AdamSmith

...John Pistole, the head of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), said on Thursday that the bomb did not detonate because Abdulmutallab had been wearing the same underwear for more than two weeks. "He had it with him for over two weeks," Mr Pistole said at the Aspen Security Forum. Asked by his interviewer whether the bomb's fuse had become "damp" from two weeks of wear, Mr Pistole said: "Let's say it was degraded. We're getting kind of personal now."... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/10989843/Underwear-bomber-plot-failed-because-he-wore-same-pants-for-two-weeks.html

Bait & switch!

And the beat goes on. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/24/us-terrorism-watchlist-work-no-fly-list

INTERVIEWER Has the decision to be a critic . . . or it’s not really a decision, I suppose. BLOOM It’s not a decision, it’s an infliction. INTERVIEWER Has the vocation of criticism been a happy one? BLOOM I don’t think of it in those terms. INTERVIEWER Satisfying? BLOOM I don’t think of it in those terms. INTERVIEWER Inevitable only? BLOOM People who don’t like me would say so. Denis Donoghue, in his review of Rain the Sacred Truths, described me as the Satan of literary criticism. That I take as an involuntary compliment. Perhaps indeed it was a voluntary compliment. In any case, I’m delighted to accept that. I’m delighted to believe that I am by merit raised to that bad eminence. INTERVIEWER Are there personal costs to being the Satan of literary criticism? BLOOM I can’t imagine what they would be. All of us are, as Mr. Stevens said, “condemned to be that inescapable animal, ourselves.” Or as an even greater figure, Sir John Falstaff, said, “ ’Tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation.” I would much rather be regarded, of course, as the Falstaff of literary criticism than as the Satan of literary criticism. Much as I love my Uncle Satan, I love my Uncle Falstaff even more. He’s much wittier than Satan. He’s wiser than Satan. But then, Shakespeare’s an even better poet than Milton.

INTERVIEWER I’ve heard that you occasionally listen to rock music. BLOOM Oh sure. My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone, but what I love to do, when I don’t watch evangelicals, when I can’t read or write and can’t go out walking, and don’t want to just tear my hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen and I watch rock television endlessly. As a sheer revelation of the American religion it’s overwhelming. Yes, I like to watch the dancing girls too. The sex part of it is fine. Occasionally it’s musically interesting, but you know, ninety-nine out of a hundred groups are just bilge. And there hasn’t been any good American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded. I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful. It confirms exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation—that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes away. It’s quite fascinating. And notice how pervasive it is! I spent a month in Rome lecturing and I was so exhausted at the end of each day that my son David and I cheerfully watched the Italian mtv. I stared and I just couldn’t believe it. Italian MTV is a sheer parody of its American counterpart, with some amazing consequences—the American religion has made its way even into Rome! It is nothing but a religious phenomenon. Very weird to see it take place.

INTERVIEWER You’ve written that the Christian Bible is, on the whole, a disappointment. BLOOM The aesthetic achievement is so much less than that of the Old—or original—Testament. The New Testament is a very curious work from a literary point of view. So much of it is written by writers who are thinking in Aramaic and writing in demotic Greek. And that curious blend of Aramatic syntax with a Greek vocabulary is a very dubious medium. It’s particularly egregious in the Revelation of St. John the Divine, the Apocalypse, which is a very bad and hysterical and nasty piece of writing. Even the most powerful parts of the New Testament from a literary point of view—certain epistles of Paul and the Gospel of John—are not works that can sustain a close aesthetic comparison with the stronger parts of the Hebrew Bible. It is striking how the Apocalypse of John has had an influence out of all proportion to its aesthetic, or for that matter, I would think, its spiritual value. It is not only an hysterical piece of work, but a work lacking love or compassion. In fact, it is the archetypal text of resentment, and it is the proper foundation for every school of resentment ever since. INTERVIEWER Is belief anything more than a trope for you now? BLOOM Belief is not available to me. It is a stuffed bird, up on the shelf. So is philosophy, let me point out, and so, for that matter, is psychoanalysis—an institutional church founded upon Freud’s writings, praxis, and example. These are not live birds that one can hold in one’s hand. We live in a literary culture, as I keep saying. This is not necessarily good—it might even be bad—but it is where we are. Our cognitive modes have failed us. INTERVIEWER Can belief be as individual and idiosyncratic as fiction? BLOOM The religious genius is a dead mode. Belief should be as passionate and individual a fiction as any strong, idiosyncratic literary work, but it isn’t. It almost never is. Religion has been too contaminated by society, by human hatreds. The history of religion as an institutional or social mode is a continuous horror. At this very moment we see this with the wretched Mr. Rushdie, who, by the way, alas, is not much of a writer. I tried to read Midnight’s Children and found myself quite bored; I have tried to read The Satanic Verses, which seems to me very wordy, very neo-Joycean, very much an inadequate artifice. It is not much better than an upper-middle-brow attempt at serious fiction. Poor wretched fellow, who can blame him? There’s no way for him to apologize because the world is not prepared to protect him from the consequences of having offended a religion. All religions have always been pernicious as social, political, and economic entities. And they always will be.

INTERVIEWER How do you manage to write so quickly? Is it insomnia? BLOOM Partly insomnia. I think I usually write therapeutically. That is what Hart Crane really taught one. I was talking to William Empson about this once. He never wrote any criticism of Crane, and he didn’t know whether he liked his poetry or not, but he said that the desperation of Crane’s poetry appealed to him. Using his funny kind of parlance, he said that Hart Crane’s poetry showed that poetry is now a mug’s game, that Crane always wrote every poem as though it were going to be his last. That catches something in Crane which is very true, that he writes each lyric in such a way that you literally feel he’s going to die if he can’t bring it off, that his survival not just as a poet but as a person depends upon somehow articulating that poem. I don’t have the audacity to compare myself to Crane, yet I think I write criticism in the spirit in which he wrote poems. One writes to keep going, to keep oneself from going mad. One writes to be able to write the next piece of criticism or to live through the next day or two. Maybe it’s an apotropaic gesture, maybe one writes to ward off death. I’m not sure. But I think in some sense that’s what poets do. They write their poems to ward off dying.

