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Hemingway, Bumbie, and Wife #1

Lesley Blume‘s Town & Country article begins with a head fake, one that I didn’t even know was making the rounds: “Last week, a letter supposedly written by F. Scott Fitzgerald—quarantined due to the Spanish Flu in 1920—made the social media rounds. In it, Fitzgerald states that he and Zelda had fully stocked their bar, and called Hemingway a flu “denier” who refused to wash his hands. This letter went viral.”

“The only problem? It was not written by Fitzgerald; its true author is Nick Farriella, who had written it as a parody for McSweeney’s earlier this month. (The story now carries a heavy-handed warning at the top: i.e., this is a joke.) However, for those of you who crave an actual Lost Generation quarantine story, you’re in luck. Please allow me to entertain you with the true story of how Ernest Hemingway was once quarantined not only with his wife and sick toddler, but also his mistress. He actually took quite nicely to it.”

Well, why wouldn’t he? At least in the beginning. The middle and ending were a different story. It didn’t end well.

The occasion was the summer of 1926, when Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, their three-year-old son Jack (a.k.a. “Bumby”) were in Paris. It was a breakthrough season for Hemingway, and he was acquiring the trappings of success – including a mistress, a Vogue editor named Pauline Pfeiffer.

“When Hadley had, just weeks earlier, learned of the affair and confronted Hemingway about it, he had grown furious and told her that she was the true offender. He raged that everything would have been just fine if she hadn’t dragged the situation into the open.

“The couple decided to carry on, but it became clear that Hemingway had no intention of giving up Pauline; nor did his mistress intend to bow out. Rather, she made herself omnipresent. It was just going to take Hadley a while to get used to her new normal.”

But the new normal quickly became out of whack on the Antibes, where “Bumby” came down with whooping cough, then a dangerous and deadly disease, and highly contagious.

“Hadley wrote Hemingway and told him that she’d invited Pfeiffer ‘to stop off here if she wants,’ adding that it would be a ‘swell joke on tout le monde if you and Fife and I spent the summer [together]’ on the Riviera. She appeared to be making light of the tricky romantic situation. In any case, Pfeiffer moved into the house.”

Hemingway and Wife #2

“Soon Hemingway joined them, setting the stage for what must have been one of the odder and more claustrophobic households in literary history. The idea of sharing a two-bedroom house with his mistress, an angry wife, a contagious, sick toddler, and a hovering nanny might have brought a lesser man to his knees, but Hemingway later described the setting as ‘a splendid place to write.’” The story continues:

Pfeiffer remained ubiquitous—“everything was done à trois,” Hadley later recalled. Even now that they were all out of strict quarantine, Pfeiffer even crawled into the Hemingways’ bed in the morning to share their breakfast. Hadley also later recalled that Pauline insisted on giving her a diving lesson that almost killed her.

After Pfeiffer went back to Paris, she peppered the Hemingways with letters, including one that brazenly stated, “I am going to get everything I want.”

Not surprisingly, the Hemingway marriage did not last the summer. They had survived whooping cough and quarantine, but the onslaught of Miss Pauline Pfeiffer proved fatal.

Read the rest here. Hemingway’s second marriage to Pfeiffer didn’t last either. But that’s another story.

Frank Barrett, Ellis Marsalis at a conference in New Orleans, circa 2013

Ellis Marsalis, one of the leading figures in jazz, is among the latest victims of the coronavirus pandemic. He died last night at 85. Frank J. Barrett, author of Say Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz and formerly a pianist with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, is currently writing his biography as a visiting scholar at Harvard. 

Ellis Marsalis is perhaps best known through refraction – thanks to the accomplishments of two of his six sons, each of whom is a master of his instrument and an innovative leader jazz. Wynton and Branford are famous in the wider world, but within the jazz world two other sons, Delfeayo and Jason, are deeply admired for the trombone and percussion respectively. Delfeayo and Jason are also world-class producers. Branford and Wynton became much more famous and financially successful in their twenties than Ellis did in his entire lifetime. The patriarch was a very innovative, modern jazz pianist in New Orleans, a city that values older, traditional jazz. He knew the costs of taking the road less traveled, and yet he remained committed to his music. He began as a sax and clarinet player and later focused exclusively on piano.

