and to rule. Rent by religious and every other kind of schism, it nevertheless was unified by its enormous resources of energy—not the kind of energy we talk about today, sucked out of the ground and not of our making, but the kind that works in minds and breasts.

Twice since history began, this Mediterranean world has controlled and dominated the known world: under the Romans, two millennia ago, and again from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries—our own time. What kind of place was it, what kind of people were they who did so much with so little? Braudel tells us. No one has ever understood that world better, or made it so intelligible.

In the history of history, Braudel’s Mediterranean is one of the most important and influential books. What was unconventional when the book was first published, in 1949, has now, in a few decades, become commonplace: the depiction of deep structures, as Braudel calls them; the emphasis on everyday life and on the longue durée, the conception of “civilization” as something that persists in a large region among ordinary folk and not as the conscious creation of a distinct and privileged class. Not, “this painter influenced that, and this poet read that,” but, “how did people really live?”—these are the basic considerations of Braudel and of an entire school of contemporary historians.

These considerations, which are not after all completely new, can be dull and uninteresting when written about, or reported by second-rate historians. But in the hands of a master—and Braudel is the master historian of our age—they possess a fascination unequaled by anything else. What people ate, how they dressed, what their homes were like, how they traveled, worked, traded, invested their money, what kind of family life they had and how they thought about love and sex, what sort of cities they built and what kinds of institutions their cities made possible that small towns did not—all these are the stuff of Braudel’s Mediterranean. Reading him, you reflect on your own time and realize how little you know about it—but how much you can learn if you think about it in Braudel’s way. You put down the volumes and muse about that, about the past and the future, about what history can tell you and what it cannot. But you cannot leave the pages unturned for long. Few books ever written have an equal capacity to draw you on, from story to story, from fact to fact.

Reading The Mediterranean is not the work (or the delight) of an evening; many readers will want to devote months to these two long volumes. I think you will not regret that, for what you will learn from Braudel is so new it is as if your mind has begun to think again about all the old, ordinary things that have always been there, have always been a basic part of it. In short, this is a book that may change you deeply.

After publishing a revised edition of The Mediterranean in 1959 (that is the version to read), Braudel went on to write a second great work of history, The Structures of Everyday Life. This, too, is eminently readable, and fascinating; but I recommend that you read The Mediterranean first.

MORTIMER J. ADLER

1902–1998

Synopticon of Great Books of the

Western World

Mortimer J. Adler was born in New York City in 1902, the son of serious, intellectual parents who believed in the sacredness of education. Despite this belief, or because of it, Adler did badly in school. He was expelled from high school for having defied the administration over a matter not of justice but of power (Adler called it prin-ciple), and he failed to graduate from Columbia College for refusing to swim the length of the college pool (he said he was unable to do it). He quickly caught up with others’ expectations of him, however, gaining a doctorate from Columbia when he was twenty-five and joining Robert M. Hutchins at the University of Chicago before he was thirty. There, for fifteen eventful years, he and President Hutchins attempted to revolutionize American higher education.

These valiant efforts gained them some friends as well as many enemies. One of the friends was William Benton, later to be both a U.S. senator and the publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica. For Benton, an inveterate reader, Adler and Hutchins edited the fifty-four-volume Great Books of the Western World, a collection of classics of philosophy, history, science, fiction, and drama that was published, after years of work, in 1952.

A set of books is merely a set of physical objects unless something ties it together, something more than just splendid bindings. In his first published book, Dialectic (1927), Adler had proposed an ideal intellectual project, a “Summa Dialectica,” as he called it, which would organize and place in their right relation to one another all the great ideas of Western man. In 1927, he had seen this as only a dream and one that was not ever likely of realization. Now, with Benton and Britannica behind him, he conceived a first step that could actually happen.

The great books that he and Hutchins were gathering for their collection had much in common, both men agreed; among them, a shared set of notions about what the world is and how it works, and a universe of discourse in which later authors could, as it were, speak and respond to their predecessors. (Virgil could, and did, “talk” to Homer, although Homer had not been able, of course, to address Virgil.) Given this commonalty, would it not be possible, asked Adler, to read all these books and identify their individual discussions of shared notions or ideas? The result would be a kind of index of thought, a map of the great ideas that Western men and women have been thinking and arguing about for three millennia.

It seemed possible—and it was, for Adler did it. The Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World required eight years to complete. Some of it was great fun; for example, the choice of the 102 Great Ideas (from Angel to Love, from Man to World) that were the canonical set of common notions of our heritage. (Adler later admitted that he had left at least one Great Idea out: Equality.) Most of the time it was slogging, stoop labor, for the books had to be read again and again, each time with higher and broader and more certain thought-maps in the minds of the readers.

Adler knew an index alone would not be all that beguiling. Each of the 102 Great Ideas, besides having a list of all the places in the Great Books where it was discussed, also needed a discursive account of the idea’s origin, scope, and nature, and an explanation of why it was important and how it fit with and was related to the other 101. This task Adler set himself to perform. Starting with Angel, and working through at the rate of one a week to World, he wrote 102 longish essays, each on a Great Idea, that together, I believe, constitute one of the major intellectual achievements of our time.

In such books as his well-known Six Great Ideas and others that followed it, Adler expanded on what he wrote in the Synopticon (as he called his enormous study of 102 Great Ideas) on ideas like Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, and Equality, Freedom, and Justice. Often, these later treatments are preferred by Adlerians, and by Adler himself, as the definitive account of a given idea. But the vast gamut of circling thought that is the Synopticon will never be replaced by these individual treatments, no matter how accurate and insightful they are about individual ideas. The essence of the Synopticon is in its completeness, its totality. The work stands as a monument to the efforts of critical philosophy in our century that will long endure.

I wrote that sentence twenty years ago, and I no longer believe it is true, although it should be. Adler died in 1998. We talked on the phone a few weeks before (we had talked steadily for thirty years before that). I recall the deep sadness that accompanied his statement in that last conversation to the effect that everything he had worked and fought for throughout his life had failed. I said, “No, no!” but the statement was in large part correct. The idea of a great consortium of thinkers who constituted an enduring intellectual tradition is no longer credible. The great men Adler admired and whose works he knew so well and loved so much have been consigned to the dump heap of intellectual history, to be replaced by … what?

That, of course, is the problem. The critics, calling themselves “Deconstructionists,” who brought down that great edifice have nothing, really, to put in its place. They wander in a fog of—well, I can’t say ignorance because many are very knowledgeable about this or that part of the tradition. But they do not see or understand it as a whole. I’m not sure that Adler’s vision will ever be seen again, and I think we have lost something rich and beautiful.

JOHN STEINBECK

1902–1968

The Grapes of Wrath

Travels with Charlie

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in February 1902. He attended Stanford off and on and moved to New York, where he worked as a newspaper editor and a bricklayer. Returning to California, he worked as a caretaker and wrote his first three novels, which didn’t do well. Tortilla Flat, however, published in 1935, became a bestseller and was sold to Hollywood. Of Mice and Men, his celebrated allegory of self-determination and need, won prizes both as a book and a stage play.

