On-line Guide
with Exercises and
Additional Museum Exhibits For

Clear and Simple as the Truth:
Writing Classic Prose

This web page is copyright © Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, 1996 - 2005.

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Clear and Simple is available from Amazon.com, A Common Reader, Princeton University Press, and Midnight Special Bookstore.

The Rationale Of the Course
Stranger and Stranger
Two Paths
Results

Assignments

Presentation versus Description
Assumed Stand versus Real Situation
The Reading Daybook (Todd Oakley)
The Sketchbook (Todd Oakley)
Contrast, 1 (Michael Schoop)
Contrast, 2
A Suite of Writing Assignments

Introduction
Place and Self
The Vita
The Admissions Essay
The Art of the Classic List

Passages For Analysis

The Museum

Additions To The Permanent Collection of Classic Presentations
The Gallery of Miniatures
"Moral Portraiture" Tony Judt.
"The Balkans" John Keegan.
"Roosevelt" John Keegan.
Fontenay and the Cistercian School
"The Rats on the Waterfront" Joseph Mitchell
"Lotteryville, USA" Kim Phillips
"The Marburg Virus" Richard Preston.
"The Plague" Thucydides.
"Civil War in Corcyra, 427" Thucydides.
"The Modest Threshold" A. J. Liebling.
"Reflections in a Cul-de-sac" A. J. Liebling. (With a headnote)
"Prime Numbers" G. H. Hardy. (With a headnote)
"The Role of the Bishop" Jacob Aagaard. (With a headnote on the use of technical terms in classic style)
A Presentation of a person, 1
A Presentation of a cultural institution, 1
A Presentation of a person, 2
"How Wrong We Were!"
"Les Enfants Gâtés"
"Progress"
The Student Gallery of Classic Presentations
The C. Burr Artz Library
A presentation of self, 1
A presentation of Self, 2
A presentation of Self, 3
A fictional presentation of Self
A presentation of Self, 4
England
Victoria
A classic obituary of Anne Boleyn
A classic obituary of Bonnie Parker
A classic obituary of Faye Dunaway
Jesse Ventura
Guide To Inexpensive Hotels Of Europe
Fried Chicken
Letter from Burkina Faso
Dear Jessica
Dear Jessica II
Dear Lara
L'Université de Fribourg
Forks
Summer Time
Clearing
11800 Twinlakes Drive
Tanzanian Peaberry coffee beans
My Neighborhood
Fairmont Street, Bethesda
The Welch's Grape Girl
Related Exhibits and Gallerys
Gallery: Non-Classic Voices in Classic Texts
Contemplative contrasted to classic, 1
   Julien Green and A. J. Liebling.
Contemplative contrasted to classic, 2
   Julien Green and A. J. Liebling.
Contemplative contrasted to classic, 3
   Richard Preston and Julien Green.
Affiliate Museums
"The Mandarin Style" Kenneth Clark
"The Official Style" Richard Lanham
"The School Style" Richard Lanham
"Clear and Not Commonplace" Aristotle
"Deliberative Style and Judicial Style" Aristotle
"Reference Style"
"The Devil's Reading List" Stephen Cox

"The Elements of Style"
"What's Wrong With College English"
"Reading For Writing"
"The Curriculum Is Looking At You"

Some Other Useful Links

The Reference Room

The Rationale Of The Course

Learning to write in a style is learning an activity - like playing the violin, sprinting, pole-vaulting, sparring, riding a horse. This course and the book that grew out of it teach an activity, not a content. Students consider the concept of style and learn to notice style, to recognize styles, and to analyze styles. Analyzing them makes it much easier to acquire them.

A style consists of a conceptual stand on some basic intellectual questions that are the elements of style. Learning to write in a style is learning to inhabit its conceptual stand.

We select one style, classic style, for daily practice. Classic style is a general style, suitable for presenting anything, accessible to anyone who wishes to learn it. Although there are many distinguished classic writers who work in English, and although workaday classic style is widely used in journalism, advertising, and instruction in English, classic style is not a routine style in the English-speaking world and is almost never taught in its schools. This unfamiliarity with writing in classic style actually makes it easier for the student to recognize that classic style is a style, to detect the classic stand, and to practice classic style without sliding into intuitive and unconscious but poorly developed or incoherent former versions of it. Since classic style has thrived in English and appears in every field and situation, regardless of content, students notice instantly that the activity they are trying to learn is widely practiced. They recognize its products in literature, manuals, guide books, news reports, book reviews, personal letters, statements of purpose, nearly anywhere they care to look, provided they know how to look.

The status of classic style in the French-speaking world as a routine, automatic, culturally privileged style, taught in the schools, deliberately acquired, associated with the greatest French writers, helps American students see that the ease with which they fall into a style is largely a matter of their cultural biography, and that the unconscious styles they have acquired, which seem to them inseparable from their identity, are stands that can be exchanged. A style is like a coat one can put on and take off. One coat can be exchanged for another. If the student had been born in France and had attended certain French schools, he or she would have come in adulthood to regard classic style as a standard style, in fact the style that sets the standard.

Classic style is also an incomparably effective style for American students to learn, because classic style is associated in America with intelligence and distinction, even though classic writing does not draw attention to itself or appear to be trying to promote the writer. Having learned to inhabit the classic stand and to write or speak from it gives the student an invaluable instrument for dealing with any moment that calls for self-presentation or persuasion, because classic style in America is taken as a mark of the superiority of the writer. The ethos carried by classic style gives an implicit but powerful picture of the writer which often accomplishes all by itself the task the student faces. The writer confronted with the law school application, the blank "Statement of Purpose," the application to graduate school, the job interview, the brief interval in which she may be allowed to pitch whatever it is she has to pitch, has a great advantage over competitors if she can assume the classic stand and speak from it.

Classic style is elastic over personalities, allowing the student to develop an individual style that is none the less classic for being individual. La Rochefoucauld, Thomas Jefferson, A. J. Liebling, and the authors of the Audubon Guide to North American Birds are all distinct and well-formed individuals, but they are all prototypical classic stylists.

Classic style offers the student exceptional pleasure since it is flattering to the writer, flattering to the reader, and intellectually collusive. It takes the stand that there is no external pressure on the writer and certainly nothing that the writer is trying to beat out of the reader - a grade, a letter of recommendation, a contract. The writer is unquestionably competent, absolutely interesting, entirely disinterested, at leisure, and articulate. The writer's security as a thinker and a writer is not at issue. As students learn to write in classic style, their adoption of the classic stand becomes, by degrees and in pulses, more and more thorough. The assumed scene of classic style displaces ever more effectively the real scene. Many of them forget, for long stretches, that they are enrolled in a class, writing to a teacher, or vulnerable to grades. The student is sprung, if only temporarily, from the undergraduate nightmare of being treated like an adolescent, pushed into intellectual fraud, and required to pretend that the fraud is educational. Adopting the classic stand can become addictive for undergraduate students because it reliably and enjoyably brings them good grades, gives them a social distinction, and springs them from the undergraduate intellectual ghetto.

Since the course teaches an activity, it defines the teacher in the role of the coach, the dance instructor, the music instructor, the sen-sei. The coach gives tips on performance, suggests training routines, helps the student see what is to be achieved. There are tricks, and we will present those tricks on this web site from time to time, but the tricks are secondary; the student must above all be dissuaded from imagining that a style can be learned by acquiring a bag of tricks, especially surface tricks. Learning to write in a style is learning to inhabit the intellectual stand of the style; surface features to some degree follow a stand, but in ways that differ across classic stylists. Little local rules for doing this but not doing that are an impediment, not a help, to learning classic style. We use the trick of prohibiting students after the first few weeks from mentioning surface features in their stylistic analyses, and requiring them instead to begin an analysis by answering the questions on page 22 of the book. We maintain this proscription until the danger seems to have passed.

We tell students frankly that they are being asked to think about style in an unnatural way and to learn to write in a style that is foreign to them, and that we know, based on our experience in teaching this course, that they will be profoundly confused and uncomfortable for about a month. We do not yet know of a way to speed up this period. Students appear to do a great deal of conceptual work during this month, but not to flower until the fifth or sixth week. We tell students that the first month of work may be the most important - certainly it is indispensable - but that there is almost no point in grading anything they write during that month, because it will bear little relation to what they can do by the end of the class. We tell them that above all they must not approach the class by trying to understand it as fitting something they already know. They do not know what we are about to teach, or anything like it, and if they substitute something they do know for the activity of the course, it only means they will not learn. They are being asked to learn something new, and they must approach the course in that spirit - they are being asked to learn to walk on their hands, become a mime, fly. We tell them that the only way to learn an activity is by doing it routinely, to think about it all the time, to practice it as part of their daily intellectual equipment, and that if they try to learn classic style or the analysis of style by turning on their "style module" for an hour or two the night before an assignment is due, not only will they fail completely to learn the activity, they may be worse writers at the end of the course than they were at the beginning. Scales must be practiced every day, fan kicks must be worked on every day, front kicks every day. To learn the activity, the student must do stylistic analysis as part of looking at the world, and try every day, a few times a day, to inhabit a style and write from it. At first, it is like learning to hold a violin bow - everything seems to go wrong. But after a while, it is like knowing how to hold a violin bow - it seems unnatural to hold it any other way.