I am honored to be writing his biography, which has given me the opportunity to spend many hours with him over the last few years. He had a special quality that only the best teachers have, in the way he closely assessed his students’ capacities and accomplishments. He could be realistic to a fault. I imagine some of his students could have been deflated by his frank assessments. He might have sounded aloof to some. He was certainly not excitable. But he was always honest, “just telling it like it is.” And he intuitively sensed his students’ learning potential. What might have been his greatest gift of all was his profound sense of what was needed to take a student to the next level. All of this he seemed to accomplish with minimal intervention. That’s one reason so many referred to him as “cool.” He knew what the right amount of words should be, and then he subtracted 25 percent, leaving the student in a field of questions. He overstated nothing.

While doing interviews for this book, I once asked Wynton what adolescence was like for him, whether and how he rebelled against his father, as one would assume all adolescents are prone to do. There were stories of Wynton as a sometimes stormy adolescent, and so I asked him directly how and when he rebelled against his dad. When Wynton responded I knew immediately what he meant: “Not with my dad. There was nothing to rebel against.” Nothing for an adolescent son to rebel against? Unless you knew Ellis you wouldn’t understand how he seemed to have no guarded ego, no defensiveness, no need to assert his knowledge or authority, the great temptation for many teachers. He was devoted to learning and teaching. And with his sons he was the opposite of the Great Santini. Rather than tell them what to do, he asked provocative questions and let them find their way. And we know how they managed to do just that.

Barrett: What he learned.

Wynton tells a story that captures how his father was a role model for him. He had a recording date with Columbia for an album that would include several standard songs from the Great American Songbook – “Street of Dreams,” “Where or When,” “The Very Thought of You,” “I Cover the Waterfront.” For this album, the best pianist he could imagine was his father. So he asked him to play on this session.

“My father’s so much hipper than me and knows so much more,” he reflected afterwards. “I can tell him, ‘I don’t like what you played on that’, and he’ll just stop and say, ‘Well, damn, what do you want?’ Then I’ll say, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ and he’ll try it. That’s my father, man. … If I said I didn’t like it, he’d change it and at least look for something else, because he’s a sensitive musician. The more I get away from him, man, the more I know how much I learned from him just by looking and watching. I grew up with one of the greatest examples.”

This exchange says so much about Ellis and what Wynton learned from him. Wynton apparently had musical insight that he thought was harmonically more appropriate than the chords his father was playing. Ellis did not defend the correctness of his musical ideas, or generate rationales to explain his choice, but immediately respected his son’s suggestions.

There is an irony in this exchange, too. Who is the learner here? Ellis appeared to be the one learning to try different musical ideas, but Wynton walked away with a lasting insight, admiring his father’s approach to and immersion in music, an openness to learning and commitment to creative invention. What he taught him apparently is to avoid becoming too attached to what is comfortable and secure, to be open to exploring new pathways, to avoid defensive routines. The young Wynton was learning that even established, competent musicians must be willing to abandon comfortable practices and to abdicate postures of established status that block the emergence of good ideas.

When I first began to meet with Ellis, I thought it would be a good idea to take a piano lesson from him. I wanted to impress him, so I prepared an arrangement of a standard tune, “The End of a Beautiful Friendship.” I was a bit nervous so I spent many hours preparing complex and rich harmonies up front, two solo choruses, and dramatic finish. I tried to make my solo as “hip” as possible, throwing in some be-bop licks, working in some two-handed phrases, quoting a Monk tune. Ellis sat about five feet away watching and listening. Finishing with a flurry, I looked up. After what seemed like a long silence he said: “Okay, for starters, I never comment on players’ solos. That’s too personal.” Then he asked this: “Do you know the lyrics to that tune?” Huh? The lyrics? I’m not a singer. Why would he ask that? I was perplexed and mumbled something about the tune’s theme of friendship and love. “How can you know what a song means if you don’t know the words?” he asked. He pointed to rows of file cabinets in his music studio that contain songs and lyrics. Then before we were about to leave for dinner, he said: “I insist on one thing. Students must play the melody correctly.” I was puzzled because I had learned this song by heart. Then he asked: “How does this song end?” I played the last four bars. “That’s not the correct ending.” And he sang back the correct ending in perfect tune. On the surface it was only a slight variation from the ending, but I learned that for Ellis one must be loyal to the essence of the song.