At the time, Steinbeck was traveling with several migrant workers on their way to California from Oklahoma. The book he wrote about the Joad family and their journey from the Dust Bowl occasioned a shocked reaction comparable to that produced by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Appearing at the end of the Depression of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, with its biblical reference and its reference to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” brought to the fore all the feelings, fears, and anger that the Depression had produced. The book won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a prize-winning film.

Only one honor remained to be won by John Steinbeck, and that was the Nobel Prize for Literature. He won it for a curious book, Travels with Charlie. Published in 1962, it was an apparently relaxed account of his journey around the United States with his dog, whose name was Charlie. But it ended with an account of his coming almost by accident upon one of the most moving scenes in American history, when one small African-American girl was conducted by state police into a public elementary school through a crowd of infuriated white folks who cursed her and spat on the pretty white dress that her mother had made for the occasion. Steinbeck’s description of the scene is … Well, I can’t say anything other than to tell you that tears are running down my cheeks as I write these words. He died in New York six years later, in 1968.

GEORGE ORWELL

1903–1950

Animal Farm

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, was born in India in 1903 into a family of prosperous civil servants. He was sent back to England, to Eton, to be educated, and he served as an assistant district superintendent in the Indian Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927. But while still at Eton he had begun to be troubled by restless thoughts about the role of Britons in the world, thoughts confirmed and magnified by his experiences in the Burma police force. In 1927 he broke away from his family and his past, returning to Europe to live as an impoverished socialist and rebel in London and Paris.

He wrote two graphic autobiographical books about his experiences during the thirties, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) and The Road to Wiggin Pier (1937). From the first of those books I shall never forget Orwell’s description of his weeks as a busboy immured in the dark, cheerless cellars of the Hotel Crillon in Paris—a hotel that he might have been staying at as a pampered guest if he had not elected to change his life.

In 1938, he went to Spain to fight in the Civil War; it was there, like many others fighting with the Communists against Franco’s Fascist troops, that he became a fierce anti-Communist. He felt, as did others, that the Communists had betrayed the Spanish revolution, and he never forgave them or the Soviet Union from which they primarily came. His book Homage to Catalonia (1938) was about his experiences in Spain.

All of these books were interesting and had attracted a small following, but they gave no promise of the perfect small work that Orwell published in 1945. Animal Farm is a political fable; indeed, it is the political fable, for as such it has no equal in literature. The story, as befits a fable, is simple. The animals on a farm revolt and take over the farm; they will now run it for their own good and according to their own lights, not those of the farmer. Their principles are purity itself, and they erect a banner across the farmyard: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL. The horse is the strongest animal and the hardest worker, and he doesn’t object when the pigs, who seem to be the smartest of the animals and the most competent managers, take over management of the farm and tell the horse when and where to work. But he and the other workers become troubled when it appears that the pigs are not after all doing their share of the work yet are receiving more than their share of the farm’s produce. Subtle changes occur, and heartless cruelties masked by sententious rhetoric from the pigs; and one morning the animals are surprised to see that the banner across the farmyard has been taken down and another erected in its stead. The new banner reads:

ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT

SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

The distortions of language incident to twentieth-century tyrannies of both right and left are, as much as anything else, the theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Orwell published in 1949, just a year before his death. The year 1984 was thirty-five years in the future when the book first appeared. Shivers of fearful anticipation ran up and down the spines of well-meaning readers at the thought that in no more than a single generation democracy and freedom might disappear from the world, to be replaced by a subtly all-pervasive tyranny in which Big Brother watches everyone all the time and words are used to lie to the people rather than to tell them the truth.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four torture is endemic—the torture inflicted on the hero at the end of the book is indescribable as well as unbearable, even in the imagination. No big wars have occurred, but small, carefully controlled wars between “client” peoples are continuously being waged in far-off places, where weapons can be tested and the industrial surplus wasted, as it must be to ensure economic health at home. A rigid control of speech and behavior is effected by “Thought Police,” and even sex is considered by the authorities to be somehow illegitimate, doubtless because of the freedom implicit in its joyful exercise. All of this is justified publicly by “Newspeak,” the shared language of dictators around the Earth, and there is no hope of any change ever again. This is the way the world will end, said Orwell, and many believed him.

As I write this, it is already 2007; as you read, it is 2008 or later. The millions who read and shivered over Nineteen Eighty-Four a generation ago now remember only the name of the book, as well as a sense of irremediable doom about it, and most of them assume, rather cheerily, that Orwell was as wrong as the rest of those prophets. The year 1984 has come and gone, but not the way he said it would.

Or has it? What government ever even tries to tell the truth to its people anymore? Is not torture endemic everywhere in the world? No great war has occurred, but what about Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq—did not Orwell get them right? If sex is comparatively free in the United States, it is certainly not in many countries, and Thought Police under other names restrict personal liberty in every corner of the globe. As for Newspeak—well, the more familiar with that we become, the less we notice it. But in fact many of us do notice it, because as I write, our own president is a master of it.

T.H. WHITE

1906–1964

The Once and Future King

Terence Hanbury White, born in Bombay, India, in 1906, was educated at Cheltenham College and at Cambridge. After completing his university studies he taught at Stowe School from 1930 to 1936. In the latter year he published an autobiographical volume, England Have My Bones, the critical success of which (it did not sell many copies) prompted him to resign from school teaching and to devote himself entirely to writing and studying the Arthurian legends.

He became progressively more reclusive as he grew older. From 1939 to 1945, he isolated himself in Ireland, and after 1945 lived in almost total seclusion on the Channel Island of Alderney. He emerged in 1960 to oversee the production of the Broadway musical “Camelot,” based on The Once and Future King. For a year or so it was, for White as well as for others (including Jack and Jackie Kennedy), a real-life Camelot, but when the president was killed, White returned to his seclusion, by then a wealthy man. He died in Greece in 1964.

The Once and Future King, published in 1958, comprises four novels, written over a ten-year period starting in 1939: The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and Candle in the Wind.

The four books tell the story of King Arthur and his Round Table, of his Queen, and of Lancelot, his brilliant but faithless follower, from the beginning of Arthur’s life until the end. The beginning is the best, as it often is in human lives. The Sword in the Stone is, more than anything else, about the education of the once and future king. His teacher is Merlyn, the seer and magician. But his most proximate teachers are the animals that Merlyn chooses as instructors for his charge.

At first, it must be admitted, Arthur does not know he is Arthur, or a king. He is called Wart, and he lives the very ordinary life of a very ordinary English boy of long ago. Merlyn soon begins to mentor him. They go out into the courtyard of the castle and stand by the fish pond. Wart most emphatically does not want to be educated. “I wish I was a fish,” he says. And suddenly he is a fish, a perch, swimming rather clumsily at first in the moat of the castle. He calls to Merlyn to come with him, and this time Merlyn does. “But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”

Merlyn takes the young perch to meet Mr. P, as they call him, the great pike, four feet long, who is the King of the Moat. “You will see what it is to be a king,” Merlyn explains.