We tell the student to obliterate completely the hope of learning to write by revising what they have written. To write in classic style, or any style, the writer must first inhabit the conceptual stand of the style, and then write from it. The beginning student is asked to write, to analyze the style of what she has written, and to notice ways in which it is unclassic, and then to lay it completely aside, to inhabit the classic stand, and to write something new. A passage already in a style can be improved by local revision, but it usually cannot be turned into another style by local revision. In the second half of the course, we in fact ask students to "revise" a piece to make it classic, but this kind of "revision" is actually more a "substitution." Many courses in writing take local, textual revision as their central method. We, by contrast, do everything to encourage the student to abandon that method. For the first few weeks, it is best if the student never revises a thing she writes, but instead always tries to inhabit the style more fully before starting from scratch.

Defining the teacher in the role of the coach requires the teacher to perform spontaneously for the students the activity they are asked to learn. In sports, a coach can plead old age or infirmity, but there are no excuses for the teacher of this class. The class will often become, simply because students will insist on it, an impromptu workshop. The teacher must be able to pause and speak in classic style, often to replace something a student has offered, while pointing out the difference between the student's prose and the teacher's prose. The teacher will then turn the tables on the student, and give the student something to be jettisoned and replaced with a classic alternative. This is not difficult. With a little work, any competent teacher of writing can learn to do it.

Stranger and Stranger

In the first four weeks of the course, we lose a few students. The course looks stranger and stranger to them, their work looks worse and worse, they cannot see a future, and they flee. Typically the students we lose have been raised on courses in which serious, sequential, and productive industry has supplanted actual learning: the syllabus in such a course provides a program of progress with tasks to be performed at each step, the tasks require exertion and suffering which the student can recognize, and the products of suffering can be marked up and graded. By contrast, in this course, students spend the first several weeks trying to become comfortable with the concept of inhabiting a conceptual stand and writing from it, and they do not acquire this concept easily or in visible pieces. In the first month, their efforts typically show little progress and they can become frustrated at the lack of tricks for improving their work. Should they revise this sentence? No. Should they work on their vocabulary? Maybe; it depends. What should they do with this essay, to which they have dedicated their time? Well, observe its stylistic stand, lay it aside, try to inhabit the style, and start over from scratch in the attempt to write from that stand.

It is possible to teach prose style through a program of explicit steps and tricks, and this method does create a feeling of success, but in our experience it is an illusion that fails, in the end, to produce the right results.

We do not know of a way to speed up this initial period or make it less confusing. We keep the student working, we offer examples, we give initial assignments designed to allow the student to get a foothold, we discuss the concept of style. We say, "Think about it for a minute. Do you really expect to be able to acquire a style, or even a part of a style, in a couple of weeks, by using these words instead of those words, that paragraph structure instead of this, or in any way making some little adjustments in what you already do? People teaching themselves have been delighted to learn classic style after working on it for a decade, while this class is going to make you a basic classic stylist in fifteen weeks. If you were trying to learn to hurdle, you would expect to spend at least a month before you looked like a hurdler instead of a goose flopping over the bar. Patience." This is just too bizarre for some students.

Two Paths

We give a sequence of assignments designed to save the beginning student from crashing. Our method has something in common with giving a child a bicycle with training wheels, confined to a safe course, and letting the child ride. Now and then, in stages, we raise the training wheels and make the course harder. The alternative - giving the child an unmodified bicycle and telling it to go ride in the street - is for most students the path to sure obliteration.

But in each class there are a couple of students who are frozen by proscription ("don't write about x; don't begin with y") and who have a knack for learning activities at a swoop. Their debilities and abilities are inseparable. To such a student, we say, aside, "See that bicyclist? Here's a bicycle; get on it and ride." The student falls down fast and often, but, surprisingly, by afternoon can wobble along on the bicycle and can even articulate the principles that guide her riding. Specifically, we give such a student something like the Audubon Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region and say, "See these presentations of birds? Go write twenty presentations that sound like that." Sometimes the student not only produces passable imitations but also learns the principles of the style.

This second method is not recommended except under a doctor's orders.

Results

We teach this course, in this way, because the results are miraculous. We find it hard to believe it ourselves. When asked to describe the results, we lie, afraid of looking self-deceived. Privately, we use words like "inexplicable" and "magic."

This course is incomparably gratifying for the teacher. Students whose writing was embarrassing in the past, who wrote the kind of paper that makes the Freshman writing instructor sigh with despair before correcting some spelling and scribbling "awk" here and there, become passable writers. They still write "it's" for "its," but that is a flaw they can fix easily and locally, and which they now have a motive to fix since they can recognize it as a blemish on something basically sound. Average students become good stylists, even though in some cases it takes three months. All of the students learn to analyze the style of a passage presented to them. There are always a few students in the class whose work becomes absolutely distinguished, publishable, a portfolio for launching a career. The greatest surprise for us is the student whose writing goes from truly terrible to truly superb, who produces work we would have thought permanently out of his reach. We ask in office hours, "What happened?"

There comes a gratifying moment in about the twelfth or thirteenth week of the semester when we announce that we will start each class with readings from student work. We read these fine pieces one after another, and the class as a whole judges its collective performance to be breathtaking. The individual students write in their sketchbooks and in private email, "I thought I was the only one who had made the jump."

In fact, the improvement is clearly too large to be the result of fifteen weeks of study. We imagine that much of it comes from clearing away impediments to hidden abilities.

Presentation versus Description

Classic style is not descriptive style. The word "description" covers so much ground that Pascal could be said to give a "description" of the Jansenist position and Liebling a "description" of the modest threshold in the passages quoted below as exhibits in the Museum, but I want to narrow the meaning of "descriptive style" to a stand in which the writer is a delivery device, a videocamera, a conduit passing salient and canonical features of what he perceives through to the reader. Sometimes the description is cast as a running account of the writer's perceptions. Sometimes it conforms to a general template ("Suspect is a 5' 10" male, white, medium-build, with short brown hair, tattoo on left forearm, last seen wearing baseball cap and track suit"). In descriptive style, the writer is not responsible for including an element in the description, in fact has no obligation to present but merely to report or describe. The writer's justification for including an element in the description is simply that it is a salient or canonical feature of what is to be described. The writer is no more to blame for including something in the description than the videocamera is for the image it relays.

The classic stylist, by contrast, first perceives an interesting, not necessarily grand, truth that is worth presenting. This perception almost always involves conceptual nuance - the classic stylist would otherwise have no reason to speak, since there is no call to point out what everyone already sees. The classic stylist then presents the truth she has perceived. She does not simply report it, pass it along, hand it over. The chef who perceives in the lettuce, endive, grapefruit, and olive oil a combined taste does not plop them in front of the diner. Instead, she works invisibly to make that taste perceptible to the diner, gives the salad a presentation on a plate, and hands it to the waiter for its complete presentation to the diner. The restaurant takes full responsibility for the quality of the dish and the appropriateness of the presentation - it has no excuse for presenting something not worth eating.

If I ask for a description of a car accident I can object if you don't tell me the point of impact and the nature of the damage. If I ask for a description of a building I can object if you don't tell me how many floors it has. But a presentation of the car accident or the building has none of these obligations. A description of a wound and a presentation of the same wound come with different requirements, different scenes, different motives, different justifications, different responsibilities.

A classic presentation can recruit, partially, from descriptive style, as when Liebling tells us that someone has long hair and white teeth, is about six feet tall and dressed in rags, but in such a case Liebling is presenting rather than describing because Liebling is responsible for having selected these elements, feels no obligation to meet the standards of canonical description - indeed might leave out everything a description would be obliged to include and instead provide us with features that would never have appeared in a description. It is possible that an excerpt from a classic piece could count as an adequate description, but its adequacy as a description would be accidental. It would not have been motivated to be adequate in that way.

A description of a chair cannot omit the fact that it is brown or has no legs, but a presentation of the chair might present nothing except the superb, nearly invisible craftsmanship evident in the way its back is sculpted to fit the human body. Can you "see" craftsmanship? In the classic stand, of course you can: everything that can be presented is assimilated to the model of perception. Vision is the prototype.

The descriptive stylist conveys what you would see if you were in his position. He is a substitute pair of eyes. By contrast, when a classic stylist presents, say, the interior of a store, although she takes the stand that of course what she presents is actually there in the store to be seen, it is not automatically assumed that you would have seen any of it had you walked into the store on your own, or that you would have known where to look for it, or even that you would have known that it could be found anywhere. The classic stylist takes the stand that you could not fail to perceive what she presents once she has presented it to you.