Anyone who wonders how this sensibility matters should listen to the album “Loved Ones,” in which each of the fourteen selections is a woman’s name. When Ellis was getting ready to record it he realized that in order to fully realize the delicate emotion he wanted to convey, he needed a lyrical horn player. The most sensitive, melodic musician he could think of was his son Branford, so he invited him to join. There’s a tenderness in these songs that can move one to tears. You can tell that Ellis feels each note. Listen to their version of “Maria” from West Side Story and you would swear that they are singing the lyrics. On “Miss Otis Regrets,” an ironic Cole Porter tune about a lynching, you can hear Ellis conveying the lyrics during the song’s denouement: “The moment before she died / she lifted up her lovely head and cried, madam/ Miss Otis regrets she’s unable to lunch today.” Ellis feels each note deeply. Listening again to this recording I am reminded – instead of just working on flashy, impressive soloing it’s more important to be loyal to the meaning and essence of the music. In fact, who even knew that a song can have a denouement?

For me personally, he was a friend and a teacher. I will miss him.

Biographer and subject: Frank Barrett and Ellis Marsalis

Making his mark, as always

Steve Wasserman has 15,000 books –all of them choice, and all of them on display at the offices of Heyday Books, where he is publisher. I don’t know how this compares to other Bay Area private collections, but it must be high in the rankings. Certainly when it comes to quality:

“I’m a snail who’s hostage to an oversized shell,” he jokes during a tour of his library. Unlike most personal collections, Wasserman’s is intrepid and surprising: belles lettres, poetry, literary criticism. Black history, civil rights, California history. Fiction from The Arabian Nights to Stefan Zweig.

“This is all wheat, no chaff,” he says with pride. Turn a corner and find Antiquity, Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt, geology and dinosaurs. Civil War, the Holocaust, Vietnam. Art, dance, architecture.

“Books are like Aladdin’s lamp,” Wasserman enthuses. “You don’t rub the lamp, the geni doesn’t come out. And a book that lies on the shelf is in something of a coma. Writers need readers to complete the work.” 

We’ve written about him here and here and here, among other places. Now Edward Guthmann, a former San Francisco Chronicle writer, has written about him, too. He has just published a profile of Steve, one of our favorite subjects, for the current Oakland Magazine. But the best parts always are the bits from Steve himself. He has an enviable way with words. And a sense of style.

Back at his table at Chez Panisse (photo: Moi)

Guthmann captures the trademark nattiness of Steve in this paragraph: “There’s a watchful, canny look in his eyes. On the day of our meeting, he’s dressed in a retro, semi-dandy style: Purple corduroy trousers, purple necktie, black vest, button-down white shirt, and cuff links. His shoes are two-toned, brown and buff, and a handkerchief blooms in the breast pocket of his wool blazer — a gallant sartorial gesture.”

Steve was editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review when it was the best book section in the nation, bar none. Then he did a stint as editor at large at the Yale University Press. What lured him back to Berkeley? You can read the reasons in the piece, but this some of those factors were Heyday’s small-scale “lack of bureaucracy” and the chance  “to write Heyday’s second chapter and to make a mark on independent California publishing. Plus, Alice Waters promised me I could have back my old table at Chez Panisse.”