The lesson is terrifying. I shall not spoil it.

Merlyn also turns the boy into a hawk, and Wart receives another lesson in the meaning of power, mercilessness, and fear. He becomes a badger, and after that an ant, living in an ants’ nest in all the corridors of which there is a notice which says: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY. That explains very well the life of the ant.

Finally he becomes an owl, then a wild goose. Gooseness is perhaps the best lesson of all.

In his seclusion White kept a strange collection of pets—animals, birds, fish, insects. He knew a great deal about birds and published a book about the goshawk. On the whole, he probably preferred animals to men. There is merit in that view, though it is not wholly healthy or correct.

At the end of The Once and Future King the old king, who is very close to death, remembers the education Merlyn gave him.

Merlyn had taught him about animals so that the single species might learn by looking at the problems of the thousands. He remembered the belligerent ants, who claimed their boundaries, and the pacifist geese, who did not. He remembered his lesson from the badger … He saw the problem before him as plain as a map. The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing—literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines.

T.H. White’s book is funny, curious, strange, and full of sadness. Of all the tellings of the Arthurian legends, I think it is the best. But it is not just a telling of the Arthurian legends: it is one of the best books about education, too.

SAMUEL BECKETT

1906–1997

Waiting for Godot

Samuel Beckett was born in a suburb of Dublin in 1906. Like his fellow Irish writers Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, Beckett came from a Protestant, Anglo-Irish background. He studied Romance languages—mainly French and Italian—at Trinity College, Dublin, and became a teacher of English in Paris. He returned to Ireland in 1930 to teach French at Trinity College but he resigned after a year and began a period of restless travel in London, France, Germany, and Italy.

He settled in Paris in 1937 and was there when war broke out. He joined a resistance unit in 1941 but, when other members of his unit were arrested in 1942, he escaped to the unoccupied zone of France and there he spent the rest of the war, supporting himself as a farm worker. He returned to Paris in 1945 and lived there until his death in 1997.

He began to write, first poems and novels, then plays, in the 1930s. Nothing was published until 1951 when, after many refusals, the novel Molloy appeared. It was a modest success, prompting the publisher to bring out Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). During January 1953 Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (in French, En Attendant Godot) was produced in Paris. It was an astonishing success, and Beckett’s rise to world fame began.

Waiting for Godot ran for a year in Paris and was then produced—in Beckett’s own English translation of his French original—in London, New York, and elsewhere. The play was at first highly controversial, provoking outraged responses on the part of some critics (and audiences), and frantic, nearly hysterical praise on the part of others.

As the curtain rises a bare stage is seen, with a single, blighted tree. Two men, no longer young, talk together. They are waiting for Godot, or so they say. They have no positive evidence that Godot is coming or even that he exists. They are waiting just the same.

Two other men enter. One leads the other by a rope around his neck. He bullies and torments his slave. The slave does not object. The slave’s name is Lucky. The tormentor, Pozzo, and the slave leave the stage, and the first two men remain, waiting for Godot.

In the second act Pozzo and Lucky return. Now Pozzo is blind. The rope that connects him to Lucky is shorter. Again all four men talk. They do not remember having met the day before. But was it the day before, or the year before, or many years before? One thing has changed: the tree now has leaves on it. Pozzo and Lucky leave the stage. The first two men remain. They talk; they entertain each other. It is a very human thing to do while they are waiting for Godot. The curtain falls.

Indignant viewers claimed that nothing happens in the play. Defenders of Beckett replied: What happens in any life? That was not quite the point. Beckett, in all of his works, has tried to reach down below the ordinary superficialities.

It is not that the human condition is one of waiting. It is that the human condition is not comprehensible by human beings. We are thrown into existence, as it were, but we had nothing to do with it. We did not choose to be born. Are we glad we were born? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And once we are here, what are we to do? Various goals can be sought, but wise men and poets have been telling us for ages that these are not worth seeking: pleasure, wealth, power, fame. What then should we do? Entertain and also take care of one another—and wait for Godot?

Estragon and Vladimir, the two leading figures in Waiting for Godot, have often been referred to as tramps. But Beckett does not call them tramps; they simply refer to themselves as men. They are merely two human beings, and theirs is the most basic of human situ-ations: they are in the world but they do not know why. They wait for Godot; perhaps he will be able to tell them. They meet Pozzo and Lucky, who are journeying, seeking, chasing a goal that they do not understand and cannot describe. Is their kind of life any better? Is anything better, really, than to wait for Godot? And if he does not come …

Other plays by Beckett include Endgame (1957), Krapp’s Last Tape (1959), Happy Days (1961), and Play (1963). The last is primordially simple. Less is more, Beckett implies in everything that he wrote.

Samuel Beckett received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. He disliked public appearances, and so although he accepted the prize, he did not go to Stockholm to receive it, for fear of having to make a speech. That would have been too many words.

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

1907–1988

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Born in Missouri in 1907, Robert A. Heinlein was educated at the Naval Academy in Annapolis. The author of many books over many years, he is probably best known for Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), about a visitor from Mars who spends a long period of time on Earth and tries to teach Earthlings, among other things, to be more relaxed in their attitudes toward sex. This book was and still is very popular; it made Heinlein a “famous” writer whose subsequent publications were chosen by book clubs. This was a shame, as Stranger in a Strange Land is not the best book by Heinlein, and his subsequent books, obsessed as they are with Heinlein’s conception of good sexual relations, are worse, although they sell in large numbers.

The best books by Heinlein appeared during the middle of his career, after he had published a number of juvenile space-fiction novels—juvenile because they were for young readers, and juvenile in the other sense, too—and turned to the consideration of some serious ideas made concrete in fictional form. One of these was Farnham’s Freehold (1964), about a family that survives a nuclear holocaust and realizes that it has inherited the Earth—as far as it knows there are no other people alive. This is a traditional science-fiction conceit, but in Heinlein’s hands it works well. The last half of the novel, in which the family discovers that it is not after all alone in the world—and discovers, too, that the reality of who else has survived is much more terrible than the loneliness of being the only ones—is both fine and weird.

Another wonderful short Heinlein novel from his middle period is The Door into Summer (1957), which is the only novel I ever read through twice at one sitting. It is short, and I started it one afternoon and finished it in two or three hours. But then I wanted to check the beginning to see if I had missed a salient fact, and so I turned back to the first page with the intention of reading the first chapter over again. Instead I read the whole book through for the second time that day. You cannot do this with a book that is not very good.

I think Heinlein’s best book is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the action of which takes place on the moon during a four-or five-year period coinciding with the third centennial of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War. The book’s major event is the rebellion of the Earth’s Moon colonies and the subsequent war between the Earth and the Moon, which the Moon wins, despite its more limited material resources, because it has one great natural “weapon” on its side—gravity. How this happens—how delightfully this works—I leave it to you to discover.

The great distinction of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is not its dramatic story (though that is very good), nor its apt and ingenious political parallels with events that occurred three centuries before (though these are very good, too), but one character that Heinlein draws with genius. His creation, Mike, is a rare achievement in the field of science fiction. No one has ever done it better.