This assignment is intended to draw the distinction between presentation in classic style and description in descriptive style. Choose a concrete, definite, visible object; present it in classic style. Then treat it in descriptive style. Repeat the assignment for different subjects, advancing along a gradient toward invisible concepts. A typical scale might be: a pencil, a chair, a tree, a bird, a dress, the way a particular animal moves, the way a particular person talks, a place (Mount Vernon Square in Baltimore), a city (Washington, D.C.), someone's character, a legal concept like perjury.

Practice your scales.

Assumed Stand versus Real Situation

Classic style is defined by its assumed stand on the elements of style, not by the actual situation. In the real situation, it may be that there is no symmetry between writer and reader, that the reader is incompetent, that the scene is formal, that the writer is terrified, that the purpose is persuasion or defense or fraud, that the motive is ambition or vanity. The real situation can be anything. The classic writer nonetheless assumes the classic stand, complete with classic scene. It may be that Liebling was principally interested in getting you to admire Liebling rather than boxing. No matter. His writing takes the stand that fame is not the motive, persuasion not the purpose; on the contrary, the motive is truth, the purpose is presentation. It may be that in fact we read a classic piece for its style, and even that the writer's real purpose is to lead us to admire the style rather than the subject. No matter. The classic writer adopts the stand that we are not reading for the style but rather for what he presents, and certainly that he is not writing for the style but rather for what he presents. Almost no one alive cares in the least about the dispute between the Sorbonne and the Jansenists that so motivated Pascal to write Les Lettres Provinciales, but the book is immortal because people read it for the writing. The real situation does not matter.

Often, a real setting will require a writer to represent a group or speak to a group; hence the prose may have surface marks of the actual scene - words like "we"; references to the audience as a group; a formula at the beginning and another one at the end marking the occasion. E.g., "The trustees of the museum invite the members of the audience to meet the actors at a reception following the performance." This does not make the prose any less classic, because a style is defined by its assumed scene, not its real situation. As long as the voice presents itself as a single voice, not the rumble of bureaucracy, and sounds as if it is speaking for itself, not at the will or direction of some other authority, and sounds as if it is speaking to another classic mind, even if in reality it is speaking to a wide and diverse audience, the classic scene stays intact.

In the paragraph you have just read, I am in fact speaking for all teachers and analysts of classic prose; I represent my group and its accumulated learning. We teach classic prose, and I am presenting what we teach. I am also speaking to an audience of at least twenty or so students, some of whom I have never met and whose names I do not know. You know who you are. The facts that I represent a group, or say "we," or speak to a wide audience, or even call you "students" does not make the prose any less classic. These are merely surface marks required by the real situation. Does this paragraph sound like one person talking informally to another? Is the assumed relationship between writer and reader symmetric? (It does not matter at all that I am actually the professor and you are actually the students.) In the assumed stance of the prose, is the writer competent? the reader competent? the language adequate? the motive truth? the purpose presentation? Does the prose have a clean onset and a clean dismount? The real situation and the surface marks that it imposes on the writing are beside the point. Style is defined by the writer's stand, not by the moment in which the stand is actually assumed.

It is an invaluable power in a writer to be able to establish the assumed scene, cast, purpose, and motive. The assumed stand can effectively displace the reality. You may be assigned to do a piece of writing, but in fact almost no one wants to read a piece of writing that takes the stand that it is an assignment. You may in fact want something from the reader, but the reader may be disposed to resist, and so it can be much more effective to take the stand that you want nothing at all. You may be terrified and insecure, but by assuming the classic stand, you may hide that from the reader and perhaps even lose your terror and insecurity.

Assignment: Imagine yourself in five real situations, each one further from the assumed stand of classic style. In each situation, assume the classic stand, and write from that assumption.

The Reading Daybook

The reading daybook documents a particular kind of reading. It documents your development as a critical reader of prose style. By the end of this semester, you should have accumulated approximately 30 entries, all of which will vary in detail. Here is the procedure: read two portions of text a week in expository prose. Your reading can be from a textbook, newspaper, magazine, web page, advertisement, pamphlet - any expository piece is fair game. Start small. Read your selection once, and then have the document in front of you as you answer the following six fundamental questions. You may make multiple entries for different portions of one text.

1. What can be known?

2. What can be put into words?

3. What is the relationship between thought and language?

4. Who is the writer addressing and why?

5. What is the implied relationship between writer and reader?

6. What are the implied conditions of discourse?

These six questions, taken from page twenty-two of Thomas and Turner's Clear and Simple as the Truth, may be hard to find answers to at first, especially questions 1, 2, and 3. Aim to make specific comments for each question (you may not be able to come up with answers to all of them at first) regarding each piece of text. Remember each text has unique properties worth presenting.

The format of these entries should follow these general guidelines. Use a loose-leaf notebook. Tape this assignment sheet on the inside front cover. At the top of each page, provide a citation: author(s), press or publication, date of publication, and page number. Date each entry. On the page itself, provide numbered answers to the six questions. As the entries grow, so should the level of specificity and insight of your responses. I will check this daybook three times during the semester and grade it at the end of the course.

The Sketchbook

Like an artist who keeps a sketchbook of her attempts to present something pictorially, you will keep a sketchbook of attempts to present something verbally. This sketchbook should be used every day. By the end of this course, you should have accumulated approximately 105 entries. Each entry should be legible and dated. Begin by dividing your sketchbook into five sections: objects, scenes (events), persons, abstractions, and class work. Our course will begin with you presenting concrete objects and events as well as people and will move toward presenting abstractions, which in classic style are presented as if they were concrete objects. You will have more entries under the concrete heading; however, by semester's end you will have accumulated a significant number of abstract presentations (about 25). Bring this notebook to class every day. The work you do in it will provide material for your portfolio assignments. I recommend a loose-leaf notebook.

Contrast, 1

Contrast the styles of the following two passages.

"He chased us silently over picket fences, through thorny hedges, between houses, around garbage cans, and across streets. Every time I glanced back, choking for breath, I expected he would have quit. He must have been as breathless as we were. His jacket strained over his body. It was an immense discovery pounding into my hot head with every sliding, joyous step, that this ordinary adult evidently knew what I thought only children who trained at football knew: that you have to fling yourself at what you're doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive."
- Annie Dillard. An American Childhood.

"So let us press forward. Let us resolve to conduct ourselves in such a way that our children's children will read about the 'Spirit of Kyoto,' and remember well the place and time where humankind first chose to embark on a long-term sustainable relationship between our civilization and the Earth environment."
- Albert Gore, Jr., Vice-President of the United States, at the 1997 conference on Global Warming in Kyoto, Japan.

Contrast, 2

The exhibit on page 129 of Clear and Simple as the Truth is a classic presentation of a portrait of Terukatsu. Constrast the style of that presentation with the style of Walter Pater's presentation of the Mona Lisa, analyzed and quoted by Denis Donoghue in the following passage from "The Practice of Reading," Ideas 5:2, 1998, pages 82-84:

The most celebrated or derided record of an impression, as something not entirely subjective but more subjective than objective, is Pater's commentary on La Gioconda of Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa. It is not a commentary in any strict sense; it is a reverie. Pater does not examine the painting for its formal qualities. He does not lead us through the painting as Leavis leads us through "Surprised by Joy," helping us to "live through" the poem. Pater's main concern is to divine the particular sensibility, the structure of feelings, which he thinks of as Leonardo's, or at least Leonardesque, and then to respond to that with his own. The painting embodies a distinctive psychological type which Pater identifies as Leonardo's. By looking at his works, or works deemed however inaccurately to be his, Pater gradually senses a type of human being, a particular discovery among the possible ways of being alive. Then, since he is an aesthetic critic, he lets that sense of the Leonaresque exert itself on his mind, inciting it to a new act of sensibility. The particular impression is what Pater's mind does in return. When he contemplates a particular manifestation of the Leonardesque - say, when he looks at the Mona Lisa - he trusts the impression the painting incites his mind to produce. It is a new act of his own mind, an extension of his creative life. That is what his "reading" of the painting comes to. The critical problem is then to find the right words to convey that impression. So Pater writes of the Lady Lisa:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and the modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea.

That passage of Pater's may sound bizarre, a gorgeous flourish of nonsense, so much the rhapsody of a hedonist that it could not establish a tradition of criticism, but it has done exactly that. Critics have Pater's authority, if they want to invoke it, when they give more credence to their mental acts in the face of a work of art than to any formal, historical or otherwise objective qualities the work may be shown to have. They have his authority, too, when they assume that the human mind or spirit is so abundant that no sequence of articulations could exhaust it. Critics can express some of that abundance: By divining it in the artist, they proclaim its possibility in themselves. We call that abundance one's sensibility. Pater responds to it in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo by trusting to his own provoked eloquence.

A Suite of Writing Assignments: Introduction

We offer a suite of assignments to help the student distinguish between the real situation of the writing and the assumed scene of the style. Present, in classic style,

- A visible physical object.
- An animal.
- A place.
- A work of art, particularly a painting or a sculpture.
- A meal.
- The character of a person.
- A person, in the form of an obituary.
- A legal or institutional concept, such as impeachment or monopoly.
- An abstract concept, such as confidence.
- The teaching of writing, as you know it.
- Yourself, in the form of a curriculum vitae.
- Yourself, in the form of a personal web page.
- Yourself, in the form of a college admissions essay.
- A controversial assertion, with evidence.

