Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves 9781472590114, 9781472590121, 9781474241953, 9781472590145

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Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves A high-school drop-out who served in the American army and then managed to slip into Oxford on the G. I. bill, Frank Cioffi gained a considerable public reputation in Freudian and Wittgensteinian circles. This account of his conversation is written in a Boswellian spirit, and captures the sharp intelligence, boisterous sense of humour and wealth of illustration Cioffi was able to bring to bear on life’s biggest problems when he was, as if were, off-duty. Tackling subjects such as the unruly body, the challenge of art, dealing with failure, the lure of science, the meaning of life, our understanding of others, depression, and the case for suicide, David Ellis describes how a philosopher who was profoundly influenced by Wittgenstein dealt with general issues and creates a vivid impression of an unusual and gifted individual. This portrait is followed by a post-script in which Nicholas Bunnin, who worked in the philosophy department at Essex when Cioffi was a professor there, situates him in a more strictly academic context and discusses his less well-known essays on literary criticism and the behavioural sciences, arguing for Cioffi’s potential to inspire those seeking a role for analytic philosophy within the broader scope of humanistic philosophy. Educated in New York and Oxford, Frank Cioffi taught at the University of Singapore, the University of Kent and the University of Essex, where he was a founding member of the Department of Philosophy. His published work centred chiefly on Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He died in January 2012. David Ellis is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of numerous works on D. H. Lawrence and, more recently, The Truth about William Shakespeare: Fact, Fiction and Modern Biographies (2012) and Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English (2013). Nicholas Bunnin is the Director of the Philosophy Project at the Institute for Chinese Studies, University of Oxford and a Visiting Professor of Chinese Philosophy at King’s College, London, UK. He is editor of The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (2002) and The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy (2009).

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Also Available From Bloomsbury Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud, Erich Fromm Freud: A Guide for the Perplexed, Céline Surprenant Portraits of Wittgenstein, edited by F. A. Flowers III and Ian Ground Starting with Wittgenstein, Chon Tejedor

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Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves David Ellis

With an afterword by Nicholas Bunnin

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © David Ellis, 2015 Afterword © Nicholas Bunnin, 2015 David Ellis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4725-9011-4 PB: 978-1-4725-9012-1 ePDF: 978-1-4725-9014-5 ePub: 978-1-4725-9013-8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ellis, David, 1939– Frank Cioffi: the philosopher in shirt-sleeves/ David Ellis; with an afterword by Nicholas Bunnin. pages cm ISBN 978-1-4725-9011-4 (hardback) 1. Cioffi, Frank. I. Bunnin, Nicholas, writer of afterword. II. Title. B945.C4764E45 2015 191–dc23 2014046226 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd, Chennai, India

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In memoriam: Frank Cioffi 11 January 1928–1 January 2012

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Contents Acknowledgements 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Sunday Afternoons The Unruly Body and Goffman Remembering the Past The Moral Career Failure and Retirement The Lives of Others Organicism The Lure of Science But Why Then Do We Read Biographies? A Sense of Humour The Two Directions Aesthetics The Meaning of Life Pessimism and Suicide Death Conclusion

Afterword by Nicholas Bunnin Major Works of Frank Cioffi Index

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viii 1 11 21 31 41 51 61 71 81 91 101 111 121 131 141 151 161 183 185

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Acknowledgements In the preparation of this book we owe a special debt of gratitude to Frank L. Cioffi, of Buruch College of the City University of New York, and to Sagar Nair. Edward Greenwood, who was a close friend of its subject, has also been ours, making many helpful suggestions. For much careful reading and helpful advice, we would also like to thank Pamela Sue Anderson, Simon Critchley, Hywel Davies, Glen Durbridge, James Hopkins, Alan Montefiore, Julian Mannering, Adrian Moore, Jerome Neu and Carter Wilson. Nicholas Bunnin David Ellis

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Sunday Afternoons

‘Condemned to Hope’s delusive mine’, writes the ever-cheerful Samuel Johnson, in a striking characterization of human existence, ‘As on we toil from day to day, / By sudden blasts, or slow decline, / Our social comforts drop away’. As a realist as well as a pessimist, Johnson knew that when we lose someone we care about, as he had, we tend to focus not on what the person concerned might have felt about losing his or her life (a difficult if not impossible enterprise), but on the difference that loss makes to us: the diminution in our ‘social comforts’. Interesting talk is a rare commodity. Every Sunday for well over 20 years, a friend and I would go to Frank Cioffi’s in order to converse or, more often, listen to what he had to say. He lived in one of those Regency houses which are fine to look at from the outside but not very convenient to inhabit – all height and no breadth. The narrow staircases proved a real problem when his wife became disabled and chair lifts had to be installed. He used as his study the front room on the first floor, which had bookcases on its three sides, and wherever else they could be fitted between the two large sash windows on the fourth. This may evoke images of those scholars’ dens full of neatly arranged sets of classic texts whereas, in fact, the odd hardbacks on Frank’s shelves were cheek by jowl with a huge miscellany of cheap paperbacks, photocopied versions of books he had not been able to get hold of otherwise, and video recordings. We would find him sitting at his desk in the

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middle of the room, with his computer to the left so that there was direct line of sight to a small television set on a table against the front wall. On the desk and all around him was a sea of papers and bent-backed, heavily annotated books. These were mixed up with unopened letters from his building society or from insurance companies (having worked for a term in a small university in North Carolina, he left about US$20,000 in the local bank and then forgot about it for so long that the money was appropriated by the State authorities). It seemed impossible that he could ever find his way through all that clutter, but when he wanted a particular text to illustrate a point, it was very rare that he could not lay his hand on it. Very tall (6′ 4″), the tales Frank told us indicated that he had been strong and powerful in his youth but, when we knew him, his body was beginning to let him down and the stoop that tall men tend to develop had become pronounced. He would shuffle painfully up and down the awkward stairs in order to tend to his wife or prepare something in the basement kitchen for her to eat; but go out very little: the idea of ‘taking exercise’ being totally incomprehensible to him. Most of his day was spent reading or in front of his computer and he would say, gesturing towards it, and to the television opposite, ‘I’ve got everything I want here. What more could any man need?’ There were, however, stairs just outside his study which led to an attic room and he would often climb these, partly to look out of its back window because of the view there on to some trees (the windows of his study faced the street). He was distressed when, shortly before his death, these trees were pollarded. Frank was by no means anti-social but he was completely incapable of small talk so that he avoided most ordinary social occasions (I can remember only one occasion when he went out to dinner). He would very much have liked to have had more recognition for his work, yet he must have known that this would almost certainly have required the kind of social networking of which he was, by nature rather than principle, incapable.

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Our weekly sessions had rules of engagement, one of which was that there should be no cinema talk in the first hour. This had been insisted upon by our friend, Edward Greenwood, who felt that he had seen all the films he would ever need to when his father managed a cinema in the North of England. At Oxford, Edward had become a committed highbrow with no patience for popular culture. During his own childhood and youth in New York, Frank had been completely immersed in pulp magazines, radio programmes, cartoons and the weekly adventure series at the cinema but, far from turning his back on his early cultural baggage, as Edward had, he carried it with him into his professional life. In his 70s, he was still showing interest in studies which tried to work out what it was about Mickey Mouse’s androgynous shape, physiognomy and squeaky voice which had had such appeal for children of his generation. As far as films were concerned, he could quote the example of that ardent cinema-goer Wittgenstein and claim that, had he lived long enough, the great philosopher might well have watched as much television as he himself did. Although I have no proof, I suspect that when Frank did watch television he was very much a flicker, or what is known in the States as a channel surfer. I deduce this from the eccentric way he read books, or at least those concerned to present an argument rather than tell a story. With these, he would invariably read the final pages and then, if he was interested enough, work his way back in order to discover how the writer’s conclusions had been reached. Both Edward Greenwood and I belonged to the school of those who begin at the beginning and then conscientiously plod through a book to its end; however much the heart may already have begun to sink. We liked to ‘give an author every chance’. I used to feel that in refusing to read in our seriatim fashion, Frank risked making serious errors of misrepresentation but, when it came to books we both of us had read recently, I was never able to catch him out.

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His fondness for a large number of writers whom Frank had read in his youth and who are now regarded as second or third rate, if they are known about at all, did not lessen his enthusiasm for the classics. Proust was a favourite, references to episodes in Shakespeare’s plays littered his conversation, and he would talk often about the great Russian writers, Tolstoy in particular. There was hardly a French or British author from what used to be known as the canon he had not read. Yet his most intense concentration was reserved for philosophy. When he first arrived in Oxford, he had been swept up in the rapidly rising tide of what is commonly called logical positivism. He used to describe to us the ferocious verificationist he once had been, inspecting every statement for the faintest signs of what he called ‘bullshit’, and seeking to reduce enquiry to a few determinate areas. What was it one could say that made crystal clear sense and what questions had to be dismissed because they could never yield answers sufficiently innocent of obfuscating abstraction? There was a certain leaning towards the scientific method in all this which may have been strengthened in him when, after he graduated, he went to work on various projects in social psychology under the direction of Michael Argyle. But this was only a way of marking time until he found a job as an academic philosopher. In his first years as a teacher of philosophy Frank was wholly what is called ‘analytic’, and very hard headed at that. But as time passed he came more and more to share Wittgenstein’s suspicions of anything akin to the scientific approach, and even developed a grudging admiration for Heidegger. Alien as the idiom of German idealism was to him, he appreciated the efforts he detected in Heidegger to dig down to what is basic in everyday life. He was nonetheless someone who would always challenge you to define more closely an abstract word and, when a specific domain of human interest or activity was in question – sport, for example, or literary criticism – delight in multiplying examples which showed

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how heterogeneous a mass of human behaviour these words represented, and how unlikely it therefore was that generalizations could have much value. A favourite book of his was William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience in the preface to which James declares his belief that ‘a large acquaintance with particulars often makes us wiser than the possession of abstract formulas, however deep.’ Frank would have certainly agreed with that. When he was discussing philosophy, he could be remarkably intense. Having no philosophical expertise myself, I used often to have to sit on the sidelines while he and Edward Greenwood battered away at whether it was possible to ground ethical standards in absolutes, what Kant has to say about aesthetics, Nietzsche’s notion of the eternal return, whether Husserl was right about intentionality, and a dozen other topics of that nature. Edward could be choleric and grow red in the face, but this was nothing to Frank’s extraordinary vehemence and he would sometimes reach a point where he sought support in abuse of the most obscene kind. It was then he would accuse us both of bad faith. He spent so long pondering his own positions, and scrutinizing them from every possible angle, that he resented bitterly people whose judgements he felt had been arrived at too easily, especially if they happened to be successful academics in public life. The volcanic element in Frank’s character was something he was both aware of and apologetic about. He was ashamed of a story he once told us which related to the time when he was a professor in Essex. He had got into the habit of sometimes going to London to work in a library or see friends and afterwards catch the last train back to Colchester. On this occasion, he must have been taken up to London in a car and then arrived at the station a few minutes before the departure time of the last train which would take him back home. He expected to pay for his ticket during his journey, as he had done several times before but on his way to the train he was blocked by an officious ticket collector with whom he had a heated exchange.

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Intemperate words degenerated into a scuffle and ended with Frank knocking the ticket collector down. Arrested by the railway police, he was detained for a few hours but then released by officials who told him they did not like that particular ticket collector either. We used to tell him he had been very lucky (‘Philosophy professor in ugly brawl’, the tabloid headlines might have read), and he agreed. Kindly in nearly all his human relations and able to establish close and easy relationships with all kinds of people (he got on very well with the barely literate young women who came to help him look after his wife), he reacted very strongly to contradiction in the intellectual sphere so that there was always something of a risk in disagreeing with him. When Edward and I did that he strained every muscle to show why we were wrong, which much of the time we eventually came to realize we were. On the remaining occasions, he would grudgingly admit that perhaps we had a point but only during the session which followed the one in which we had disagreed. This was because, when a discussion was in full flow, he had always, like his hero Dr Johnson, a tendency to argue for victory, whatever the merits of his case. He was one of those fortunate people whose power over words increases the more the temperature rises, and whose presence of mind is not diminished but enhanced when a dispute becomes public. I can recall a seminar in which he met the challenge of an admittedly obnoxious young academic with the withering, ‘No, that’s wrong. I hate to hear Wittgenstein misquoted, especially in such a bad cause.’ For Frank philosophy was above all a question of problems not people and he had little patience with the history of ideas. He nevertheless had his major points of reference, the most important of which was the work of Wittgenstein, not his Tractatus or even Philosophical Investigations, but the notebooks and his remarks on Frazer as well as those on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief gathered together by Cyril Barrett in a very slim green volume published by Blackwell’s in the 1960s. Frank pondered these often gnomic observations endlessly

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and used often to regret how small the community made up of commentators on them was: to be well known within it hardly made you a household name. He had been slow to appreciate the importance of Wittgenstein, even though one of his tutors at Oxford had been Friedrich Waismann, a mathematician and physicist as well as a philosopher, who had been a member of the Vienna circle and known Wittgenstein well. He used to recall how Waismann had given him a book on Einstein to think about and, excitingly active as his life as an undergraduate then was, he had not managed to get round to it by the time of the next weekly tutorial. To excuse his laziness he had told Waismann that he had failed to do what had been required of him because, not having any mathematical background, he had been defeated by the equations. But, Waismann had protested gently, I knew that and therefore deliberately gave you a book which contains no equations. I don’t know how he wormed his way out of this situation but he must have made a sufficient impression at Oxford for Elizabeth Anscombe to have invited him to her rooms while she was working on Wittgenstein’s as yet unpublished Investigations. His brief was to sit there silently while she laboured away and handed him from time to time a sheet that she must have thought might interest him. But he would confess that, in this early period of his life, he could make nothing at all of what he read. The other great professional interest of Frank’s was Freud. He had been dismayed by the uncritical acceptance of psychoanalysis in the intellectual community at large, and even among one or two analytical philosophers. He acknowledged that Freud was a fascinating figure, and a highly gifted writer, but thought the theories he proposed were largely nonsense and that they represented, in the words of Peter Medawar, ‘the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th century’. Reading the collected works over and over again, he became a pioneer in the anti-Freud movement, distinguishing himself from other critics by his insistence that it was not so much Freud’s

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pretensions to scientific method which mattered, bogus though they may well be, but the fact that psychoanalysis presented itself as a testimonial science, reliant for confirmation of its hypotheses on the reports of its practitioners who were the only people to have access to certain kinds of evidence. In this case, it mattered a great deal that Freud himself could be clearly shown misreporting and tampering with his results. A short talk he gave on the BBC in 1973 entitled ‘Was Freud a liar?’ proved crucial in setting the anti-Freud movement going in England and, though Frank’s involvement made him a minor celebrity, his importance was acknowledged and honoured by people much more in the public eye than he was (Frederick Crews, for example). He worked away tirelessly at the issues so that the opening 90 pages of his 1998 book Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience is an astonishing display of close thinking and intellectual rigour. By that stage many of his criticisms had been accepted but he was infuriated by the way Freudian apologists could (for example) agree that their hero had given a totally misleading account of how the Oedipus theory originated (glossing over the fact that the method which led to the first collocation between early sexual experience and neurotic disorder was identical to that which produced the second), and still feel it made no difference. Or that they themselves could quietly drop the central notion of penis envy, not for any sound theoretical reasons but because it had become politically inconvenient. What he set out to do in those opening pages was block their every avenue of escape, impossible though he knew that to be. The commonest riposte to criticisms of Freud is that those who make them must be suffering from resistance. The charge is always unanswerable but if there was anything in Frank’s psyche that motivated his attacks on Freud, other than intellectual dismay, I never saw it. On matters of sex he was remarkably uninhibited and when it came to sexual morality was a complete utilitarian, always arguing that it did not matter what people got up to in private as long as they did no harm to others.

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Having once been very taken with Freud (especially his case histories) I did not have to sit by when our conversations veered round to him and, having spent some time in France, I could be a help to Frank when there were French texts involved. His own French was good. He had learnt it a long time ago when, just after the war, he worked in Paris for the American version of the War Graves commission; but it was overwhelmingly demotic. He could tell jokes in French, some of them pretty obscene (I can remember one about why the vertically challenged Napoleon preferred les combats); and he taught me a famous reply to the charge that the French have no limericks: Il y avait un jeune homme de Dijon Qui avait très peu de religion; Il disait: Quant à moi Je déteste tous les trois Le père, le Fils et . . . le Pigeon.

When I occasionally went to France, he asked me to bring back bilingual versions of the Sherlock Holmes stories, so that he could try to recover the proficiency he once felt he had while at the same time indulging in some of his favourite reading. But he needed more knowledge than he possessed when he was invited to contribute to a huge, iconoclastic volume on Freud devised by a French publisher and called Le Livre Noir de la Psychanalyse. It was then that all three of us wondered what to do about the line taken by Elisabeth Roudinesco, specifically in relation to Freud’s account of how he came to discover the Oedipus complex. ‘This invention’, she wrote, meaning this fabrication, ‘bears witness to a historical reality to which we cannot oppose the simplistic argument of a reality of facts . . . [The truth of the story lies in] . . . its legend and refers to the way in which the psychoanalytic movement tells itself the initial fantasies about its birth’. He was exasperated by this approach, throwing up his hands in desperate recognition of an intellectual bolt hole he would never be able to block up.

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Frank Cioffi: The Philosopher in Shirt-Sleeves

Much of what Frank had to say about Freud can be found in Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience (1998) and many of his best thoughts on late Wittgenstein are in his Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, which appeared in the same year. Anyone who wanted to observe him in a professional guise can find him there. But in his conversations, his range was much broader than these two publications suggest and he had interesting things to say on a very wide variety of topics. What follows is an attempt to give the flavour of those conversations. In doing so, I have supplemented my memories of what Frank said with material from the mass of notes left on his computer at his death. That I have not been able to check all the very many quotations embedded in these notes for minor errors of transcription (he could be careless in those matters) has not concerned me unduly since it was as examples in the form he had noted them down that they fulfilled his argumentative or illustrative functions. My aim has been to present Cioffi as a general thinker about life rather than an academic specialist, although in an ‘Afterword’ which follows my own text, Nicholas Bunnin, who was for many years Frank’s colleague at the University of Essex, has briefly but expertly situated him in a more professional context. Although there may be an occasional overlap, what I have tried to provide is what cannot be found, or not found easily, in his published work. The kind of thinker this reveals Frank to be is suggested in a story told by Edward Greenwood at his funeral. That related to when he was in hospital and proving temporarily difficult to locate. When Edward asked where in the ward he could find Professor Cioffi, a nurse replied with a kindly smile, ‘Oh you mean the patient who knows all the answers.’ ‘No’, came a voice from underneath some nearby bedclothes, ‘I know all the questions.’ Frank may not have known all the questions but his correction of the nurse indicates what he felt the role of philosophy in ordinary life ought principally to be.