INTERVIEWER Can essays like Hazlitt’s or Ruskin’s or Pater’s still be written today? BLOOM Most people would say no. I can only say I do my best. That’s as audacious a thing as I can say. I keep saying, though nobody will listen, or only a few will listen, that criticism is either a genre of literature or it is nothing. It has no hope for survival unless it is a genre of literature. It can be regarded, if you wish, as a minor genre, but I don’t know why people say that. The idea that poetry or, rather, verse writing, is to take priority over criticism is on the face of it absolute nonsense. That would be to say that the verse-writer Felicia Hemans is a considerably larger figure than her contemporary William Hazlitt. Or that our era’s Felicia Hemans, Sylvia Plath, is a considerably larger literary figure than, say, the late Wilson Knight. This is clearly not the case. Miss Plath is a bad verse writer. I read Knight with pleasure and profit, if at times wonder and shock. These are obvious points but obviously one will have to go on making them. Almost everything now written and published and praised in the United States as verse isn’t even verse, let alone poetry. It’s just typing, or word processing. As a matter of fact, it’s usually just glib rhetoric or social resentment. Just as almost everything that we now call criticism is in fact just journalism. INTERVIEWER Or an involvement with what you refer to as the “easier pleasures.” What are these easier pleasures? BLOOM Well, I take the notion from my friend and contemporary Angus Fletcher, who takes it from Shelley and Longinus. It’s perfectly clear some very good writers offer only easier pleasures. Compare two writers exactly contemporary with one another—Harold Brodkey and John Updike. Updike, as I once wrote, is a minor novelist with a major style. A quite beautiful and very considerable stylist. I’ve read many novels by Updike, but the one I like best is The Witches of Eastwick. But for the most part it seems to me that he specializes in the easier pleasures. They are genuine pleasures, but they do not challenge the intellect. Brodkey, somewhat imperfectly perhaps, does so to a much more considerable degree. Thomas Pynchon provides very difficult pleasures, it seems to me, though not of late. I am not convinced, in fact, that it was he who wrote Vineland. Look at the strongest American novelist since Melville, Hawthorne, and James. That would certainly have to be Faulkner. Look at the difference between Faulkner at his very best in As I Lay Dying and at his very worst in A Fable. A Fable is nothing but easier pleasures, but they’re not even pleasures. It is so easy it becomes, indeed, vulgar, disgusting, and does not afford pleasure. As I Lay Dying is a very difficult piece of work. To try to apprehend Darl Bundren takes a very considerable effort of the imagination. Faulkner really surpasses himself there. It seems to me an authentic instance of the literary sublime in our time. Or, if you look at modern American poetry, in some sense the entire development of Wallace Stevens is from affording us easier pleasures, as in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and before that “Sunday Morning,” to the very difficult pleasures of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” and then the immensely difficult pleasures of a poem like “The Owl in the Sarcophagus.” You have to labor with immense intensity in order to keep up. It is certainly related to the notion propounded by both Burckhardt and Nietzsche, which I’ve taken over from them, of the agonistic. There is a kind of standard of measurement starting with Plato on through Western thought where one asks a literary work, implicity, to answer the question “more, equal to, or less than?” In the end, the answer to that question is the persuasive force enabling a reader to say, I will sacrifice an easier pleasure for something that takes me beyond myself. Surely that must be the difference between Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, an enigmatic and to me in many ways unequal play. I get a lot more pleasure out of Barabas than I do out of the equivocal Shylock, but I’m well aware that my pleasure in Barabas is an easier pleasure, and that my trouble in achieving any pleasure in reading or viewing Shylock is because other factors are getting in the way of apprehending the Shakespearean sublime. The whole question of the fifth act of The Merchant of Venice is for me one of the astonishing tests of what I would call the sublime in poetry. One has the trouble of having to accommodate oneself to it.

INTERVIEWER You have mentioned you might write on the aesthetics of outrage as a topic. BLOOM Yes, the aesthetics of being outraged. But I don’t mean being outraged in that other sense, you know, that sort of postsixties phenomenon. I mean in the sense in which Macbeth is increasingly outraged. What fascinates me is that we so intensely sympathize with a successful or strong representation of someone in the process of being outraged, and I want to know why. I suppose it’s ultimately that we’re outraged at mortality, and it is impossible not to sympathize with that. INTERVIEWER This is a topic that would somehow include W. C. Fields. BLOOM Oh yes, certainly, since I think his great power is that he perpetually demonstrates the enormous comedy of being outraged. I have never recovered from the first time I saw the W. C. Fields short, The Fatal Glass of Beer. It represents for me still the high point of cinema, surpassing even Groucho’s Duck Soup. Have you seen The Fatal Glass of Beer? I don’t think I have the critical powers to describe it. Throughout much of it, W. C. Fields is strumming a zither and singing a song about the demise of his unfortunate son, who expires because of a fatal glass of beer that college boys persuade the abstaining youth to drink. He then insults a Salvation Army lassie, herself a reformed high-kicker in the chorus line, and she stuns him with a single high kick. But to describe it in this way is to say that Macbeth is about an ambitious man who murders the King.

INTERVIEWER How have you found being in the public eye? The Book of J is your first book on the best-seller list. BLOOM Though it’s the first time, I’m informed, that a work of literary criticism or commentary has been on the best-seller list, it has not been a pleasant experience. INTERVIEWER How so? BLOOM I did not, on the whole, relish the television and radio appearances, which I undertook because of the plain inadequacies of the publisher. The people who work for that publisher did the best they could, but they were understaffed, undermanned, never printed enough books, and have most inadequate advertising. I know that all authors complain about that, but this is manifest. INTERVIEWER You were on Good Morning America of all things. BLOOM I was on Good Morning America, I was on Larry King, and many others. I must say that I came away with two radically opposed insights. One is the remarkably high degree of civility and personal civilization of both my radio and TV interlocutors. In fact, they’re far more civilized and gentlemanly or gentlewomanly than journalistic interviewers usually are, and certainly more so than the so-called scholarly and academic reviewers, who are merely assassins and thugs. But also, after a lifetime spent teaching, it was very difficult to accept emotionally that huge blank eye of the TV camera, or the strange bareness of the radio studio. There is a terrible unreality about it that I have not enjoyed at all.

INTERVIEWER What is it that you think keeps you from writing when you’re unable to write? BLOOM Despair, exhaustion. There are long periods when I cannot write at all. Long, long periods, sometimes lasting many years. Sometimes one just has to lie fallow. And also, you know, interests change. One goes into such different modes. What was incredibly difficult was the commentary on the J-Writer, which underwent real change for me as I became more and more convinced that she was a woman, which made some considerable difference. I mean, obviously it’s just a question of imagining it one way or another. No one will ever demonstrate it, that he was a man or she was a woman. But I find that if I imagine it that J was a woman, it produces, to me, more imaginatively accurate results than the other way around. INTERVIEWER But do you think that the importance of the J-Writer’s being a woman has been exaggerated? BLOOM Oh, immensely exaggerated. In an interview that was published in The New York Times, the extremely acute Richard Bernstein allowed me to remark at some length on my strong feeling, more intense than before, that on the internal, that is to say psychological and literary evidence, it is much more likely to have been a woman than a man. I also said—I believe this quite passionately—that if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have mentioned the putative gender of the author. It has served as a monstrous red herring that has diverted attention away from what is really controversial and should be the outrage and scandal of the book, which is the fact that the god—the literary character named Yahweh or God—has absolutely nothing in common with the God of the revisionists in the completed Torah and therefore of the normative Jewish tradition and of Christianity and Islam and all their branches. INTERVIEWER Certainly that aspect of the book has caught the notice of the normative Jewish reviewers. BLOOM The normative Jewish reviewers have reacted very badly, in particular Mr. Robert Alter. And the other Norman Podhorrors–type review was by his henchman, Neil Kozody, a subscriber to the Hotel Hilton Kramer criteria. (The marvelous controversialist Gore Vidal invariably refers to that dubiety as the Hotel Hilton Kramer.) Mr. Kozody, in playing Tonto to the Lone Ranger, went considerably further than Mr. Alter in denouncing me for what he thought was my vicious attack on normative Judaism. And indeed, I’ve now heard this from many quarters, including from an absurd rabbinical gentleman who reviewed it in Newsday and proclaimed, “What makes Professor Bloom think there was such a thing as irony three thousand years ago?”—which may be the funniest single remark that anyone could make about this or any other book. But I’m afraid it isn’t over. It’s just beginning. There was a program at Symphony Space, where Claire Bloom and Fritz Weaver read aloud from the Bible, and I spoke for ten minutes at the beginning and end. I got rather carried away. In the final ten minutes I allowed myself not only to answer my normative Jewish critics, but to start talking about what I feel are the plain spiritual inadequacies for a contemporary intellectual Jewry. It has been subsequently broadcast, and all hell may break loose. Many a rabbi and Jewish bureaucrat has been after my scalp. INTERVIEWER What did you say? BLOOM Well, I allowed myself to tell the truth, which is always a great mistake. I said that I could not be the only contemporary Jewish intellectual who was very unhappy indeed that the Holocaust had been made part of our religion. I did not like this vision of six million versions of what the Christians call Jesus, and I did not believe that if this was going to be offered to me as Judaism it would be acceptable. I also allowed myself to say that the god of the J-Writer seems to me a god in whom I scarcely could fail to believe, since that god was all of our breath and vitality. Whereas what the Redactor, being more a censor than an author of the Hebrew Bible, and the priestly authors and those that came after in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition, gave us are simply not acceptable to a person with literary sensibility or any high spirituality at this time.