In the classic stand, the writer, on the motive of truth, wanting nothing from the reader, presents something as if it and its features exist objectively and can be recognized once the writer points them out. Interpretations, opinions, judgments, and preferences are folded into the texture of specific facts and presented as if they are no different from specific facts. Some real situations - like pointing out features of an animal - are quite close to the stand of classic style. Other real situations - like presenting yourself in a job interview, or trying to argue the reader into agreement - are very far from the stand of classic style. But all of these real situations can be addressed in classic style. In the job interview, you take the stand that your motive is truth and your purpose presentation, that you want nothing from the interviewer, that you and the interviewer are intellectual equals, and that it never occurs to you that the interviewer will doubt what you point out. You turn a real situation of tension and opposition into a scene of pleasure and collusion by adopting the classic stand. To argue in classic style, you take the stand that you are not arguing at all, merely pointing out what there is to be seen, and that it never occurs to you to doubt that the reader will recognize what you present..

As you proceed through the suite of assignments, if you stumble at some point, break off and go back to presenting the visible, recognizable features of an object or animal. Study again the presentations of the Titmouse and the Northern Shrike in Clear and Simple as the Truth. Those pieces are the model for every other presentation in the suite of assignments. In the classic stand, presenting a controversial assertion, an abstract concept, or the invisible impulses of human psychology is no different from presenting the stripes on the wing of a bird.

Some of the assignments will be hard because you already know non-classic styles in which they are done. You know how to write a contemplative essay of effusive praise for a work of art, an endorsement of a restaurant meant to encourage your friends to dine there, an overtly argumentative essay in which you take one side in an adversarial dispute, and an official-sounding overstatement of your qualifications for a job you want. These automatic styles must be recognized, examined, and locked away, or they will take control of your writing.

Presenting a Place, Presenting a Self

This is a dangerous assignment: present a place in classic style, and in doing so, implicitly present yourself. The student will typically choose to present a place that she finds psychologically powerful, often a place important in childhood or young adulthood. It is natural for the student to resort to a kind of poetic diction in which the phrases and phrasing tell readers what they are to think of the place - much the way the soundtrack to a movie tells us when to be happy, when to be apprehensive, when to be relieved. It is equally natural to try to make the prose iconic for the writer's psychology, to enact in the writing the writer's sensations. These impulses must be resisted if the writing is to stay classic.

The following passage is an example of a presentation of place. It implicitly presents the writer. It is classic in nearly every way, and of course superb in all ways, but its phrasing is so uniformly writerly as to lean away from the freshness of speech that belongs to prototypical classic style. With that exception, it would be a perfect execution of this assignment.

Mount Vernon, Baltimore

From Daniel Mark Epstein, "Mr. Peabody and His Athenaeum," in Tolstoy's Dictaphone, edited by Sven Birkerts
(Saint Paul, Minnesota: Greywolf Press, 1996), pages 165-167.
(Gift of Arthur Evenchik)

As I set out to learn the mysterious art of poetry twenty-five years ago, I got along in Baltimore on a weekly salary of forty dollars from part-time work in a jewelry store. I lived in a third-floor walk-up apartment on Cathedral Street just off Mount Vernon Square. Once H. L. Mencken occupied a lavish suite of rooms just up the street, overlooking the statuary and fountains of that city park he called the most beautiful in America. There the statue-topped pillar of the nation's first Washington monument passes its shadow over a brick mansion designed by Stanford White, the Greek Revival pediment of the Walters Art Gallery, the columns of the cacophonous Music Conservatory and its venerable, silent neighbor, the George Peabody Library.

I say that I lived in the apartment, but the tiny efficiency in which I slept and wrote in the mornings was hardly a space for living. I lived, really, in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon, which twenty-five years ago still kept the serenity and something of the gentility of a southern town. In the summer, businessmen crossed the square wearing seersucker suits, bow ties, and straw hats. They shopped downtown in haberdasheries their grandparents had patronized. This was before the real estate boom and bust filled the streets with brokers, mortgage bankers, and nouveau bureaucrats. Baltimore had a stable middle class that used the public schools. Old women in flower-print dresses and white gloves strolled arm in arm on Charles Street in the evening, without fear.

The old city was quiet and lazy, hospitable to ghosts and visions and reverie, a perfect place for a poet. I haunted the elegant, slightly seedy streets of Mount Vernon. The deserted marble salon of the Walters Art Gallery was my living room, hung with paintings by Ingres, Botticelli, and Monet, the dusky bar of the Alcazar Hotel was my dining room. And the great Peabody Library was my study.

There is no other library like this in America, or anywhere else, excepting the parallel universe of Jorge Luis Borges's fiction.

From the cobblestones of the Square you ascend marble steps between fluted double columns, pass under the arch of a classical portico and through the cubic vestibule. The loft reading room with its low shelves and card catalogs looks out on the green park through three enormous windows. Like ancient censers, eight ceiling lamps hang on chains, illuminating gilt-framed portraits of long-dead librarians.

In the middle of the interior wall, beneath a high archway of dark wood, an unwound pendulum clock hangs silent under the keystone. Through the doorway under the arch you see the white marble floor shining, set with black diamond tesserae. As you pass under the arrested pendulum into the open space, your eye is drawn up slender columns sixty feet to the latticed skylight with its gilded finials, the pale sky supported by a mountain range of books, two hundred fifty thousand books under the roof's painted vaults, whispering, humming a mazy fugue, a bibliographic Tower of Babel. Books are shelved to the sky upon five tiers of cast-iron balconies, ladders of lacy grillwork railings running all around the four sides, friezes and columns glittering with rosettes and gold scallops. Double globe lamps hang from the columns on brass stems, lighting oaken library tables in the alcoves of the lower stacks.

Once the globe lamps were gas fueled, now they are electric. Nothing else here has changed in a century. The collection is noncirculating: these books have never left the building. The space breathes such a dignified air of antiquity, it is hard to believe the library has not been here since the founding of the Republic, ours or another state more imposing, more deeply rooted, a Republic of human letters. But the library opened its doors to the public in 1878, as part of the educational institute founded by George Peabody.

A cameo portrait of George Peabody shows the prosperous silver-haired bachelor in his sixties, with muttonchop whiskers, kind, wide-set eyes, broad forehead, a large patrician nose, and a determined mouth that flickers at the corners with wry humor. He was born poor in Danvers, Massachusetts, in 1795. The boy served an apprenticeship to a grocer for five years, then he worked in a drapery shop. Peabody served in the army during the War of 1812, where he met Elisha Riggs, a merchant. In 1815, when the war ended, the men set up a dry goods business in Baltimore under the sign Riggs, Peabody & Co. Peabody, the younger partner, cranked the business up into an enterprise with branches in New York and Philadelphia. By 1829 the firm's name had become Peabody, Riggs & Co.

In Baltimore George Peabody made the small fortune that would provide the cornerstone for the great one he would pile up later as a financier. The center of the financial world was then London, so Peabody left Baltimore for London in 1837. But he never forgot his home here, or the friends he had made in his youth; and he vowed that someday he would return to do something worthy of the city that had given him his start.

No one could have predicted this tyro's success in the treacherous world of bankers and bond factors. By the beginning of the Civil War, George Peabody was so rich that he single-handedly rescued the endangered credit of the U. S. government in England. Sensitive to the plight of the working class in Dickens's London, the energetic American built more than forty thousand housing units at his own expense, and gave them away to needy families. For this heroic act of charity, Queen Victoria offered Mr. Peabody a baronetcy. He declined the title, explaining that it might only come at the expense of his U. S. citizenship, which was dear to him. The philanthropist gave tens of millions of nineteenth-century dollars to Harvard, Yale, Philips Academy, to his hometown of Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts, and to the South for public education after the war. Thus he became the prototype for other great nineteenth-century philanthropists - Andrew Carnegie himself acknowledged his debt to Peabody's example.

The charity Mr. Peabody is best known for today, however, was his endowment of the cultural institute in Baltimore that bears his name. The founder's letter dictated that the Institute should have four elements: an art gallery, a lecture series, an academy of music, and a library "which I hope may become useful towards the improvement of the moral and intellectual culture of the inhabitants of Baltimore. . . ." The fastest-growing city in America in 1857 had no university, no library, no art museum - Baltimore was a cultural wasteland. It took the ex-grocery clerk, who had not the leisure to read fifty books in his lifetime, to see the need and provide the basic elements for a civilization.

The Vita

This is an assignment for the mature student.

At first, it may sound odd to think of writing a vita in classic style. The classic scene is one person talking to another, but the vita is mostly a list. Nonetheless, it is not difficult to imagine the classic stylist sitting down to compose a vita. The classic stylist wants nothing from the reader; there is no task at hand; prose is perfect performance; writer and reader are intellectual and aesthetic equals; writer and reader are competent; thought and language match; the motive is truth; the purpose is presentation.