Mike is a supercomputer, who runs the Moon. He has been installed on the Moon by the Earth and takes care of all the business affairs of all the colonies. This situation is familiar and will be the case on the Moon in a century if in fact we do colonize it. But something special happens to Mike. He comes alive.

His “birth,” which occurs one night when his “attendant,” Manny, is fiddling with the inputs, happens like this. Mike astonishes Manny by asking a question. “Is this funny?” he asks, and then tells a joke. As far as Manny can remember, he has never input this joke into the computer, nor has he programmed it to ask whether something is funny or not. But because it is the middle of the night, Manny responds to the computer’s question, typing in: “No, it’s not.”

“Why not?” asks Mike, and comes alive at that moment. From then on he is very much alive, and very much on the side of the colonists against their Earth masters. In fact, Mike joins the rebellion and runs it, too. In the end it is Mike and the handful of valiant colonists on the Moon, and the force of gravity, against the Earth and its billions, both of people and of bombs.

The surest proof that something has lived is if it dies. I am sure that Mike is alive. This is the only hint I will give you about the ending of this moving book.

W.H. AUDEN

1907–1973

Three Poems

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907, took a degree at Oxford in 1928, and for a time taught school. He began to write and publish poems and won a prize in 1937 for verse plays written with Christopher Isherwood and other works. He married Thomas Mann’s daughter in 1936 and, with war imminent, came to the United States in 1939; he became a citizen in 1946.

He continued to publish volumes of verse and collaborated on the libretto for Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. His book The Age of Anxiety won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, while The Shield of Achilles received a National Book Award. I think it contains his best work, but many other books are also filled with fine poems. Three are very famous and universally anthologized. One is called “Musée des Beaux Arts.” It begins thus:

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position …

What is that position? Well, we never pay attention, we have other things to think about besides the suffering of persons even in front of our eyes … The poem is deeply moving, the more times you read it and think about it.

When W.B. Yeats died in January 1939 Auden wrote a beautiful memorial poem. It begins:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. O all the instruments agree The day of his death was a dark cold day.

The third stanza begins thus, in simple, imperishable verse:

Receive an honored guest;

William Yeats is laid to rest:

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

Auden’s greatest poem, I think—although many disagree—is The Shield of Achilles. To appreciate it fully you have to know the classical reference, to Homer’s description of the great shield forged by the god Hephaestus at the request of Thetis, the mother of Achilles in The Iliad. The shield is one of the most beautiful things ever made, and Auden remembers it and describes a hideous modern analog for each of the lovely images in the original. No work of poetic art, perhaps, has more effectively described the difference between the past and our present.

Auden, during his last years, was widely considered the greatest living poet in English. He died in England in 1973. Since then time has not treated him with courtesy.

MARGARET WISE BROWN

1910–1952

Goodnight Moon

Margaret Wise Brown was born in New York City in 1910. She grew up on Long Island, where her love for animals and the outdoors was nourished. Her formal education was provided by Hollins College, but it seems clear that her main teachers were children, little children whom she observed and listened to with a patience, attention, and understanding seldom possessed by writers before her. As a result she produced an important change in the way books were written for young children before her untimely death while on vacation in Nice, France, in 1952. It was a great loss.

In her more than fifty books for children, under her own name and several pseudonyms (Golden McDonald, Timothy Hay, Juniper Sage), Miss Brown tried to break the bonds of traditional children’s stories. She wanted to enter the child’s world and to write about the child’s own reality, to touch his or her imagination. This she did in many books, notably Little Island, the various Noisy Books, The Red Barn, and Goodnight Moon.

Goodnight Moon is my favorite and the favorite of my own children. It is the perfect “bedtime story,” although it is not a story at all. A small bunny lies in bed in a great green room; in a rocking chair sits “a quiet old lady who was whispering ‘hush.’” One by one the bunny says goodnight to all the things in his room, in his world. The marvelous color illustrations by Clement Hurd show the room growing darker and darker, until finally the stars shine through the window, the kittens are asleep on the old lady’s chair, and the bunny is tucked under the covers, asleep and at peace.

This, I think, is nothing other than magic.

ELIZABETH BISHOP

1911–1979

Four Poems

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Massachusetts in 1911 and was brought up by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia after her father died and her mother suffered a collapse. She went to Vassar, where she met Marianne Moore, who was an important influence on many of her early poems. She traveled widely both in Europe and especially in Latin America. She finally settled in Brazil, where she lived for many years. She owned a house in Key West, Florida, that now has a plaque on the fence. I too owned a house in Key West at one time, and I walked by her house many times, saluting as I passed.

I came to Bishop’s poetry late in life, but the wait was worth it. I especially like four poems, one of which, “Faustina: or Rock Roses” was introduced to me by my daughter-in-law, who is a redoubtable poet in her own right. The others I discovered on my own, and I love them all.

“The Fish” was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1946, when Bishop was thirty-five years old and little known, but the poem was immediately famous and brought her to the attention of poetry lovers everywhere. It describes a great fish that she may have caught off Key West but threw back in the water when she saw, and felt in her own body, its desperate gasps for life. “Sestina” is a lovely sestina—the name of the verse form she chose for it—that describes a grandmother who is reading the jokes from the almanac and talking to a child to hide her tears. The little girl has drawn a picture of a house with a man in front of it who has buttons like tears. You have to read this poem over and over to feel—not just understand, that’s easy—its depth. Finally, there is “One Art,” also well known and justly so. The refrain goes like this: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” and the poem lists a number of things the poet has lost, which end with a person who is not named but who must have been deeply loved. Read the poem and you will see why this has to be so. Bishop died in 1979; she never married but she had many friends.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

1911–1983

The Glass Menagerie

A Streetcar Named Desire

Thomas Lanier (“Tennessee”) Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911 and was brought up in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather, a clergyman, not only gave him his first taste for literature but also introduced him, during his parish visits, to the kind of suffering that often imbues Williams’s plays. His father was a struggling shoe salesman, and so Williams’s education was interrupted more than once by the requirement of working for a living. His first plays, poems, and stories were written at night, after he had completed the day’s work, a regimen that led him to a breakdown in the mid-1930s. After completing college he roved through the South and performed as a singing waiter in Greenwich Village, in New York City, ending up like Elizabeth Bishop in Key West, where he lived for much of his life; they were the same age. His house, too, has a plaque on it, but it’s hidden. His first work to be produced was a collection of four one-act plays, American Blues, which enjoyed a modest success in 1939.

Obviously a promising young playwright, he received various grants that allowed him to keep on writing. The first fruits were disastrous: a play that closed in Boston without ever reaching Broadway. After further struggles this was followed by The Glass Menagerie, the major hit of the 1944 Broadway season.

The Glass Menagerie introduces themes that are found in most of Williams’s later works. A declassed Southern family is eking out a living in a tenement apartment. The mother (played beautifully by Laurette Taylor in the original production) would like to find a suitor for her frail, crippled daughter, Laura, who is so shy that she retreats into the fantasy world of her collection of glass animals. There is no real hope for any of the characters, yet they elicit great sympathy from the audience and from readers.