INTERVIEWER Do you think that the word processor has had or is having any effect on the study of literature? BLOOM There cannot be a human being who has fewer thoughts on the whole question of word processing than I do. I’ve never even seen a word processor. I am hopelessly archaic. INTERVIEWER Perhaps you see an effect on students’ papers then? BLOOM But for me the typewriter hasn’t even been invented yet, so how can I speak to this matter? I protest! A man who has never learned to type is not going to be able to add anything to this debate. As far as I’m concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they’re called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it. INTERVIEWER And someone else edits? BLOOM No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited. INTERVIEWER Do you revise much? BLOOM Sometimes, but not often. INTERVIEWER Is there a particular time of day when you like to write? BLOOM There isn’t one for me. I write in desperation. I write because the pressures are so great, and I am simply so far past a deadline that I must turn out something. INTERVIEWER So you don’t espouse a particular work ethic on a daily basis? BLOOM No, no. I lead a disordered and hurried life. INTERVIEWER Are there days when you do not work at all? BLOOM Yes, alas, alas, alas. But one always thinks about literature. I don’t recognize a distinction between literature and life. I am, as I keep moaning, an experimental critic. I’ve spent my life proclaiming that what is called “critical objectivity” is a farce. It is deep subjectivity which has to be achieved, which is difficult, whereas objectivity is cheap.

INTERVIEWER What do you think of creative-writing workshops? BLOOM I suppose that they do more good than harm, and yet it baffles me. Writing seems to me so much an art of solitude. Criticism is a teachable art, but like every art it too finally depends upon an inherent or implicit gift. I remember remarking somewhere in something I wrote that I gave up going to the Modern Language Association some years ago because the idea of a convention of twenty-five or thirty thousand critics is every bit as hilarious as the idea of going to a convention of twenty-five thousand poets or novelists. There aren’t twenty-five thousand critics. I frequently wonder if there are five critics alive at any one time. The extent to which the art of fiction or the art of poetry is teachable is a more complex problem. Historically, we know how poets become poets and fiction writers become fiction writers—they read. They read their predecessors and they learn what is to be learned. The idea of Herman Melville in a writing class is always distressing to me.

INTERVIEWER Have you ever acted Shakespeare? BLOOM Only just once, at Cornell. I was pressed into service because I knew Father Falstaff by heart. But it was a disaster. I acted as though there were no one else on stage, something that delights my younger son when I repeat it. As a result, I never heard cues, I created a kind of gridlock on stage. I had a good time, but no one else did. Not long ago President Reagan, who should be remembered only for his jokes because his jokes I think are really very good, was asked how it was he could have managed eight years as president and still look so wonderful. Did you see this? INTERVIEWER No. BLOOM It was in the Times. He said, “Let me tell you the story about the old psychiatrist being admired by a young psychiatrist who asks, ‘How come you still look so fresh, so free of anxiety, so little worn by care, when you’ve spent your entire life sitting as I do every day, getting worn out listening to the miseries of your patients?’ To which the older psychiatrist replies, ‘It’s very simple, young man. I never listen.’ ” Such sublime, wonderful, and sincere self-revelation on the part of Reagan! In spite of all one’s horror at what he has done or failed to do as President, it takes one’s breath away with admiration. That’s the way I played the part of Falstaff. I’m occasionally asked by old friends, who don’t yet know me well enough, if I had ever considered becoming a psychoanalyst. I look at them in shock and say, Psychoanalyst! My great struggle as a teacher is to stop answering my own questions! I still think, though no one in the world except me thinks so and no one’s ever going to give me an award as a great teacher, I’m a pretty good teacher, but only in terms of the great Emersonian maxim “that which I can receive from another is never tuition but only provocation.” I think that if the young woman or man listens to what I am saying, she or he will get very provoked indeed. INTERVIEWER Do you ever teach from notes? Or do you prefer to improvise? BLOOM I have never made a note in my life. How could I? I have internalized the text. I externalized it in different ways at different times. We cannot step even once in the same river. We cannot step even once in the same text.