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The Unruly Body and Goffman

Frank’s first memory dated back to infant school. He was sitting on the floor with a number of other toddlers when he soiled himself. As the smell became more incriminating, he pointed to a little girl who was unpopular in the group and called out: ‘it was her.’ The other children took up the chant so that the noise attracted the nuns who were in charge and he was taken away to be cleaned up. This sounds very much like what in Freudian terminology is called an anamnesis, a memory dredged up from the past, often with the help of the analyst, and inspected for any pathogenic content. Yet as far as I know Frank had no trouble in recalling this shameful episode and, if there had ever been any unease in his relationship with his own natural functions, it was long gone by the time I met him. I have in fact never come across anyone who was less self-conscious about those matters. I can remember visiting him in hospital after he had undergone a bowel operation and his penis was attached by a tube to a bottle on a stand. When I raised some general problem that attracted his interest, he clambered out of bed, grabbed hold of the stand (which was on wheels) and began pacing up and down the ward, his nightshirt flapping open and his bottle speeding alongside him. He was far too absorbed in expounding his point of view to pay any attention to the impression he was making. One of his happiest memories seemed to have involved sitting on the toilet during his army days and indulging in leisurely chat with fellow soldiers all of

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whom were in cubicles which may have had side panels but were certainly without, he informed us, any doors. Unselfconscious Frank may have been, but the unruly body and how we live with it was one of his special areas of interest. He was familiar (as most of us are) with the story Aubrey tells in his Brief Lives about the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, the same thought by some to have written Shakespeare’s plays. Making a ‘low obeisance’ to Elizabeth one day, Oxford had the misfortune to fart. He was so ashamed that he went on his travels for 7 years only to have the Queen say to him, when he next appeared at Court, ‘My Lord, I had forgot the fart.’ As an accompaniment to this anecdote, Frank had found somewhere in the Arabian Nights the story of Abu Hassan who farted during his wedding ceremony and also then disappeared for a long period. More cautious than the Earl of Oxford, he hung about the outskirts of Baghdad on his return in order to assure himself that his misdemeanour had been forgotten. Unhappily, he then overheard a woman who was chatting casually with a neighbour and wanted to recall the date of a certain episode. ‘Oh yes’, she apparently remarked, ‘that was the year of Abu Hassan’s fart’. These stories belong to the territory that Frank associated above all with Erving Goffman and the title of Goffman’s most well-known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. How do we manage our image in the eyes of others? The strategies of withdrawal which both Oxford and Abu Hassan practised could, he thought, be listed under what Goffman calls ‘defence’. The alternative was ‘coping’ and he liked to illustrate what this could mean with a moment from a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart called The Man Who Came to Dinner (it was made into a film in the early 1940s with a young Bette Davis in a leading role). This describes how a celebrated and acerbic critic from New York injures himself on the icy steps of a house in the mid-West and decides, or is invited to take up residence there until he recovers. Because his hosts are in such naïve awe of his intelligence

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and celebrity, and he himself is of a bullying nature, they initially allow him to take over their lives. At one point, which is not in the film but must therefore I assume be in the play, the New Yorker belches loudly and when the company looks a little startled says, ‘Well, what did you expect, chimes?’ The book by Goffman which I remember him talking most about is called Stigma. This proposes a distinction between those social disadvantages which are immediately evident, such as facial disfigurement, obesity, being too tall or short, and the ones in a person’s background it is possible to conceal (a criminal record, sexual preferences at variance with those of the group, discordant religious or ethnic origins). These call for different strategies of social interaction, in the case of the second category, for example, what Goffman refers to as ‘information control’ (not letting people find out what might diminish you in their eyes). A strategy that relates to the first category – stigmas immediately evident – of which Frank was especially fond concerns a man who has lost both his hands in the war and has to make do with metal prostheses. He likes drinking in bars and has devised a method for calming the initial disquiet or anxiety his appearance causes. Taking up a prominent position, he performs the relatively intricate operation of extracting a cigarette from a packet and lighting it with his metal hands, before remarking, in a voice that could be overheard, ‘At least, I never burn my fingers.’ Such successful coping with presentational problems as the man with no hands demonstrated are alas less common than the problems themselves. Frank had cut out from the London Review of Books the three minor examples with which Alan Bennett had begun his review of one of Goffman’s books. The first involved meeting people at the railway station and deciding whether to allow the smile with which you greet them to become fixed during the long trek between their getting off the train and arriving at the barrier. In the second, you are waiting for an appointment and the leather couch you are sitting

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on makes a fart-like sound. Since this is loud enough to attract the attention of the secretary, you deliberately make the sound again in order to demonstrate its provenance and then worry that she might think you have farted twice. The third involves attending a funeral, maintaining an appropriately solemn demeanour and then wondering how to respond when an old friend greets you effusively. It is a tribute to the writer Bennett was reviewing that these situations are now all immediately recognizable as Goffmanesque. It was no surprise to Frank that people like Bennett (or Christopher Ricks) were admirers of Goffman since the kind of detail found in his work is very much like that found in novels and plays. The question was whether it could ever be turned into a legitimate science. The chapter in his Wittgenstein book called ‘Information, contemplation and social life’ argues cogently that it could not, extending its criticism to Thorsten Veblen’s work on conspicuous consumption and David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd. Characteristic of Frank’s way of taking no prisoners and making no friends is the way he deals there with Goffman’s attempt to give a bogus scientific authority to one of his enquiries and establish a category called the ‘ritual profanation of the front region’. When those of a higher status have temporarily vacated a region which they normally occupy, Goffamn says, those of lower status may take advantage of the opportunity to ‘ritually profane it’. As Frank points, this has an interestingly obscene ring about it but, in the examples Goffman gives, what it boils down to is mimicking absent superiors, and generally larking about in their offices. ‘In other words’, Frank concludes sardonically, ‘when the cat’s away the mice will practise ritual profanation of the front region.’ One of his intellectual heroes was John Wisdom and he had been struck by Wisdom having once asked, ‘However does anyone ever say to another anything worth hearing, when he doesn’t know anything the other doesn’t know?’ From the point of view of legitimate scientific discourse, the trouble with the knowledge in which Goffman deals

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is that so little of it is new. The most he usually does is remind his readers of what they already know. The consequence is a number of criticisms from within the sociological community about ‘endless elaboration of the obvious’ or ‘slick wearisome examples to illustrate the most elementary concepts’. As for the concepts themselves, Frank would point out that they needed only to be stated for us to acquiesce, sometimes immediately and sometimes only after reflection, but rarely because of the documentation supplied. An essay by Goffman he admired is called ‘Where the action is’ and its central claim is that sometimes people do risky things because it is part of their job, but sometimes because they want to be known for doing risky things. This isn’t news, he commented, only the risky things they do is. The claim itself has a general truth but he would emphasize the difference between many of Goffman’s similar claims and scientific propositions by observing that it would seem as inappropriate or ill-mannered to produce counter-examples to his theses as it would be to suggest that he who hesitates is not always lost, or a stitch in time is just as likely to save eight or ten as nine. It would, he said, allowing his sense of fun to overstate the case, be like bombarding with falsificatory instances someone who claimed that the female of the species is deadlier than the male. To characterize the area of knowledge to which Goffman really belonged, he would collect ‘anticipations’ of his work from the great writers. There is, for example, in one of Dr Johnson’s essays, some thoughts on the passengers in a stage coach. Because they are usually unknown to each other, and without expectations of meeting again once their journey is over, they all tend (Johnson claims) to ‘assume a character of which they are most desirous, and on no occasion is the general ambition of superiority more obviously indulged’. Travelling is also the subject of an essay by Hazlitt in which he is similarly concerned with the advantages of leaving the milieu in which one is known:

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Oh it is great to shake off the trammels of the world and of public opinion – to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties – to hold the universe only by a dish of sweetbreads and to owe nothing but the score of the evening – and no longer seeking applause and meeting with contempt to be known by no other title than the Gentleman in the Parlour.

If the phrase ‘no longer seeking applause and meeting with contempt’ immediately suggests we are in Goffman country, it also indicates he was not the first to explore it. To better characterize Goffman’s writings, Frank would try to imagine what kinds of sociological discourse would be more valuable. I would willingly forgo, he would say, a brilliant Goffmanian analysis of social miscarriages for a shortening of my own secondary function with respect to presentational mishaps (‘secondary function’ being that psychological term for the thoughts that assail us after some embarrassing or humiliating incident is long gone). Imagine, he would also ask, the following exchange: A: Some day having African features will be as little remarked on as speaking with a regional accent now is. B: That’s all very well but isn’t there a way of hurrying up the process?

Is it unreasonable to expect social science, he would comment, to contribute something to the expediting of the disappearance, or at least the attenuation, of physiognomic racism, and to object to being fobbed off with taxonomic felicities like those introduced by Goffman in his discussion of ‘passing’ (the attempt to be accepted as a member of a different racial group)? One of Goffman’s major interests is composure but it is clear that different people react very differently to social catastrophe. In Othello, Cassio is led by Iago into forgetting that he ought not to drink and,

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as a consequence, behaves in a wholly unprofessional manner while he is supposed to be on watch. The ensuing loss of his reputation makes him distraught. In All’s Well that Ends Well, on the other hand, Parolles is tricked by colleagues into a shocking display of cowardice and treachery which puts an end to his army career, but then responds in lines that Frank would often repeat: If my heart were great ‘Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more, But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft As captain shall. Simply the thing I am Shall make me live.

A high point in a not very distinguished play, what Parolles provides, is a utopian vision of being able to exist as a ‘thing’ rather than a social being. His triumph over shame seemed to Frank an extraordinary instance of composure, or of that presence of mind which is even more memorably illustrated in Falstaff. Would we not spontaneously prefer, he wondered, a discourse which made a contribution to the problem of producing persons who possessed those varieties of composure among which Goffman discriminated to those discriminations themselves? It is easy to imagine a social historian offering a narrative which described how, in the case of certain stigmas, Goffman’s ‘passing’ had given way to ostentatious and even pugnacious ‘declaring’ of apparent deviance (as has often occurred today with homosexuality and some ethnicities). Yet it would not be markedly eccentric, Frank thought, to favour a Goffmanian overview of the presentational dilemmas of those who continue to be stigmatized to this kind of narrative account. What would however be eccentric, in his view, would be to prefer an overview of the predicaments of those with what Goffman calls ‘abominations of the body’ to an advance in understanding which enabled us to abort the demoralization and withdrawal attendant

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upon (say) disfigurement or amputation, and foster the successful kind of coping achieved by the legless air ace Douglas Bader, or the facially disfigured Richard Hillary and those other RAF pilots who adjusted to life after having suffered extensive third-degree burns. Here he was perhaps searching for a degree of practicality in sociological discourse which seems almost crude but I imagine this was because he was caught between his deep enjoyment of Goffman’s writings and a feeling that, in the end, what they had to convey did not amount to very much. He had noted Alan Bennett’s remark that one of the attractions of Goffman is his taxonimizing: items that have been lying around in one’s mind for ages can be neatly filled away after having read him; and he had wondered also whether the way Goffman ordered his observations did not help to banish, at least momentarily, the jarring sense of the unmanageable variety and multitudinous nature of life in general, and modern megapolitan life in particular, producing in its place an impression of grasp and inwardness over a wide range of social practices, opaque or exotic to others. Perhaps also (he conjectured) what Goffman did for secret self-presentational stratagems of interactional life was similar to what Kinsey did for masturbation and illicit sexuality generally: secure a wider and therefore potentially comforting acknowledgement of ubiquity. One service which Frank felt Goffman’s writings certainly did perform was to enhance our powers of articulating our social situation. He noted that one critic, while admitting that Goffman may not have brought new facts to light or revealed information that was up till then unknown, had claimed that he had ‘made clear what was previously unclear, pointed to the significance of things that had been regarded as of little or no consequence, and disentangled what was previously an indiscriminate muddle’. Another had said that he had taken an area of intimate human interplay which often appears to us flat and humdrum and shown it to be ‘intricate, dynamic and dramatic’. Frank considered this latter claim especially as an example

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of what Wittgenstein called ‘shining a light from above’. One aspect of the difference that made he would try to illustrate with a thought experiment. Supposing, he would say, you were sitting down to master German irregular verbs and were offered a pill which would place you in the position you hoped to be after completing your course of study. You would, he said, obviously take it, whereas that would not be the case if what the knowledge pill enabled you to do was dispense with reading all the way through King Lear, or having to listen to the whole of a Beethoven quartet. Now what is the significance, he would ask, of our feeling that these last two experiences are ones for which the pill is not an acceptable solution and that reading Goffman is among them? Is it that we are brought up against a distinct kind of knowledge, one that while it may not meet the positivist standard of allowing us to predict what might happen in the future, is knowledge just the same; or is that in such cases our motives for cultivating the discourse, or seeking the experience in question, are not epistemic? What we need, and what he felt we were very far from having, is a comprehensive account of the role different forms of discourse play in our lives, and also quite what we have in mind when we characterize some of these roles, but not others, as epistemic or knowledge-giving. Like most philosophers, he was reluctant to regard the experience of reading Proust, Shakespeare or Tolstoy as epistemic in character. That troubled me since the implication was that frequenting these and other great writers left one (as it were) none the wiser. Yet it all depended, we were sometimes able to agree, on what one meant by knowledge.

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3

Remembering the Past

Frank’s memory of soiling himself was the sign of an increasing tendency in old age to look back to his childhood and youth in New York. Both his parents had died when he was very young so that he had been brought up by his grandmother in an Italian enclave close to Washington Square and Greenwich Village. The language spoken at home was a Neapolitan dialect and he used to wonder what difference that had made to him, just as he used to speculate whether he would have had more success in his career if his name had been easier to pronounce (he was very tolerant of those who insisted on a hard ‘c’). One way of thinking about early formative influences is in terms of a narrative environment and, since his own was provided by Italian Catholic women (a great aunt as well as the grandmother), it tended to involve stories of exemplary self-sacrifice, with tenderness extolled and hardness of heart reviled. But where was he to look for the consequences in himself of these stories and how could he be assured that these would not have risen independently? Certainly, he was a man easily touched by tales of misfortune and hardship, and always anxious to help. One particularly vivid memory he had from his early youth was of emerging from Mass on a bright wintry morning and striding homeward in the sure and certain conviction that, were he to be struck dead before he arrived, his soul would go straight to heaven but that, if he made it back to his flat, there would be pancakes and syrup

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for breakfast. He thought this amalgam of the spiritual and material unusual until he found in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist the description of Stephen sitting by the fire ‘not daring to speak for happiness. Till that moment he had not known how beautiful and peaceful life could be . . . breakfast in the morning after communion in the college chapel. White pudding and eggs and sausages and cups of tea’. An altar boy and profoundly believing Catholic until his adolescence, Frank’s faith quickly melted away from him as if it had never been and, when I knew him, the only sign of his religious background was an instinctive tendency to cross himself in moments of great stress or tension. It is true that in his frequent pondering of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of the explanatory methods adopted by Frazer in The Golden Bough he would sometimes cite holy communion as a practice whose meaning could not be satisfactorily elucidated by reference to its presumed origins in human sacrifice; but he never gave the impression that loyalty to the old faith had anything to do with his taking this stance. Frank dropped out of high school only a few months before graduation. The story he told us was that one of his masters was particularly strict and capable of ferocious sarcasm when a boy told him he had not been able to do his homework because he had mislaid or lost his books. On this occasion Frank did indeed lose his books but was so reluctant to face this master’s scepticism that he decided to simply stop going to school. By this time his grandmother was dead and her son, a man only 7 years older than Frank whom he always regarded as his brother, was away at the war so that he was being looked after by the great aunt. It was presumably because she was relatively unfamiliar with the American education system that he could leave the house at the usual time, as if he were in fact going to school, and then wander round the city, getting to know parts of New York he remembered later with great fondness. It was I think at this time that he first got to know James Baldwin, ‘Jimmy’ as he called him, although the acquaintance was revived when they were later both living in Paris.

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One of his favourite films was Bye Bye Braverman, made in the late 1960s by Sidney Lumet and adapted from a novel by Wallace Markfield. This tells the story of how four middle-aged Jews, who have come together in order to attend the funeral of a friend (the Braverman of the title), endure a series of comic mishaps in trying to discover where in New York it is being held. The interest lies in the conversations they have as, after their meeting in Greenwich Village, they make their way round various well-known parts of the city. One explanation for Frank’s liking of this film was the lively portrait it painted of New York Jewish culture. Strong friendships with Jews in his adolescence, and then later in the army, left him with nothing but admiration for Jewish humour and intelligence and he was pleased when friends noted that, as he grew older, his dark complexion and strong features gave him more and more the look of an Old Testament prophet. What chiefly attracted him to Bye Bye Braverman, however, and what has made it something of a cult film among the cognoscenti, were the lingering shots of areas and buildings in New York he had known well. Similar reasons drew him to the paintings of Edward Hopper. He must have seen the most famous of these, Nighthawks, with its depiction of three people sitting at the bar in a diner, before he identified the diner in question. He used to compare what he felt then with Freud’s account of how, when he first saw the Acropolis after having read so much about it at school, he said to himself, ‘So it really does exist.’ He was fond of these semi-comic comparisons. In Remembrance of Times Past the narrator describes how, in his youth, he was frustrated at never being able to express the effect that certain sights and smells had on him. What this seemed to indicate was that he had no literary talent and his dream of being a writer would therefore never be realized. It was an important moment in his life therefore when, after watching from a carriage the two spires of the church at Martinville, he suddenly found what seemed like the right words to describe

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them. ‘When a man after long and strenuous attempts to recapture and reconceptualise some segment of his past hits on a felicitous mnemonic formula’, Frank once said, ‘he is exultant and feels like Marcel before the spires of Martinville. For example, trying to capture the England I first knew, I came up with the phrase “England of the big penny, half-day closing and Housewife’s Choice”, and was inordinately pleased.’ An anglophile as well as a philo-semite, he had loved the England he had encountered when he first arrived in Oxford in the 1950s. I used to tell him this was because it was only in that location he could find the remnants of the kind of English people he had read about in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and that if he had liked so much Anthony Quinton, who was one of his teachers, it was because his beautifully modulated voice, impressive physical presence and general charm and politeness, personified what the English gentleman ought and occasionally used to be. But no, he would reply, his admiration for the way the English behaved towards each other and himself may have been partly based on his experiences at the university in Oxford but he had found a similar tact and consideration for others among the factory workers he had interviewed for Michael Argyle. Nothing disturbed him more than what he perceived as the catastrophic decline in English public manners, and his feeling that the English were simply not as nice to each other as they used to be saddened the last years of his life. Frank was, as I say, increasingly inclined to reminisce in those last years but wondered what the medley of recollections of the past which he (and all of us) tended to harbour calls for. Philosophically speaking, how should they be characterized and regarded? In Henry James’s The Bostonians there is a reference to ‘those hours of backward clearness’ which, come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reason of things, like unobserved

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finger posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.

What would be a satisfying epistemic characterization of this process James describes, supposing it to be possible? Frank thought that one motive people had for interrogating their past was the hope of discovering a previously hidden teleology, but he was acutely aware, after all his work on Freud, of the dangers of imposing such a teleology on the data, retrospective rationalization being what George Gusdorf calls the original sin of autobiography. He knew too that William James had wondered how much of our ignorance of ourselves could be attributed to the fact that ‘the mass of our thinking vanishes forever, beyond hope of recovery, and psychology only gathers up a few crumbs that fall from the feast’; and he was familiar with the entry in Kafka’s diary in which he inveighs against introspection. ‘Explanation of one’s soul’, Kafka wrote, ‘such as yesterday I was so, and for this reason; and today I am so, and for this reason. It is not true. Not for this reason, not for that reason, and therefore not so and so.’ Wittgenstein is recorded as having wanted to have his life ‘laid out clearly before him’, but how is this possible? Some principle of organization seems inevitable and the one which is perhaps dearest to autobiographers goes by the name of the turning point. Rousseau claimed that his sensual enjoyment of being beaten by his surrogate mother, Mlle Lambercier, was responsible for his subsequent inclination to expose his bare buttocks to passing females and therefore determined his tastes, desires and very self for the rest of his life. One of the Goncourt brothers describes how Mérimée had told them that when he was a child and had been scolded, he heard his parents laughing at the blubbering face he made during the reprimand and swore that no one would ever laugh at him again. That explained, according to them, the harsh, curt exterior which he

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always maintained and which had become part of his profoundest nature. The natural successor to these two French examples of early turning points is the effect Proust’s narrator attributes to having been sent to bed without his mother’s customary goodnight kiss, because she had guests for dinner. It is from this moment that is set in motion ‘the fatal decline of [his] will’. Two at least of these examples are well known but Frank would add to them a story he had found in Freud about Mahler. The premise of this is that Mahler’s music often fails to achieve the highest rank because of the intrusion into its noblest passages of some commonplace melody. This was a consequence, Mahler thought, of his having on one occasion in childhood rushed from the house where his mother and father were quarrelling bitterly and come across an organ grinder playing a catchy popular song. Wondering how one could be sure that apparently traumatic episodes in childhood had the significance their sufferers describe, Frank became interested in the Russian writer, Michail Zoshchenko, who was dissatisfied with a merely situational analysis of his depressive states and therefore embarked on a rigorous programme of anamnestic enquiry: ‘And so I decided to recall my life in order to discover the incident or series of incidents which had affected me adversely and made me an unfortunate particle of dust to be blown about by every wind.’ Although he then managed to retrieve 38 memories from his childhood which he felt were traumatic, in not one of them could he find the pathogenic source of his difficulties. ‘Of course certain scenes are extremely sad’, he wrote, ‘but not sadder than what usually takes place. Everyone’s father dies; everyone sees their mother in tears; everyone has disappointments in school, hurt feelings, anxious moments, deceptions. No. Not in a single episode could I find the unfortunate experience which had ruined my life; which had given birth to my melancholy and despair’. Whether or not this only proves the impossibility of self-analysis, a similar scepticism came from one of Freud’s own patients. This was the unfortunate

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individual known as the Wolf Man who, describing how his sister used in childhood to play with his penis, remarked, ‘But must that necessarily have such consequences? Perhaps it also happened to other boys and had no effect’. However much turning points may be called on to explain, and however illegitimate the weight they are sometimes required to bear, they do not necessarily have to have anything immediately traumatic about them, or be confined to childhood. One example that particularly interested Frank came from the autobiography of E. R. Dodds, the classical scholar well known for his work on the Greeks and the irrational. He describes as the ‘mistake of a life time’ leaving a provincial university in which he had been very happy in order to take up a chair in Oxford where his colleagues resented the circumstances of his appointment and made life very unpleasant for him. ‘Had I known’, he wrote, ‘that [my appointment] represented, not the considered opinion of the university . . . but merely Gilbert Murray’s personal preference, I should have declined it without hesitation – and how much unhappiness [my wife] and I would have been spared’. The move to Oxford seemed to Dodds a turning point with deleterious effects on the rest of his life, but what his description of it brings out, perhaps more clearly than the other examples, is the degree of counter-factual speculation in his thinking back about his life. How does he know that if he had stayed put something else would not have happened to make him even more miserable than he became in Oxford? The counter-factual, and the difficulty we have in avoiding it when thinking about the past, was one of Frank’s special interests. Imagine, he used to say, that you are at the supermarket and decide to join what seems like the shortest queue at the checkout. As you move slowly forward an old lady in front of you has trouble finding her change and there is a delay while the girl at the till has to cash up. The result is that someone you had noticed at the end of one of

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the longer queues has already left the building by the time you come to pay and you can therefore say, with certainty, that had you joined that other queue you would have finished sooner. But how many other choices in life can be tested in these tightly controlled circumstances and on how many occasions are we like the contestants in Who Wants to be a Millionaire who, having decided to settle for the money already won, are told immediately what the question was which would have allowed them to double their winnings and know whether or not they could have answered it? Deciding to take this job or that, marry a particular person, or move houses are not choices the alternatives to which are easy to calculate and, when we think about our lives, we tend to imagine the difference not going to university, or coming from a wealthier background, would have made to the person we already are when, if those major changes had taken place, we would no longer be that person. Frank’s thinking about how we approach our past tended to take a Goffmanesque form, with rather more examples than analysis. But following on from Wittgenstein’s talk of laying out one’s past life clearly, he did take from his favourite philosopher a distinction that seemed to him to be crucial, and not only in this area. When we are faced with a phenomenon which challenges or puzzles us, such as how we became who we now are, there are (he would say) two directions in which we can go. We can either search for information which might help us to resolve some of our counter-factual speculations (‘what were the reasons that prevented me getting that job?’, for example) or, putting into order what we already know, simply ponder some of our more fateful decisions. In ‘As I walked out one evening’, Auden writes: ‘O plunge your hands in water / Plunge them in up to the wrist; / Stare, stare in the basin / And wonder what you’ve missed’. How natural is it, Frank asked, to construe these lines apodictically rather than hypothetically, that is to say not as speculations as to this or that decision or choice but as an invitation to strive for a clearer view of

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what it is we lack. Staring into the basin and wondering what we have missed need not find its natural consummation in the resolution of counter-factual puzzles and appeals to the data protection act, but in a more precise realization of what we once hoped for and our failure to be reconciled to its lack. How, after all, do we determine what we have missed? Perhaps certain possibilities were never on the cards but what we can be sure of is the intensity of our craving and the extent of our disappointments. In his journals, Wittgenstein imagines a man reproaching himself on his deathbed with: ‘If only I had . . . now it is too late’. Frank thought that there was lurking here a genre of reflection that an exclusively empirical preoccupation with the course our lives might have taken under different circumstances confuses. What we feel it is too late for is not something we have to make enquiries about. Towards the end of her life, Alice James wrote: ‘all longing for fulfilment, all passion to achieve has died within me . . . the shaping period is past and one is fitted to every limitation through the long custom of surrender’. It may be something like Alice James’s rather miserable equanimity that we hope for although, on the other hand, Frank would say, putting as so often an alternative point of view, we are also often in search of something which stands to our lives as the regimental historian’s account of a battle stands to the confused impressions combatants have from their tiny corner of the field. Not that this is likely to be available. One of Kierkegaard’s most famous aphorisms is that ‘life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.’ Naïvely optimistic is how Frank would sometimes describe the first part of this sentence.