Steve has a remarkable gift for the crisp, polished, quotable phrase that makes me weep with envy. Here’s an example:

“I feel a little bit like Rip Van Winkle,” Wasserman says. Soon after his return to the East Bay, he took his dog, Pepper, for a walk in Codornices Park in the Berkeley Hills and entered a small redwood grove he hadn’t seen in 50 years. “It was a summer day, the sunshine dappling through the trees, and the smell of the redwoods braided together with eucalyptus and oak and that particular kind of barometric pressure that suffuses the Bay Area, which is very light on the skin. None of the East Coast humidity. I stood there, my eyes welling up with tears. It was almost, I’m tempted to say, a Proustian moment.”

Shit, Steve. Braided. The smells were braided together. I wish I’d said that. (I know, I know … I will). 

Read the whole thing here.

While we wait for the all-clear on coronavirus so we can resume our lives, maybe you’d like some historical perspective.  Robert Harrison for a Zoom discussion of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron this Sunday, March 29.

Links to join us are included in the notice below, from today’s Stanford Report:

Online discussion: Join a Zoom discussion of The Decameron, the 14th-century masterpiece that begins with 10 young people fleeing to the countryside as the plague of 1348 ravages the city of Florence, Italy. Robert Harrison, professor of French and Italian, will discuss what the book says to us today. The Zoom session will take place from 10:30 a.m. to noon (PST) on Sunday, March 29. Members of the Stanford community are invited to join via this LINK. Discussion will focus on the preface, introduction and first tale in the book, which was written by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375). Participants are encouraged to read these in advance. The Project Gutenberg e-book of The Decameron is available at no cost here.

The announcement specifies members of the Stanford community, but Robert Harrison asked me to spread the word. Consider yourself invited. I’ll be there, too – cybernetically, of course. There is no “there” in cyberspace.

Eavan Boland: one of Ireland’s leading poets

Ireland’s terrible period of starvation and disease from 1845 to 1849 was called the “Great Famine” or the “Great Hunger” – George Bernard Shaw had a different term for it: “the Great Starvation.” About a million died, and a million emigrated. The worst year was 1847.

I ran across Eavan Boland‘s poem “Quarantine” the other day over at the Poetry Foundation website. I asked her how she came to write this poem about the Great Potato Famine, and whether the story was true. Here’s what she replied:

The story itself is anecdotally true – that is, it comes from a book called Mo Sceal Fein by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire (the title means he was a priest). The book was published  as autobiography somewhere about 1907 and in the Irish language. The title means “My Own Story.”

There is a brief recounting in that book of the story of Kit and Patrick, who left the workhouse during the 1847 famine to return to their cabin. Both were weakened by lack of food and she had famine fever. In the morning they were both found dead. In the text it says “the feet of the woman were in Patrick’s bosom, as if he had tried to warm them.”

It’s a very brief story and I first heard it as just that, when I was a teenager. Later I read a translation of it in the book. It seemed to me then, as it does now, to bring together so much of the public agony and private experience of the Ireland of that time. Just a terrible parable of people on the dark side of history, who somehow amend it for a moment by the grace of their actions.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
.  of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
.  He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
.  Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
.  There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
.  Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Arendt had the best company: herself

The business of being a writer is necessarily solitary. I’m used to it. In fact, with the current coronavirus “shelter in place” in  California and elsewhere in the country, little has changed in my work routine. One good adjustment: the rest of the world is on “pause,” so I don’t have the usual intrusion of emails, phone calls, and other interruptions.

Nevertheless, should all those fail, I have shelves of books I’ve never read. And it’s always a good day when you can reread Jane Austen, or explore The Divine Comedy again. Revisit Proust, or Stanisław Barańczak. Or finally get around to reading something by Michel Houellebecq, or the unopened novel by Ismail Kadare.

Yet all over the social media I hear complaints about loneliness and boredom during the coronavirus crisis. But the antidote to loneliness isn’t society – it’s solitude.

Hannah Arendt wrote that the ability to tolerate the solitariness of an internal space, in which one can commune with oneself and think for oneself, is central to personal responsibility. In an essay on “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship,” she argued such “being-with-oneself” is connected with the sustained practice of examining issues, weighing contradictory thoughts, making up one’s own mind. She observed that those who resisted the Nazi call had the habit and experience of daring to judge for themselves:

“The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking.”