INTERVIEWER You teach Freud and Shakespeare. BLOOM Oh yes, increasingly. I keep telling my students that I’m not interested in a Freudian reading of Shakespeare but a kind of Shakespearean reading of Freud. In some sense Freud has to be a prose version of Shakespeare, the Freudian map of the mind being in fact Shakespearean. There’s a lot of resentment on Freud’s part because I think he recognizes this. What we think of as Freudian psychology is really a Shakespearean invention and, for the most part, Freud is merely codifying it. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Freud himself says “the poets were there before me,” and the poet in particular is necessarily Shakespeare. But you know, I think it runs deeper than that. Western psychology is much more a Shakespearean invention than a Biblical invention, let alone, obviously, a Homeric, or Sophoclean, or even Platonic, never mind a Cartesian or Jungian invention. It’s not just that Shakespeare gives us most of our representations of cognition as such; I’m not so sure he doesn’t largely invent what we think of as cognition. I remember saying something like this to a seminar consisting of professional teachers of Shakespeare and one of them got very indignant and said, You are confusing Shakespeare with God. I don’t see why one shouldn’t, as it were. Most of what we know about how to represent cognition and personality in language was permanently altered by Shakespeare. The principal insight that I’ve had in teaching and writing about Shakespeare is that there isn’t anyone before Shakespeare who actually gives you a representation of characters or human figures speaking out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, and then brooding out loud, whether to themselves or to others or both, on what they themselves have said. And then, in the course of pondering, undergoing a serious or vital change, they become a different kind of character or personality and even a different kind of mind. We take that utterly for granted in representation. But it doesn’t exist before Shakespeare. It doesn’t happen in the Bible. It doesn’t happen in Homer or in Dante. It doesn’t even happen in Euripides. It’s pretty clear that Shakespeare’s true precursor—where he took the hint from—is Chaucer, which is why I think the Wife of Bath gets into Falstaff, and the Pardoner gets into figures like Edmund and Iago. As to where Chaucer gets that from, that’s a very pretty question. It is a standing challenge I have put to my students. That’s part of Chaucer’s shocking originality as a writer. But Chaucer does it only in fits and starts, and in small degree. Shakespeare does it all the time. It’s his common stock. The ability to do that and to persuade one that this is a natural mode of representation is purely Shakespearean and we are now so contained by it that we can’t see its originality anymore. The originality of it is bewildering. By the way, I was thinking recently about this whole question as it relates to the French tradition. I gave what I thought was a remarkable seminar on Hamlet to my undergraduate Shakespeare seminar at Yale. About an hour before class, I had what I thought was a very considerable insight, though I gather my students were baffled by it. I think that I was trying to say too much at once. It had suddenly occurred to me that the one canon of French neoclassical thought that was absolutely, indeed religiously, followed by French dramatists—and this means everyone, even Molière and Racine—was that there were to be no soliloquies and no asides. No matter what dexterity or agility had to be displayed, a confidante had to be dragged onto the stage so that the protagonist could have someone to whom to address cogitations, reflections. This accounts not only for why Shakespeare has never been properly absorbed by the French, as compared to his effect on every other European culture, language, literature, dramatic tradition, but also for the enormous differences between French and Anglo-American modes of literary thought. It also helps account for why the French modes, which are having so absurd an effect upon us at this time, are so clearly irrelevant to our literature and our way of talking about literature. I can give you a further illustration. I gave a faculty seminar a while ago, in which I talked for about two hours about my notions of Shakespeare and originality. At the end of it, a woman who was present, a faculty member at Yale, who had listened with a sort of amazement and a clear lack of comprehension, said with considerable exasperation, Well you know Professor Bloom, I don’t really understand why you’re talking about originality. It is as outmoded as, say, private enterprise in the economic sphere. An absurdity to have put myself in a situation where I had to address a member of the school of resentment! I was too courteous, especially since my colleague Shoshana Felman jumped in to try to explain to the lady what I was up to. But I realized it was hopeless. Here was a lady who came not out of Racine and Molière but in fact out of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. Even if she had come out of Racine and Molière, she could never have hoped to understand. I remember what instantly flashed through my head was that I had been talking about the extraordinary originality of the way Shakespeare’s protagonists ponder to themselves and, on the basis of that pondering, change. She could not understand this because it never actually happens in the French drama; the French critical mind has never been able to believe that it is appropriate for this to happen. Surely this is related to a mode of apprehension, a mode of criticism in which authorial presence was never very strong anyway, and so indeed it could die. INTERVIEWER Can you explain how you came to notice this about Shakespeare’s protagonists? BLOOM Yes, I can even remember the particular moment. I was teaching King Lear, and I’d reached a moment in the play that has always fascinated me. I suddenly saw what was going on. Edmund is the most remarkable villain in all Shakespeare, a manipulator so strong that he makes Iago seem minor in comparison. Edmund is a sophisticated and sardonic consciousness who can run rings around anyone else on the stage in King Lear. He is so foul that it takes Goneril and Regan, really, to match up to him . . . He’s received his death wound from his brother; he’s lying there on the battlefield. They bring in word that Goneril and Regan are dead—one slew the other and then committed suicide for his sake. Edmund broods out loud and says, quite extraordinarily (it’s all in four words), “Yet Edmund was belov’d.” One looks at those four words totally startled. As soon as he says it, he starts to ponder out loud. What are the implications that, though two monsters of the deep, the two loved me so much that one of them killed the other and then murdered herself. He reasons it out. He says, “The one the other poison’d for my sake / And after slew herself.” And then he suddenly says, “I pant for life,” and then amazingly he says, “Some good I mean to do / despite of mine own nature,” and he suddenly gasps out, having given the order for Lear and Cordelia to be killed, “Send in time,” to stop it. They don’t get there in time. Cordelia’s been murdered. And then Edmund dies. But that’s an astonishing change. It comes about as he hears himself say in real astonishment, “Yet Edmund was belov’d,” and on that basis, he starts to ponder. Had he not said that, he would not have changed. There’s nothing like that in literature before Shakespeare. It makes Freud unnecessary. The representation of inwardness is so absolute and large that we have no parallel to it before then. INTERVIEWER So that the Freudian commentary on Hamlet by Ernest Jones is unnecessary. BLOOM It’s much better to work out what Hamlet’s commentary on the Oedipal complex might be. There’s that lovely remark of A. C. Bradley’s that Shakespeare’s major tragic heroes can only work in the play that they’re in—that if Iago had to come onto the same stage with Hamlet, it would take Hamlet about five seconds to catch onto what Iago was doing and so viciously parody Iago that he would drive him to madness and suicide. The same way, if the ghost of Othello’s dead father appeared to Othello and said that someone had murdered him, Othello would grab his sword and go and hack the other fellow down. In each case there would be no play. Just as the plays would make mincemeat of one another if you tried to work one into the other, so Shakespeare chops up any writer you apply him to. And a Shakespearean reading of Freud would leave certain things but not leave others. It would make one very impatient, I think, with Freud’s representation of the Oedipal complex. And it’s a disaster to try to apply the Freudian reading of that to Hamlet.

INTERVIEWER Have you had run-ins with friends or writers whose books you’ve reviewed? BLOOM I wouldn’t say run-ins exactly. Mr. Styron, who has, of course, his difficulties and I sympathize with them, once at Robert Penn Warren’s dinner table, when I dared to disagree with him on a question of literary judgment, spoke up and said, Your opinion doesn’t matter, you are only a schoolteacher, which still strikes me as perhaps the most memorable single thing that has been said to me by any contemporary novelist.

INTERVIEWER Do you have any response to the essay Tom Wolfe wrote urging the big, Victor Hugo–like novel? BLOOM He is, of course, praising his own Bonfire of the Vanities, which is a wholly legitimate thing for an essayist-turned-novelist to do. But with all honor to Tom Wolfe, a most amiable fellow and a former classmate of mine at Yale, and as someone who enjoyed reading The Bonfire of the Vanities, I found very little difference between it and his book of essays. He has merely taken his verve and gift for writing the journalistic essay and moved it a little further over the edge; but the characters are names on the page—he does not try to make them more than that. The social pressure is extraordinarily and vividly conveyed. But he’s always been remarkable for that. He’s still part of that broad movement which has lifted a particular kind of high-pitched journalism into a realm that may very nearly be aesthetic. On the other hand, I must say I would rather reread The Bonfire of the Vanities than reread another Rabbit volume by Mr. Updike. But then Mr. Updike and I, we are not a mutual admiration society.

INTERVIEWER And Saul Bellow? BLOOM He’s an enormous pleasure but he does not make things difficult enough for himself or for us. Like many others, I would commend him for the almost Dickensian exuberance of his minor male characters who have carried every one of his books. The central protagonist, always being some version of himself, even in Henderson, is invariably an absurd failure, and the women, as we all know, are absurdities; they are third-rate pipe dreams. The narrative line is of no particular interest. His secular opinions are worthy of Allan Bloom, who seems to derive from them. And I’m not an admirer of the “other Bloom,” as is well known. In general, Bellow seems to me an immensely wasted talent though he certainly would not appreciate my saying so. I would oppose to him a most extraordinary talent—Philip Roth. It does seem to me that Philip Roth goes from strength to strength and is at the moment startlingly unappreciated. It seems strange to say Philip is unappreciated when he has so wide a readership and so great a notoriety, but Deception was not much remarked upon and it’s an extraordinary tour de force. INTERVIEWER It was seen as an experiment or a sort of a leftover from— BLOOM —from The Counterlife. Well, The Counterlife, of course, deserved the praise that it received. It’s an astonishing book, though I would put it a touch below the Zuckerman Bound trilogy with its marvelous Prague Orgy postlude or coda. I still think My Life as a Man as well as, of course, Portnoy’s Complaint are remarkable books. There’s the great episode of Kafka’s whore in The Professor of Desire. I’ve written a fair amount about Philip. After a rather unfortunate personal book called The Facts, which I had trouble getting through, he has written a book about his late father called Patrimony, which is both beautiful and immensely moving, a real achievement. The man is a prose artist of great accomplishment. He has immense narrative exuberance, and also—I would insist upon this—since it’s an extremely difficult thing, as we all know, to write successful humorous fiction and, though the laughter Philip evokes is very painful indeed, he is an authentic comic novelist. I’m not sure at the moment that we have any other authentic comic novelist of the first order.