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4

The Moral Career

Another way of thinking about our lives, of ‘laying them out clearly’ as Wittgenstein says, would be in terms of ‘the moral career’. This was a concept originally introduced by Goffman but then taken up and developed by the philosopher Rom Harré. In his book Social Being, Harré tells us that ‘the basic problem for a person in society is to be recognised as of worth’, and that human beings are therefore persistently ‘seeking out occasions for acquiring respect while risking pity or disdain’. These occasions are what he calls hazards, or social events in which a person can gain respect while risking contempt. An obvious example of a hazard would be an examination, the publication of a book, an election or a sporting contest. An individual’s willingness to encounter such hazards, and his or her degree of success in negotiating them, would constitute a moral career. The moral career encourages us to think in terms of life trajectories and Frank was fond of categorizing all the different forms these might take. There was, for example, waking up to find oneself famous, as Byron did, or having one’s promise abruptly terminated, as happened to Chatterton, the marvellous boy who perished in his pride. Sudden early fame could be followed by neglect, which was the case (Frank thought) with Colin Wilson, the author of The Outsider: ‘the name died before the man’, as Housman says. A happier alternative was going from strength to strength, your reputation spreading in everwidening circles until you are asked to choose a book and a luxury for

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Desert Island Discs. He was keen on examples of late flowering, Ulysses S. Grant being one of his favourite illustrations with his progression from failed professional soldier and unsuccessful shopkeeper to the magnanimous victor who allowed Lee to keep his sword. Some individuals voluntarily quit the public scene at the height of their success, like Greta Garbo, while the merit of others (Gerard Manley Hopkins) is not properly recognized until they are dead. Dreyfus is an obvious example of ignominy followed by vindication, Richard Nixon of the career blasted by disgrace (this was before the Lance Armstrong scandal); and there are those who impose themselves early, slip into anonymity and then triumphantly reappear: ‘the cry went once on thee, and still it might, and yet it may again’ (as a character in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida remarks). An example he liked here was Khan-Du of the house of Tang who was dismissed from the Chinese court and reduced to selling coal in a remote province. When the emperor was on one of his campaigns, he happened to come across this former favourite and, reminded of his versatility, commanded him to compose a poem about selling coal. The result was so impressive that the Emperor immediately restored Khan-Du to his former status. Which of us has not rehearsed his poem on coal on the off-chance of the emperor passing by, Frank reflected? These were all interesting cases to ponder but how could they rise above anecdotage? In his hard, verificationist Oxford youth Frank had shown a penchant for behaviourism. I once looked forward, he said, to having my life, and the episodes which composed it, retold in terms of my primary and secondary reinforcement history, drive strengths, need systems and so on, all stated clearly so that my decisions would be rendered as transparent as those of a rat in a maze. But in later life his attitudes softened sufficiently to allow for that interest in Heidegger’s concern for the everyday I have already mentioned. What we sometimes want, he would say when in a particularly euphoric mood, is a perspicuous view of the importunacies, copings, evasions

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and reveries that a typical day holds for us. Or, if we are philosophically ambitious, what any day must hold for any human creature. Something analogous, that is, to the phonetic systems which aim to account for all the sound producible by human organs. Instead of what Ortega calls ‘a man’s need for a periodic going-over of the accounts of the enterprise which is his life’, we may pursue the far more grandiose project of a going-over of the accounts of the enterprise which is life itself. This he knew was an impossible dream but if the work of Goffman and Harré interested him so much, it was in part because they seemed to offer, with their ‘ethogenic science’, a systematic and perhaps therefore potentially philosophical approach to describing how life works. But of course as soon as he began examining the claims of a concept like ‘the moral career’ to be scientific, the difficulties proliferated. In the first place, the fact that much of social life is structured around respect/ disapproval hierarchies seems too obvious to require documentation; and when documentation is sought (on different kinds of hazards, for example, and their role in generating public esteem) the supply appears inexhaustible. It is interesting that in the First World War a pilot needed to shoot down five enemy planes to qualify as an ace and in Second World War shooting down a Mosquito was regarded by the Germans as equivalent to two kills. But although this kind of information appears relevant to the study of hazards, it is difficult to know what scientific purpose it could serve and, perhaps more importantly, how it could have any limit. The distinctions which seem necessary are also hardly in short supply. One could, for instance, differentiate between hazards according to the speed of feedback. A poet may have to wait long years (or for ever) to know whether he or she has successfully negotiated them whereas a concert pianist very quickly has a good idea of how things have gone, as does a gunfighter (supposing him to be still alive to have any ideas at all). An obvious area for discriminations is how the standee learns of his or her standing since there are situations where the feedback is interactional and others where the conduits are much

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more distant and indirect. And then there is the very difficult and perhaps impossible question of whether people’s notion of where they stand in public esteem is accurate and what criteria you would employ to determine what it ‘really’ was. An obvious problem with the moral career is that its establishment would seem to imply a public dimension. ‘Here lies Fred’, a famous epitaph runs, ‘who was alive and is now dead. Nothing more to be said’. Most of us are more like Fred than the people we read about in the newspapers and although it would be hyperbole to compare the gap our deaths would cause to removing a stick from water, it is only mild hyperbole. As far as negotiating hazards is concerned, how can the stoicism with which people tolerate illness, bereavement, estrangement or other private grief always be the basis of public esteem? There are certainly varieties of success whose very nature precludes them from being private (what would my private knowledge that I was a superb stand-up comedian be?), but there are others which are very difficult to make part of any systematic enquiry. There needs to be a distinction between activities of which records are kept and those dependent on oral testimony (‘She was a good mum’); and even with respect to evanescent oral testimony, it is doubtful whether everyone has a group of intercommunicating others of which they are the intermittent topic of evaluative assessment. My mother-in-law, Frank reflected, used to refer to me as ‘that Papist’ but I eventually won her over. Is this an episode in my moral career? Frank’s scepticism about Harré’s attempts to turn his investigations into a science did not prevent him from agreeing wholeheartedly with the notion that status, the pursuit of esteem in the eyes of others, plays a crucial role in all our lives. Perhaps it was an effect of having worked in a university, but he used to claim that it was a more important motivating force than sex, which after all was rarely lifelong in its effects. Sophocles is reported to have said of his defunct sexual urges that he was relieved to have the demon off his back; yet in his

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eighty-sixth year Berenson was still complaining in his journal about ‘what offended prestige does to complicate life’ and adding, ‘If only one could feel without fatuity sure enough of one’s position in the world’. The people whose felicity depends to an exorbitant extent on how successful they have been in attracting favourable attention may constitute a sub-class, but it is a very large one and Frank would cite in illustration of how much reputation could matter (‘my reputation, Iago, my reputation’) that a gifted novelist was goaded into attempting suicide because a journalist had described him as a washed out alcoholic while a celebrated British broadcaster (Isobel Barnett) did in fact kill herself because she was unable to bear the disgrace of having been caught shop-lifting. Frank was conscious that his own need to be well thought of had, in his youth, been very strong and would instance the time he spent in the American army occupying Japan just after Second World War. The conditions of peacetime military service meant that a high value was placed on anything which promised relief from boredom and that explained (he thought) why he had been rarely more popular and sought after than during the period of his enlistment. ‘Get your ass over here and let’s hear some of your bullshit’, was how the other GIs would warmly, if unceremoniously greet him. At one point, however, he was sent away on a training course and when he enquired eagerly on his return how much he had been missed, he was disappointed that there had been no wailing and gnashing of teeth. He took this disappointment as a sign that his vanity was out of the ordinary (the most reprehensible form it took, he would say, was irritation at hearing colleagues praised), and was therefore inclined to be tolerant of displays of vanity in others and their possible slide into what Berenson calls fatuity. He had to agree that it was hard to extenuate Robert Frost when he caused a commotion in order to drown out a fellow poet’s reading, but could not help feeling some commiseration. He thought it was not fatuous of Boswell to have said ‘I am a remarkable man,

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notice should be taken of me’, or that there was anything unusual in Joseph Heller’s ‘I have much to be pleased with, including myself. I have wanted to succeed and I have.’ On the other hand, he did not take much persuading that A. L. Rowse’s conviction that he ought to have been awarded the Order of Merit rather than Isaiah Berlin (‘What has he written?’) was fatuity of the highest order. He was very fond of an episode in the Charlie Brown cartoons when Lucy has set up as a counsellor. ‘I want to be liked’, Charlie tells her, ‘No, I want more than just to be liked. I want people to say, “That Charlie Brown is a great guy”. . . . I want to be a special person. I want to be needed’. ‘Forget it’, is Lucy’s sound but tactless advice. Once my hilarity has subsided, Frank said, my heart goes out to Charlie Brown. Frank’s vanity was chiefly intellectual and I used to ask him what could ever satisfy it. He tried various thought experiments the most persistent of which involved a group of the philosophers he admired saying casually to each other, ‘I wonder what Cioffi would think of this?’ I suggested to him one day that there was a fine example of what he was looking for in a film called A Beautiful Mind. This tells the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician who was also a paranoid schizophrenic. After numerous difficulties caused by his condition, he wins a Nobel prize and at a point near the end of the film, in what is presumably meant to be the Princeton senior common room, a large number of the senior faculty come up to his table to congratulate him, each one then laying down his pen on the table in front of Nash so that eventually there is a whole row of them (I was sorry to hear from a couple of people who had worked in Princeton that this ritual, which seems bizarre enough to be authentic, had either fallen into disuse or been invented). Frank was only mildly impressed. Imagine, he would say, your wildest dreams of distinction fulfilled, something even better than playing sandlot baseball as a young boy and the recruiting coach from a major league team happening by and saying ‘Who is that kid?’; or having your books set as compulsory reading

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for first-year philosophy classes. Imagine that your work was to draw from some future thinker as admirable and gifted as Lucretius the tribute that he pays to Epicurus at the beginning of the third chapter or book of De Rerum Natura. Would that really set one’s mind at rest? To illustrate the complications of any praise one might receive, he used to refer to Chekhov’s The Sea Gull. At one moment in that play the aspiring actress, Nina, tells Trigorin that she would like to be in his place for a while so that she could know what it is like to be a famous writer. How does he experience fame? What sort of feeling does it give him to be famous? And she goes on: What a wonderful world you live in! How I envy you . . . How different people’s destinies are! Some just drag out their obscure existence, all very much like one another and all unhappy. And there are others, like you for instance – one in a million – who are given an interesting life, a life that is fortunate and full of significance.

Yet Trigorin himself is not a contented man and feels that the public response to his work is to say: ‘Yes, it is quite charming . . . but a far cry from Tolstoy’. He suspects that when he dies his friends will pass by his grave and say, ‘Here lies Trigorin. He was a good writer but not as good as Turgenev.’ Chekhov’s Nina and Trigorin are reminders of the tendency we all have to admire but also envy others, ‘desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope’, as Shakespeare has it. Yet the superiority of other people can sometimes be accepted with resigned calm. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the heroine meets up in Bath with an old school friend called Mrs Smith who has fallen on hard times. Why, Anne Elliot reflects, did this woman, whose situation was so cheerless, `have only moments of languor and depression to hours of occupation and enjoyment’? The answer, she concludes, is that although a submissive mind might be patient and a strong understanding resolute, ‘here was that elasticity of mind, that disposition to be comforted, that power of

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turning readily from evil to good, and of finding employment which carried her out of herself, which was from nature alone’. Some people, that is, are just better equipped genetically for handling certain situations than we are, just as some have more talent than we have. But calm resignation of Ann Elliot’s kind is not available to us all. After a trip to Rome where he had inspected Bernini’s sculptures and felt that they gave marble ‘the texture, presence and quivering animation of life itself ’, Roubiliac decided that they made his own work look ‘as meagre and starved as if made of nothing but old tobacco pipes’; and there is an entry in the journals of the Romantic painter Benjamin Haydon which Frank would often quote. ‘Spent a miserable and bitter morning comparing myself to Raphael’, it read, ‘At my age he had completed a room in the Vatican.’ ‘Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn’, writes William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. ‘We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out!’ If this is the experience of most of us, then what is important is how we deal with it. Unsuccessful writers have special reasons for hoping their relative anonymity will not become too demeaning: in Frank’s words, they realize they may never ride in triumph through Persepolis but do not want to be reduced to cleaning up after the horses. Stendhal is exemplary here when, in his Memoirs of an Egotist, he writes: ‘If there is another world, I shan’t fail to go and see Montesquieu. If he says, “My poor friend, you haven’t any talent whatsoever”, I shall be annoyed but not at all surprised.’ But then Stendhal had his own methods for reconciling himself to his comparative lack of success (he wrote far more than was ever published). In the memoir from which I quote, for example, he imagines for himself an ideal readership consisting of people like Madame Roland, one of his heroines from the French Revolution, and Louis Gros, the man who had taught him mathematics back in

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Grenoble; and he always said it would not be until 40 years after his death that his distinction would be recognized (a prediction which proved weirdly accurate). But Posterity is a strange resource when we won’t be there to take advantage of it. One of Frank’s favourite short stories was by Max Beerbohm. It was called ‘Enoch Soames’, the name of its central character, and describes how this minor poet of the 1890s becomes frustrated with his lack of success. Happening to meet a gentleman of a distinctly diabolical appearance, Soames sells his soul in exchange for the privilege of being briefly transported 50 years into the future so that he can visit the British Museum and see what he feels sure will be the accumulation of critical work on his poetry. When this visit takes place, however, he is devastated to find exactly the same absence of documentation with which his haunting of the Library has already made him familiar. The only addition is the existence of a footnote which briefly refers to one Enoch Soames and which is to be found in a book on the 1890s by Max Beerbohm.

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5

Failure and Retirement

If Beerbohm’s account of Enoch Soames so appealed to Frank, it was in part because he himself had a sense of never having had a success which was quite commensurate with his talents. This feeling became more nagging once he was retired and no longer on the receiving end of the admiration, even adulation, which his lectures tended to inspire in young people. He left Essex when he was around 65 but was not made an emeritus professor. Since he had been that university’s founding professor of philosophy, responsible for building up a department soon to become highly regarded, it seemed to me that this could only have been an administrative oversight – that a retiring professor should become emeritus was more or less routine elsewhere in the academic world. Here was an anomaly which I suspected could be rectified but, although Frank would occasionally express mild irritation at not having been given the title, he was never sufficiently concerned to make the necessary enquiries (‘emeritus’, we would both agree, was the Latin for ‘clapped out’). Once he was retired, he accepted invitations to lecture whenever they came along; but as time passed, they inevitably came less frequently and he was, in any case, so disorganized in practical matters that there were major logistical problems in moving him from one place to another. I remember at one point that he had been invited to go to a conference being held in the small town or village near Vienna where Wittgenstein had once been a schoolmaster. He managed to

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arrange for his wife’s carers to sleep in his house while he was away and I took him to the airport nervously checking along the way that he had with him his passport, plane ticket and foreign money. He told me afterwards that when he came to check in to the area which gives direct access to the aircraft, he found he had put his passport in his suitcase, and that it was already on its way to be loaded on his plane. Somehow he managed to talk his way through passport control and gave a lecture in Austria which, from all accounts, was a great success. Lecturing he did when he could and he was pleased also to be able to do some reviewing for the London Review of Books, although that was eventually cut short because of the difficulty he always had in sticking to the prescribed length. He also appeared on radio, and on television on one occasion, in a late night discussion programme where he charmed the other participants into virtual silence and dealt a trifle roughly with the Bishop of Durham. Quick, pugnacious, funny he could have made a career in televised discussion programmes, had he been a little less unworldly. But what, he once asked himself, would he have then been able to look forward to as the fruits of success. A larger or more appreciative entourage, perhaps; more frequent demands for his company by more celebrated, creative or amusing people (and here he would fix a satirical eye on us)? He followed this speculation by wondering whether when he grew tired of being himself what he was really tired of was being a self. Horace, he suggested, had not been astringent enough. Not only would changing the skies not be sufficient but neither would changing the self. It is not merely, he lamented, that wherever I am I will be there and not elsewhere; but whoever I am I will be him, and not another person. Preoccupied with failure as he often was, he had a special interest in those various expedients which human beings develop in order to reconcile themselves to that state. He would often cite the very simple

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stratagem which is described in a passage from the second volume of The Principles of Psychology where William James points out that with no attempt there can be no failure, and with no failure, no humiliation. So our feeling about ourselves depends entirely on what we back ourselves to do, it is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities. Thus: Self-esteem ------------------ = Success Pretensions Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. . . . To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to have them gratified. There is a strange lightness of the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. . . . How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, or slender!

This is all very well but reconciling oneself to putting on weight as one grows old is not so difficult; much harder is accepting that one is much less intelligent than one had originally imagined; or that what one has written is without much value. Then one might need a more radical approach, nearer to the Chinese sage who, invited by his Western hosts to the races, declined on the grounds that he already knew one horse could run faster than another. James’s formula for contentment is close to several commonplaces of folk wisdom, the most obvious of which is perhaps the suggestion that if we do not hope for too much, we will never be disappointed. Since our perception of success in the world is almost wholly dependent on comparison, the most sophisticated of formulations in this area are never too far from similar sayings. That there is always someone better off than yourself will usually be the mantra of the discontented while there is balm for the bruised ego in that statement’s more familiar companion piece. That you can always find someone worse off may not be an absolute truth – ‘the worst

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is not / So long as we can say “This is the worst”’, says Edger in King Lear – but it is close enough. Another possible source of comfort can be found in recognizing how being well thought of is usually restricted to relatively small groups of interested parties. Frank liked to think of social interaction in terms of what he called ‘wediscourse’, the participants in which share basic premises and can therefore make allusions which will be immediately understood. A single individual had access to very many of these groups or circles so that, for example, he himself could talk to Wittgensteinians and baseball enthusiasts with a similar ease. Yet just as often they were isolated one from the other. When Jane Austen’s Anne Elliot attends a dinner party some distance from her home, she discovers that the prominent personages of her neighbourhood are of no interest to the company and she therefore learns ‘the lesson of our nothingness outside our own circle’. To a greater or lesser extent, whatever success or fame we have achieved in life will be parochial in this way. That success is a matter of perspective, and that what counts in one circle is as nothing in another, is a reason for never celebrating it too loudly or regretting its absence with too much bitterness. This is a way of thinking which can be taken to extremes. In Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, Frank had found this passage: I dwelt upon the conviction which had long possessed me that I was insignificant, that there was nothing much in me, and it was this which destroyed my peace . . . And yet there is consolation. The universe is infinite. In the presence of its celestial magnitudes who is there who is really great or small, and what is the difference between you and me, my work and yours?

This may be true yet just as the approach of the Chinese sage takes all drama and interest out of life, so the consolation which Rutherford provides for himself here is a sure recipe for lethargy and depression.