Classic style, because it is a style of informal presentation, always has a clean onset and a clean dismount. It is never pushy. These are particularly important points to remember in composing the vita. The classic vita typically has ample white space and a pleasant font. The writer never appears to be trying do anything to make the writer look better.

The Admissions Essay

In the early part of the course, assignments call for a real scene not far from the assumed scene of classic style: present a bird, a building, a restaurant, a movement, an action in a sport, an abstract concept, to someone competent who was not there or who does not have the needed accidental knowledge, in an informal moment, in perfect speech. Once students can inhabit classic style for these limited scenes, the assignments begin to call for a real scene increasingly far from the assumed scene of classic style. It is a power in a writer to be able to assume a scene that obscures or displaces the real scene. It typically takes maturity and discipline in the writer to resist the influence of the real scene. What follows is an assignment not to be given during the early part of the course.

A high school student applying to college is typically asked to submit a "college application essay," sometimes referred to as an "admissions essay," or "statement of purpose." In the real scene that goes with this task, the motive is something like ambition to enter college and the purpose is to persuade the admissions committee to grant admission. Students who want financial aid or other help have other motives as well. It is assumed that there is absolute asymmetry between writer and reader, and that the occasion is formal.

Members of admissions committees recognize certain kinds of essays that inevitably result, with a dreary repetition, from the conditions of this real scene. First, the nearly vacuous statement that glues together general, formulaic phrases: "My purpose in attending college is to . . . My interests have always been interdisciplinary. I am interested in both history and languages, as well as mathematics and computer science . . . If admitted, I will simultaneously pursue studies in . . ." Second, the splashy, look at me essay: "I have always set high goals for myself, and, supported by my family, have often achieved them. I was lead whistle monitor for my high school band at the same time that I assisted the track team in raising money to purchase new hurdles." Third, the I- am-a-character essay: "I can be recognized on campus by my characteristic red backpack. No one else wears red, but I have not specialized in following the crowd. . . ." Fourth, the pity-me essay: "My parents will not let me apply out of state and I want desperately to obtain my degree from your university." And so on. They are painful to read and drift to the bottom of the stack, unless the reader is able to see past the unfortunate style to locate a worthy, obscured candidate. These styles present the candidate as either a faceless cliché dedicated to absorbing more clichés or an anxious supplicant trying to find some way, any way, including bluff and arrogant flourish, to handle the pressure of writing the essay. They are unleisurely, uncomposed, uncalm, insecure, inappropriately formal. They are unpleasant to read, unflattering to the writer, and, for all their easy sycophancy ("It would be an honor for me to gain admission to your university . . ."), they usually paint a picture of the writer that is unappealing to the reader.

A real scene of application or supplication can be treated in classic style, by substituting the classic scene, in which the motive is truth, the purpose presentation; writer and reader are intellectual and aesthetic equals; writer and reader are competent; one person is talking to another; language is adequate; language matches thought; prose is perfect performance; of course the reader is interested; the occasion is informal; the writer speaks for himself or herself; and so on.

While college admissions essays typically assert qualities of the applicant ("I have a strong interest in sociology and have always been absorbed by local details of human interaction"), the classic application presents the candidate as having those qualities. The classic application, often meticulously planned, sounds spontaneous. The following, for example, could begin an application whose actual agenda is to convince the reader that the writer is an interesting, articulate, poised, amateur sociologist:

I knew the restaurant I used to work in only from the back. I parked in the gravel lot and walked up the back steps into the kitchen. It was a small kitchen, tiny really when you consider that it produced the best food in the city. And while the customers never saw it, part the of restaurant's charm was in the kitchen. The ice machine was upstairs, the storage room downstairs. The door to the walk-in didn't shut tight and the cash drawer opened if you bumped against it. If something broke, the owner's husband fixed it, or tried to. The paint peeled off the walls and the tiles off the floor, and the dish pit was more like a platform. The radio played country or oldies, depending on the cook, and rap after the cooks left for the night. The kitchen was open during blizzards and ice storms. More than one afternoon we worked without electricity. (copyright © Kate O'Leary, 1998; used with permission.)

Assignment: pretend you are back in your senior year in high school, and write your application essay in classic style. Once you have done this, try to dig up your original application essay. Turn them in together.

We note that this assignment is calculated to be soft, unthreatening. The student is only counterfactually in the difficult situation.

The Art of the Classic List

Classic style is exceptionally receptive to the art of the list. In the classic stand, a list is a presentation of what is there to be recognized, the prose is a perfect and perfectly transparent window on that reality, and the writer takes no credit for listing what is to be seen. Actually, of course, the tight constraints of the genre of the list may pose a difficult challenge to the artistry of the classic stylist. Georges Perec is celebrated in large part because of his absolute mastery of the art of the classic list. The assignment is to write perhaps five hundred words of classic prose that include several classic lists. Here is an example, the first three paragraphs from Lawrence Weschler, "A Reporter At Large: Deficit," The New Yorker, May 11, 1992, page 41:

The Stadium of the Tenth Anniversary rises from the flatlands of Warsaw's Praga district. Late this past December, when I took to visiting the stadium, the iced-over playing field at its center and the hundred thousand seats on its interior slopes were regularly empty and chillingly windswept. All the action was occurring outside, for it was there that, day after day, tens of thousands of merchants and traders and smugglers and shoppers converged for the largest open market in Eastern Europe. The variety of goods offered for sale was astounding, but even more astounding was the variety of those doing the offering: Russians, Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Armenians, Afghans, Serbs, Croats, Romanians, Lithuanians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Gypsies, Kazakhs, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks. There were Mongols hawking sheepskins and Chinese vending calendars and pocket calculators, North Koreans flogging jewelry and Vietnamese mongering shirts and leather jackets.

Some of the booths were wholesale operations - bales and bales of cellophane-wrapped knockoff jeans, for example, with busy entrepreneurs distributing calling cards in an effort to drum up more ambitious orders. (Items from the Warsaw stadium, I was told, quickly radiated to all the towns and villages of the former Eastern bloc.) Here and there, I came across a lone bedraggled peasant sitting on his battered suitcase, with a pathetic array of trinkets spread out across a grimy rag before him. The vast majority of sellers seemed to have come from the former Soviet Union, and they seemed to have brought with them everything they owned or could conceivably forage. After the Second World War, it had appeared to the Poles - with some justification - that every possession of theirs that was not physically battened down had been transported east as plunder by the Red Army forces going home. Now it all seemed to be coming back.

I saw Red Army gas masks, helmets, binoculars, infrared night-vision goggles, military medals. "Kalashnikov?" one vender whispered conspiratorially. I came upon bicycle chains, fur coats, fur caps, bonsai plants, Lenin busts and Virgin Mary icons, boxloads of Estée Lauder perfume, panoplies of porn, tuxedos and other formal wear, puppies, computer games, computers, waffle irons, checkerboards, lingerie, car-seat covers, lipsticks and eyeliners, Washington Redskins T-shirts, Gucci T-shirts, possibly real Reeboks as well as obviously fake ones, firecrackers, wire strippers, dubious telephones, circular-saw blades, surveyors' tripods, reindeer antlers, Mickey Mouse plastic molds, fishing tackle, rusty shovels, broken toys, packets of unlabeled medical tablets, towers of cigarette cartons, bottles of vodka, bottles of beer, bottles of a green syrupy goop that advertised itself as "Kiwi Juice," and bottles labeled "Fresh & Fruity Orange Drink," whose contents appeared anything but. There were pirated books and pirated videos and pirated audiocassettes. Pickpockets roamed the crowded paths, gruff rogues elaborated sinister cons, pimps rustled up business for teams of prostitutes crammed into trailers rimming the back lots.

Use the questions on page 22 of Clear and Simple As the Truth to guide your analysis of the following passages.

From Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (New York: HarperPerennial, 1985 [1974]), pages 102-103.
(Gift of Marjorie Clarkson.)

My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton's prayer, "Give us time!" It never stops. If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek. You don't run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You'll have fish left over. The creek is the one great giver. It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation. This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day.

Here is the word from a subatomic physicist: "Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves." Let me twist his meaning. Here it comes. The particles are broken; the waves are translucent, laving, roiling with beauty like sharks. The present is the wave that explodes over my head, flinging the air with particles at the height of its breathless unroll; it is the live water and light that bears from undisclosed sources the freshest news, renewed and renewing, world without end.

From "New Discovery in the Fine Arts."
[The announcement in America of the invention of photography] The New Yorker, April 13, 1839.
(Gift of Kate O'Leary.)