INTERVIEWER Could you give us your opinion of some novelists? We could start with Norman Mailer. BLOOM Oh, I have written on Norman a lot. I reviewed Ancient Evenings at some length in The New York Review of Books and I came forth with a sentence that did not please Norman, which I’m still proud of. It was, “Subscribers to the Literary Guild will find in it more than enough humbuggery and bumbuggery to give them their money’s worth.” I had counted up the number of homosexual and heterosexual bumbuggeries; I was rather impressed by the total, including, unless I misremember, at one point the protagonist or perhaps it was the godking successfully bumbuggering the lion. But then Norman is immensely inventive in this regard. He told me the last time I saw him that he is completing a manuscript of several thousand pages on the CIA. That should be an amazing nightmare of a book since Norman’s natural grand paranoid vision is one of everything being a conspiracy. So I should think that might be very interesting indeed. What can one say? Mailer is an immense imaginative energy. One is not persuaded that in the sheer mode of the fantastic, he has found his proper mètier. Beyond a doubt his most impressive single book is The Executioner’s Song, and that is, of course, very close indeed to a transcript of what we want to call reality. So it’s rather ironic that Norman should be more effective in the mode of Theodore Dreiser, giving us a kind of contemporary American Tragedy or Sister Carrie in the Executioner’s Song than in the modes he himself has wanted to excel in. I would think that he is likely to impress future literary historians as having been a knowing continuator of Dreiser, which is not an inconsiderable achievement.

At this point we wander into the kitchen, where Mrs. Bloom is watching the evening news. BLOOM Now let’s wait for the news about this comeback for the wretched Yankees. I’ve been denouncing them. They haven’t won since 1979. That’s ten years and they’re not going to win this year. They’re terrible . . . What’s this? [TV: The Yankees with their most dramatic win of the year this afternoon . . . And the Tigers lost again.] BLOOM Oh my God! That means we’re just four games out. How very up-cheering. MRS. BLOOM Jessica Hahn. BLOOM Jessica Hahn is back! [TV: . . . hired on as an on-air personality at a Top 40 radio station in Phoenix.] BLOOM How marvelous! [TV: Playboy magazine had counted on Hahn to come through. She appeared nude in a recent issue.] BLOOM Splendid . . . Let us start again, Antonio. What were we talking about? We return to the living room.

From the same... ...[With Bloom,] talk is punctuated by strange exclamatories: Zoombah, for one—Swahili for “libido”—is an all-purpose flavoring particle, with the accompanying, adjectival zoombinatious and the verb to zoombinate." INTERVIEWER Are you still watching the TV evangelists? BLOOM Oh yes, I love the TV evangelists, especially Jimmy Swaggart. I loved above all his grand confession starting “I have sinned . . .,” which he delivered to all of America with his family in the front row of the auditorium. One of the most marvelous moments in modern American culture! I enjoyed it immensely. It was his finest performance. And then the revelation by the lady, when she published her article, that he never touched her! And he was paying her these rather inconsiderable sums for her to zoombinate herself while he watched. Oh dear. It’s so sad. It’s so terribly sad.

Speaking of non sequiturs... "You know, I’ve learned something over the years, picking up copies of my books in secondhand bookstores and in libraries, off people’s shelves. I’ve written so much and have now looked at so many of these books that I’ve learned a great deal. You also learn this from reviews and from things that are cited in other people’s books and so on, or from what people say to you—what you pride yourself on, the things that you think are your insight and contribution . . . no one ever even notices them. It’s as though they’re just for you. What you say in passing or what you expound because you know it too well, because it really bores you, but you feel you have to get through this in order to make your grand point, that’s what people pick up on. That’s what they underline. That’s what they quote. That’s what they attack, or cite favorably. That’s what they can use. What you really think you’re doing may or may not be what you’re doing, but it certainly isn’t communicated to others. I’ve talked about this to other critics, to other writers; they haven’t had quite my extensive sense of this, but it strikes an answering chord in them. One’s grand ideas are indeed one’s grand ideas, but there are none that seem to be useful or even recognizable to anyone else. It’s a very strange phenomenon. It must have something to do with our capacity for not knowing ourselves." -- Harold Bloom http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2225/the-art-of-criticism-no-1-harold-bloom