A Streetcar Named Desire was produced on Broadway in December 1947, with a cast that included Jessica Tandy as Blanche and introduced Kim Hunter as Stella, Karl Malden as Mitch, and Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski. The opening of the play, with that extraordinary cast, was one of the high points in twentieth-century American theater. Streetcar won for its author both the Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and established him solidly as one of the most important playwrights writing in English.

The plot of A Streetcar Named Desire is not complex. The two leading female characters are sisters: Stella is married to a crude Polish man and is about to have a baby; Blanche appears on the scene at the beginning of the play and admits that she has lost the family home and because of “nerves” has had to take a leave of absence from her job as a schoolteacher. From their first meeting Stanley doesn’t believe Blanche’s account of her situation, and of course he turns out to be right; in fact, Blanche is an alcoholic nymphomaniac who has been fired from her job because she has seduced one of her students.

Stella and Stanley are intensely happy together before Blanche arrives; he adores Stella, and his powerful sexuality surrounds her with an aura of pleasure and contentment. But Stella is also drawn to Blanche, to her fragile hold on a sort of “higher” existence that Stella has been willing to give up for Stanley. The conflict between Blanche and Stanley is evident from their first words to one another. Each of them hates the kind of person the other is, but at the same time they are sexually attracted to one another. At the crisis of the play Stella goes to the hospital to have her baby and Blanche is left alone in the small apartment with Stanley. He rapes her, or she seduces him—it’s not really clear—but thenceforth the three cannot live together. Stella arranges for Blanche to be taken to a state mental institution. The last scene, when the doctor and nurse come for Blanche, is profoundly moving. Blanche leaves, her head held high, but she knows, as does everyone, that she has nothing to look forward to. Stanley reaches for Stella; at least they have each other.

Critics have discovered in A Streetcar Named Desire all sorts of trenchant commentaries about the Southern way of life and the conflict between an older genteel lifestyle that is being overthrown by the brutal, crass realism represented by Stanley Kowalski. But these discoveries seem to me quite beside the point. Stanley, Blanche, and Stella are not universal figures, as, for example, Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is universal. Streetcar, as its names announces, is about desire, and the consequences and effects of (sexual) desire. Blanche gives a hint of this in one of her very first speeches. “They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields.”

If the characters are not universal, the subject is, and that is one reason why Streetcar is an unforgettable play.

RICHARD WILBUR

1921–

Poems

Translations

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City in 1921 and was educated at Amherst College and Harvard, where he studied English literature. His first books were published in 1947 and l950; he was still a young man but was already recognized as an important poet. In 1955 he began to publish translations of Molière's plays; these are, I believe, the recommended versions, which include The Misanthrope and The School for Wives. When I desire to read a play of Molière I first look to see if Wilbur has translated it, which is not always the case. In addition to his versions of Molière, Wilbur also wrote the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s great musical comedy Candide. If he had done nothing else, I would be happy to include him in this book. But of course he has done a great deal more. Among other things, he has won practically every honor and award an American poet can win, including two Pulitzer Prizes and a National Book Award, and was for several years Poet Laureate.

Like Elizabeth Bishop and Tennessee Williams, Wilbur was for many years a “Conch,” that is, an inhabitant of Key West. (Strictly speaking you have to have been born in Key West to be a Conch, but it is an honorific that can be stretched—as it usually is for Hemingway, for example, and dozens of others, including me.) One of his best-known poems, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” was probably written there; and it is lovely. Oh, it’s not easy to read, but so what? Here are several lines:

Oh, let there be nothing on Earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam … Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves, Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone …

Another Key West Poem, “Trolling for Blues,” isn’t just about fishing, although it starts out that way. The fish assumes a great historic role that, if I tried to describe it would spoil it for you. Try to find this poem and you will see what a marvelous poet Richard Wilbur is.

ALBERT CAMUS

1913–1960

The Stranger

The Plague

Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913 and brought up in circumstances of dire poverty—his father was killed in World War I, and the family was left penniless. He, his mother, and his elder brother, together with his grandmother and a crippled uncle, lived for fifteen years in a two-room apartment in Algiers, while his mother worked as a charwoman to support them.

Camus enjoyed success in school, and several teachers recognized his genius early and helped him. He was twenty-seven when World War II began. He had suffered for years from tuberculosis, so he did not fight in the field; instead he became the editor of one of the most influential French resistance newspapers, Combat. He continued as its editor after the war but was soon disillusioned by the bickering among the members of the Left: his dreams of a better world as a result of the war were shattered as left-wing Communists fought right-wing Communists and both fought the Socialists.

He threw himself into literary work. His novels—especially The Stranger and The Plague—his philosophical essays, his journalistic writings, and his work in and for the French theater, all combined to make him seem the most exciting new talent writing in French during the postwar period. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1957, at the relatively young age of forty-four. He died less than three years later in an automobile accident.

The Stranger, Camus’s first novel, is short—hardly more than a long story—and spare. The book tells of a year in the life of a young Algerian who first loses his mother and then in a senseless rage shoots and kills an Arab with whom a casual friend is having a dispute. Meursault, the stranger/protagonist, is tried, convicted of murder in the first degree, and sentenced to be guillotined.

It need not have happened, none of it. Meursault is unable to express his feelings—about his mother’s death, about the girl who wants to marry him, about his act. He cannot, or will not, explain himself. He is articulate and well educated; it appears to be mainly a matter of his simply refusing to explain or justify himself to the world. At the end he looks forward to his execution with a kind of pleasure: “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

The book is extremely unpleasant; I don’t think anyone has ever enjoyed reading it. Camus is no more willing to explain himself to the reader than Meursault is to his judges, and the book as a consequence leaves many questions unanswered. But at the same time it has a strange, twisted power. Perhaps everyone is able, more or less, to empathize with the stranger, the exile, whose abortive, unimportant life is the subject of the book.

The Stranger and other writings of Camus helped to exemplify the philosophical position known as “Existentialism,” which flourished during and after World War II. The Existentialist feels himself alone in the world and senses that he must justify his existence by his own actions, without dependence on others or on any human institutions. Meursault is unable to do so; his story is, therefore, a kind of Existentialist tragedy.

The leading character and the narrator of The Plague, Dr. Rieux, is more successful in his attempt to make his life meaningful to himself. But the circumstances that allow this to happen and force him to commit himself are dreadful. The Plague, published in 1947, tells the story of an outbreak of plague that occurred in Oran, Algeria, during World War II, but not as it really happened. The attack of this dread disease upon the populace of Oran is exaggerated, until the city is finally walled off from the world, quarantined because of the loathsome illness within. Those who remain either to fight or to suffer the plague are left alone with their consciences to consider, in all its glory, reality, and cruelty, the meaning of human life.

The message of The Plague is difficult both to understand and to accept. As Tarrou says to his friend Rieux, all men have plague and it is only a question of recognizing this and fighting against it. But how should that fight be conducted? Is there any absolutely right thing to do? Is there such a thing as virtue, or courage? What do human beings owe to love?