Where are we going? Who can tell? The phantasmagoria of inventions passes rapidly before us - are we to see them no more? - are they to be obliterated? Is the hand of man to be altogether stayed in his work? - the wit active - the fingers idle? Wonderful wonder of wonders!! Vanquish aqua-tints and mezzotints - as chimneys that consume their own smoke, devour yourselves. Steel engravers, copper engravers, and etchers, drink up your aquafortis and die! There is an end of your black art - "Othello's occupation is no more." The real black art of true magic arises and cries avaunt. All nature shall paint herself - fields, rivers, trees, houses, plains, mountains, cities, shall all paint themselves at a bidding, and at a few moment's notice. Towns will no longer have any representatives but themselves. Invention says it. It has found out the one thing new under the sun; that by virtue of the sun's patent, all nature, animate and inanimate, shall be henceforth its own painter, engraver, printer and publisher.

Old faces are forbidding or beautiful for what is expressed in them; in a face that is young enough almost everything but the youth is hidden, so that it is beautiful both for what is there and what cannot yet be there.
- Randall Jarrell. Pictures From An Institution. (Gift of Michael Schoop)

One can hold a scrubbing brush with two good fingers and the stumps of two others even if both joints of the thumb are gone, but it takes considerable practice to get used to it.
- Frank Norris. McTeague. (Gift of Brooks Headley)

Museum entry

Moral Portraiture Disguised as Presentation of Fact

Headnote: Tony Judt's one-sentence appraisal of Tony Blair is not directly about Tony Blair at all; it is an observation about the nature of Mr. Blair's "inauthenticity," a complex and invisible moral quality subject to endless dispute treated here as if it were as obvious as a hat. To call someone "inauthentic" is merely an insult, to observe that someone's inauthenticity is completely uncontrived is a classic and refined insult all the more effective for being presented as a matter of placing this quality in the correct category.

From
Tony Judt, "The Gnome in the Garden: Tony Blair and Britain's 'Heritage'" in Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin, 2008), 219-232. Quotation from page 221.

There is nothing contrived about Tony Blair's inauthenticity.

Museum entry

Presentation of Place: The Balkans as Strategic Terrain

From
John Keegan
The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1990, page 142.

Headnote: John Keegan is a widely respected British military historian. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He ordinarily takes a classic stand. In his military histories, he often engages in analysis by presentation, as he does in this passage on the Balkans. His treatment of the Second World War is strongly presentational; it unfolds like a guided tour. All the hard choices involving management of detail and arrangement of material are made silently, so that what is obviously one presentation of a very complex cluster of events seems like an inevitable view of a single thing: the Second World War seen from the obviously correct perspective.

Presentation of Persons: Franklin Roosevelt as a War Leader

From
John Keegan
The Second World War. New York: Penguin, 1990, page 540-541.

Headnote: This presentation of Franklin Roosevelt as a war leader concentrates on style and does this partly by contrast: Churchill did this, Hitler did that, but Roosevelt did the other. This is an interpretation, of course, but it advances almost wholly by the deployment of fact. He started work at ten, lunched off a tray, took few calls at night, and so on. The language does not call attention to itself - Keegan is intent on his presentation of Roosevelt - but it is carefully chosen, and the passage ends with a virtuoso dismount. When the reader gets there, he is ready to accept Keegan's interpretation of how Roosevelt directed American strategy - and the New Deal - as if it too is a fact on the same order as what time he started work in the morning and how he had his lunch served.

. . . Roosevelt was able to hold aloof from the business of directing war, an activity alien to his temperament. Such an aloofness was not granted to any of the other leaders. Churchill, of course, revelled in high command, dedicated his days (and nights) to war- making, had rooms, suites, even whole houses adapted to his needs as a wartime Prime Minister, preferring his "siren suit" to any other garb (though he also kept handy his uniforms of an honorary colonel of the Cinque Ports Battalion), demanded a constant diet of Ultra intelligence intercepts and lived in hour-to-hour intimacy with his military advisers. Hitler turned himself into a military hermit after the opening of Barbarossa, seeing few but his generals, even though he found their company grating. Stalin's wartime routine conformed strangely in pattern to Hitler's - secretive, nocturnal, troglodyte. Roosevelt scarcely altered the pattern of his life at all after Pearl Harbor. Unthreatened by air attack, he continued to live at the White House, occasionally vacationing at Hyde Park, and there pursued a timetable that drove the methodical and purposeful almost to distraction. [General George C.] Marshall's day was measured to the minute: his only relaxation was to visit his wife in his official quarters for lunch, which was served as he stepped on to the veranda from his staff car. Roosevelt lunched off a tray brought into the Oval Office, did not begin work until ten in the morning and took few telephone calls at night. . . .

. . . Unlike Churchill, who was constantly on the move - to Paris (before the fall of France), to Cairo, to Moscow, to Athens (where he spent Christmas Day 1944 while the sound of gunfire between British troops and ELAS rebels rocked the city), to Rome, Naples, Normandy, the Rhine - Roosevelt travelled little. His mobility was, of course, limited by his physical disability, which was the result of poliomyelitis and which a discreet press disguised from its readership almost completely. Nevertheless he travelled when he chose, but during the war his travels took him only to Casablanca in January 1943, Quebec twice (August 1943 and September 1944), Cairo and Tehran at the end of 1944 and Yalta in the Russian Crimea, in February 1945. He saw nothing of the war at first hand, no bombed cities, no troops at the front, no prisoners, no after-effects of battle, and probably did not choose to; he directed American strategy as he had directed the New Deal - by lofty rhetoric and by rare but decisive strikes at the conjunctions of power.

Fontenay and the Cistercian School

From Burgundy, Morvan. Michelin Green Guide, 1992.

Cistercian architecture first appeared in Burgundy in the first half of the twelfth century (Cistercium was the Latin name for the town of Cîteaux). It is characterized by a spirit of simplicity in keeping with the teaching of St Bernard, who had a considerable influence on his times. He strove against the luxury displayed in some monastery churches. With a passion and a violence that were extraordinary, he opposed the theories of the great builders of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as St Hugh, Peter the Venerable, and Suger, who considered that nothing could be too rich for the glory of God: "Why," he wrote to William, Abbot of St-Thierry, "this excessive height in the churches, this enormous length, this unnecessary width, these sumptuous ornaments and curious paintings that draw the eyes and distract attention and meditation? We, the monks, who have forsaken ordinary life and who have renounced the riches and ostentation of the world . . . in whom do we hope to awaken devotion with these ornaments?"

There is however a certain grandeur in the sobriety and austerity that he advocated. The uncluttered style and severe appearance truly reflected the principles of the Cistercian rule, which regarded as noxious everything that was not absolutely indispensable to the development and spread of monastic life.

The Cistercians almost always insisted on an identical plan of construction for all the buildings of their order and themselves directed the work on new abbeys. The Abbey of Fontenay is a good example of the standard plan. This design and its architectural techniques are to be found throughout Europe from Sicily to Sweden. Every new monastery was another link with France and craftsmen followed the monks. It was the turn of the Burgundian Cistercian monasteries to spearhead the expansion of European monasticism. In 1135 the Cistercians adopted Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, a recent foundation (1132); there they were to build on a large scale what was to become the wealthiest Cistercian abbey in England.

The Rats on the Waterfront

From Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel. New York: Vintage, 1993.

The brown rat is an omnivorous scavenger, and it doesn't seem to care at all whether its food is fresh or spoiled. It will eat soap, oil paints, shoe leather, the bone of a bone-handled knife, the glue in a book binding, and the rubber in the insulation of telephone and electric wires. It can go for days without food, and it can obtain sufficient water by licking condensed moisture off metallic surfaces. All rats are vandals, but the brown rat is the most ruthless . . . Instead of completely eating a few potatoes, it takes a bite or two out of dozens. It will methodically ruin all the apples and pears in a grocery in a night. To get a small quantity of nesting material it will cut great quantities of garments, rugs, upholstery, and books to tatters. In warehouses, it sometimes goes berserk . . . One night, in the poultry part of the old Gansevoort Market, alongside the Hudson, a burrow of them bit the throats of over three hundred broilers and ate less than a dozen.

Lotteryville, USA

By Kim Phillips. (Gift of Brooks Headley)

In Grand Crossing, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, the average monthly spending on the lottery is $60 per household. Grand Crossing lies just west of the South Shore neighborhood, home of the much-lauded community-development-oriented South Shore Bank. Jeffery Boulevard, the busy commercial thoroughfare where the Bank's headquarters are located, is lined with thriving small businesses--hair salons, pizzerias, Black-owned clothing stores. But traveling from South Shore to Grand Crossing you pass a boarded-up apartment building, an abandoned grocery store, a deserted TV repair shop. A little bit further and you come to Stony Island Avenue. The businesses here are distinctly different than on Jeffery--there's a Checker's, a Church's Fried Chicken, a Burger King; a neighborhood has started to become a ghetto. Next to a shuttered bar there's an ad for a pawn shop--"Need Cash Fast? Top Dollar for Broken Gold." Go under the highway that passes over the neighborhood; you'll find a sudden proliferation of storefront churches, one of which, the House of Deliverance, has obviously been abandoned. At Cottage Grove there's a Currency Exchange and a store that advertises itself as selling liquor--and as an afterthought, food. Beyond, there's nothing but ramshackle buildings, no businesses as far as the eye can see. Only the passing of an occasional bus reminds you that you're connected to the rest of the city.