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Rutherford derived comfort by looking through the wrong end of the telescope, if indeed it could be described as wrong; and so too does one of La Bruyère’s Characters in the eighth section of his book devoted to life at Court. ‘Thirty years will bring down these powerful giants whom we can only see by peering upwards’, are the thoughts there of someone described as N. ‘We shall all disappear, I myself, who am next to nothing, and those whom I gazed at so eagerly and from whom I hoped to gain advancement.’ The principle being invoked here may be time rather than scale, but it is still a question of shifting the perspective. What is especially interesting in this passage, however, is the way La Bruyère goes on: ‘the greatest of all blessings . . . would be to live in blissful retirement in some place of one’s own. Such were N’s thoughts when he was in disgrace. He forgot them in prosperity’. Here then is that additional stratagem of withdrawal – ‘retirement’ in its seventeenth or eighteenth century sense – which some people practise in order to diminish the feeling of having been too little esteemed. The Phantom of the Opera syndrome is how Frank sometimes liked to describe it. Proust has an explanation for withdrawal from most social interaction which one might be inclined to dismiss more easily had he not been someone who spent the last part of his own relatively short life in virtual isolation. ‘An absolute and lifelong claustration’, he writes, ‘often springs from an inordinate love of the crowd which so completely dominates every other feeling that, unable to obtain the admiration of the concierge, the passer-by, the loitering taxidriver, a man prefers never to be seen by them and hence gives up every activity that would require going out’. Isn’t Proust’s hyperbole as to this particular remedial technique for coping with expressive failure instructively familiar, Frank wondered, and is not our ability to recognize it as hyperbole free of any indebtedness to social research? Moreover, he noted, the temptation to dismiss the motive Proust invokes as exaggerated or too idiosyncratic might be diminished by

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remembering that Wittgenstein recorded in his diary what he felt was a ‘cowardice’ which sprang from his ‘fear of making an unfavourable impression on others, for example the doorman at the hotel, the servant, etc.’ Retirement is a familiar eighteenth-century theme in British writing and no one treats it with more relish than Dr Johnson. In his life of Cowley, he makes a pretence of arbitrating fairly between one commentator’s view that Cowley’s ‘vehement desire of retirement’ was the consequence of disappointed ambition, and another’s that it resulted from a genuine taste for solitary study. Yet his own sympathies are clear when he notes that Cowley retreated from the bustle of life only so far ‘as that he might easily find his way back when solitude should grow tedious’; and we have a fair indication of what he felt about withdrawal from one’s own circles (or ‘we-discourse’ groups) in his description of Richard Savage’s forced retreat into Wales. When Johnson urged Savage to make a resolute effort to earn a living rather than depending on charity (one condition of which was that he should leave London and retire to the country), he records that his friend ‘could not debar himself from the happiness which was to be found in the calm of a cottage, or lose the opportunity of listening without interruption to the melody of the nightingale, which he believed to be heard from every bramble, and which he did not fail to mention as a very important part of the happiness of a country life’. This is of course satire on the pastoral but, throughout Johnson’s account of Savage, there is an evident scepticism about withdrawal as a remedy for any form of social difficulty or disappointment. It was perhaps with Johnson in mind that Hazlitt was later to make a distinction between Gray, whose love of privacy was he felt quite genuine, and Shenstone who affected it ‘merely to be interrupted with the importunity of visitors and the flattery of absent friends’. An even more interesting example of the complications of withdrawal is provided by Proust in his account of why the painter

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Elstir lived in seclusion. ‘He had thought’, Proust writes, that thanks to his work . . . he was giving a loftier idea of himself to those who had misunderstood and hurt him . . . he lived alone not from indifference, but from love of his fellows, and dedicated his work to certain people as a way of approaching them again, by which without actually seeing him they would be made to love him, admire him, talk about him.

The characteristically Proustian twist to this account is that, as time passes, Elstir finds himself valuing seclusion entirely for its own sake, moving (that is) from a Shenstone-like rationale to the one favoured by Gray. But then motives for withdrawal are clearly numerous and complicated. A writer with a fine idea of the complications is Dickens in his portrait of Edward Dorrit. He is a character who spends most of his time secluded from the world in a debtors’ prison, a place which is recommended to him early in his stay because ‘we don’t get badgered here . . . Outside people are restless, worried, harried about; anxious, suspecting one thing, anxious, suspecting another thing. Nothing of the kind here, sir. . . . We’ve got to the bottom and we can’t fall. And what have we found? Peace. That’s the word for it, Peace’. The peace invoked in these words would seem to be akin to that which the protagonist of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying is seeking when he is described as wanting to be underground, a place where ‘failure and success have no meaning. Life had beaten him; but you could still beat life by turning your face away.’ In fact, however, as ‘Father of the Marshalsea’, Dorrit has managed to create in prison a situation in which he is deferred to by all the other inmates and enjoys a remarkable degree of esteem. When he is suddenly released into the outside world, a very wealthy man, he finds it impossible to replicate this situation, and is therefore not too unhappy when another change in his fortunes sends him back to prison again.

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One of the most cheerful examples of withdrawal Frank collected came from Macaulay’s review of the letters of Horace Walpole to Sir Robert Mann, with its account of the political defeat of Carteret, a minister in the reign of George III. After being driven from office, Carteret made a bold and indeed desperate attempt to recover power, and when that failed ‘retired laughing to his books and his bottle. No statesman ever enjoyed success with so exquisite a relish, or submitted to defeat with so genuine and unforced a cheerfulness’. Ill as he had been used, Horace Walpole reported, he did not seem to have any resentment, or any feeling except thirst. As a model Carteret is perhaps deficient in that he did at one point enjoy great success so that a better illustration of withdrawal for Frank’s purposes is Flaubert’s reply to Maxime Du Camp who had urged that he ought to do more to bring himself to public notice: At what point should I hasten to ‘arrive’ as you put it? At the eminence of Mm. Murgier etc. and seventy-two others? To ‘become known’ is not my main concern – that can afford satisfaction only to very mediocre vanities. And beside can celebrity be considered a proof positive of the value of one’s work? Even the most widespread fame during one’s life may not suffice to endure afterwards, and seldom can anyone but a fool be sure of posthumous glory. Thus, even to one’s self, illustriousness is not proof that one has accomplished great things, and obscurity is no proof that one has not. I am aiming at something better – to please myself. Success seems to me a result not an end in itself. I am simply a bourgeois living quietly in the country, occupying myself with literature, and asking nothing of others, neither consideration nor honour nor even esteem.

Excellent as this may be as an example to follow, I imagine Frank found it a little suspect. What, for example, was the state of Flaubert’s own vanity if it was not mediocre? It is true that celebrity is no proof of lasting value and posterity can be, to say the least, unreliable; but how far does pleasing ourselves provide a safe criterion of judging

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what does and will matter? One of Frank’s favourite writers was D. W. Harding who was for a long time an editor of the literary review Scrutiny, but happened also to be a professor of psychology. In a discussion of how the initial hostility with which his painting was received led Cézanne to withdraw from the world, Harding points out the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘a valuable persistence in individual development and the stubbornness of worthless selfconceit’. How is it possible to be sure of the difference if the only judge is oneself? Like all of us, Frank was conscious of a problem in managing his contacts with the outside world but thought that, if it was unrealistic to strive for a resolution of the ambivalence which condemns us to an incessant alternation of withdrawals and returns, we may reasonably aspire to a clarification of its sources. He was aware of the appeal which a retirement that had been forced on him by age might have for younger men and would sometimes quote with relish the lines which the ninth-century Chinese poet, Po Chü-i, wrote after his retirement from office: Lined coat, warm cap and felt slippers, In a little tower, at the low window, sitting over a sunken brazier. Body at rest, heart at peace, no need to rise early. I wonder if the courtiers at the Western Capital know of these things or not?

And yet he was acutely conscious of having something important to communicate, of a point of view that needed to be conveyed. When it appeared to him that the task had become hopeless, in relation to Freudian apologists, for example, he would sometimes give way to despair and ask himself what the point was of continuing to work and think as hard as he did. In those moods he would decide that what remained self-sustaining, what kept him going when he had become unusually aware of how little impact his work was having, was the

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satisfaction he derived from making his own thoughts clearer than they had been before. He would go over anything he had written time and time ago, working to ensure that it had the upmost clarity as far he was concerned although even then, of course, he needed a third party (some member of the outside world) to confirm that clarity was what he had in fact achieved.

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6

The Lives of Others

It was not only his own past life that Frank was curious about but also the past lives of others and biographies were therefore often his favourite reading. When he talked about them his interest tended to focus on how different biographers filled up what he liked to call the ‘narrative gaps’. As an example of what he meant by this term, he would quote an episode from one of those Sherlock Holmes stories which held such a special place in his affections. In the episode in question, Dr Watson is looking for lodgings and hears from a medical friend about a certain Sherlock Holmes who is in the same position and might want to share. Watson naturally enquires what kind of person Holmes is and learns that, although an interesting individual, he nevertheless has some peculiar habits. When he asks what these are the reply is that Holmes sometimes comes to the hospital in order to beat the cadavers in the dissecting room. This is alarming news – who would want to share lodgings with someone with those proclivities? – but Watson is pacified when he then learns that the reason for Holmes’s strange behaviour is the desire to find out how long after death a bruise will form. Here for Frank was the perfect example of a narrative gap, which is closed by a satisfactory explanation (scientific research). What worried him about many biographies was their over-reliance on early childhood experience for closing narrative gaps. He felt this had a lot to do with Freud and collected a list of examples from

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Freudian biographers which struck him as absurd. There was, for instance, the biographer who wanted to associate Churchill’s return to the gold standard, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, with his early toilet training; and the other who sought to explain Luther’s attack on the Virgin Mary in terms of his childhood resentment of his mother. Freud himself criticized Emil Ludwig for having ignored, in his biography of Napoleon, that he had an elder brother whom he had both loved and hated called Joseph, and hence his marrying a woman called Josephine . . . and his going to Egypt. Had he not also suggested to Thomas Mann that the ill-considered invasion of Russia was an attempt by Napoleon to punish himself for divorcing Josephine/ Joseph? The behaviour of Churchill, Luther or Napoleon in these instances may not seem to most sensible people much of a puzzle, to offer much of a narrative gap; but there are plenty of the latter in Freud’s own case histories, which are after all mini-biographies. In these, one of Frank’s favourite examples was the way Freud had managed to interpret the persistent tickle in Dora’s throat as a sign that she had wanted to indulge in fellatio with her father. His objection was not so much that the tortuous explanatory route Freud took to arrive at this conclusion was in its very procedures pseudo-scientific. It might well be that but then the domain in which Freud operated was one which could sometimes be said to make proper scientific rigour impossible. Frank’s complaint was rather that even by ordinary humanistic criteria, the ones we invoke in reading biographies and also novels, the reasoning in the Dora case history was self-evidently dubious and unconvincing. An example he liked to give of satisfactory humanistic explanation came from Great Expectations and involved the reasons Dickens provides for Miss Haversham’s strangely neurotic and initially puzzling behaviour. Once we know she was jilted at the altar, everything falls into place. The episodes that really matter for Freud take place very early in childhood and involve the tribulations of what he defined as infantile

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sexuality. It seemed to Frank that there might be incidents which happened later, to which an important causal role might just as well be attributed. The boating accident which leaves its victim with a morbid fear of water could happen at 3 or 13 for any perceptible difference it makes to its consequences. Freud thought that the Kaiser’s bellicose nature was the result of his mother’s response to the withered arm he incurred during childbirth (she being the kind of woman who demanded physical perfection in her offspring); but since the Kaiser went on having a rejecting mother after the Oedipal phase was over, in fact until he was well over 40, how could her influence in the early years be separated from its effects later? Anthony Storr attributes Churchill’s inordinate ambition to the deprivation of maternal love in early childhood but then goes on to give a convincing account of the humiliations of his schooldays which could themselves explain the element of over-compensation in his later strivings. In any case, it was characteristic of Freudianizing biographers to commit what Frank liked to call the monotheistic fallacy: tracing back complicated and over-determined phenomena of human conduct to a single source. Explanations of the broadly Freudian variety usually involve psychological determinants of which the subject is not aware: they deal in unconscious motivations. While not denying these exist, Frank was sceptical of many of the appeals often made to them by biographers. In his view, there were very large areas of our lives which lie on the fringes of consciousness and can therefore be reached by the more or less strenuous anamnestic efforts of the individuals concerned. (One of the attractions of Freud’s notion of the unconscious, he felt, had been that it had allowed people to disclaim responsibility for discreditable behaviour which had motives of which they had always been half-aware.) An implication of all this seemed to be that biographical subjects should be given more authority than they usually are for analysing their own characters. This was relevant to the problem of writing the lives of subjects who have themselves

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written autobiographies. Wordsworth would be a good example here, or Stendhal. When biographers deal with these two figures, they are often involved in a hopeless contradiction. On the one hand, they are continually anxious to impugn the trustworthiness of The Prelude, or La Vie de Henry Brulard, in order to demonstrate that their own efforts are not redundant (why read their accounts when those of their subjects are available?); yet, on the other hand, they are sometimes helplessly dependent on these texts for information about the feelings and even activities of their subjects which could not be discovered except through their autobiographies. They are constantly in the position, that is, of biting the hand that feeds. Popular Freudianism had created a situation, according to Frank, in which a default position was always that people are incapable of telling the truth about themselves. He did not believe this to be the case. When one of the Goncourt brothers reported how Mérimée had indicated there was some kind of causal link between being mocked by his parents and his habitual demeanour in adult life, there was no reason to disbelieve him, even if the only way of establishing the claim with any certainty would require access to Mérimée’s internal soliloquies. If, that is, the episode in his childhood was the recurrent theme of his persistent self-communings and choice-determining ruminations, then the link could be regarded as legitimate. Frank was very keen on this idea of the internal soliloquy, perhaps because his own mental life was so active; he felt it went a long way towards defining who and what we are. Any account of a life which ignored how we habitually talked to ourselves, what (as it were) went on in our heads, would be seriously deficient. This meant that there was not much point in trying to write the life of someone who had not left behind the letters or diaries which gave some possible access to the internal soliloquy, or all of whose private papers had disappeared, as was the case with Shakespeare. Yet this placing of so much of meaningful life inside may sometimes have given him Wittgensteinian

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anxieties. He was always keen to expose the fallacy of thinking that everything we do in the world must be accompanied by some kind of mental or psychic event. A frown, he would say, is just a physical occurrence in what Wittgenstein calls certain surroundings. If you are told to frown so that the muscles involved can be inspected, what makes the result a pseudo-frown is not the absence of the usual mental accompaniment but the different circumstances. It was perhaps with this at the back of his mind that he once wrote, ‘If you have lived for long periods in a dormitory or a barracks, there is much you can say about the characters of those who shared them with you, even if you weren’t among their confidants.’ Both biographers and autobiographers, he thought, were often inclined to confuse a causal claim with what was in effect more like a simile, driven by a tendency to make the life expressive of what they saw in the work, or vice versa. He had found an illustration of the latter process in the way Edmund Wilson accounted for the unsatisfactory prose style of Ambrose Bierce (who suffered from asthma). ‘His writing’, Wilson wrote, ‘with its purged vocabulary, the brevity of its units in which it works and its cramped emotional range, is an art that can scarcely breathe’. Similar was the claim of a philosopher called Van Meter Ames that in Santayana the man and the author are one . . . His vigorous neck and shoulders are behind the impact of his sentences. A firm mouth and perfect teeth are in the solidity of his style. The urbanity of his manners is in his pages; the smoothness of his white skin; the frequent laugh and the hermetic smile.

Frank noted that Ames had gone on to discuss Santayana’s baldness but without insisting that its effects were also to be found in his prose. Much was sometimes made of the fact that Flaubert’s father was a hospital doctor and that he therefore grew up in a hospital

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environment. This was often mentioned in discussions of his literary methods – a famous cartoon shows him as a surgeon with a scalpel performing an autopsy on Emma Bovary. But whereas here two facts are being brought together: his father’s profession and his so-called realism, the idea that one gave rise to the other would be quite false, as examination of the careers of other writers whose fathers happened to be doctors might help to establish. And, after all, Zola was able to say of one of his own novels that he made of people ‘the analytic study that surgeons make of corpses’ without having had Flaubert’s medical background. The mistake involved here was identified by Leslie Stephen who once wrote, ‘if someone thinks it pertinent to mention that the novelist was a physician or had physician-like experiences the chances are that his novels will also be thought comparable to anatomies or dissections and his style “clinical”’. What biographers may be doing in recalling the father of Flaubert, or his days in the hospital where the family lodged, is providing a social context that helps to explain character, and for some of them that context is what partly if not wholly determines how we behave: we are what our environment allows us to be. Yet by linking him to his parents, they are also suggesting how much his character may have owed to them, from a genetic point of view. In considering a childhood background of this kind, they sometimes also fasten on a particular episode which they can regard as especially formative and significant; the layman’s equivalent of what Freud liked to term the primal scene. For him, the primal scene lays the foundation for what comes later and biographers can simplify their task, and give to what they write an organizing principle which helps to ensure a satisfying literary form, by concentrating on some similar, if later episode. Then it can have a function similar to Proust’s description of the significance of the mother’s goodnight kiss for his novel’s narrator. In this instance, as in the others I mention, they are exploring explanatory routes which are different from, although perhaps also complementary to, the more

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unadorned variety of psychological or psychoanalytical analysis (it is a common criticism of Freud that his accounts are too often sealed off from questions of social background). Sometimes, however, the approach is directly sociological, as it is (bizarrely enough) in Henry James’s account of why it was that his compatriot Hawthorne was not the great writer he might have been. In James’s view this had little to do with Hawthorne’s education or family but rather the fact that he was an American, living in an environment where ‘the literary man must have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The best things’, James goes on, ‘come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions, working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation’. The further back in time the biographical subject was born, the more important becomes this question of social context which James raises. Lucien Febvre may or may not have been right when he claimed that, in the time of Rabelais, atheism was simply not an option, that the available structures of thought did not allow for it; but ways of thinking in those days were clearly very different from what they are now so that when biographers are considering, and above all judging, the behaviour and character of their subjects, they need to know a great deal about the period in which they lived, and be able to deploy considerable historical imagination. In the prologue to his 1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare, James Shapiro complains that previous biographers have made the mistake of assuming that ‘what makes people who they are now made people who they were [in the 16th century].’ An example of the difficulty he describes occurs in the debate over whether or not Shakespeare was bisexual. Deciding this question for certain is an impossibility, so that even pursuing it is a fool’s errand, given the absence of private documents; yet in considering the warm endearments towards men which can be found in some of the plays, and above all in the Sonnets, most biographers have been keen

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to point out that the way in which men were accustomed to address each other in Elizabethan and Jacobean times was very different from what it is now (‘To the memory of my beloved, the author, William Shakespeare’ writes that notoriously macho figure, Ben Jonson, at the beginning of the First Folio). The conventions of the time allowed for much stronger displays of verbal affection between males, whatever their sexual orientation, as well as much greater physical intimacy than would be considered usual today. A problem the Sonnets raise which is associated with this issue of autres temps, autres moeurs is how someone with Shakespeare’s background could have addressed in such warm and apparently intimate terms a man of the Earl of Southampton’s social standing, supposing (as most people do) that they were meant for him. In her biography of Shakespeare, Katherine Duncan-Jones acknowledges and would seem to resolve the issue at the same time. ‘It might be thought that the social distance between the young nobleman and yeoman was far too wide to permit of physical intimacy’, she writes; but then goes on: ‘Yet later examples, such as those of Oscar Wilde and E. M. Forster, suggest that wide social difference can in itself act as an aphrodisiac.’ The reference to Wilde and Forster does not solve the problem of how Shakespeare was able to speak to an Earl the way he does in public; but in any case to apply criteria about homosexual relationships of one age to one which was in so many respects very different is a dangerous biographical procedure. I had long discussions with Frank about biography that I later condensed into a semi-fictional dialogue or interview and published in a book on various biographical matters which I was then editing (he was satisfied enough with the result to include it later in his own book on Freud). The way both Goffman and Harré think about our lives, the lives of others and life in general, could be described as broadly sociological. The approach of Freud and his followers is in a tradition which is psychological, but as I tried to point out in the book,

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there are many other, different ones. Recalling his early interest in behaviourism, Frank would describe to us the pigeon which Skinner had prompted to behave in strange ways simply by patiently rewarding it when it made this or that movement in a certain direction, and he would jokingly suggest that if we had access to the manner in which individual human beings had been rewarded throughout their past, we would have the essential clue to their characters. As I said earlier, he had not always thought this approach a joke and in fact once wrote, ‘There was a time when I had hopes of attaining a lucid image of swirling personal life with the help of Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence. The idea that a hungry or thirsty rat at a choice point in a maze differed only in motivational transparency from any human action filled me with inexpressible joy.’ That joy had long disappeared when we knew him and another, quite different idea he liked to entertain was that the explanation of people’s behaviour was not always a question of how they had been brought up, something that had happened to them in their childhood, their genetic inheritance or the social conditions of their time, but depended overwhelmingly on the situations in which they found themselves. It may be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, he would say, but then why that straw and not the one before? The reason could lie in pressure on a weak spot which eventually collapses; but it may also have to do with the straw in question, one that almost all other people would find back-breaking. There were no rules for analysing the life of another person, just a series of methods the appropriateness of which had to be judged by the biographer, who then had to decide how or if they could be correlated, one with another. And after all, if one’s own life was so difficult to fathom, why should it be any different with the lives of others?