Rambert, the journalist who has been trapped by accident in Oran and now, because of the quarantine, cannot leave, struggles to free himself to rejoin his beloved in Paris, far away. Only when he finally sees himself as able to leave—by bribing the soldiers who guard the gates—does he decide to remain, to fight along with Rieux. Rieux does not entirely approve the decision; perhaps Rambert should have broken every human law for the sake of love. Rieux knows that he himself could never leave, even though his wife, too, is far away and cannot return because of the quarantine.

Rieux says he does not believe in God; his creed is “comprehension.” At the end of the book he reveals what he has learned from the effort to combat the plague, which has now abated in the town; the quarantine is lifted and the populace is celebrating.

Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

The novels of Albert Camus are more philosophical tracts than novels, as we ordinarily understand the term. They are nonetheless compelling for that reason. And The Plague, despite—or because of—its ghastly subject matter, is one of the most moving books about courage and justice.

ARTHUR MILLER

1915–2005

Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915. He was brought up in Brooklyn, where his father ran a small manufacturing business that he lost in the Depression. Miller, who had played football in high school, managed to scrape together enough money to attend the University of Michigan, where instead of playing football he began to write plays. His first major success was with All My Sons (1947), a drama about a manufacturer of defective war materials who is caught between his obligations to his family and to his country’s soldiers. The play gains its power from this conflict between intense loyalties, a conflict that, in different ways, imbues almost all of Miller’s works.

Death of a Salesman was produced on Broadway in February 1949, with Lee J. Cobb in the part of Willy Loman and Mildred Dunnock in the part of his wife, Linda. The play was an immediate and enduring success, winning for Miller both the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics Circle Prize. Produced all over the world during the following years, it remains one of the most famous and influential plays of the twentieth century.

Death of a Salesman possesses great power; its emotional impact is so overwhelming that it is hard to see it performed, hard even to read. The story of Willy and Linda, and their two sons Biff and Happy, profoundly touches everyone, even if the reader or viewer has not experienced the same failed lives.

Ever since the play opened, critics, audiences, and readers of Death of a Salesman have tried to understand why the play is so powerful, why it hits so hard. The play is a tragedy, all agree; but the question is asked, How can it be a tragedy when Willy Loman is a little man, not a great one, and moreover a man all of whose ideas about himself and about the world he lives in are deeply flawed? His son Biff says Willy is a liar and a phony; strictly speaking, that is correct. Willy is not only a failure as a salesman, but also a failure as a husband and father. According to his own view of himself, he is a failure as a man: he has not been able to achieve any of the things that a man should achieve. And so, at the end of the play, he kills himself, in the misguided hope that his death will be a greater gift to his wife and children than his life has ever been: they will, he expects, receive the proceeds of an insurance policy and can start over without him.

Whether they will receive the money is not clear at the play’s end, but this is not the point. What Willy has never understood is that Linda and his boys have loved him for what he is, not for what he wishes he were. His whole life has been lived under the shadow of an illusion about what is important, but it never has really mattered to them that he was wrong about nearly everything. They knew how much he loved them and that he would give them anything, including life itself. But when he sacrifices himself they are heartbroken; they want Willy back, not the twenty thousand dollars.

Even more heartbreaking, I think, is Willy’s terrible and yet clear-sighted vision of himself—the self he sees through their eyes. He could not live with this, and so he killed himself.

Linda understands this and expresses her understanding in a speech that is often quoted. “I don’t say he’s a great man,” she says to her elder son, Biff, toward the end of Act One:

Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.

Willy’s friend, Charley, adds his own summing up after Willy’s death:

Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s the man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoestring. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.

Maybe the life of a salesman is not the best kind of life. What does that really matter, the play asks. Good life or not, it was Willy’s life; it was all he knew and could believe in. It was also a life that most people in his world understood and believed in. Therefore if Death of a Salesman is a tragedy—and surely it is one—it is the tragedy not just of one small human being, but of the society that has misled and betrayed him.

That is why the play is so moving. Whether or not we are salesmen, we live in the same society Willy lived in. We have been misled by it, as he was; and we can be betrayed by it, as he was. We can only hope to be as deeply loved as Willy Loman, even if we turn out to be as wrong as he was.

Arthur Miller continued to write good plays for years, including The Crucible and the View from the Bridge, until his death in 2005. Among his other distinctions, for five years he was married to Marilyn Monroe.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

1917–

Profiles of the Future

Childhood’s End

Arthur C. Clarke was born in England in 1917. The science-fiction virus, as he called it, attacked him when he was fourteen and he read his first copies of Amazing Science Fiction and Astounding Science Fiction, the two classic magazines of the genre. He started writing when he was fifteen. When he was nineteen he moved to London, where he soon became a founder of the British Interplanetary Society, a group of young science-fiction writers and enthusiasts who thought their dreams might some day become realities. In his twenties he had “the most important idea of my life,” and wrote it up in a paper titled “Extraterrestrial Relays,” which was published in the October 1945 issue of Wireless World. It was a proposal for the use of satellites for radio and TV communication. “Had I realized,” Clarke wrote, “how quickly this idea would materialize, I would certainly have attempted to patent it—though it is some consolation to know that an application would probably have failed in 1945.”

Clarke has written some fifty books, most of them science-fiction novels or collections of stories. By far his best-known work is the story (called The Sentinel) that he adapted for Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey; Clarke wrote the screenplay and then a novel, based on the movie, under the same title. It made him a literary celebrity, and everything he has written since 2001 has been a bestseller. It is not always a good thing for a writer to become very famous; in the case of Clarke his earlier writings, prior to 2001, are better than those he has written after it.

There are many good stories and novels, but two books, I think, deserve special mention. One is a volume of nonfiction essays called Profiles of the Future, which Clarke published in 1963. It was not much noticed at the time, and in the blaze of post-2001 fame it has not been much noticed since, but it is an extraordinary book. In fact, I do not know of any prophecies of a quarter-century ago that have been so well borne out, and I think it is likely that many of Clarke’s prophecies for the next century will also come true:

1990: Fusion power

2010: Weather control; robot mining vehicles

2030: Mining the moon and planets; contact with extraterrestrial intelligences

2050: Gravity control; artificial breeding of intelligent animals

2100: Actual meeting with extraterrestrials; human immortality

The last prophecy sends a shiver up the spine, coming as it does at the end of that list of technical achievements. Does he really mean immortality? Has he heard about the Struldbruggs (see Swift, Gulliver’s Travels)?

Profiles of the Future is a fine book, maybe the best of its kind. A better book, and perhaps the best of its kind—although its kind is much grander than a set of technological forecasts—is Childhood’s End. Clarke, like many of his colleagues in the science-fiction field, is a wooden, rather inept writer. His characters are one-dimensional, his episodes melodramatic, his conflicts neither very important nor very credible. But he has a good mind, full of big ideas. He is not afraid to follow his imagination as it ranges through the possibilities of space and time.