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Entirely gratuitously... American Girl: The Wallis Simpson story, told differently Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. By Katharine Jose 11:35 a.m. | Feb. 17, 2012 | Capital New York The story of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII, the man who was known, for the latter part of his life, as Edward, Duke of Windsor, is one of those tales that, even though it took place in the public eye, sifts down through generations not always accurately. We remember it because it seems like a great love story: Edward gave up the throne of England for the love of a woman that the monarchy would not make a queen. And we remember in part because it reinforces American values; in a country whose founders deliberately rejected the entrenched formality of the monarchy, the belief in social mobility is sacred, as is the belief in second starts. We like to think a woman twice-divorced would not be shamed for it, could still do anything and be whoever she wanted to be. So the story survives this way, with one character as the lovestruck would-be king, and the other a woman so bewitching—though not because of her beauty—that she was able to coax him off the throne. If the story author Anne Sebba tells in her new book, That Woman: The Life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, is true, then the narrative of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor that has been passed down is very much a myth. The story Sebba tells is more like this: an emotionally and morally stunted prince who never wanted to be king becomes obsessed with a woman who—although she enjoys his attention, the jewelry, and the lifestyle—he essentially has to corner into marriage. The trouble with writing about this particular story and this cast of characters is that much of the work that goes into it is purely interpretation of documents written or letters sent by people who knew they were on the historical record, and had an interest in curating their legacies even as they were inventing them. Still, Sebba’s interpretation is credible, and unusual. The title of the book comes from what the royal family, their advisers, and their close circle of friends came to call Wallis Simpson, derogatorily. But throughout her life she was, in the circles she was closest to, often a form of “that woman,” someone remarkable yet always apart. She was the sort of person who always had the material—the past, the personality—to be a legend, going back to the circumstances of her birth. Wallis had no birth certificate, nor was there a newspaper announcement of her birth, although it probably took place on June 19, 1896. She was born in a cottage at a fashionable resort that happened to sprawl across the meeting of four counties, two in Maryland, two in Pennsylvania, such that she literally came into the world on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Wallis' parents both came from distinguished families, and both had supported the Confederacy, but neither family approved of their marriage; her mother’s Warfields looked down on her father’s Montagues, who they believed to be below them. Wallis’s father died five months after she was born. She grew up in Baltimore, with her mother always dependent on the Warfield fortune, which was meted out in small, irregular amounts by Wallis' controlling uncle Sol. She went to the most prestigious preparatory school in Maryland, Oldfield’s, where she got a reputation for smoking, sneaking out, and having boyfriends. While she displayed a strong and outgoing personality that made her magnetic to some of the girls—in particular her best friend, Mary Kirk—that same disposition offended most adults, including Mary’s family. “Some of the parents at the time believed that there was something extraordinary about Wallis and that her influence was malign,” Sebba writes. It is a description that, if one were to substitute any number of social groups for “parents,” would accurately describe the reputation Simpson established in many places throughout her life. Just after graduation Wallis went to live in Pensacola, Florida, with her cousin Corrine, whose husband, a U.S. Navy captain, had just been appointed head of the then-new Pensacola Air Base. This sort of excitement suited Wallis, and she almost immediately fell in love with an officer at the base, Lieutenant Earl Winfield Spencer—known as Win—and married him. The way Sebba tells the story is somewhat remarkable, because the book is extraordinarily detailed, yet reads easily. Quotes from any number of sources are in almost every paragraph, which makes her interpretation of the evidence all the more convincing. Yet since this is a work of popular nonfiction—certainly approachable for any reader—rather than a scholarly work, hunting down the sources and original texts does not always reward the reader. (There are footnotes and a bibliography.) The brisk pace of Sebba's narrative, however, is rather jarringly interrupted along the way with a half dozen or so moments where she leaves aside the story and attempts to analyze the tale's main characters from a formal psychiatric perspective. It's a bizarre, though ultimately compelling strategy, even if the writing in these sections becomes somewhat clinical. In the first she devotes a chapter to the possible sexual abnormalities that may have contributed to the ways in which Wallis approached others, and the choices she made in her life. Among these theories, the most dependable seems to be the one that originated from her biographer, Michael Bloch, who lived in her house in Paris while she was still alive and consulted with her doctors. Bloch thought she may have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which means she would have been born with an XY chromosome—genetically male—but with receptors that were insensitive to testosterone, so that she developed as female. People who have this condition are considered female by doctors, but they do not have ovaries or a uterus, and therefore cannot have children. If true, the condition may have contributed to the development of her angular features, and Wallis’s lifelong obsession with being thin, lest it become obvious she didn’t have a waistline, and of course, that through three marriages she never had children. According to one biographer, she told her good friend Herman Rogers, who gave her away at her wedding to the Duke of Windsor, that she had never had sex with her first two husbands, nor had anyone been allowed to touch her below her “personal Mason-Dixon line.” Nevertheless, Wallis was a talented and notorious flirt, lit up by men in a way she never was with women, so much so that Win Spencer’s sister said of her, “she could no more keep from flirting than breathing.” Because Win was in the military the couple moved frequently; he drank heavily and was at times abusive, and it’s likely that Wallis’s flirting and failure to produce children (or perhaps have a sexual relationship of any kind) contributed to the disintegration of their marriage, but Wallis dropped the idea of pursuing a legal divorce when Win was posted to China. “It was easier for unhappy naval wives like Wallis to keep up appearances of still being married while living alone,” Sebba writes. “Wallis was 25, and she now discovered freedom.” From this point until nearly the end of the book Wallis' life appears as a waterfall of parties and lunches and lists of names and who was having an affair with whom and where. Wallis was, for example, passed over by a man she had fallen in love with—Don Felipe Espril, first secretary at the Argentine Embassy and later ambassador—for “one of a quartet of Chicago debutantes known as the Big Four who attended parties, played tennis together and were legendary for their beauty, money and magnetism. All had multiple relationships, at least two of which provided the inspiration for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s characters in The Great Gatsby.” When Win wrote and asked Wallis to come to China to try to make the marriage work again, she went, and in 1924 she arrived in Hong Kong. Things didn't work out with Win, but Wallis didn’t go home. She went to Shanghai. Wallis called this period in her life—single and in China—her “Lotus Year,” where she perfected the social skills she would depend upon for the rest of her life: using sometimes distant contacts to go where she wanted and to obtain access to the most fashionable parties. In Shanghai she lived for a time with a man whose exact identity remains a mystery, and later moved to what was then known as Peking (now Beijing). There, attending a party with a man who was a friend of her cousin, she ran into an old friend, Katherine Rogers, who was living in China with her husband Herman. Wallis went to their house for lunch the next day, and subsequently moved in. The Lotus Year ended fairly bleakly when Wallis, nearing 30, thought it was time she go home and get married. Wallis became extremely ill on the boat back to the United States and on arrival had to be taken to a Seattle hospital for surgery. The source of her ailment, or the “stomach attacks” she had throughout her life, was never clear, with theories ranging from Win’s abuse to a botched abortion to complications of the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome she may have had. Once she recovered, and was legally divorced from Win, Wallis was, as usual, dependent on the kindness of friends in New York. During this period she was theoretically trying to find a job, but she continually failed, sometimes as a result of her own tastes and sense of her own elevated social standing: an attempt at a secretarial course failed because she did not take to typewriters. At the time, though, Wallis asserted that she wanted to “do something different, something out of the ordinary for women, a job in which I could pitch my wits not against other women, but against men in a man’s world,” which is the enormous irony of her life. Wallis did do a number of things that were very out of the ordinary for women of her time and did go up against a man’s world, but she never did so by taking a job, and often did so in pitting herself against women. The man she finally chose to marry, or who chose her—one comes away with the impression that in all of Wallis’ relationships, it was usually one way or the other, rather than a mutual choosing—was Ernest