It’s what  Stanford professor Robert Pogue Harrison said a decade ago at a Stanford conference on Arendt, when he made the event’s most spirited remarks in a talk on “passionate thinking.” Read the whole article here. A relevant excerpt:

Stanford’s Gerhard Casper, Robert Harrison at back (Photo: L.A. Cicero)

[Harrison] considered Arendt’s notion of friendship and thought as rooted in solitude and the ability to commune with oneself – that “plurality begins with the individual.”

The “overwhelming question” in the humanities, he said, is: “How do we negotiate the necessity of solitude as a precondition for thought?”

“What do we do to foster the regeneration of thinking? Nothing. At least not institutionally,” he said. “Not only in the university, but in society at large, everything conspires to invade the solitude of thought. It has as much to do with technology as it does with ideology. There is a not a place we go where we are not connected to the collective.

“Every place of silence is invaded by noise. Everywhere we see the ravages of this on our thinking. The ability for sustained, coherent, consistent thought is becoming rare” in the “thoughtlessness of the age.”

So do take some time to talk internally with yourself during this unusual time. We hope it will be over soon! And if you want to read what Arendt wrote to James Baldwin, go here.

Postscript from George Dunn of Zhejiang University: Ursula LeGuin has a powerful story that addresses issues of injustice and scapegoating, titled “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” I’ve used it in my Ethics class more times than I can count. The title refers to the very small minority of citizens in the imaginary city of Omelas who walk away from the hedonic paradise this city represents because they are unwilling to partake of a joy that’s purchased through the torture of a child. There is one line in the story had that always struck me as somehow key to what LeGuin wants us to understand, though it is spoken so causally that its import can easily be missed. Most of the citizens of Omelas are reconciled to the horror on which their happiness is built, though some leave in their youth the moment they come face to face with that horror. Yet, reports LeGuin, “Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home.” The phrase “falls silent” stands out for me, indicating as it does a retreat into deep introspection. Such a retreat into silence would be quite conspicuous in Omelas, whose citizens are depicted by LeGuin as highly gregarious. LeGuin then recounts how these few leave the city, three times using the word “alone” to underscore the solitude of those who walk away. Reading these passages always puts me in mind of Arendt’s essay on “Responsibility,” also assigned a few times, with its reminder that ethics is predicated on our ability to resist the crowd, which in turn depends on having cultivated an inner space for reflection. Being highly intelligent, articulate, and quick-witted in debate is no guarantee of a capacity for reflection. To the contrary, as we’ve both seen, those with the greatest intellectual gifts will also often display the greatest ingenuity in making excuses for themselves.

Editor, translator, and poet, too.

I know Boris Dralyuk as a Russian translator, scholar, and author, and also as the editor I work with at the estimable Los Angeles Review of Books. In addition, I know him  as the husband of author and translator Jennifer Croft, winner of the Man Booker prize for her translation of Nobel prizewinner Olga Tokarczuk’s Extraordinary Flights from the Polish.

But I didn’t know him as a poet … until now. Three poems have appeared in the current issue of The New Criterion.  I also didn’t know him as a native Angeleno, but all three poems are set in that legendary city. “Yes, the town is a stage set, but it’s also the stage where our lives play out — lives no less rich, no less meaningful than those playing out elsewhere,” he has written in an LARB piece on Henri Coulette, titled “…With the remote shine of dead planets”: A New Year’s Meeting in Los Angeles.”

Nazimova in 1921 (Photo: Arthur Rice)

On Boris’s blog, he wrote about the poems in The New Criterion:

“This brief sequence of poems is set in the Los Angeles neighborhood where I grew up and where Jenny and I now make our home. Hollywood is by no means underexposed, of course, yet some corners of it receive less attention than others, and some episodes of its past are gradually sinking into oblivion. In the stanzas below, I spend some time with a monument to Rudolph Valentino; imagine what one of the neighborhood’s early residents, Paul de Longpré, would have made of its current state; and consider the fates of two generations of Russian émigrés — those among whom I was raised in the 1990s, and those who, like Alla Nazimova, flocked here in the 1910s and ’20s.