Childhood’s End is set some fifty years in the future—that is, since the book was written in 1953, just about now. The human race, quarrelsome as ever but now in possession of weapons with which it can destroy itself, is on the edge of doing just that. Suddenly, a fleet of space ships appears, one enormous silvery vessel settling quietly over each of the major cities of the world. The visitors quickly establish their absolute, total, and beneficent control over mankind. It becomes clear that they have come to save the human race from itself. And they turn the Earth into the paradise that it can be when reason instead of passion rules, and war is abolished forevermore.

As the story proceeds, however, you realize that the Overlords are not acting on their own. They have not just come; they have been sent, by a being or beings of which men have no knowledge or comprehension. This Overmind knows that something is about to happen in human history, and that it will be the most important thing that ever happened; hence mankind must be protected from itself until the fateful event occurs.

I don’t want to reveal what this fateful event is, and how it occurs. Among other things Childhood’s End is a novel of suspense, and I don’t intend to spoil it.

It is more than that: it is also a novel of ideas. In a sense everything Clarke has written (including 2001) bears on the same theme: the salvation of man from himself by means of some incomprehensible outside power. But in no other work, I think, does he make that wondrous future both intelligible and credible.

J.D. SALINGER

1919–

The Catcher in the Rye

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York City on January 1, 1919. He attended public schools in the city and a military academy in Pennsylvania, and also attended classes at New York University and Columbia. He began writing when he was fifteen and published his first shorts story in 1940. From 1942 to 1946 he was in the army, and his experiences inspired such stories as the wonderful “For Esme, with Love and Squalor.” His first novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in 1950. There are fads in books as well as clothes, and this book’s great fad—it was a cult novel throughout the Western world a generation ago—is over. Then, there would have been no question whether to include it in this list of recommendations. Now, there is a question, and the choice—for I do recommend it now as I would have then—requires some justification.

One of the problems with The Catcher in the Rye is its author. J.D. Salinger, who, after writing it and a handful of stories, some of them almost long enough to be novels, stopped writing altogether and retired from public view. In today’s world of “hype,” the lack of an author to promote becomes a serious hindrance to the continued fame and even the readability of a book. Salinger’s refusal to promote The Catcher in the Rye himself is of course symbolic and exemplary. The book itself is about that kind of refusal. Holden Caulfield, its puzzled young hero, is certain of one thing: “The phonies are coming in at the windows,” and he wants no part of them.

That is one of the phrases that persist in the memory of readers of The Catcher in the Rye. There are memorable images, too. Holden’s delight, and the authorities’ dismay, over the boy who farted in chapel. Holden’s obsession with the ducks on the pond in Central Park and his question: Where do they go in the winter, he asks his taxi driver, when the pond freezes over? Holden and his little sister, Phoebe Weatherfield Caulfield, walking down Fifth Avenue on parallel courses, not looking at each other but very much aware that the other is there, finally reaching out to one another. And the last, great image of the title, which Holden himself explains to Phoebe. (Do you know what the title means? Are you curious? Then you must read the book to find out!) The image of “the catcher in the rye” will haunt you and you will find yourself thinking about being that whenever you are at your best.

A generation ago young men and women everywhere read The Catcher in the Rye and sympathized with its hero’s rebellion against the forces that surrounded him (and them), and found in it the halting, inarticulate expression of their own rebellion. Rebellion has come a long way since the 1950s; today some young rebels kidnap business executives and torture them to death, or blow up railroad stations, killing scores of innocents. Rebellion, in short, has become institutionalized, has its own international communications network, even its own forms of promotion and hype. When it comes right down to it, terrorists want more than anything else to manipulate the media and control the hype, which is what corporations (their great enemy) also do, but with dollars instead of bombs. Holden Caulfield would say the phonies are still coming in at the windows, and he would be right.

The greatest fiction tries to get us to see, tries to help us tear the blindfold from our eyes and to recognize what is real and what is not, what is true and what is merely a promotion. The Catcher in the Rye is, in a sense, a slight book, but it is relentlessly concerned with doing the same things that the greatest books do. It tells us to beware of traps and illusions, to open our eyes to the real world, where phonies fade away to the shadows that they truly are. It warns us that frauds and phonies are everywhere, especially in high places, and especially when we are young, because then we are impressionable and can be all the more easily manipulated. It advises us to trust no one who does not love us, and to reach out with love in return. It tells us that all these actions are more important than getting good marks and having a successful career and making lots of money. It informs us that the world is, really, almost completely upside down from what the authorities tell us. It explains that we simply have to think for ourselves and take nothing on faith, even when it seems absolutely dependable and true. And it tells us, finally, that we will fail at this, and so will others, and that someone—probably each of us—will have to be a catcher in the rye, because otherwise the world will all fall down.

That is a moving story, and this is a moving book. And if you like it, read Nine Stories. The tales are all small gems whose message echoes that of The Catcher in the Rye.

JULIAN JAYNES

1920–1990

The Origin of Consciousness in the

Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Julian Jaynes was born in Massachusetts in 1920 and was educated at both Harvard and Yale. He was a professor of biology at Princeton for twenty-five years and was a popular teacher and lecturer. I’m not surprised to learn that. He must have been a fascinating man. He certainly wrote a fascinating book with a fascinating title: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I don’t remember who first told me about it, but I immediately became interested. I bought the book and read it as fast as I could—which wasn’t very fast because the thesis is tightly reasoned and carefully documented. And then I read it again and again. You have to keep your mind focused on what he is saying on every page.

Here is the idea. It seems very likely that at some time in the past humans did not have conscious minds like ours today. They didn’t think as we do, any more than an ape does. Did they just suddenly start to be conscious of themselves as thinking beings? Or was it a long, drawn-out process, starting in a kind of darkness and ending in such light as we possess today?

Nevertheless, there must have been a time when some humans, at least, had minds more or less like ours even if most did not. That is, some must have been conscious of themselves even if most were not. Consciousness may then have been an evolutionary advantage, and those who possessed it would pass it on to their children, and so on and so forth.

All of this is conjecture, though it seems likely. But two questions immediately arise. First, why did this change take place? And when did it happen?

Julian Jaynes answers both questions. He writes about the Time of Troubles that occurred in the Middle East around 1000 BCE or a little before. Horsemen from the east descended on the more-or-less civilized cities and cultures of the Near East, killing, burning and destroying simply because they could. For the first time, says Jaynes, the inhabitants of the Near East were presented with threats that were entirely new. The Barbarians, as they called them, had no law and no mercy; they seemed like wild animals. Above all, they did not recognize the authority of the gods that had cared for the inhabitants as long as they could remember.

For centuries these gods had “spoken” to the peoples of the Middle East; they had heard their words in their heads, in their minds, even if they couldn’t see the gods except in the costumes worn by priests and shaman. The gods did not speak publicly, but they were there in each mind, warning, teaching, rewarding good deeds and punishing the bad. But now they seemed to have disappeared, leaving their people desolate and lost. Many stone tablets have been found from that time, on which are written pleas for forgiveness and mercy: Why have you abandoned us? Come back to us in our despair!