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7

Organicism

Organicism is a word for the attribution of behavioural or character traits to physical causes and is the method of biographical explanation which is most difficult to combine with any other. ‘A mere nothing, a tiny fibre, something that could never be found by the most delicate anatomy, would have made of Erasmus and Fontenelle two idiots’, Frank recorded Julien Offray de la Mettrie as once saying. He was fond of an episode in Dostoevsky’s The Devils where the mysticnihilist Kirilov describes his moments of harmony in this way: There are seconds – they may come five or six at a time – when you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony in all its fullness. It is not rapture, but just gladness. You forgive nothing because there is nothing to forgive. Nor do you really love anything – oh, it is much higher than love! If it went on for more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and must perish. In those five seconds I live through a lifetime, and I am ready to give my life for them, for it’s worth it.

Yet his friend Shatov tells him that what he describes is identical to how he has been told epileptic fits begin and warns him, ‘Be careful, Kirilov, it’s epilepsy!’ A more clearly reductive example of an organicist explanation occurs in Huxley’s After Many a Summer with Dr Obispo. He is a hard-boiled materialist willing to describe another character in the novel, who is suffering from melancholia, as ‘a pharmacological

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tragedy’, and claim that with ‘a course of thiamin chloride and some testosterone I could have made him as happy as a sand boy’. ‘Has it ever struck you’, he asks, ‘what a lot of the finest Romantic literature is the result of bad doctoring?’ He quotes in illustration a couple of lines from Shelley’s Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, namely ‘I could lie down like a tired child / And weep away the life of care’. These describe, he insists, one of the most characteristic symptoms of tubercular pleurisy. ‘And most of the other Weltschmerz boys were either sick men or alcoholics or dope addicts. I could have prevented every one from writing as he did’. Huxley is indulging here in caricature but there are cases where organicism does not seem as irrelevant and where difficult discriminations may have to be made. That the spidery quality of Shakespeare’s last signature (only six are extant) indicate he was suffering from syphilis just before he died is a claim not worth bothering with when the only evidence ever adduced for it is the frequency with which he refers to venereal disease in his work. The attribution of what some regard as excessive malice in Pope’s satires to his chronic bad health, ‘this long disease my life’, as he puts it, is also a suggestion for which adequate documentary support is lacking. But there are trickier instances the nearer we get to our own time. It is well known, for example, that in 1889 Nietzsche went mad and spent the remaining 11 years of his life in a hopeless state of torpor. The awkward question is how far madness ought to be taken into account when considering the texts he wrote just before his breakdown (Ecco Homo, for example); but then, whether it is at all relevant to those he wrote even earlier in his career. A seemingly simpler issue arises in the case of D. H. Lawrence and tuberculosis. In his time it was assumed, in both medical and lay circles, that the tubercular bacillus produced in its victims heightened sexual awareness and activity. In the minds of some, this was a convincing explanation of why Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Most experts now believe that this collocation

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is nonsense, and yet how or to what extent Lawrence’s serious health problems influenced his thinking in his last 10 years remains a very difficult question. There are at least two major reasons why biographers are wary of organicist explanations. In the first place, when it is a question of the effects of illness, there is a difficulty of diagnosis even as late as the nineteenth century. Keats’s symptoms we can be reasonably sure of, because his medical training allowed him to report them with some accuracy, and the way in which tuberculosis usually progressed was in any case well known at the time. What it was that brought an end to the life of Byron, on the other hand, and may well have influenced his behaviour in his last days, remains a mystery; and the notion Dr Obispo entertains, that Shelley was tubercular before an ill-advised sailing expedition brought a dramatic close to his life, is impossible to establish with any certainty. There is still also no consensus as to whether syphilis was responsible for Nietzsche’s breakdown and a problem with Lawrence of determining quite when he should be described as tubercular. This is important because, as Katherine Mansfield developed TB, she said it allowed her to understand why Lawrence had been inclined to such furious rages when she was in close contact with him and his wife Frieda in 1916. Yet there are reports of these rages which go back to Lawrence’s very early manhood, long before there is any evidence he was in any way ill. It is difficult to circumscribe the symptoms of particular illnesses, even when the latter can be diagnosed, or take account of the fact that they might affect different people differently; but in any case illness is only the most gross and crude fashion in which the body can affect character and behaviour. Our moods are continually affected by biochemical factors which may well explain why we wake up cheerful and energetic one morning but gloomy and apathetic the next. And what is the biographer to say of that ‘mere nothing’, or ‘tiny fibre’, which prevented Erasmus and Fontenelle from being idiotic, but

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whose presence may have been disastrous for another subject, even it could be clearly identified? The second major drawback of organicist explanations implicit in this last question is that, once admitted, they are inclined to occupy all the available interpretative space. As an explanation for why people are as they are, they tend to trump all others. Johnson once told a friend that there were times when he felt so languid and inefficient that he could not distinguish the hour on the town clock. Boswell admitted that this may have been a consequence of some ‘defect in his nervous system, that inexplicable part of our frame’ but then went on: But let not little men triumph upon knowing that Johnson was HYPOCHONDRIACK, was subject to what the learned, philosophical, and pious Dr. Cheyne has so well treated under the title of ‘The English Malady’. Though he suffered severely from it, he was not therefore degraded. The powers of his great mind might be troubled, and their full exercise suspended at times; but the mind itself was ever entire.

It is difficult to see here how, if Johnson’s mind was troubled on occasions, it could be described as ever entire; but Boswell is implicitly acknowledging that organicist explanations belong to a separate explanatory order, which combines badly with others and which we may sometimes want to ignore. We are content not to take Shelley’s Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples in the direction of its casual conditions because it is its consummate expression of a particular mood which is the chief object of interest. Some time ago, there was a controversy when Captain Cook’s unpleasant and apparently quite uncharacteristic behaviour on his third and final voyage to the South Seas was attributed to vitamin B deficiency. In an area of debate where political considerations rank high, it was suggested that this was too conveniently exculpatory, too much like Scrooge’s

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efforts to avoid the demoralizing implications of Marley’s remarks by attributing his former partner’s ghostly appearance to indigestion, the physical effect of ‘a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato’. And yet Frank was chary of denying all explanatory relevance to physical factors. He was fascinated by the first space explorations (The Right Stuff was a film he could watch repeatedly). Of the 12 men who first walked on the moon, six had serious difficulties afterwards, either falling into alcoholism or failing to sustain important relationships. Was this the effect of sudden celebrity followed by comparative obscurity, or did exposure to extraterrestrial conditions have some physiological effects? Buzz Aldrin, who had a depressive breakdown, spoke of the necessary anti-climax of post-lunar existence, ‘the melancholy of all things done’, but in his memoir also wrote that ‘Scientific studies . . . seemed to indicate the possibility of some damage on very long flights . . . Could this have happened to me? Could some particularly important nerve cells have been disturbed?’ Frank was sceptical, yet did not want to dismiss an oganicist explanation entirely. There are many instances where organicist explanations might plague a biographer, but Frank was also interested in what the organicist implications might be for the biographical subjects themselves. One of his favourite books was Brave New World and he used to wonder how we might say its protagonist, Bernard Marx, stood to the knowledge that his inferiority to his prepossessing, confident fellow products of test tube birth was imputed to an unfortunate, antenatal accident in which too much alcohol had been added to his blood-surrogate. In one episode in the novel, Bernard goes to see his boss and behaves in a way which makes him feel ashamed of the character defects he is displaying: Bernard entered the room . . . A veneer of jaunty self-confidence thinly concealed his nervousness. The voice in which he said

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‘Good morning, Director’ was absurdly too loud: that in which, correcting his mistake, he said, ‘You asked me to come and speak to you’, ridiculously soft, a squeak.

How could Bernard’s awareness of the role of the physical conditions in his test tube, Frank wondered, bear on recurrent humiliations of this order? However well documented those conditions were, they could surely never be felt by him as pertinent to his alternating boastfulness and timidity as, for example, unusually slight stature would be? They would not, that is, confer that essential Wittgensteinian quality of perspicuity. A knowledge of his endocrinological abnormalities would not have rendered Dr Johnson’s habitual misery perspicuous to him in the way the memory of a long-forgotten offence might his hitherto incomprehensible feelings of guilt. In the work of the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, Frank had found a useful distinction relating to various autobiographical implications of organicism. Someone who was suffering the pains of love, it went, is likely to find more satisfaction in reading The Sorrows of Young Werther than in a description of those endogenous opiates which mediate his addictive dependence on his beloved. On the other hand, Margalit goes on, a compulsive gambler might value more an account of the opiates that mediate his addiction than whatever he finds in Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. As far as love is concerned, an intriguing situation develops in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Demetrius, who has been hopelessly in love with Hermia, is mistakenly given a magic potion by Puck and immediately becomes infatuated with Helena. Dismay at his own inconsistency would obviously have been mitigated had he known what had happened to him, but for the outsider the crucial distinction is perhaps that any grounds he could have given for his first love were not necessarily rationalizations whereas those he offered for his love for Helena must have been so. Lovers are inclined to object to organicist analyses

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of their state because they take away its particularity, yet that is precisely what can bring comfort to the gambler. The nature of the satisfaction they provide can be further explored by considering them, not as rivals to Dostoevsky’s story, but in relation to a passage in Freud where compulsive gambling is interpreted as a masturbation substitute. Both the biochemical and psychoanalytic accounts have the air of scientific determinism and therefore relieve the gambler from personal responsibility; yet one of them does so rather more comfortably and completely than the other! There are, then, special circumstances in which a certain amount of scientific determinism can bring comfort. A neurologist has said of brain scan investigations for Alzheimer sufferers that ‘for many knowing that the distressing symptoms are unequivocally the result of organic brain disorder can make all the difference in coming to terms with personal tragedy’. Yet sometimes, it is not the deterministic element itself (‘since I can do nothing about this, it is out of my control’), but the mere use of scientific terms which matters. This is because, even before it has kept any of its promises of greater understanding, science works its magic through the depersonalization and psychic distancing effected as it strains chaotic or dismal experience through its tranquillizing mesh. ‘The Elephant Man’, called that because it was claimed that his mother had been frightened by an elephant when pregnant with him, was hideously deformed; but there are situations in which, rather than saying that, it is better to use the distancing idiom of teratology (as the study of physical abnormalities is called). An example Frank liked concerned the use, in one of those Kinsey-style surveys of adolescent sexual behaviour, of the acronym PBW for ‘petting below the waist’. According to the authors of the survey, this was indulged in by 40 per cent of the 14–16 year olds they canvassed. For someone who has ever shared the revulsion towards sexuality which Graham Greene exploits so well in his depiction of Pinky in Brighton Rock, he would say, LBW is just a useful cricketing term for ‘leg before wicket’, but PBW is exorcism.

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This distinction between the comfort that might be provided by feeling that your character is biologically determined and the use of scientific terms was, he believed, useful in trying to explain why the grip of psychoanalysis on the public mind was so hard to loosen. In most of its procedures and attitudes psychoanalysis has often been anti-organicist, fiercely advocating the talking cure, for example, rather than pill-popping. It is instinctively hostile to those who, defending the prescription of Prozac in cases of prolonged incapacity for normal hedonistic tone, would ask whether, if you suffered from migraine all your life but found relief in aspirin, you would bother to wonder whether the real me was the one with or without the headache. The starkness of the opposition between the two camps comes out in Rebecca West’s response to the psycho-dynamic account which Bullitt and Freud gave of why Woodrow Wilson behaved so ineptly at the 1919 peace conference. ‘If he failed’, she wrote, in what was no doubt a quite unconscious echo of de la Mettrie, ‘it was because a disaster within a man’s body that disorganises an area hardly bigger than a pinhead may bring him down from the heights of intellectual eminence to the level of a village idiot’. Psychoanalysis thus seems the very opposite of organicism and yet it gave to a whole series of practices, usually regarded in the society as a whole as humiliating or discreditable, both an exculpatory aetiology which could function in much the same way as believing that your character deficiencies could be blamed on biochemistry, and also a series of technical terms with potentially the same distancing effect as PBW might have had for Pinky. In an example of the latter effect which illustrates Frank’s fondness for the demotic, he would suggest that some of Freud’s patients who practised fellatio might well have found comfort in knowing that they were not as they might be described in vulgar American parlance (‘cocksuckers’), but victims of the adhesiveness of their infantile object cathexes. There are clearly no rules for whether people like or benefit from seeing their past in an organicist framework, or merely described in

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organicist or scientific terms. Frank had found in a short story by Conan Doyle, that had nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes and was called ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’, an account of a professor who ascribes a bad night’s sleep to ‘some little cerebral congestion’, ‘for, after all, all disturbances are vascular, if you probe them deep enough’. For him ‘it is always instructive to reduce psychic or emotional conditions to their physical equivalents. You feel that your anchor is still firm in a bottom of ascertained fact.’ Philistine though this may seem, this wanting to anchor yourself in ascertained, scientific fact is a recognizable and valuable human response, and while some are best satisfied when the meaning of their experience is illuminated in a way that presents it in a unique light, there are others who would rather feel they belong to a known, general pattern, if only on the principle that a trouble shared is a trouble halved. When it comes to writing the lives of both kinds of people, I have already suggested that the organicist route can seem very barren. From the time people are first taken into hospital nowadays, they are often hooked up to all kinds of machines which record what is happening in their bodies from second to second. In this digital age, it does not seem too farfetched to imagine all the functions of these devices being stored in a small instrument which could be implanted in individuals at birth. If at their deaths the results were then printed out and correlated with what all that could be otherwise known of their character and behaviour, the upshot could be described, in a very restricted sense, as a true biography. Yet quite apart from being unmanageably long, this document would also be even more intolerably dull than that account of his primary and secondary reinforcement history, drive strengths and need systems which Frank had once believed would provide a satisfactory summary of his own life.

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8

The Lure of Science

When biographers turn to organicism in order to solve their problems they may be said to be in search of ways which would found their enquiries on a solid basis of science. Spinoza famously boasted that he would analyse the appetites and actions of men ‘as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of solids’ while Schiller felt that if there should in fact emerge ‘a Linnaeus to classify the impulses and inclinations, he would greatly astonished mankind’. As a satire on this approach, Frank was fond of the remark of Lichtenberg which Freud records in his book on jokes. Why not, says Lichtenberg, consider the motives which lead to human action as if life were a compass and could be discussed in terms of the 32 winds so that instead of ‘northnorth-west’ we should have ‘bread-bread-fame’, or ‘fame-fame-bread’. He liked also the well-known reductio of quantitative obsessiveness which goes: ‘life is stale, flat and unprofitable 64% of the time.’ Coleridge spoke of the ‘magical circle of mathematical formulae’ and claimed that from the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only things in external nature, but also the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within it. But a more straightforward account of the expanding empire of science, and the hopes many people had for it, comes from H. G. Wells who once said that ‘the way that led from the darkness of the cave to the electric light is the way that will lead to light in the souls of men.’ It was very much in

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the tradition which these words announce that Frank felt people like Richard Dawkins wrote. For many weeks during our Sunday conversations, I can remember Frank searching for the right words to express his dislike of Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow. As far as I could see, his disapproval of this and other books by Dawkins had nothing at all do with his own Catholic background but rather focused on the foolishness of believing that science can solve all our problems. And yet he had to admit that several distinguished minds were also victims of what he called the scientific pathos. There was, for example, Georges Lefebvre who, in Richard Cobb’s reminiscence of him, ‘looked forward with great eagerness to a time after his death when every imaginable historical problem would be able to be solved scientifically’. Cobb remembered his talking with enthusiasm about some article he had read in a popularizing scientific review on brain cells. ‘“You, Cobb”, he said, “will probably live long enough to see the day when every form of individual human conduct will be predictable”’. Collingwood was also someone who talked of ‘a new kind of history’ which ‘might prove able to teach men to control human situations as natural science has taught us to control the forces of nature’, and who wondered ‘how could we construct a science of human affairs, so to call it, from which men could learn to deal with human situations as skilfully as natural science has taught them to deal with situations in the world of nature.’ But perhaps the biggest challenge to his point of view came from Santayana, since he was a thinker Frank admired so much. ‘Were science adequate’, Santayana once wrote, ‘it would absorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow, have to be satisfied by dramatic myths . . . In science we are surveying all it concerns us to know, and in so doing we are becoming all it profits us to be’. For Pater all art aspired to the condition of music, whereas for Quine all thought aspired to the condition of mathematics. Yet as Macaulay remarked of the utilitarianism of J. S. Mill’s father, ‘when

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men, in treating of things which cannot be circumscribed by precise definition, . . . talk of power, happiness, misery, pain, pleasure, motives, objects of desire as they talk of lines and numbers, there is no end to the contradictions and absurdities into which they fall’. Although this was broadly Frank’s opinion and he was sympathetic to Luckács’s belief that ‘systematic thought distorts and violates the kaleidoscopic character of life in its profusion, heterogeneity and polyphony’, if not to Nietzsche’s more extreme, ‘the will to system is cowardice’, he was aware that, for certain temperaments, scientific thinking of the more abstract kind can sometimes be a boon. There is a passage in The Prelude where Wordsworth describes how much he appreciated the pleasure which could be gathered from ‘the elements / Of geometric science’ and the fact that they at least were not ‘touch’d by the welterings of passion’. He says that he has read of a man who, when he was shipwrecked on a desert island with a ‘treatise of geometry’ as his only reading matter, spent his time drawing diagrams in the sand so that he ‘Did oft beguile his sorrow, and almost forgot his feeling’. ‘Mighty is the charm’, Wordsworth concludes, ‘Of those abstractions to a mind beset / With images, and haunted by itself ’. As De Quincey put it, in reference to Wordsworth himself (whose original intention, on going up to Cambridge, was to read mathematics), ‘the secret of his admiration for geometry lay in the antagonism between the world of bodiless abstraction and the world of passion.’ To value the abstract logical processes which accompany geometry for the relief or escape they provide is not exactly the strongest of recommendations. William Whewell, who was one of Wordsworth’s contemporaries and who succeeded the poet’s brother, Christopher, as Master of Trinity, noted the ‘peculiar fascination’ these processes can have and said that those who pursue such studies may acquire an exaggerated feeling of the value of their labours and develop ‘a contempt and impatience of all those portions of our knowledge where a more vague and loose kind of reasoning seems to be adopted’.