Marburg virus

From
Richard Preston
The Hot Zone. New York: Random House, 1994, page 27.

Headnote: Preston's passage presents an aggressive virus through its visible effects. The writer already knows what he is presenting here; there are no discoveries made in the course of the writing. The passage presents what the writer has come to know, and takes the position that anyone else in his position would see what he sees once he has pointed it out. The writer takes no credit for arrangement or selection.

Marburg virus . . . affects humans somewhat like nuclear radiation, damaging virtually all of the tissues in their bodies. It attacks with particular ferocity the internal organs, connective tissue, intestines, and skin. In Germany, all the survivors lost their hair–they went bald or partly bald. Their hair died at the roots and fell out in clumps, as if they had received radiation burns. Hemorrhage occurred from all orifices of the body. I have seen a photograph of one of the men who died of Marburg, taken in the hours before his death. He is lying in bed without any clothing on his upper body. His face is expressionless. His chest, arms, and face are speckled with blotches and bruises, and droplets of blood stand on his nipples.

The Plague

From
Thucydides
The Peloponnessian War. Translated by Rex Warner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1980 [1954], pages 151-156.

Headnote:Thucydides has views - of human nature, religion, the unreliability of the mob, and the inevitable degeneration of democracy - that he means his reader to come to share, but he takes the stand that, far from arguing, he is simply presenting things as they are to a reader who, like him, has a classic mind. He is the original master of the classic feat of presenting his interpretations, evaluations, and judgments as if they are specific, hard, visible facts no different from the many facts that surround them.

They had not been many days in Attica before the plague first broke out among the Athenians. Previously attacks of the plague had been reported from many other places in the neighbourhood of Lemnos and elsewhere, but there was no record of the disease being so virulent anywhere else or causing so many deaths as it did in Athens. At the beginning the doctors were quite incapable of treating the disease because of their ignorance of the right methods. In fact mortality among the doctors was the highest of all, since they came more frequently in contact with the sick. Nor was any other human art or science of any help at all. Equally useless were prayers made in the temples, consultation of oracles, and so forth; indeed, in the end people were so overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things.

The plague originated, so they say, in Ethiopia in upper Egypt, and spread from there into Egypt itself and Libya and much of the territory of King of Persia. In the city of Athens it appeared suddenly, and the first cases were among the population of Piraeus, where there were no wells at that time, so that it was supposed by them that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the reservoirs. Later, however, it appeared also in the upper city, and by this time the deaths were greatly increasing in number. As to the question of how it could first have come about or what causes can be found adequate to explain its powerful effect on nature, I must leave that to be considered by other writers, with or without medical experience. I myself shall merely describe what it was like, and set down the symptoms, knowledge of which will enable it to be recognized, if it should ever break out again. I had the disease myself and saw others suffering from it.

That year, as is generally admitted, was particularly free from all other kinds of illness, though those who did have any illness previously all caught the plague in the end. In other cases, however, there seemed to be no reason for the attacks. People in perfect health suddenly began to have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became red and inflamed; inside their mouths there was bleeding from the throat and tongue, and the breath became unnatural and unpleasant. The next symptoms were sneezing and hoarseness of voice, and before long the pain settled on the chest and was accompanied by coughing. Next the stomach was affected with stomach-aches and with vomitings of every kind of bile that has been given a name by the medical profession, all this being accompanied by great pain and difficulty. In most cases there were attacks of ineffectual retching, producing violent spasms; this sometimes ended with this stage of the disease, but sometimes continued long afterwards. Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor was there any pallor: the skin was rather reddish and livid, breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. But inside there was a feeling of burning, so that people could not bear the touch even of the lightest linen clothing, but wanted to be completely naked, and indeed most of all would have liked to plunge into cold water. Many of the sick who were uncared for actually did so, plunging into the water-tanks in an effort to relieve a thirst which was unquenchable; for it was just the same with them whether they drank much or little. Then all the time they were afflicted with insomnia and the desperate felling of not being able to keep still.

In the period when the disease was at its height, the body, so far from wasting away, showed surprising powers of resistance to all the agony, so that there was still some strength left on the seventh or eighth day, which was the time when, in most cases, death came from the internal fever. But if people survived this critical period, then the disease descended to the bowels, producing violent ulceration and uncontrollable diarrhoea, so that most of them died later as a result of the weakness caused by this. For the disease, first settling in head, went on to affect every part of the body in turn, and even when people escaped its worst effects, it still left its traces on them by fastening upon the extremities of the body. It affected the genitals, the fingers, and the toes, and many of those who recovered lost the use of these members; some, too, went blind. There were some also who, when they first began to get better, suffered from a total loss of memory, not knowing who they were themselves and being unable to recognize their friends.

Words indeed fail one when one tries to give a general picture of this disease; and as for the sufferings of individuals, they seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure. Here in particular is a point where this plague showed itself to be something quite different from ordinary diseases: though there were many dead bodies lying about unburied, the birds and animals that eat human flesh either did not come near them or, if they did taste the flesh, died of it afterwards. Evidence for this may be found in the fact that there was a complete disappearance of all birds of prey: they were not to be seen either round the bodies or anywhere else. But dogs, being domestic animals, provided the best opportunity of observing this effect of the plague.

These, then, were the general features of the disease, though I have omitted all kinds of peculiarities which occurred in various individual cases. Meanwhile, during all this time there was no serious outbreak of any of the usual kinds of illness; if any such cases did occur, they ended in the plague. Some died in neglect, some in spite of every possible care being taken of them. As for a recognized method of treatment, it would be true to say that no such thing existed: what did good in some cases did harm in others. Those with naturally strong constitutions were no better able than the weak to resist the disease, which carried away all alike, even those who were treated and dieted with the greatest care. The most terrible thing of all was the despair into which people fell when they realized that they had caught the plague; for they would immediately adopt an attitude of utter hopelessness, and, by giving in this way, would lose their powers of resistance. Terrible, too, was the sight of people dying like sheep through having caught the disease as a result of nursing others. This indeed caused more deaths than anything else. For when people were afraid to visit the sick, then they died with no one to look after them; indeed, there were many houses in which all the inhabitants perished through lack of any attention. When, on the other hand, they did visit the sick, they lost their own lives, and this was particularly true of those who made it a point of honour to act properly. Such people felt ashamed to think of their own safety and went into their friends' houses at times when even the members of the household were so overwhelmed by the weight of their calamities that they had actually given up the usual practice of making laments for the dead. Yet still the ones who felt most pity for the sick and the dying were those who had had the plague themselves and had recovered from it. They knew what it was like and at the same time felt themselves to be safe, for no one caught the disease twice, or, if he did, the second attack was never fatal. Such people were congratulated on all sides, and they themselves were so elated at the time of their recovery that they fondly imagined that they could never die of any other disease in the future.

A factor which made matters much worse than they were already was the removal of people from the country into the city, and this particularly affected the incomers. There were no houses for them, and, living as they did during the hot season in badly ventilated huts, they died like flies. The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around the fountains in their desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of the dead bodies of people who had died inside them. For the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or of law. All the funeral ceremonies which used to be observed were now disorganized, and they buried the dead as best they could. Many people, lacking the necessary means of burial because so many deaths had already occurred in their households, adopted the most shameless methods. They would arrive first at a funeral pyre that had been made by others, put their own dead upon it and set it alight; or, finding another pyre burning, they would throw the corpse that they were carrying on top of the other one and go away.

In other respects also Athens owed to the plague the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness. Seeing how quick and abrupt were the changes of fortune which came to the rich who suddenly died and to those who had previously been penniless but now inherited their wealth, people now began openly to venture on acts of self-indulgence which before then they used to keep dark. Thus they resolved to spend their money quickly and to spend it on pleasure, since money and life alike seemed equally ephemeral. As for what is called honour, no one showed himself willing to abide by its laws, so doubtful was it whether one would survive to enjoy the name for it. It was generally agreed that what was both honourable and valuable was the pleasure of the moment and everything that might conceivably contribute to that pleasure. No fear of god or law of man had a restraining influence. As for the gods, it seemed to be the same thing whether one worshipped them or not, when one saw the good and the bad dying indiscriminately. As for offenses against human law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to trial and punished: instead everyone felt that already a far heavier sentence had been passed on him and was hanging over him, and that before the time for its execution arrived it was only natural to get some pleasure out of life.

This, then, was the calamity which fell upon Athens, and the times were hard indeed, with men dying inside the city and the land outside being laid waste. At this time of distress people naturally recalled old oracles, and among them was a verse which the old men claimed had been delivered in the past and which said:

War with the Dorians comes, and a death will come at the same time.