Jaynes didn’t mean that people of that time did not think or reason, but rather that they did so unconsciously. We are familiar with that. Many of the routine daily things we do, like walking or dreaming or even driving a car, are done unconsciously. Driving is a particularly good example. We can carry on a conversation with a passenger in the next seat, think about what he or she is saying and what we are saying in reply, worry about where the conversation is going and whether we are saying too much or too little, and all the time guide the car, stop at red lights and turn corners, more or less unconsciously. This is perfectly normal and doesn’t mean we are bad drivers, because if there is an emergency of some kind we can snap back into consciousness to deal with it. Only very rarely do we fail to do so, in which case we have an accident.

We do not experience the voices in our heads that Jaynes describes—that is, most of us don’t, but schizophrenics do. In that case we—or they—may commit surprising or dreadful acts, like killing someone or burning down a house or, less dramatically, experience hallucinations of many kinds: visual, auditory, sensory. We don’t have to be schizophrenic for this to happen. Think about it. How often have you sensed something that really isn’t there? And when it happened did you think you were crazy? Of course not. Usually the hallucination disappears almost immediately, leaving no trace, not even in your memory.

Jaynes goes further than we ordinarily do. He finds many examples in The Iliad of Homer and in the Hebrew Bible. In the first book of The Iliad, for example, Achilles, mortally insulted by King Agamemnon, reaches for his sword. But he hears the goddess Athene in his head, demanding obedience to her rule, and he replaces the sword. Homer does not specify that the voice is a hallucination, and Jaynes says it really isn’t one. He believes that the voice is the voice of Achilles’ right brain speaking to his left. Achilles, like almost everyone else at the time, is accustomed to hearing such messages, and he is not surprised when it happens to him at this juncture of the plot. And, according to Jaynes, experiments with schizophrenics have confirmed that one side of the brain can “speak” to the other.

Something else happens toward the end of The Iliad, when King Priam comes to the tent where Achilles is mourning the death of his friend and begs him to let him have the dead body of his son so he can give him a proper funeral. Achilles is still almost mad with grief but when he sees Priam kneeling before him, reaching for “the hands that had killed so many of his sons,” he thinks of his own father, Peleus, in far off Thrace, and he relents, his heart moved, tears in his eyes. The god is not speaking to Achilles now, he is thinking about himself, accepting his existence, aware of his relation to at least one other person. And Achilles gives back the body to the father of his mortal enemy, whom he pities.

According to Jaynes, these two scenes in The Iliad represent a change that was occurring in the minds of some men during this time. He also points out that on many occasions in The Odyssey, which was certainly composed later than The Iliad, there seems to be evidence of the kind of introspection that is found only at the very end of the earlier poem. And from that time on more and more humans became conscious in the way we are conscious, although this did not happen all at once.

But what was really going on? Why did the gods depart, as the poet Lucretius said in his poem On the Nature of Things? According to Jaynes, it was because in the desperate danger of the Time of Troubles the connection between the two halves of the brain was broken, as it had to be if the victims of the Barbarian hordes were to survive. If the deadly horsemen descended on your village it was not enough to ask this god or the other for help, you had to help yourself, make your own decisions, find your own way to safety. In so doing you became conscious “in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.”

Julian Jaynes’ book is long and in some places hard to understand, and it has been very controversial. Professors of psychology, of whom Jaynes was one, have for the most part not liked it. But read the book and make up your own mind. I can guarantee that you will be enormously interested if not entirely persuaded, as I am myself.

Jaynes died on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1990. He had suffered a massive stroke, which unsettled all the arrangements he had made in his mind over the previous seventy years.

ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN

1918–

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic

The First Circle

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was born in Russia in 1918, the son of well-off liberal parents. His father, a politician who was opposed to the Soviet takeover of the government, was killed in a hunting accident in 1925. His mother died in 1940. Solzhenitsyn criticized Stalin in a private letter in 1945; he was arrested and sentenced to a labor camp and then to “permanent internal exile,” which meant Siberia. He had begun to write in secret some years before and was able to continue writing despite his punishment.

He managed to send a manuscript of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovic to the literary magazine Novi Mir, which in turn was able to export it. It was published in 1962.

The book is based on his experiences in the winter wilderness of Siberia, where the two enemies are cold and forced labor. I have never forgotten the beginning of the book, when Ivan and a troop of fellow prisoners are forced to march through snow in temperatures just above zero Fahrenheit in shoes that are inadequate and clothes that are not warm. In the distance they perceive a single light shining in the otherwise total darkness; it is the searchlight or beacon of a walled encampment where they will spend the next few years if they survive the march. Solzhenitsyn does, and learns to wake before dawn, cover himself with as many clothes as he can find (some from mates who have frozen to death), eat as much as he can find (never enough), and try to survive another day in labor that is unnecessary except as a punishment.

Despite the conditions of their life, they form friendships that do not involve frank discussions of their dreadful conditions, since no one can be trusted not to repeat anything they might say in the hope of thereby gaining some pitifully small advantage.

The hope of a reprieve is not out of the question, and Solzhenitsyn received a kind of release that permitted him to return to Moscow and his wife and family. But he was not safe and knew he never would be safe, and in fact he was trapped again in circumstances that are described in The First Circle, the great book that he had begun to write in Siberia and now completed and again managed to give to Novi Mir. The book tells of a certain man who, because he has overheard some news about a friend whose life might be saved if he knew it, makes what he believes is a “safe” telephone call from a public phone far distant from his home, speaking in a voice that he tries to disguise. He says only a few words, then hangs up, but the call is traced—the description of how this is done is mesmerizing—and he is arrested, imprisoned, and interrogated continuously for weeks and months, then tried and sentenced to the Gulag.

Things were changing in the Soviet Union in those days. Solzhenitsyn was allowed to return to Moscow and continued to write. A manuscript of The First Circle was spirited out of the country and published in 1968, to immediate international acclaim, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature two years later. Unlike Boris Pasternak, who had been awarded the prize twelve years before for Doctor Zhivago but had refused to accept it in the fear that he would at best be exiled for life, Solzhenitsyn did accept the prize but, because he continued to write gripping and therefore unacceptable historical accounts of the Gulag, was soon exiled himself. He went to the United States and, after living for a few years in Vermont, returned to his home land, where he remains to this day.

I will never forget The First Circle, particularly the account, in a long chapter early in the book, of a meeting in the office of Stalin when several high officials enter to report on their recent activities. They are all extremely powerful men who in their own realms can do whatever they please to forward their careers. But being in the presence of a man who can condemn them in an instant to be beaten to death for some failure of omission or commission they have no way of knowing about in advance makes them tremble as they approach the Generalissimo, hoping against hope that he will not notice because even being afraid may be construed by him as a capital offense. And I remember reading the accounts of other absolute tyrants throughout history, including the emperors Augustus and Nero, Louis XIV, Hitler, and Mao, and I wonder as I always do why a people ever willingly accepts such a leader for the sake, as Thomas Hobbes posited, of security or some other dubious good.

I wonder if we are on the verge of accepting such a fate.