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That is to say, as Macaulay claimed, ‘logic has its illusions as well as rhetoric’ and ones that can work against themselves if William James is right when he says that ‘at a certain stage in the development of every science a degree of vagueness is what best consorts with fertility’. These views had a special interest for Frank since there had been an important period of his life when his ardent verificationism made him impatient of any problem which could not be firmly nailed down. For someone who only has a hammer, everything appears as a nail was one of Wittgenstein’s more famous remarks which was there to rebuke him; but of even more significance was perhaps, ‘If you do not understand a statement then discover it has no verification it is an important piece of information about it; you understand it better; you do not find there is nothing to understand.’ In theory, of course, there is no reason why the discipline of scientific thinking cannot help to refine and control thought in those areas (like biography) where science may not be directly applicable, why on certain occasions Pascal’s esprit de finesse and his esprit de géométrie could not co-operate. ‘The geometrical spirit is not so tied to geometry that it cannot be detached from it and transposed to other branches of knowledge’, wrote Fontenelle, ‘the order, clarity, precision and exactitude which have been apparent in good books for some time might well have its source in this geometric spirit’. But this was said well before the great advances made by science in the nineteenth century. In a book on Wittgenstein, David Pears writes that ‘all his philosophy expresses a strong feeling that the great danger to which modern thought is exposed is domination by science and the consequent distortion of the mind’s view of itself.’ Frank felt he had found an example of what Wittgenstein meant in the way that, quoting Yeats, Richard Dawkins had asked, ‘As Michelangelo’s mind moved upon silence “like a long legged fly upon the stream”; what might he not have painted if he had known the contents of one nerve cell of the long-legged fly?’ He found it equally absurd that Dawkins

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had gone on: ‘Think of the Dies Irae that might have been wrung from Verdi by the contemplation of the dinosaurs’ fate when 65 million years ago, a mountain sized rock screamed out of deep space at 10,000 miles per hour straight at the Yucatan peninsula and the world went dark.’ These speculations illustrated for Frank the way in which an infatuation with science could make the mind lose its bearings and he expressed relief at being spared Dawkins’s conjectures as to how Shakespeare’s achievement might have been improved had he taken an A-level in chemistry. At the same time as he made fun of Dawkins, he was wary of the pendulum swinging too far in an opposite direction and used sometimes to take D. H. Lawrence as an example of mindless opposition to the scientific ethos. This seems reasonable enough if one recalls that Lawrence, in his aptly named Fantasia of the Unconscious, defiantly claims that life always precedes matter and that it is the ‘spontaneous living soul’ which ‘maintains the sun alive’, not the other way round. But Frank’s attention focused rather on a passage in ‘Introduction to these paintings’ where Lawrence seems to be complaining about teaching young children the chemical formula for water. What in fact he says is that there is a difference between the ‘alert science’ which explains that, under certain circumstances, water produces two volumes of hydrogen and one volume of oxygen, and telling children that water is H2O; and he goes on to complain of the tendency in modern scientific books on astronomy to cite figures for the number of miles between the stars which are too absurdly huge for the human mind to grasp. That such figures are ‘just occult’, as Lawrence says, is a reasonable enough proposition yet, never at a loss for an illustration, Frank could find further and better evidence for the attitude he wanted to stigmatize in Bachelard who deplores the fact that teachers, instead of leaving the child ‘free to see the sun setting’, demonstrate that the earth is round and revolves around the sun: ‘And the poor dreaming child has to listen to all that! What a

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release for your reverie when you leave the classroom to go back up the hill’. A release into reverie perhaps, but also into obscurantism? Frank was not above suspecting that Wittgenstein himself exhibited an occasional leaning towards obscurantism so he was happy to record that the great man had said that ‘the important thing about an explanation is that it should work. Physics is connected with engineering. The bridge must not fall down’; and also that one of his pupils recorded he had once urged someone whose loose talk annoyed him to read scientific literature, so as ‘to learn what honest thought is’. It was characteristic of Frank himself to try and tread the narrow path between obscurantism on the one side and scientism on the other. The way he managed to do this could be exasperating to those who met him as regularly as Edward Greenwood and I did since on one Sunday he would succeed in persuading us to adopt a certain point of view but then, a week later, switch to defending its contrary. This was in part mischievousness on his part, or a delight in intellectual gymnastics; but chiefly a sense of the complications which ensue when general principles are applied to particular instances. I can remember that for a week or two he dismayed us by feeling that he had found an important philosophical truth in the lyrics of a popular song which dated from the 1950s. When I had been discussing biography with him some years previously, and we were considering the reliance of many biographers on the childhood experience of their subjects, I found it was altogether apt that he should have recalled a line from a Bing Crosby number which goes, ‘You must have been a beautiful baby ‘cos, Baby, look at you now.’ This other song had also been recorded by Crosby, in a duet with Ella Fitzgerald, and concerned the way Istanbul (its title) had been changed to Constantinople by the Turks: ‘Even old New York was once New Amsterdam’, it went, ‘Why they changed it I can’t say / People just liked it that way’. We must be prepared to say of many of the momentous but enigmatic directionchanging decisions made by agents, he said, ‘why they did it we can’t

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say, they just liked it that way’, and he suggested these words were relevant to many of the conundrums to which, vainly applying the scientific method to human affairs, we seek solutions. But this was a mood only, and shortly he was back wondering whether Wittgenstein did not sometimes go too far in battling against an ethos in which we are inclined to seek rational explanations for everything. Disapproving of Dawkins as he did, Frank was nevertheless not one to deny that science had resulted in huge benefits. After the work of Thomas Kuhn had brought in its train the idea that it was wrong to talk of progress in science, and that what its history illustrated was rather an alternation of paradigms, Frank would ask whether when people who held these views fell ill, they were happy to consult a witch-doctor. In Thomas Mann’s Black Swan, Frau Rosalie Tumler sees in her postmenopausal vaginal bleeding, subsequent to her passionate love for a young man, an example of the renewal of youth, of ‘the soul proving herself mistress of the body’ instead of ‘obediently letting the body act upon it’. Her daughter agrees and feels that the transformation of the youthfulness of her heart into an organic phenomenon is a splendid example of the soul’s power. It is degrading, she says, ‘to turn your experiences over to a medical man who is competent for jaundice or laryngitis, but not for deep human ills . . . there are sicknesses too good for the doctor’. Even in his most anti-scientific, Wittgensteinian moods, I think Frank would have thought it would have been wise for Frau Tumler to consult the medical profession, just in case; and that this was also Mann’s view is clear from the way the novella develops. Frank’s attitudes to science are difficult to summarize because they altered not only with his mood but also with the kind of inquiry or knowledge under consideration. Medicine was an area where he was content to accept its dominance, at least insofar as the body was concerned. When it was a question of the mind, he was more sceptical. Not especially hostile to drug therapy, he certainly agreed with all Freud’s other critics in regarding the pretensions of psychoanalysis to

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a scientific method as bogus. Where he differed from them, as I have already suggested, is in believing that this was far from being what most mattered. Social science he considered a misnomer when it came to writers like Goffman or Harré, and yet he was always interested in the experimental method when it was applied in social psychology. He would refer often to Stanley Milgram’s famous demonstration of how easily decent people can be persuaded to inflict pain on others once they are exposed to what appears to them like authority, how obediently they would press the buttons which seemed to make people they could observe through a glass suffer, if they were told to do so in a sufficiently authoritative manner. He enjoyed thinking how the reactions of people could be tested in laboratory conditions, and when some puzzle of human behaviour came up would surprise us with ingenious ways in which it might be explored experimentally. One of his most consistently held thoughts when it came to the incursions of science into areas where it is not usual to find it was nevertheless that certain kinds of inquiry are incommensurate, one with the other. ‘All science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided’, writes Karl Marx and during a lecture he gave in the 1850s on Goethe’s scientific researches Helmholtz, in what is presumably a reference to Nature, said that ‘poetry is concerned solely with the “beautiful show” . . . how that show is produced is a matter of indifference. The natural philosopher, on the other hand, tries to discover the levers, the cords, and the pulleys which work behind the scenes, and shift them. Of course the sight of the machinery spoils the beautiful show’. It was Frank’s conviction that, as in the case of the rainbow, this was just not true for a majority of people. One kind of inquiry does not necessarily impinge on another. An egregious illustration of this would be the uselessness of offering art lovers, who wanted to know why they responded so enthusiastically to certain pictures, scans of what was happening in their brains while they were looking at them. Frank

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followed quite closely work on the brain, and in neurology generally, where he detected the same kind of optimism which Richard Cobb records Georges Lefebvre as having entertained. That is to say there was an assumption that the great strides research had made in recent times, would go on being made, so that it was only a question of time before the mysteries of human consciousness would be finally resolved. This seemed to him improbable. In fact, just as he was always prepared to call himself an atheist rather than an agnostic after his Catholic beliefs had faded away, so he would often declare that the gap between a scientific understanding of brain chemistry, and many of the higher, healthy functions of what we call our minds, was and would remain unbridgeable. Igoramus et ignorabimus, as Du BoisReymond was by no means the first person to have put it.

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9

But Why Then Do We Read Biographies?

My illustrations in the previous chapters would indicate that many of the biographies Frank read were of writers. That was true, although he also had a special interest in prominent political or military figures from the Second World War. But why should we read literary biographies (he was far from being alone in asking) when we have their subjects’ works? A common answer or assumption is that in doing so we acquire a richer, deeper understanding of the works in question. This was a view implicitly challenged by a phenomenon known in the States as ‘the new criticism’, some of whose practitioners maintained that biographical data should never be evoked when considering a work of art, and that the intention of the writer or artist was wholly irrelevant to what one might want to say about it. One of Frank’s first essays was an attack on this point of view. It was characteristic of him that he should begin with over 40 examples of the kind of questions one might legitimately want to ask of a work of art and go on to demonstrate the absurdity, and indeed impossibility of excluding biographical data from any reasonable attempt to answer very many of them. Sometimes the function which the data performed was merely eliminative: it was no good detecting the influence of X in a poem by Y if it could be shown conclusively that Y could never have read X. But in other cases biographical information might produce that radical aspect change which Wittgenstein discusses when he imagines the same smiling face in the context of someone looking down at a child

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at play, or observing the sufferings of his enemy. An example Frank liked to give of where it was clearly appropriate to appeal to biography concerned the poem which A. E. Housman wrote in the 1890s about a young man who is being dragged off to prison because of the colour of his hair: ‘But they pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see and stare, / And they’re taking him to justice for the colour of his hair’. The naïve reader of the day, he said, might well have felt that persecuting people for their hair colour indicated a pretty poor state of affairs; the less naïve ones that the colour of the young man’s hair must have been intended by Housman to stand for something else. But for those who first read the poem without knowing anything about its author and then learnt that he was a homosexual, dismayed by the punishment recently meted out to Oscar Wilde, every line in it would have undergone a radical and irreversible change. The example seemed so straightforward and telling that I asked his permission to use it in something I was writing. This was of course granted, but not before Frank had reminded me of the individual who, having made a witty remark, was told by Wilde, ‘I wish I had said that’ and swiftly replied, ‘You will, Oscar, you will.’ Another poem by Housman provided illustration for an issue which is also related to intention. 1887 is the poem which opens A Shropshire Lad and is a celebration of the fact that by that date Victoria had been on the throne for 50 years. ‘God save the Queen’ is a phrase which, with slight modifications, occurs repeatedly in it as Housman pays tribute to the soldiers from Shropshire (living or dead), who have defended the Empire and therefore, by extension, the Queen herself. ‘Get you the sons your fathers got / And God will save the Queen’, it ends. When Frank Harris read 1887 he assumed that it was an anti-imperialist jibe and that ‘God Save the Queen’ was being used sarcastically. After Housman had vehemently denied this was so, Harris found it hard to read the poem as he had done before in spite of his conviction (as Frank puts it) ‘both as to the superiority of

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his interpretation and its greater consonance with Housman’s general outlook’. The option would of course always have been open to Harris to decide that Housman was self-deceived, and did not know his own mind well; and another, if rather perverse alternative would have been simply for Harris to ignore what Housman had said and go on reading the poem as he had initially. Sometimes the response to a literary work is so clear and strong that no amount of external information can shift it. Any accumulation of evidence that when Blake referred to ‘dark satanic mills’ he was not thinking of the factories which in his day were only just beginning to disfigure the landscape in the Midlands or the North of England, is hardly likely to change the way the vast majority of people now read his poem. Frank was especially interested in those cases where our acquisition of new knowledge, which ought to change the aspect of a work of art, fails to do so. A particularly tricky example from this area he liked to talk about concerned a Renaissance painting which showed a young woman holding a plate of fruit. X-rays of the canvas revealed that there had been some painting over, and that what the plate had originally held was the head of John the Baptist. How would acquisition of this information, he wondered, affect the viewer’s response to this painting – to the expression on the girl’s face, for example – if it affected it at all? That literary biography can sometimes deepen our understanding of literature is only the most standard of explanations for its popularity, and clearly only ever a partial one. He liked the idea that people are fond of biography because it provides a means of continuing the pleasure they have already received from a particular subject’s work. Of the feeling one has after turning the last page of an enjoyable novel, Proust writes: ‘One would have wanted so much to have had more information on all these characters, to learn something about their lives, to devote ours to things that might not be entirely foreign to the love they had inspired in us.’ This last phrase especially provides an explanation for the popularity of writers’ lives and he was pleased

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to find it echoed in an essay on biography by John Updike since he was a writer Frank admired greatly (not so much for his novels but as a reviewer and essayist). We read literary biographies, Updike claims, above all out of ‘a desire to prolong and extend our intimacy with the author and to partake again, from another angle, of the joys we have experienced with the author’s oeuvre, in the presence of a voice and mind we have come to love’. The problem here, however, is that biographical information is sometimes discontinuous with the feelings a subject’s work inspires, just as actually meeting a living author might be as disappointing as the narrator’s encounter with Bergotte in A la recherche. Specifying a transition from an author’s work to his conversation, Dr Johnson said it was ‘too often like an entrance to a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples, and turrets of palaces, and imagine in it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence: but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke’. The move from the works to biography can have a similar effect. It is a shock to learn from George Painter that Proust seems to have derived sexual pleasure from sticking pins into rats, and anyone who has luxuriated in Dickens’s pictures of domestic bliss might reasonably be disconcerted by a biographical account of how he treated his wife. Spinoza, apparently, liked to entertain himself by dropping flies into spiders’ webs and enjoyed the consequences so much that he would occasionally burst out laughing. Yes, admitted Frank, there may well be on occasions a disturbing mismatch between one set of feelings and another, when we have to recognize that, as Shakespeare puts it in one of his sonnets, ‘Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud’ or (perhaps more pertinently) as Benedick muses in Much Ado ‘is it not strange that sheep’s guts can hale men’s souls out of their bodies.’ But then, he would say, another form of satisfaction kicks in, which at its best is the recognition that our literary or intellectual

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heroes, so apparently beyond any conception we might have of what is normally possible in the world, are human after all. At its worst, and meanest, there is also the pleasure in watching the great brought down to our own level, or even lower. Max Beerbohm protested against Edmund Gosse having detailed in an essay Swinburne’s unusual sexual proclivities and said, ‘How definitely dreary and ghastly the whole thing becomes . . . Why not let lovers of poetry hereafter be immune from definite knowledge’. Auden complained apropos of some dismaying revelations in the letters of Beethoven, ‘what profits us that we should learn ugly little secrets about another human being?’; and the response of Bing Crosby fans to some unwholesome details in a biography of him was, ‘Not easy thinking those things about Bing’. Among those who would feel that it is always better to know than not know would be Dr Johnson who famously justified biography by reference to its exemplary function and claimed that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.’ This edificatory rationale takes us back to the origins of biography in The Lives of the Saints, although Johnson distances himself from that kind of writing here with his ‘judicious’ and (above all) ‘faithful’, and elsewhere, in a celebrated formulation, insisted that ‘if we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.’ The rationale he offered for biography now seems old-fashioned, yet in a German film of only a few years ago (Das Leben der Anderen) a grim-faced Stasi officer is told to spy on a well-known author whose loyalty to the East German state is suspect. He hides so many microphones in the author’s flat that he is able to listen in on the most intimate details of his life. The effect of what he overhears is to make him question his own values and he ends up helping the author out of a difficult situation, to the serious detriment of his own career in the East German secret police. What has happened is that he has found the life of another human being exemplary enough for him to want to change his own.

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Laying as he does so much stress on what is useful, Johnson makes an interesting distinction between the kinds of detail in which a biographer might be interested. Praising Sallust for having noted that Cataline’s walk was ‘now quick and again slow, as an indication of a mind revolving something with violent agitation’, he complained that he did not see what advantage Posterity received on learning from Tickell that Addison was distinguished from the rest of mankind by ‘the irregularity of his pulse’. A quite different approach was suggested by Nicholson Baker, a modern writer whom Frank admired for his sharp intelligence and particularly for his having recorded a lifelong admiration for Updike in a book with the clever title U and I (the best thing about it, in my view). Quoting the description of what Johnson wore on his Scottish tour from A Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides, Baker notes an apologetic addendum from Boswell in which he asks not to be censured for recording such minute particulars. ‘Everything relative to so great a man is worth mentioning’, Boswell writes. ‘I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore lachets in his shoes, instead of buckles.’ I crave knowledge of this kind of detail, comments Baker (‘Think of it: John Milton wore shoelaces!’), thereby proclaiming his kinship with the thousands who want to know anything at all about their favourite writers, whether or not it has any significance. In a country where some anonymous person has paid £100,000 in order that a ring Jane Austen might have worn can stay England, the feeling to which Baker confesses must be widespread. Its obvious danger, in Johnson’s view, is triviality; and yet methods of biographical interpretation change over time so that a detail which might seem gratuitous in one age can easily become important in another. Although nothing is more unreliable than medical diagnosis of people long dead, it is not entirely impossible that a biographer may one day be able to make something even of Addison’s irregular pulse.

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Certain methods of interpretation may indeed change over time yet the ability the ordinary biography reader has to build up a picture of the subject from minor details has remained, I suspect, pretty constant. This was an aspect of the topic I was reminded of when, idly flicking through the usual rubbish on the television one evening, I came across a documentary of the life of Arthur Lowe, the actor who became famous in England for his depiction of Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, and found myself fascinated. Since Lowe was the son of a railway booking clerk, his life trajectory was the familiar one of rags to riches (familiar in biographies if not personally so to most of their readers). It seemed to me that the human interest of the programme quickened with the years of Lowe’s fame after a spectacularly well-received role in Coronation Street and then Dad’s Army. Work in the first took him away from his home in London where his wife, who was a former actress and already cast into the shadows by her husband’s success, was left on her own and deprived of those first nights which had kept her in touch with theatrical friends and theatre gossip. She began to drink heavily and a situation developed so instantly recognizable to the viewers of the programme that it seemed to me they required no analysis of quite why Lowe then chose to compromise his career by only agreeing to appear in plays if his wife was also given a part. A key moment came in an interview with a theatrical agent who described how he once cast Lowe in a tour without his wife only to have the actor come to his office with tears in his eyes and ask him never to do that again. ‘I have had’, he reported Lowe as saying, ‘one of the worst weekends of my life’. What I wanted to discuss with Frank was the ability that we have, perhaps partly because of our familiarity with certain kinds of fictions in novels and films, and a rich store of biographical narratives, to discern the main lines of another’s life from the merest hints. This is often so marked that it sometimes appeared to me like early language learning, a phenomenon striking enough that, according to some,

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it can only be explained in terms of genetic endowment. What it appeared to confirm was that we lived in a common world and that Frank’s dream of providing categories for how all of us might pass 24 hours was not so impossible after all. And yet, he pointed out, aside from the fact that celebrating our competence in reading or watching biographies does not always explain why we should want to do so, there is also the awkward truth that the ability concerned, while it may be widespread, is clearly not universal. Or at least by no means everyone has the desire to practise it, and few of us practise it all the time. We often come into human contact stuffed with our own notions and aspirations, and ignorant of those of others. There may be a pretence of communality when all we are, in fact, is one in an aggregation of isolated units, and it sometimes takes exceptional circumstances to make us realize that others are not mere carbon copies of ourselves. From his huge store of anecdotal information, Frank was able to illustrate for me how this realization can come about with a story about Charlie Chaplin’s first divorce. In order to exact the maximum amount of money from him, the lawyers of Chaplin’s wife drew up a long list of his misdeeds which included some unusual sexual practices. When challenged about these he is supposed to have said, in a bemused and touching way, ‘But doesn’t everybody do that?’ Perhaps if he had been more of a biography reader, he would have realized that they didn’t. Frank liked biographies, literary or otherwise, because he was interested in human behaviour, a fact which helped to ensure that, despite his early enthusiasm for verificationism, there was never anything dry or abstract about his philosophical concerns. It was primarily his own behaviour he studied but that needed a context if its degree of abnormality or idiosyncrasy could be judged. Since his social life was more and more restricted as he grew older, and he was in any case not a particularly acute observer of how other people behave in public, judging them chiefly by how they had acted towards

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himself (‘what a kind chap’, he would say of some widely acknowledged unpleasant individual who had helped him across the road or passed the salt), he was reliant on books for much of his knowledge of others. Proust, Jane Austen, Tolstoy, Dickens – these writers gave him standards for judging how people behave which he could not derive from personal experience and which he felt were just as valuable as those to be found in Goffman and Harré. But in that case, I used to goad him, why bother with social science and philosophy at all when trying to think about how we live our lives? Who needs either when Shakespeare is available? Since I knew he admired F. R. Leavis, I would then remind him of what that critic had said about the irrelevance of philosophy to the kind of issues raised in any reading of great novels, and some great poetry also; but he would quote in response Dilthey’s simple assertion that ‘literature’s superiority of content is offset by its incapacity for systematic representation.’ What helped to make Frank so interesting was the permanent battle that went on within him between a powerful will towards order, system, clarity of thought and delight in the sheer heterogeneity of human existence.

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A Sense of Humour

After Frank’s death, several of the tributes paid to him included references to his strong sense of humour. Given that this is an attribute not always associated with academics, these were appropriate but at the same time not very precise. Humour can mean so many different things. In his case, it often manifested itself in what could be described as sheer fun. I remember, for example, that he and I derived a great deal of pleasure from a video clip which circulated several years before he died, and which featured George W. Bush in early morning conversation with his Secretary of State. In well-mimicked voices, Bush begins by asking Condoleezza Rice about the new leader of China. When she tells him that Hu is now the president of China he of course responds by saying that this was precisely what he was asking her. The dialogue then continues along the lines of a routine by Abbott and Costello (‘Who’s on first?’), very well known in the States although not here since it deals with a sport the English hardly practise, until Bush reaches a pitch of exasperation which drives him to say, ‘Now look, Condoleeza, you’re beginning to piss me off, and it’s not because you’re black, neether.’ I don’t know what it says about us both that we found the whole exchange very funny. Frank’s enjoyment of this clip had nothing to do with any particular contempt for Bush. He had been a Troskyite in his youth, but soon lost faith in Marxism and was inclined to be contemptuous of those who, like Sartre, had stayed with Russian or Chinese communism long

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after evidence for the atrocities committed in its name had become freely available. When I knew him, he had long despaired of politics and had come to feel there was little to choose between Western leaders, that one was just as inept as the other. It was the level of debate on all sides which depressed him so that what the Bush/Rice exchange stimulated in him was little more that a naïve boyish glee. Something similar emerged from his repeated efforts to tell me a joke about a man who bets his friend that he can say arsehole in public three times, without offending anyone. I understood that this meant the man going to a restaurant and saying things like, ‘These are soles on the menu, aren’t they?’ or ‘Are soles plentiful this year?’ and his friend’s unsuccessful attempt to do the same thing (‘Are arseholes plentiful this year?’); but I was never able to seize the joke’s full form or learn how it ended. This was because, as Frank began to tell it, he would be struck again by its comic aspects and start giggling. The giggles increased as he moved further into the joke, tears would begin to run down his cheeks and his huge torso would rock helplessly back and forward as he tried to articulate his words. If the joke had a development which was in any way complicated, I never managed to hear it. For me, it was a particularly attractive aspect of Frank’s personality that he could abandon himself to hilarity in this fashion. Jokes are an important aspect of humour and the one most often studied. Conveniently self-contained, they are easier to analyse than other of humour’s many manifestations. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein talks of the problems arising through misinterpretation of our forms of language having ‘the character of depth’: They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language. – Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep?