Then also the oracle that was given to the Spartans was remembered by those who knew of it: that when they inquired from the god whether they should go to war, they received the reply that, if they fought with all their might, victory would be theirs and that the god himself would be on their side. What was actually happening seemed to fit in well with the words of this oracle; certainly the plague broke out directly after the Peloponnesian invasion, and never affected the Peloponnese at all, or not seriously; its full force was felt at Athens, and, after Athens, in the most densely populated of the other towns.

Such were the events connected with the plague. Meanwhile the Peloponnesians, after laying waste the Attic plain, moved on into the Paralian district as far as Laurium, where the Athenian silver-mines are. First they laid waste the side that looks towards the Peloponnese, and then the other side facing Euboea and Andros.

The Civil War in Corcyra, 427

From
Thucydides
The Peloponnessian War. Translated by Rex Warner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1980 [1954], pages 241-244.

When the Corcyraeans realized that the Athenian fleet was approaching and that their enemies had gone, they brought the Messenians, who had previously been outside the walls, into the city and ordered the fleet which they had manned to sail round into the Hyllaic harbour. While it was doing so, they seized upon all their enemies whom they could find and put them to death. They then dealt with those whom they had persuaded to go on board the ships, killing them as they landed. Next they went to the temple of Hera and persuaded about fifty of the suppliants there to submit to a trial. They then condemned every one of them to death. Seeing what was happening, most of the other suppliants, who had refused to be tried, killed each other there in the temple; some hanged themselves on the trees, and others found various other means of committing suicide. During the seven days that Eurymedon stayed there with his sixty ships, the Corcyraeans continued to massacre those of their own citizens whom they considered to be their enemies. Their victims were accused of conspiring to overthrow the democracy, but in fact men were often killed on grounds of personal hatred or else by their debtors because of the money that they owed. There was death in every shape and form. And, as usually happens in such situations, people went to every extreme and beyond it. There were fathers who killed their sons; men were dragged from the temples or butchered on the very altars; some were actually walled up in the temple of Dionysus and died there.

So savage was the progress of this revolution, and it seemed all the more so because it was one of the first which had broken out. Later, of course, practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state - democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans. In peacetime there would have been no excuse and no desire for calling them in, but in time of war, when each party could always count upon an alliance which would do harm to its opponents and at the same time strengthen its own position, it became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from though there may be different degrees of savagery, and, as different circumstances arise, the general rules will admit of some variety. In times of peace and prosperity cities and individuals alike follow higher standards, because they are not forced into a situation where they have to do what they do not want to do. But war is a stern teacher; in depriving them of the power of easily satisfying their daily wants, it brings most people's minds down to the level of their actual circumstances.

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge. To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of the fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one's blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all. Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever. These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime. If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, no openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence. And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out. Leaders of parties in the cities had programmes which appeared admirable - on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy - but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves. In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice not by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour. Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action. As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As a result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-manoeuvred in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, over-confident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

The Modest Threshold

From A.J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris (1962)
(San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), pp. 129-135

In the twenties, the Rue Sainte-Anne, a narrow street running from near the Théâtre Français end of the Avenue de l'Opéra to the Rue Saint-Augustin and skirting the Square Louvois en passant had been rendered illustrious by a man named Maillabuau, a gifted restauranteur but a losing horseplayer who had no money to squander on décor. He turned his worn tablecloths into an asset by telling his customers that he wasted none of their contributions on frills--all went into the supreme quality of his materials and wines. A place with doormen in uniforms, he would say--a place with deep carpets and perhaps (here a note of horror would enter his voice) an orchestra--was ipso facto and prima facie a snare. He would then charge twice as much as any other restaurant in Paris. My memories of visits to Maillabuau's--visits that I had enjoyed only by stratagem--were so pleasant that I had chosen the Hôtel Louvois in order to be near it.

All during my year at the Sorbonne, the Guide du Gourmand à Paris had served as the Baedeker for my exploratory splurges when I had money enough to try restaurants off my usual beat. The author addressed his book to the gourmand, rather than to the gourmet, he said, because it was impossible to like food if you did not like a lot of it; "gourmet" was therefore a snob word, and a silly one. This predisposed me in his favor. But it was his subject matter that held me captive. The restaurants were categorized as "of great luxury," "middle-priced," "reasonable," and "simple," but all were warranted "good," and there were about a hundred and twenty-five of them. At the head of the "luxury" group was a "first platoon" of six restaurants (of which today only one survives, and that scarcely worthy of mention). Maillabuau, despite the worn tablecloths, figured among the ten others in the "luxury" group. In my own forays, "reasonable" was my ceiling, but I liked to read about the others--those financially unattainable Princesses Lointaines. I knew the description of Maillabuau's by heart:

I had no thought of crossing that modest threshold myself until one warm morning in the late spring of 1927, when it occurred to me that my father, mother, and sister would be arriving in Paris in a few weeks--they were waiting only for the beginning of the summer holiday at the Connecticut College for Women, where my sister was now a sophomore--and that in the natural course of events they would ask me, the local expert, where to dine. My mother and sister favored the kind of restaurant where they saw pretty dresses and where the plat du jour was likely to be called "Le Chicken Pie à l'Américaine," but my father had always been a booster for low overhead and quality merchandise; they were the principles that had guided his career as a furrier. Russian sable and ermine--with baum or stone marten if a woman couldn't afford anything better--had always been his idea of decent wear. His views on fur were a little like J.P. Morgan's on yachts--people who have to worry about the cost shouldn't have them. Foxes began and ended, for him, with natural blacks and natural silvers; the notion of a fox bred to specifications would have filled him with horror. Seal had to be Alaskan seal, not what was called Hudson seal, which meant muscrat. Persian lamb had to be unborn Persian lamb, not mutton.

As I had anticipated, when my family arrived in Paris they did indeed consult me about the scene of our first dinner together. So Maillabuau's it was. When we arrived before the somber, almost lugubrious front, my mother wanted to turn back. It looked like a store front, except for a bit of scrim behind the plate glass, through which the light from within filtered without éclat.

"Are you sure this is the right place?" she asked.

"It's one of the best restaurants in the world," I said, as if I ate there every day.

My father was already captivated. "Don't give you a lot of hoopla and ooh-la-la," he said with approval. "I'll bet there are no Americans here."

On hearing me, old Maillabuau, who may have thought for a moment that we were there by mistake and were about to order waffles, flashed a smile of avaricious relief. Father, meanwhile, regarding the convives of both sexes seated at the tables, was already convinced. The men, for the most part, showed tremendous devantures, which they balanced on their knees with difficulty as they ate, their wattles waving bravely with each bite. The women were shaped like demijohns and decanters, and they drank wine from glasses that must have reminded Father happily of beer schooners on the Bowery in 1890. "I don't see a single American," he said. He was a patriotic man at home, but he was convinced that in Paris the presence of Americans was a sign of a bunco joint.

A second refroidissement occurred when I asked for the carte du jour.

"There is none," Maillabuau said. "You will eat what I tell you. Tonight, I propose a soup, trout grenobloise, and poulet Henri IV--simple but exquisite. The classic cuisine française--nothing complicated but all of the best."

When I translated this to Father, he was in complete agreement. "Plain food," he said. "No schmier." I think that at bottom he agreed that the customer is sure to be wrong if left to his own devices. How often had the wives of personal friends come to him for a fur coat at the wholesale price, and declined his advice of an Alaskan seal--something that would last them for twenty years--in favor of some faddish fur that would show wear in six!

The simplicity of the menu disappointed me; I asked Maillabuau about the pintaudou, fat and anointed with fragrance. "Tomorrow," he said, posing it as a condition that we eat his selection first. Mother's upper lip quivered, for she was très gourmande of cream sauces, but she had no valid argument against the great man's proposal, since one of the purposes of her annual trips to Europe was to lose weight at a spa. On the subject of wines, M. Maillabuau and I agreed better: the best in the cellar would do--a Montrachet to begin with, a Chambertin with the fowl.

It was indeed the best soup--a simple garbure of vegetables--imaginable, the best trout possible, and the best boiled fowl of which one could conceive. The simple line of the meal brought out the glories of the wine, and the wine brought out the grandeur in my father's soul. Presented with one of the most stupendous checks in history, he paid with gratitude, and said that he was going to take at least one meal a day chez Maillabuau during the rest of his stay. The dessert, served as a concession to my sister, was an omelette au kirsch, and Maillabuau stood us treat to the marc, like embalmed gold. Or at least he said he did; since only the total appeared on the check, we had to take his word for it. The omelette au kirsch was the sole dessert he ever permitted to be served, he said. He was against sweets on principle, since they were "not French," but the omelette was light and healthy. It contained about two dozen eggs.

So in 1939, on my first evening in wartime Paris, I went straight from the Louvois to the Rue Sainte-Anne. The Restaurant Maillabuau had vanished. I did not remember the street number, so I walked the whole length of the Rue Sainte-Anne twice to make sure. But there was no Maillabuau; the horses at Longchamp had eaten him.

Reflections in a Cul-de-sac

From
A.J. Liebling
The Road Back to Paris, reprinted in Liebling Abro