Simpson, whom she had met in New York through her childhood friend Mary Kirk, now Mary Raffrey. Simpson was already married, but became taken with Wallis and asked her if she would marry him once they were both out of their marriages. She agreed. Simpson was not that rich, nor was he particularly glamorous, and her decision to marry him as well as her continuing affection for him after they were married suggests that, though concerned with social status, Wallis was most interested in security. Ernest fit the bill. He was good-looking, bookish in a way that implied good breeding, and, what did turn out to be his greatest appeal, dependable. Ernest was half-British, and once married, the couple moved to London for a new start. Wallis had always curated her life, and once she and Ernest found a permanent home in which she could entertain, “she set about collecting an interesting array of guests, inevitably with a strong American nucleus. Those whom she invited for dinner were drawn almost entirely from her carefully nurtured contacts.” The parties and people and home decor and food fly by in a long stretch of entirely enjoyable, almost sensual paragraphs with a seemingly purposeful minimum of punctuation, as if the reader is supposed to get lost in it all. For example, the description of her original “carefully nurtured contacts”: “Chief among these was Benjamin Thaw, newly appointed First Secretary of the US Embassy, married to Consuelo, one of the trio of glamorous Morgan sisters who had exotic Spanish looks and lots of money. Wallis had known Benjamin’s brother, Bill, at Coronado where he had been a beau of Katherine Bigelow before she married Herman Rogers. She also knew of, although she had not met, Consuelo’s twin sisters Thelma Furness and Gloria Vanderbilt, both celebrated society beauties. Thelma was currently the much gossiped-about lover of the Prince of Wales and Wallis knew that the pair sometimes met at the Thaws’ home. “Among regulars at the table there was also Wallis’s favourite cousin Corinne, now married to Lieutentent Commander George Murray assigned as assistant navel attache at the Embassy, Major Martin ‘Mike’ Scanlon, ‘a dashing bachelor who gave gay cocktail and dinner parties’ at his house, the former Ethel Noyes now Lady Lewis and her husband Sir Bill (William), Vincent Massey, the Oxford-educated and immensely wealthy Canadian diplomat and his pretty film-actress wife Alice.” This was all before Wallis got involved with the British entitled noble classes. THE HEIR TO THE THRONE of King George V was born Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David, was formally called Edward, Prince of Wales, and was also known as the Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, until he became King Edward VIII, until, less than a year later, he abdicated and become Edward, Duke of Windsor, which he would remain. Meanwhile, he was known to those close to him simply as David, and that is what he is called in most of the correspondence quoted in the book. Many have said that all he wanted was to be normal. But he was a very strange character, according to Sebba. Though groomed from birth to be a king, Edward never seemed interested in it, which is where Sebba gets into breaking apart another part of the myth of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, that to give up the throne is such an unlikely, unexpected, even irrational act. But it becomes very clear once Sebba gets into the Prince’s personal traits that it was not at all unlikely that a person of his character would do that sort of thing. He admitted in letters to his first mistress that he thought the monarchy was a thing of the past, and that his father was out of touch, and in the 1920s, according to Sebba, wrote things in his diaries and letters like, “I feel quite ready to commit suicide and would if I didn’t think it unfair to Papa.” Edward was intelligent, but bored and tired of authority; he left Oxford before he graduated. He exercised excessively and ate sparingly in a way that was almost self-punishing. Sebba breaks off to dig into the Prince’s unusual psyche. She quotes the psychiatrist Simon Baron Cohen: “his extremes of behaviour—including a refusal to eat adequately, violent exercise and obsessive concern about the thinness of his legs, verging on anorexia, arranging his myriad clothes in serried rows, his unusual speech, social insensitivity and nervous tics such as constantly fiddling with his cuffs—are just some of the characteristics that come under the broad spectrum of autism and or its sometimes less virulent cousin Asperger’s Syndrome.” Edward's advisers and attendants were deeply anxious about him ascending to the throne. Several used the word “mad.” His assistant private secretary as of 1920, Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, referred to the Prince’s “ethical impotence.” George V’s private secretary allegedly was heard coming down from a conversation with the Prince saying, “He’s mad—he’s mad. We shall have to lock him up.” And the royal doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn was “convinced that EP’s moral development ... had for some reason been arrested in his adolescence.” Lascellus actually resigned over the Prince’s behavior. In 1928 he was with the Prince on a visit to Kenya and received a telegram that the King was very ill and the Prince needed to return. The Prince “shrugged” and gave him “a look” and then went about successfully seducing the wife of a colonial official. The place the Prince liked most was Fort Belvedere, a country house for the royal family southeast of London, in Surrey. One observer of the Court wrote that it was like, “a child’s idea of a fort ‘missing only fifty red soldiers ... between the battlements to make it into a Walt Disney coloured symphony toy.’” The Prince also had a thing for teddy bears. Wallis was not the first woman with whom he became obsessed. In 1918 he met Freda Dudley Ward, who was married to a Liberal MP, William Dudley Ward “vice chamberlain of the Royal Household and therefore often out late on public duties,” Sebba writes, “the ideal mari complaisant.” Edward was obsessed with her, sometimes writing her three letters in a day. He wrote to Ward in baby-talk, as Sebba quotes: “I’m just dippy to die with YOU even if we can’t live together...” His behavior bears a strong resemblance to the approach he would take to Wallis, and making him seem as much “That Man” as she was “That Woman,” at the highest levels of power and prestige and yet always, ineluctably other. Wallis was openly interested in meeting the prince from the moment she moved to London, and in 1931 she did, through her friend Thelma Furness, who was herself having an affair with the prince, after he and Freda were no longer an item, though she, too, was married. To keep up some appearance of innocence, Furness needed a married couple for cover, to “chaperone” a gang for a weekend at Thelma’s home in Leicestershire—fox-hunting country—with the prince. Sebba uncharacteristically lacks many details for this weekend, but the two met again at a later cocktail party Furness also hosted, and then again when Wallis and Ernest were “presented to the Court.” It’s not totally clear how Wallis went from there to entertaining the Prince at a dinner party at her home in 1932, but she did, and she and Ernest were then invited to spend a weekend at the Fort. They went on to spend many weekends there, which Ernest enjoyed at least in the beginning, although as time went by it was clear that Thelma was inviting the pair for Wallis’s benefit, as the prince had fallen for her “sharp tongue and risque repartee.” Sebba spends some time considering why the prince was so attracted to that sharp tongue and risque repartee, suggesting that there was a deeper psycho-sexual dynamic between the two. Observers noted that Wallis frequently humiliated, or emasculated the prince, by such things as taking over the carving of a chicken by seizing the knife from his hand, or having him call her a taxi instead of one of his abundant staff. When they were alone—without guests at the fort—Wallis was noted by staff members to “taunt and berate him until he was reduced to tears.” He then overcompensated to please her. The root of either of their sexual tendencies and interpersonal tics is, of course, pure speculation, but Sebba does, emphatically, speculate. Apparently the Prince had a lack of body hair, and the staff “questioned his virility.” Wallis may have had a sexual condition that made her feel incomplete, imperfect, and insecure. In a bit of a reach, with a very small grain of sand, Sebba writes, “But, drawing the conclusion that Wallis, with her obviously dominating personality, was therefore able to satisfy both his repressed and his yearning for a mother figure is, again, speculation, however likely it may seem.” Regarding Wallis, Sebba writes, “Psychologists may have an explanation for her behavior: the ideal partner for her personality would be one who allowed her to appear the perfect one, the other (him) as the inadequate one and the one who carried the flaw.” If all of this comes close to the truth, the myth of the love story between Edward and Wallis is reduced to little more than two complicated, wounded psychologies feeding off each other. “In this way an aspect of one is transferred to the other which makes both partners feel good and as a result each person develops a vital sense of closeness with the other,” Sebba writes. The first time it seemed as if the Prince might have truly singled Wallis out as a real object of affection was on the eve of a trip she was taking to the United States. She received a radiogram from him fondly wishing her good-bye and a safe journey. “Nonetheless at this stage,” Sebba writes, “Wallis believed it was evidence of no more than than a mild interest, though perhaps something to make Thelma jealous, and that she had the situation well under control.” “Well under control” is phrase that comes up throughout the next part of the book. Sebba’s interpretation is less that Wallis seduced or charmed Edward—although she took quickly and passionately to his lifestyle—but that he was obsessed with her and was not a man who liked, or was very good, at being managed, and Wallis lost control of everything fairly quickly, ending up carried along by his obsession. When Thelma left for an extended stateside trip, and the Prince was suddenly