I had a hard time picking one of the three to publish on the Book Haven, but … Boris is Russian, and I write a good deal about Russian culture and Russian poetry. Moreover, I remember fondly visiting the ethnic enclaves of Los Angeles (my in-laws lived in Armenian Glendale), so in the end I made a surprise choice for the sonnet remembering one of the legendary Russian stars of the early decades of the 20th century.

“What is a society that has no value other than survival?” Giorgio Agamben asks, in this piece published today in Italian on the blog Quodlibet.  The essay was republished on Medium, and in an authorized translation by Adam Kotsko , who described it as the important European philosopher’s “indirect response to the controversy surrounding his article about the response to coronavirus in Italy.” It was also included in the European Journal of Psychoanlysis, in a round-up of thoughts on “Coronavirus and Philosophers,” and from there to Facebook, where it came to my attention: 

Fear is a poor advisor, but it causes many things to appear that one pretended not to see. The problem is not to give opinions on the gravity of the disease, but to ask about the ethical and political consequences of the epidemic. The first thing that the wave of panic that has paralyzed the country obviously shows is that our society no longer believes in anything but bare life. It is obvious that Italians are disposed to sacrifice practically everything — the normal conditions of life, social relationships, work, even friendships, affections, and religious and political convictions — to the danger of getting sick. Bare life — and the danger of losing it — is not something that unites people, but blinds and separates them. Other human beings, as in the plague described in Alessandro Manzoni’s novel, are now seen solely as possible spreaders of the plague whom one must avoid at all costs and from whom one needs to keep oneself at a distance of at least a meter. The dead — our dead — do not have a right to a funeral and it is not clear what will happen to the bodies of our loved ones. Our neighbor has been cancelled and it is curious that churches remain silent on the subject. What do human relationships become in a country that habituates itself to live in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society that has no value other than survival?

The other thing, no less disquieting than the first, that the epidemic has caused to appear with clarity is that the state of exception, to which governments have habituated us for some time, has truly become the normal condition. There have been more serious epidemics in the past, but no one ever thought for that reason to declare a state of emergency like the current one, which prevents us even from moving. People have been so habituated to live in conditions of perennial crisis and perennial emergency that they don’t seem to notice that their life has been reduced to a purely biological condition and has not only every social and political dimension, but also human and affective. A society that lives in a perennial state of emergency cannot be a free society. We in fact live in a society that has sacrificed freedom to so-called “reasons of security” and has therefore condemned itself to live in a perennial state of fear and insecurity.

It is not surprising that for the virus one speaks of war. The emergency measures obligate us in fact to life in conditions of curfew. But a war with an invisible enemy that can lurk in every other person is the most absurd of wars. It is, in reality, a civil war. The enemy is not outside, it is within us.

What is worrisome is not so much or not only the present, but what comes after. Just as wars have left as a legacy to peace a series of inauspicious technology, from barbed wire to nuclear power plants, so it is also very likely that one will seek to continue even after the health emergency experiments that governments did not manage to bring to reality before: closing universities and schools and doing lessons only online, putting a stop once and for all to meeting together and speaking for political or cultural reasons and exchanging only digital messages with each other, wherever possible substituting machines for every contact — every contagion — between human beings.

A few days ago I wrote about the wildfires, earthquakes, mudslides, and drought of California. It hasn’t gotten better since. So here I sit, “social distancing” myself (the new advice for contagious disease), as the coronavirus numbers climb in Santa Clara County, one of the  hotspots in our afflicted nation. I wasn’t expecting to turn to C.S. Lewis for advice, but this excerpt turned up in an four-year-old Reddit post, offering some seminal thoughts for today.  The excerpt is taken from his essay, written three years after the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “On Living In An Atomic Age”:

C.S. Lewis, minding his business.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.