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In his conversations with another philosopher, he is reported as having said that a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist only of jokes. Frank once had the ambition to write an essay explicating these somewhat puzzling remarks, although precisely what makes a joke either ‘grammatical’ or ‘deep’ he was never quite able to make clear to us. It is true that there are some jokes which depend on grammatical ambiguity. A loosely formulated statement which is clear enough in a given social context can be shown by a joke to mean something quite different once that context is no longer assumed. ‘How would you like your hair cut, sir?’ asks the barber; ‘in silence’ replies the surly customer. More often, however, the ambiguity is not in the grammar but the capacity words have for meaning more than one thing, so that many jokes depend on puns. Even here, however, it is sometimes not the mysteries of language with which we need to be acquainted but human nature. Frank was intrigued by a joke about a man who is asked by a friend whether he knows of a good restaurant in the area. Yes I do, he replies, but I can’t remember its name. What do you call that flower you see everywhere and is used on badges? A rose, ventures his friend. Yes, that’s it, says the man and, turning to his wife, then goes on, ‘Rose, what’s the name of that restaurant we like so much.’ Although there is a word here with a double meaning, it has very little to do with whatever might be thought comic in this joke. The particular kind of joke Frank was, in his more professional guise, on the look out for, he would call ‘philosophical’ rather than ‘grammatical’. The ones I remember had to do with the problem of identity. There was, for example, the reply of the man in some film or other he had seen who, after he has been beaten up, finds himself in the semi-darkness of a prison cell and is asked by his companion, ‘Is that you, Joe?’ ‘Well if it’s not’, he responds, ‘someone has been doing a hellava lot of suffering on my behalf.’ More straightforward, and better known, is an exchange which occurs in Marcel Carné’s celebrated and

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somewhat sentimental Les Enfants du Paradis. This helped to make the reputation of Jean-Louis Barrault, but one of its stars is also an actress known in France simply as Arletty. She it is who at one moment is asked ‘Comment tu t’appelles?’ and replies, ‘Je m’appelle jamais, je suis toujours là’. More complicated versions of these identity jokes he found in two Jewish stories. In the first of these, two Jews who are down on their luck pass a sign outside a church which promises $10 to anyone who converts. One of them goes in and when he comes out his friend asks him if he already has the $10. ‘Ah, you Jews’, he responds, ‘always thinking about money’. In the second, an old Jew who is dying decides to convert to Catholicism. When his outraged relatives ask him what on earth he thinks he is doing, he replies that if someone has to go, it might as well be one of them. An innocent joke Frank told me which could lead into complicated areas of a very different kind is about a small boy who is asked by his teacher to tell her what seven times seven comes to. ‘Forty-nine’, replies the boy. ‘That’s very good’, says the teacher. ‘What do you mean, good?’ exclaims the indignant boy, ‘it’s bloody perfect.’ For Frank, nothing exemplified more clearly than humour that there were many areas of human activity which were so diverse, so obviously what Wittgenstein liked to call ‘a motley’, that all attempts to encompass them within a general formula would be useless. He appreciated the examples in Freud’s book on jokes but found it impossible to take seriously its theoretical claims. Yet philosophers had hardly done much better. Hobbes’s emphasis on surprise was useful, as was that of some of his later colleagues on incongruity; but that all humour was a matter of one-upmanship and of laughing at our fellow human beings showed too much mechanical subservience to what had been for centuries the classical view. It failed to recognize the crucial importance of the distinction Falstaff makes at the beginning of the second part of Henry IV when he says that no one had been able to invent ‘anything that intends to laughter more than I invent, or is

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invented on me; I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men’. In a way that Jonson, with a classical education much more advanced than Shakespeare’s, would have appeared (from his plays) not to have properly grasped, Falstaff is someone the audience is able to laugh both at and with. This is not to say that the satirical impulse was weak in Frank. He could mock with the best of them, and often felt he needed to, if not in relation to Freud’s book on jokes then when it came to considering his other works, and the methods used to defend them. These other works often provided a challenge to his comic ingenuity because they contained arguments which could not be dealt with in a conventional fashion but only with the invention of reductios: arguments which use the same logical procedures as Freud’s but produce conclusions that are self-evidently absurd. Yet reductios are hard to come by. A favourite example of Frank’s involved Macaulay on a visit to India and meeting there a clergyman who claimed to have discovered that Napoleon was the Beast of the Apocalypse. This was because if Napoleon’s name is written in Hebrew, the numerical equivalents of the letters involved can be made, with only slight adjustments, to add up to 666. Ah, no, responded Macaulay immediately, the British House of Commons is the Beast of the Apocalypse because if you add to its 600 plus members, the three clerks and the sergeant at arms, 666 is what you get. Frank attempted a rather more elaborate version of this kind of riposte in those opening pages of his book on Freud mentioned in my introduction. He noted there that Freud had confessed to some ‘unruly sexual component’ in his friendship with Fliess, and went on to show how Freud’s wanting to name at least one of his children after his friend could be interpreted as ‘a disguised expression of his unconscious wish to bear Fleiss’s child’. Support for this view could be found in certain expressions in the letters Freud wrote to Fliess: ‘where can we have our next congress’, for example; ‘I am busy rethinking out something which will cement our work

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together and put my column on your base’; or, ‘I live gloomily and in darkness until you come and then I . . . kindle my flickering light at your steady flame’ (the idea of fire, Freud claimed, is permeated with sexual symbolism, ‘the flame always standing for the male organ’). What all this could mean is that Freud’s promise to name one of his children after Fliess represented a sublimated wish to be impregnated by him. Frank’s aim was to show that this outrageous suggestion could be made to have the same degree of cogency as many of Freud’s own interpretations but of course it ran the risk of being accepted as a serious contribution to any study of the Freud/Fliess relationship, just as Macaulay’s clergyman might well have said to him, since there can be only one Beast, ‘ah, yes I see what you mean, it must be the House of Commons and not Napoleon’. The way satirical humour permeates Frank’s writing can be illustrated from that opening section of Freud and the Question of Pseudo-Science just referred to. This begins with a page-long list of its subject’s intellectual dishonesties: that he lied about his role in promoting the use of cocaine for morphine addiction, for example; that he propagated false and demeaning rumours about Breuer’s grounds for aborting their collaboration; that he boasted in 1898 of ‘innumerable’ therapeutic successes which were non-existent and so on. ‘Now what has been the response of a vocal and influential segment of the intellectual and academic community to this barrage of accusations’, he asks, and then responds to his own question with ‘Nobody’s perfect’. It is these same apologists whom he dubs ‘pick and mix Freudians’, since they were so ready to drop any part of the theory which had come under too damaging an attack. Feeling that Adolf Grünbaum’s criticisms of Freud had done more harm than good, he suggests that ‘Freudian apologists welcome his objections as the Undead welcome nightfall. At Grünbaum’s approach they smile, stir and emerge from their coffins’; and of the hagiographical way in which Freudians were able to find excuses for some of their master’s

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less creditable pronouncements, he writes, ‘The representativeness of these euphemising distortions produces an impression that were it discovered Freud was a cannibal, and that he considered fricasseed babies a particular delicacy, we would be informed that “Freud’s well-known fondness for children had recently received additional confirmation.” ’ He wonders why it is that, in raising certain questions, he was made to feel as if he had disrupted a midnight mass with a demand for proof that Jesus was born on the 25th of December; and notes that many epistemic revisionists now seemed to await validation of Freudian theory ‘as pious Jews do the Messiah, which is odd since until very recently these revisionists were insisting that he had already arrived and died for our sins’. Although his manner with Freudians was very different from the one he adopted when he was in dispute with Wittgensteinians, it will be clear enough from these examples that Frank did not mind ruffling feathers and was not unduly constrained by notions of academic courtesy. But a comic approach to social interaction was in any case natural to him and went along with an American egalitarianism and tendency to challenge pretentiousness and pomposity wherever he found it. ‘Where are you from?’ asks the American. ‘I come from a place where we do not end our sentences with prepositions’, replies the Englishman. ‘OK, then’, responds the American, ‘Where are you from, jackass?’ With us at our Sunday meeting, his habitual manner was satirical and bantering. I can recall a moment when, trying to express my indebtedness to him, I had the misfortune to suggest that he had taught me how to think. ‘Well in that case’, he replied immediately, ‘I didn’t do a very good job.’ This was characteristic and not disconcerting, especially as trading insults had played a prominent role in my own social background. One of the best moments in Bergson’s book on laughter is a description of a man who visits a neighbouring church and remains stony-faced while the rest of the congregation is moved to tears by the priest’s sermon. When asked why this should be so

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afterwards, he feels that it is explanation enough to say that he ‘does not belong to the parish’. It is of course true that whether or not we find something funny is often dependent on our belonging to the right parish but what my contacts with Frank suggested was that the parishes in question were not so much established by geographical boundaries – New York as against a small town in Lancashire – but by temperament. It was in Frank’s nature to ‘josh’, as people sometimes say. This was a habit which had no doubt been strengthened in him by the army, and was usually an affirmation of friendship. It was easily distinguished from his rare moments of anger at our failure to grasp the subtleties of an idea which he had struggled hard to work out but which had eventually become so clear to him that he was tempted to assume that it could be conveyed to others by some mysterious process of thought transference. Those who wrote the obituaries were right to talk about Frank’s sense of humour. It was important to him as a way of communicating with friends, and it certainly helped him to deal more effectively with this intellectual opponents. In a public debate he had to a formidable extent what is known as a ready wit, and had collected numerous examples of that Falstaffian presence of mind in difficult circumstances which is so enviable. A particular favourite came from Gore Vidal who, having written a hostile review of Norman Mailer, had the bad luck to meet him at a party. Floored by the competent boxer Mailer was, Vidal is supposed to have looked up and said, ‘Lost for words again, Norman’. A major part of Frank’s appeal as a lecturer was also that he could be so funny, although often in an understated way. One of the last public lectures he gave at Kent went by the intriguing title of ‘Why are some people more miserable than others?’ ‘Some of you who know me’, he began, ‘will be wondering how long it will be before I say I don’t really know. The answer is about fifty-five minutes’. Why Frank so often adopted a comic tone is as unamenable to a definitive answer as the question he was posing in that lecture, but it was clear that his

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humour was often fed by an acute apprehension of the ridiculousness of our situation in the world, and the near futility of all our best efforts to understand it. This meant that he was not slow to turn his sense of the ridiculous on himself. Falstaff does this often but he has an additional attribute the characterization of which in Freud’s joke book Frank admired. The humorous effect of Falstaff, Freud claimed, in further elaboration of his strange thermostatic theory of why we laugh, depends on the economies we are able to make in contempt and indignation; but he goes on to remark that much of Falstaff ’s appeal can be attributed to ‘the superiority of an ego which neither his physical nor his moral defects can rob of its cheerfulness and assurance’. We should be so lucky, I can still hear Frank murmuring.

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11

The Two Directions

Frank’s increasing fascination, as he grew older, with minor details of his early New York days seemed to him a manifestation of what he liked to call the preterit sensibility (you either had it or you didn’t). For describing how such details might be preserved, he borrowed from a huge tome on conversation by Harvey Sachs, which he reviewed for the London Review of Books, the term ‘custodianship’. I can remember, he once said, being told by someone of an earlier generation why Dick Tracy became a cop, and this was when I was roughly the same age that my informant had been when this career choice had been explained to him. What this person was doing, he conjectured, was hoping to create a continuity between the world he had known and the less familiar one in which he found himself living, to extend the life of a fast vanishing reference and maintain a shared allusive environment. That the detail was so trivial made it evanescent, but it was precisely its evanescence which gave it an evocative potency. Someday in my own time, he complained, there will come a Pharaoh ‘who knows not Joseph’ and, though I did not know him very well myself, the prospect saddens me for I define myself at an intimate level by the lives I did not quite manage to lead, the circles I never penetrated, the aspirations which were unfulfilled and so will be left with no one to understand what it was I feel I have missed, who it was that (and here he was referring to that Browning poem which begins ‘Ah, did you once see Shelley plain’) I might have seen plain and failed to.

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This was still his own past to which he was drawn, but he also had an interest in the past in general and how we might think about it. He had been at some point struck by the way George Luckács had talked of ‘Homer’s organic world’ being a place where ‘life and meaning were present with perfect immanence in every manifestation of life.’ This was clearly not the same kind of issue as whether Myceneans were Minoan migrants or an indigenous but non-Hellenic people, and could hardly have been resolved by administering a questionnaire to those who had been living at the time which went: ‘Would you describe the period in which you are living as (a) the best of times (b) the worst of times or’ – in one of the phrases Luckács uses – (c) ‘a blessed time when the fire that burns in our souls is of the same substance as the fire of the stars’? What it seemed rather to be was a historical conjecture which was put before us in order to evince a sense of the world of The Iliad and its discrepancy with our post-industrial culture. In that case Homer’s Greece could be as imaginary as Oz or Middle Earth without any impairment of its real function, and one could apply to Luckács what Croce said of Marx, that he describes an ideal world in order to throw light on the real one. It seemed to me that something similar to this process was going on when, in a review essay on the so-called Metaphysical Poets, first published in 1921, T. S. Eliot argued that the Metaphysicals provided better models for modern poets than Milton or Dryden, and implicitly attributed any difficulty one might have in emulating them to a radical change which had taken place in the seventeenth century, one from which English culture had never recovered. He called this change a ‘disassociation of sensibility’, a separation of the intellect from the feelings. ‘Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think’, he explained, ‘but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility’. Like the idea that good modern poetry must of necessity be difficult, or that in the greatest work there is an absolute

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separation between the man who suffers and the mind which creates, this ‘dissociation of sensibility’ had a remarkable effect on a whole generation of literary critics. Some of them went looking for the moment when the dissociation took place, even though Eliot himself became very nervous about the success of his idea, and very shortly after 1921 moved when the change is supposed to have occurred back from the seventeenth century to Dante’s time. Only slowly did it become clear that the phrase was no more historical than Luckács’s golden age of Homer’s Greece, and chiefly functioned as a method for expressing Eliot’s disdain for Victorian poetry, and preparing a path for his own. A plainer and perhaps harsher way of characterizing what Luckács and Eliot are involved in when they look back to the past would be in terms of myth and reality, a distinction which is easier to see when we consider the ‘wild west’. Through cowboy films, this had been a major part of Frank’s cultural background, as it had of many people in this country also. What difference did it make, he wondered, to learn that whereas screen cowboys always spur their horses behind the girth, the real ones did so forwards of it, and sometimes as high as the shoulder; that a quarter of all the approximately 10,000 cowboys (in the heyday of Western expansion they were heavily outnumbered by farmers) turned out not to have looked like John Wayne but to have been either Black or Mexican; or that the great trail herds one sometimes sees moving quite quickly across the screen had a maximum speed of 8 to 10 miles a day because anything more would have been economically disastrous? He was inclined to think that in these instances historical reality did not necessarily destroy the myth but that the two could co-exist in the same mind, just as someone could continue to appreciate the traditional crib at Christmas while knowing that the shepherds and wise men could not possibly have been together at the same time, or that the presence of the animals was gratuitous. How really destructive of an ordinary person’s

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participation in the spirit of Christmas, he wondered, was it to be told that one of the suggested models for Santa Claus was a fourth-century Christian saint who, having been systematically tortured for refusing to abjure his faith, had a complexion ‘the colour of vermilion’? It is a sobering thought, the writer who offers this information goes on, that the ‘ruddy complexion’ which is traditionally ascribed to St Nicolas in his later incarnation as Santa Claus was due not to rude health but the sadistic and vicious ill treatment he had received. A clearer challenge to our ability or need to separate different kinds of knowledge or experience came with the rainbow. Well before Richard Dawkins seized hold of it, Frank had been interested by a famous episode which Benjamin Haydon describes in his autobiography. This was when, with Keats, Lamb and Wordsworth, he was celebrating the unveiling of one of his paintings which showed Christ entering Jerusalem. Lamb had begun by teasing Wordsworth for calling Voltaire dull and had gone on to abuse Haydon for having put a figure with Newton’s head into his picture. Keats and Lamb agreed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours, and although a toast was then drunk to Newton’s health it included the addendum ‘confusion to mathematics’. Frank disagreed with Dawkins’s view that understanding how light can be decomposed, and how a rainbow comes about, will only add to our appreciation of it; and he was sceptical about the words Dawkins quotes of another scientist (who is talking about a flower): ‘the beauty that is there for you is also available for me, too. But I see a deeper beauty that isn’t so readily available to others.’ Perhaps he does, but in general Frank thought human beings have a capacity for keeping different kinds of understanding separate. No one’s wonder at the night sky, he felt, had ever been spoilt by a knowledge of astronomy, and it seemed doubtful to him that it had ever been much enhanced either. An art lover may know all that it is possible to know about optics without that knowledge having any effect on his

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or her appreciation of a particular painting. Not that examples might not exist of people whose scientific knowledge, far from enhancing aesthetic appreciation, inhibited it. In Conan Doyle’s ‘A Physiologist’s Wife’, that same professor who is anxious to ground all psychic events in ascertained fact is asked by a nature-loving woman to listen to the wind sighing in the trees, but remains unimpressed. ‘Do you not see that delicious tint of the background of leaves and their rich greens’, she asks him only to have him murmur in reply ‘chlorophyll’. What this suggests is that a lack of responsiveness might well have been something he was born with. The relation of scientific knowledge to aesthetic appreciation will obviously vary from individual to individual, but in Frank’s view there was certainly no law that made the first the ally of the second. This area of enquiry gave Frank the opportunity to explore further the subtleties of that notion of the two directions whose ubiquity and importance he was always trying, and not always with great success, to press upon us. He had found it first of all in various remarks which Wittgenstein is recorded as having made on Frazer’s Golden Bough. The Beltane fire festivals were pagan rituals which, in the eighteenth century and thereafter, involved dancing around a bonfire and in some cases throwing a human effigy on to it. Frazer traced these far back to times of human sacrifice, when he believed real men were burnt. For Wittgenstein, this explanation of why the festivals impressed us as they did was gratuitous, and a manifestation, perhaps, of the nineteenth century’s slavish indebtedness to science. To account for the slightly disturbing effect of the ritual in its more modern forms, we did not need genetic speculations but only the capacity to put into order what we already knew and the ability to understand our own minds better. This was true of very many experiences which could be said to ‘assault our being’, and in by no means of all of these was there the revelation of human kind’s capacity for cruelty. A remark which Frank particularly liked, for example, and which also comes from what

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Wittgenstein has to say about The Golden Bough, begins with ‘every explanation is a hypothesis’ and goes on: ‘But for someone worried by love, an explanatory hypothesis will not help much. It will not bring peace’. Wittgenstein goes on to refer to ‘the crush of thoughts that do not get out because they all press forward and are wedged in the door’. It was about how to deal with this ‘crush of thoughts’ wedged in the door that Frank felt Wittgenstein had important things to say. The distinctions Wittgenstein makes seemed to Frank to be relevant in a (to us) surprising number of areas, but he was not uncritical in his consideration of all of them. In his remarks on Freud, for example, Wittgenstein had commented on a dream in which the patient had imagined herself floating down from a height carrying a flowering branch, the blossoms of which looked liked red camellias. The feelings associated with the dream were euphoric and the patient took it as an expression of her joy at having passed through life uncontaminated, without (that is) having sinned against purity. But Freud disabused her by interpreting the branch as phallic and observing that camellias were the favourite flowers of the lady of that name in the famous novel (and play) by Dumas, where La Dame aux camelias is a courtesan who takes care to wear the red variety when she is menstruating, and white ones the rest of the time. This way of treating the dream was in Wittgenstein’s view ‘immensely wrong’ and meant that Freud had ‘cheated’ his patient. However poorly Frank could on occasions think of Freud, he was anxious here to recall that the dreamer had presumably gone for psychoanalytic treatment because she was suffering in some way. An explanation is a hypothesis and those of Freud might be especially hypothetical, but there was nevertheless here a situation where it was not reasonable to rule out some recourse to empirical investigation. A man could go to his doctor full of what seems to him unusual well-being which disappears after he has been diagnosed with very high blood pressure and put on the appropriate medication. Could it be reasonably then said that the doctor had cheated him of the previous feeling he had of being on top of the world?