without a mistress—he put the full weight of his admiration on Wallis. He came by her house to see her nearly every day, came for dinner several times a week, phoned two or three times a day, and she was expected at the Fort on weekends and whenever else she could make time. Ernest hadn’t raised any formal objections; “at the moment he’s flattered with it all, “ Wallis wrote her aunt. But she admitted, with a touch of anxiety, that “keeping up with 2 men is making me move all the time.” Wallis is generally blamed for Edward's “summary dismissal,” according to Sebba, of Thelma upon her return from America, and also of Freda, who at the time the Prince still had as a mother figure, but Sebba suggests that it was more his awkwardness and lack of courage that made the breaks so bad. In the summer of 1934, Wallis went, without Ernest, on a vacation with the prince. They were not entirely alone, of course; princes tend to travel with an entourage; Wallis’s Aunt Bessie went with them to Biarritz, and the Rogerses went with them when the whole group went cruising on a friend’s boat, but Wallis later wrote of the trip, “Perhaps it was during those evenings off the Spanish coast that we crossed the line that marks the indefinable boundary between friendship and love.” The royal opinion can be summed up the report from Hon. John Aird, who was along for the vacation as a staff member, and who was offended by Wallis’s brash behavior, and by the prince’s apparent adoration for it. By the end of it, Aird wrote, the prince had “lost all confidence in himself and follows W around like a dog.” After the trip, the prince insisted on presenting Wallis before the King and Queen, reportedly began paying Wallis an income, and at the same time began gifting her an ever-expanding collection of jewelry, a topic of much gossip in London. It becomes a matter of interpretation at this point as to who was pulling what strings. The old guard disapproved and abhored the idea of Wallis as Queen; the newer guard found the idea exciting because it meant there was a way, a way for nearly anyone, into the royal family; the royal family itself wanted her gone, and of course commissioned an investigation, but then in the investigation it came out that Ernest himself (who had already been admitted to the prince’s Mason order) was fine with the whole arrangement because he expected the prince to become king soon, at which point he imagined he would have his wife back and be awarded “high honours.” It can be difficult, around this point in the story, to keep the chronology of events clear. Like the seemingly endless and slippery lists of names that Sebba inserts, it requires of the reader a certain leap of faith that the author will ultimately produce, at the end of a chapter, a sense of overall familiarity that makes the story complete, which she does. KING GEORGE V DIED ON JAN. 20, 1936. The prince became Edward VIII and immediately horrified the royal staff by insisting that he stand next to Wallis at the ceremony of his own proclamation by the Garter King of Arms—Wallis was still married to Ernest—and then going about being king without much sense of duty. One close aide “described him as an “abnormal being, half-child, half-genius ... it is almost as though two or three cells of his brain had remained entirely undeveloped while the rest of him is a mature man” He barely read the papers, took five-day weekends with Wallis at the Fort, and when in London shut himself in with her; he became more and more attached. Meanwhile civil war broke out in Spain, and Hitler violated the Treaty of Versailles for the first time as he continued to militarize Germany. The king was, during all of these events, mainly concerned with finding a way to make Wallis his queen, facing the vehement opposition of his family and the fact that Wallis was still married to another man. Wallis, according to Sebba, eventually took a trip to Paris with a friend to escape him, in part because “she hated the pressure on her, with the King constantly telephoning her, relying on her; she felt she was losing control of the situation and wanted to get Ernest back as her husband.” One night in February, Ernest and his friend Bernard Rickatson-Hatt, the editor-in-chief of Reuters, were at dinner with the king when Ernest finally asked him if he intended to marry her. The king apparently stood up and said “Do you really think I would be crowned without Wallis at my side?” He and Ernest then reached what Sebba calls an “accommodation,” that Ernest would let go of Wallis if the king would agree to take care of her. When Edward told his secretaries and his mother that, after much thought, he had decided to abdicate and marry Wallis, they “remonstrated with the King, calling up the obvious argument of duty and responsibility, his answer was, ‘The only thing that matters is our happiness.’” Sebba adheres to the opinion, throughout the book, that Wallis was enamored primarily with the Prince’s lifestyle—Ernest’s business suffered after the crash of 1929, so what had always been his advantage, security, wasn't what it had once been—but not necessarily of him, that she did not ever want to be queen, that she always assumed his infatuation would pass, that she always intended to end up with Ernest, and that, essentially, events spiraled our of her control. Sebba makes a convincing argument, presenting letters Wallis wrote to Ernest in summer of 1935—she happened to be at the Prince’s place in Cannes, where Ernest could not have gone even if he was invited—and letters she wrote to her Aunt Bessie in the fall of the same year, when he Ernest went on a business trip, of how much she missed the “saintly” Ernest. Later, even after the Prince had told Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and his own mother, at a meeting, of his intention to abdicate the throne, and told Wallis to flee to Cannes, the letters she wrote to Ernest were filled with regret, and even after she was divorced and remarried to Edward, she wrote to Ernest tenderly, and referred to him as Peter Pan, a nickname that didn't exactly indicate hopeless love so much as deep tenderness. Even if such communications were done with posterity, and her historical reputation as a kind-hearted character in mind, or simply to make Ernest feel better about the whole thing (who was already involved with Wallis's old friend Mary Kirk, so presumably feeling okay), there's still not much convincing evidence that Wallis wanted either to be queen or for Edward to abdicate. She well knew that, set afloat in the world, they would end up dependent on others, less sought-out by powerful people, and concerned about money; all the things she'd tried her whole life to avoid. There were other options, of course: that Edward keep Wallis as a formal mistress without the entanglements of marriage; that he marry her and she be given a title, and title lower than that of queen. According to Sebba, Wallis and her Aunt Bessie did make cases for just these options, but the king stubbornly refused, and thus Wallis knew the only thing he could do was abdicate. Historians have suggested that there was a real chance the two could have been reconciled with the royal family and even moved back to England if Edward would allow Wallis to be recognized only as the Duchess of Windsor, but he would have a queen or nothing. The way that things worked out could not have been what Wallis ever wanted for her life or her relationship with Edward. She became the focal point of massive, collective ill will—she received piles of hate mail, and was so hounded by newspapers and shunned by former friends in London that she could barely leave the house, and eventually fled the country, at one point in her escape being forced to hide under a blanket in the back of the car. A wedding should, theoretically, come near the beginning of a love story, but for the Windsors, at least from the outside, it was the end of theirs. Wallis had gotten to the very top of her era's social world, and gotten her hands on a few strings, only to lose her grip and end up in a situation she could only attempt to endure. Other than the iconic dress Wallis wore, and the clement weather, the event of the wedding itself, which took place in the Loire Valley home of French-born American industrialist Charles Bedaux, was dismal, with few friends and no royals attending; the one eccentric royal chaplain who would perform the service, the Reverend R. Anderson Jardine, was ostracized when he returned to England, and moved to America shortly after. Once married, the couple did some traveling, including a trip to Germany, where Wallis was photographed meeting Hitler, a connection that would only further doom the couple to infamy at home. During World War II Edward was appointed the governor of the Bahamas, a position most people, Wallis included, generally considered a punishment. Sebba devotes only 30 pages to the lives of Wallis and Edward after the war, for the rest of their lives. She paints a drooping picture of two figures floating between France and New York City, entertaining and occasionally lending themselves to charitable events. Their lives were defined by each other, the past, and aesthetics: decorating, shopping, holding formal dinners, being noticed by the newspapers. They were bitter toward the royal family, and Wallis was eternally frustrated that she no longer held the interest of people at high levels of society, government, or the arts. Her wit grew sharper, and meaner. They wrote their separate memoirs, they ate next to nothing, and they drank a lot. Sebba cites reported opinions of Wallis that range widely, from vain and harsh to kind and thoughtful, while the Prince was primarily known only for his devotion to her. It’s a spare description of a great deal of time that, actually, doesn’t feel out of sync with the myth of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who were immortalized in the moment of abdication. “Nothing else in his life gave him any sense of achievement other than his marriage to Wallis,” Sebba writes. “For her, the slavish devotion was at times claustrophobic and she was not afraid to show it. But love is impossible to define and in their case especially so. Few who knew them well described what they shared as love. “ http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/culture/2012/02/5288414/american-girl-wallis-simpson-story-told-differently?page=all