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Frank felt he had found something close to the difficult distinctions from Wittgenstein he was always trying to make clear in a book on nests where Bachelard writes, ‘it is not the task of philosophical phenomenology to describe nests met within nature but rather to elucidate the interest with which we look through an album containing reproductions of nests.’ In a somewhat similar sense, it seemed clear that if the Beltane rituals were above all for Wittgenstein an incitement to understand our own minds better, Frazer’s investigation of their origins was not an aid in that task. Frank wondered whether the same distinctions could apply to the way some human beings have tended to respond to animals. ‘Can you imagine’, Rilke wrote in a letter, ‘how glorious it is to see into a dog, to ease oneself into the dog at exactly the centre, the place out of which he exists as a dog?’ Empirical studies of canine life, Frank noted ironically, might plausibly reconstitute the umwelt of a dog but this hardly seems relevant to any investigation of the kind of response Rilke is evincing here, or to that response itself. For Freud, the charm which certain animals have for us lies in ‘their narcissism, self-sufficiency and inaccessibility’. This was particularly the case with cats and large beasts of prey from the cat family. A few lessons in natural history about the social life of tigers which qualified or destroyed this impression might be less fruitful than prolonged reflection on its character. A seemingly more obvious target for Wittgenstein’s distinction was the pleasure many more readers than Luckács have derived from reading Homer, and the relation to that pleasure of whether a town called Troy had ever existed. Most people would assume that here reading enjoyment and historical research are not difficult to separate but that might not have been the case for Byron. In 1796 a man called Jacob Bryant published a book in which he offered to show that the Trojan war could not have taken place on a plain running south from the Hellespont, as had previously been assumed, because it had in fact not taken place at all. ‘I have stood upon that

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plain daily, for more than a month’, Byron complained in 1821, ‘and if any thing diminished my pleasure, it was that the blackguard Bryant had impugned its veracity’. For the kind of reader Byron was, it may have been difficult to distinguish the feelings The Iliad evoked from historical issues, truthfulness (as it were) from truth. Similar problems were raised in the much more complicated case of the Eucharist. One of the jokes Frank recorded concerned the Turk who, in the course of his conversion, was catechized, baptized and then received Holy Communion. His conscientious instructor, examining him the next day as to the rudiments of his faith, began by asking how many Gods there were. He was dismayed when the Turk answered that there were none at all because he had been told all along that there was but one God and yesterday he had eaten him. Cheek by jowl with this anecdote in Frank’s notes is a passage in which Santayana is describing the appeal which the Corpus Christi procession had for him as a child. It was hardly the theological mystery which impressed him, he writes, and adds, ‘the Eucharist as a means of grace; that too requires experience to comprehend it. The lovely mystery glittered on its own spectacular plane. Its wonder was intrinsic to it, like that of the stars. To have explained would have cheapened it’. Santayana appears to be thinking here of theological explanation so that, even more cheapening in his view, and others like him, would have been that narrative of the origins of Holy Communion in primitive human sacrifice which is implicit in the joke about the Turk, and which antiChristians so much enjoy. When our thinking about the past is tied to certain images (Frank thought), as Santayana’s is in his recollections of his Catholic boyhood, it may be that we come to realize that the real source of our preoccupation is not epistemic: that we do not want to know how these images correspond with reality but the secret of their hold over us. The problem is one of rendering to reflection what belongs to reflection and to empirical investigation what belongs to

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empirical investigation. When it is a matter of thinking about what might have been horrific in the past, as burning men alive or eating them certainly is, or much more recent horrors like the Holocaust, it may also be a question of not only rendering to understanding what belongs to understanding but also to peace what belongs to peace. Frank explained this remark by saying that the assumption which must be relinquished is not just that ‘when I know that these things happened they will cease to disturb’, or even ‘when I know why they happened they will cease to do so.’ The issue that should trouble us is rather how can we get used to the idea of them, or at least get used to not getting used to them.

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12

Aesthetics

Frank attached a great deal of importance to putting into order what we already know rather than accumulating data and felt (with Wittgenstein) that it was characteristic of our culture to search for explanatory information when what we should really be doing, and really wanted to do, was to clarify our own feelings. Yet the examples he cited admitted of so many qualifications and exceptions that he was sometimes difficult to follow. The area in which the distinctions he offered appeared to me to work best was aesthetics. It seemed clear that Byron should not have allowed the researches of Bryant to interfere with whatever efforts he made to clarify his responses to The Iliad, even if he could not help them doing so. Further knowledge can in any case sometimes be no more than a convenient distraction, as Proust suggests in a preface to his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies: ‘What happiness for a mind tired of seeking the truth within itself to tell itself that it is located outside’, he writes, ‘. . . that in order to reach it one has to go to some trouble, a trouble that will be entirely material and will for one’s mind be a relaxation’. It was his refusal to take this route that made Proust admire Jules Renard. ‘I esteem him’, he said, because he does not look for ways of escape, contrary to almost all those who, unable to fathom what they feel, instead of persisting in the attempt to discover what there is in it, give up, glide on to

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something else and scrambling here, scrambling there, end by covering a vast amount of ground . . . rather than at some one point having persevered and dug right down.

Proust himself of course is the classic example of someone who refuses to give up in the effort to define his own responses (to the hawthorn bush, for example, although there we have to observe him through his narrator). More knowledge about hawthorns could for him only be a distraction and he therefore raises this question of the whole relation of information to aesthetic response. No observer of a phenomenon in Nature, just as no reader of a book or viewer of a picture, is likely of course to be a tabula rasa; they all usually already know a great deal about the object being contemplated. The question is how much more should they seek to know? A neat answer would be to say that the only kind of extra knowledge that matters is the one which, to use the Wittgensteinian vocabulary, changes aspect; but the difficulty here is that the effect of the knowledge on aspect cannot be known until it has been acquired. Frank’s tendency was to feel that these observers, readers or viewers very often already have enough. D. H. Lawrence has a short but charming poem about a humming bird which begins ‘I can imagine’, and goes on to conjecture that this ‘little bit chipped off in brilliance’ once went ‘whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems’ of the primeval forest in a period when he was probably big, ‘a jabbing, terrifying monster’, so that we now are fortunate to be looking at him ‘through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time’. Dawkins calls ‘Humming Bird’ ‘almost wholly inaccurate’ and says that ‘Lawrence lacked only a couple of tutorials in evolution and taxonomy to bring his poem within the pale of accuracy.’ He adds that it would then be ‘no less arresting and thought-provoking as a poem’. Leaving aside the issue of what difference those two tutorials would have made to Lawrence himself, Frank did not deny that there might be some

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readers who, once the inaccuracies of Humming Bird were pointed out to them, found they liked it less, or not at all; but in general he associated this kind of discussion with an old dispute about the line in Hamlet which reads ‘The glow-worm shows the matin to be near / And ’gins to pale his ineffectual fire’. Someone, having established by a study of the flora in the play that the action of Hamlet must be between March and May, then pointed out that glow-worms shine chiefly from May to September. ‘Does not all this strike you as great trifling?’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins to a friend, and it would be hard to disagree. For the narrator of A la recherche, whom we can imagine as no doubt already being very well informed about the natural world, finding the right words for what he feels when in the presence of the hawthorn bush is a much more important concern than accumulating more knowledge. To open his botany books would be to make the same mistake which Proust says Swann might have made when he writes that, he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant details that made up [Odette’s] daily round in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled him in the smile or the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does the connoisseur who ransacks the extant documents of 15th century Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of Primavera, or the Venus of Botticelli.

The implication here is that just as fifteenth-century documents would not really help the connoisseur to penetrate the soul of Botticelli’s Venus, so knowing more about Odette’s activities would not enable Swann, who is of course himself a connoisseur, to understand why he was so captivated by her smile. Accumulating more information would, as Proust suggests later, only be a way of assuaging his discomfort and distracting him from the task in hand.

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Swann in this context is unlike Proust’s narrator who, elsewhere in A la recherche, says of a profound impression he had received that he felt it was his positive duty to see more clearly into his delight. Yet putting into unambiguous words something which has only been obscurely known, suspected or felt, which lies, as the American poet Seaborn Jones has it, just outside ‘the focal range’ of consciousness, is not an easy task. An affect is nudging us, writes one philosopher, and we want to know precisely what it is we are feeling; but Frank found even more telling ways of describing this experience in his favourite William James. It is James who talks of those occasions when we are in some manner aware of a whole of far-reaching significance, of the hushed reverberation of associated feelings; and of how we have ‘vast premonitory glimpses of schemes of relations between terms’ and ‘a permanent consciousness of whither our thought is going’. ‘The present image’, he writes, ‘shoots its perspective far before it, irradiating in advance the regions in which lie the thought as yet unborn’. Striking phrases like these, of course, are not only relevant to the struggle to articulate an aesthetic response, but also to any effort at thinking. Yet the question which then arises in the aesthetic field is whom, besides oneself, these struggles might be for. Frank was fond of a description of literary critical discussion by John Newton, who had been a pupil of F. R. Leavis. ‘What am I hoping for when I start talking with a friend about a film, a painting or a poem?’ Newton asked. ‘The ideal hope’, he decided, ‘is that what I have enjoyed will become clearer to me’, that I will be able ‘to bring the experience into fuller consciousness, to have it more completely’. This is all very well but makes the experience of enjoying art appear solipsistic when the talk Newton describes (as he certainly recognized) was a collaborative venture, a step in the direction of what Eliot had called ‘the common pursuit of true judgement’. Very useful here, Frank thought, was Leavis’s notion of the third realm, that space where values and beliefs which cannot be tested in laboratory fashion, and which are neither

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entirely personal nor entirely public, may be explored, defined and agreed upon. He believed there was a strong similarity between this notion and Simmel’s talk of ‘a mental category . . . which is deep rooted and not easily described by traditional concepts . . . a third something in man beyond individual subjectivity and the logical objective thinking which is universally convincing’; or Husserl’s when, in his fifth Cartesian Meditation, he claims that, for those who belong to the same cultural community, all cultural objects possess ‘an experiential sense of thereness-for-everyone’. We live to a remarkable extent, as I have already suggested Frank was fond of insisting, in a shared environment, where we are very often justified in taking ourselves as representative. Social life could not function without widespread, implicit agreement on a huge number of matters about how the world works and the way we ought to behave within it. Aesthetics may be one realm in which there are always disagreements, but even there the degree of concordance may often be greater than we think. Any theatrical performance involving successful comedy will bring out how far we are all kin, since in that situation aesthetic judgement manifests itself spontaneously in shared laughter (although if people are then asked why they laughed, the answers might be very different). What is always interesting are the exact points at which consensus breaks down. In illustration of one of these, Frank liked to quote those lines from a section of The Waste Land in which Eliot ruminates on the river Thames and contrasts an idealized past with our current situation: The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the river bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights.

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Of these lines he would earnestly ask us, and as many other people as he could find, how we would construe the reference to ‘other testimony of summer nights’, and then claim that it had a feeling tone consonant with the image of condomistic litter. Given the period when The Wasteland was written, and the character of Eliot himself, we were not so sure this was the right response, despite the very evident preoccupation in the section of the poem from which this passage comes with sex in its less wholesome aspects; and it clearly pained him to feel that his own reading might be eccentric. If he set great store by the idea of a shared world, it was in part because without it his dream of an inventory of the categories of experience which make up the 24 hours in a normal day became even more distant. Yet he was conscious of often being in a situation where he was addressing others who were unidentified by communitarian criteria and having to hope that, among them, would be found those to whom the feelings and thoughts provoked by certain phenomena, and the relative order of importance he himself assigned them, would seem both correct and illuminating. If they did not, then he had to fall back on the idea of thereness for relevant others: on that notion of a whole mass of interlocking groups who practised a ‘we-discourse’, to only some of which one might belong. New groups of this kind were emerging all the time just as others were fading away, the ones whose members knew why Dick Tracy became a cop being a case in point. This meant that his own failure to have his message heard in his immediate environment did not necessarily mean that it should be described as entirely mistaken or idiosyncratic since what he had to say might well fall into the character of flaschenposten, those messages in bottles which find their appropriate recipient when they are occasionally washed up on distance shores. That Frank would revert often to this romantic fancy seemed to me to reveal a quiet desperation, not so much about the way we hesitated to accept his interpretation of the reference in The Waste Land, but about what he

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felt was his relative failure to have his various thoughts on much more important matters heard. This would help to explain why he often liked to recall how Gibbon had said, when one of his books was about to be published, that he gave himself to the universe, ‘that is to say a small number of English readers’. The autobiography of Gibbon was one of Frank’s preferred texts and he was fascinated by the account its author gives there of his own past, particularly in the section where Gibbon says that he is endowed with ‘a cheerful temper, a moderate sensibility, and a natural disposition to repose rather than activity’, and goes on to describe his love of study as ‘a passion which derives fresh vigour from enjoyment, supplies each day, each hour, with a perpetual source of independent and rational pleasure’, and then notes that he is ‘not sensible of any decay of the mental faculties’. It was here that Frank identified another addition to a somewhat strange sub-section he had devised where he felt Wittgenstein’s distinctions also became important. This was the wonder and perhaps bafflement with which the personality, nature or character of another person sometimes impresses us, often to the extent that we cannot help desiring ‘this man’s scope and that man’s art’. Henry James may come close to describing this wonder at another’s being when, in A Small Boy and Others, he talks of his own relations as a child to other children: ‘They were so other, that was what I felt, and to be other, almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compounds wistfully watched in the confectioner’s window.’ When other people impress us as other boys did the young James, there is a natural tendency to find out how they do it, to discover something equivalent to those rules of phonetics which allow us to locate the distinctiveness of a foreign accent. In Anna Karenina, Karenin wonders if he might be to blame for the breakdown of his marriage and that question brings another in its train: whether men like Vronsky and Oblonsky, ‘these gentlemen of the bed-chamber with their fine calves’, not only did their loving and marrying differently, but also felt differently. ‘There passed before his mind’, Tolstoy writes,

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‘a whole series of these mettlesome, vigorous, self-confident men, who always and everywhere drew his fascinated attention in spite of himself ’. Part of Karenin’s fascination or wonder is a puzzlement as to just how these gentlemen of the bedchamber manage to be as they are. More explicit on this topic is the observer who saw how, during the Second World War, General Marshall’s power of command derived from ‘a remarkable presence which radiated superiority’. ‘We who witnessed it’, he says, ‘wondered how he got that way; it was a secret to be coveted’. Frank believed that there was a mistaken tendency in many of us to think of the envied qualities which those who impress us possess on the analogy of an experiential content like a sensation. It was as if we were colour blind, or lacked taste buds, and wondered what it would be like to have them. Yet in that case no account of the structure of the retina, or the taste buds, would leave us any the wiser so why should it be illuminating to discover the physical conditions of admirable otherness? I took it that this was a way of saying that there was no ‘secret’ which either Marshall’s subordinates, or Karenin, could have profited from, and that they already had in themselves the answer to the conundrum other people posed. Whether or not that was true, what interested me was how Frank himself responded to the wonder of Gibbon’s poise and self-command. This is how he described his reactions in his Wittgenstein book: What strikes us in Gibbon’s retrospect of his life is generated by our sense of the unavailability to us, those of us it does strike, . . . of a distinctive register and cadence, a mode of self-reference which we couldn’t employ without a sense of strain and affectation. The orderliness of Gibbon’s progression through life (or at least his ordered sense of that progression) intensifies by contrast the phantasmagoric character of our own reminiscences, which normally yield nothing more determinate than the sense of having lurched from one exigency to another.

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Gibbon’s composure is something that impresses most readers of his autobiography, whether they choose to describe it in terms of poise or smugness (or a bit of both). To try to explain its effect on us one could look at the conventions of eighteenth century prose or note that, when he himself talks of the ‘original soil’ of his nature having been ‘highly improved by cultivation’, he nevertheless asks whether ‘some flowers of fancy, some grateful errors, have been eradicated with the weeds of prejudice’. He is conscious, that is, of having missed out on something but without (by definition) knowing what that something was or is. Going further in this direction, one could then examine Gibbon’s description of the relatively easy way he seems to have given up his attachment to a beautiful and intelligent Swiss girl because his father did not consider her sufficiently wealthy or well born for matrimony – an episode of some historical significance because this same girl went on to marry the financier Necker and thereby become the mother of that remarkable woman known to literary history as Madame de Staël. But this would be to analyse or deconstruct Gibbon’s composure by considering the price at which it was bought, whereas Frank’s interest was in the way his encounter with the Gibbonian mode caused him to contrast how his own mind seemed to operate when he looked back over his past, and how he then became aware of its apparent absence of any ordered progression, and brought him that uncomfortable feeling of having lurched ‘from one exigency to another’. This was despite his knowledge of J. C. Powys’s claim that a human story, to bear any resemblance to the truth, ‘must advance and retreat erratically, must flicker and flutter here and there, must debouch at a thousand targets’, and Sir Thomas Browne’s more pithy ‘all men do differ from themselves as well as from other people.’ Because Gibbon fascinated him as a model of how to deal calmly with one’s past life, he was not so much interested in enquiries which tried to show what may have lain behind that calm but rather in its capacity to illuminate how he dealt

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with his own memories. He would become angry and upset when we ventured to suggest that this might be the royal road to solipsism and insist that Wittgenstein’s concern, in his talk of the two directions, was not so much with eliminating certain avenues of empirical enquiry but with rectifying a situation in which the pendulum had swung far too far in one direction.

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13

The Meaning of Life

Pascal claims that ‘man is more to be pitied for being able to distract himself with things frivolous and low than for grieving over his real miseries; and his amusements are infinitely less reasonable than his ennui.’ In his attack on this way of thinking, Maine de Biran begins by adopting an organicist approach, protesting that reason has nothing to do with either ennui or a propensity to amusements: ‘These are purely organic dispositions to which will and reason can oppose ideas but which they can neither change nor directly combat. When I am organically sad and bored no amusements, no idea can change this fundamental state of my being.’ However true this might be, it is hardly able to dispose completely of Pascal, who is one of those writers most likely to drive readers into asking what the meaning of their lives might be. This is a traditional philosophical issue but, trained as he was in the Oxford of the 1950s, there is in Frank’s notes A. J. Ayer’s summary of reasons for believing that there is no sense in asking about ‘the meaning of life’. ‘If it were logically possible for our existence to have a purpose, in the sense required’, Ayer writes, then it might be sensible to lament the fact that it had none. But it is not sensible to cry for what is logically impossible. If a question is so framed as to be unanswerable, then it is not a matter for regret that it remains unanswered. It is, therefore, misleading to say that life has no meaning; for that suggests that the statement that life has a meaning is factually significant, but false; whereas the truth

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is that, in the sense in which it is taken in this context, it is not factually significant.

Illogical though questions about the meaning of life might be, people will always go on asking them, and in his later life Frank was no exception. ‘The house is quiet’, he recorded at one moment, ‘the stillness of the view from my window’ [he is referring to the window in his attic] is only pleasingly interrupted by birds settling on the branch of a lime tree which occupies about a third of my field of vision. Beyond it I can see some clouds in leisurely movement. I have no pressing or even proximate obligations. I am free to read what I like, listen to what I like. Things are seldom better than this but they are still not good enough. I feel I am being prepared for something. What?

The young Freud described the attempt to determine life’s meaning as ‘the task of a special hour’ and wrote of ‘the mysteriousness that dwells everywhere’ and which ‘assailed and robbed him of his composure and his spirits’. Is it possible, Frank wondered, to demonstrate the necessary failure of articulation between any possible discovery we might make, any matter (in Wittgenstein’s phrase) of ‘happening and being so’, and the problem of the meaning of life, in the same way that we can demonstrate that the circle cannot be squared? He thought that those who had found answers to the ultimate questions might be like the protagonist in Orwell’s 1984 who, under torture, not only agrees that two and two make five but is momentarily convinced that they do indeed do so. Could not the importunacy of their desire for something propositional or even doctrinal to cling on to, something recitable and transmissible, have distorted the true nature of their predicament and its resolution? Since his own preoccupation with the issues was intermittent, he would imagine a situation in which, under the influence of nitrous oxide inhalation, thumb-catching

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struck us all as feasible (various efforts people have made to catch their own thumbs can be observed on YouTube), and we spent some time attempting it until the drug wore off; or he would say that asking about the meaning of life made us like those participating in the famous Müller-Lyer experiment. They have been told that the two parallel lines with arrow heads at the end, pointing inwards in the case of one line but out in the case of the other, are of exactly the same length; but on looking back they cannot help but see the length of the lines as different. Complicating whether life has any meaning, and if it does what that might be, is the suffering of others, egregiously exemplified in our time by the Holocaust. Information about the camps which was emerging towards the end of the Second World War probably added to the bitterness of Frank’s disappointment at being too young to enlist while it was still in progress. In general, he thought that the bewilderment and horror Holocaust stories created was not to be removed by any sort of explanation, yet he objected to the idea sometimes expressed that they were disturbing because they illuminate our own natures and our own bestialities. They may, he felt, make us aware of our own violent propensities but if they do, it is not chiefly through vicarious participation in the sadistic gratifications of the perpetrators of the atrocities, but because of the incitement to vengeful fantasies. He admitted to us that if, as a 17 year old, he so much wanted to join the army, it was because he was, at that time, anxious to ‘kill a few Krauts’. Many Holocaust ruminations and texts are characterized by selfreproach. He thought this was not so much due to the often explicitly proffered explanation of derelict inaction, or unmerited survival, but the necessarily sporadic nature of our commemoration of the victims, our inability to lead lives commensurate with their fates. Our dismay is produced not by what we failed to do then (and most people were not in any case in a position to do anything), but what we fail to feel

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now. This is what he decided to call the Schopenhauer thesis: the vividly entertained contrast between our fate and those markedly less fortunate which forcibly reminds us that our felicity depends on the continued possession of amenities and immunities in which our sense of justice cannot acquiesce. He found this feeling hyperbolically expressed in Brecht’s ‘Nothing that I do entitles me to eat my fill. Only by chance was I spared’; or Primo Levi’s ‘Everyone of us has usurped his neighbour’s place and lived in his stead.’ The adoption of this attitude may well make us vulnerable to the jibe of the hero’s drinking companion in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts who asks the bartender ‘bring his friend a leper to lick’; yet, on the whole, Frank did believe that the conditions on which we hold our lives were ignominious, and he would repeat often a remark of William James from Varieties of Religious Experience: ‘What kind of frame of things is it of which the best you can say is “Thank God it has let me off this time.” Is not its blessedness a fragile fiction? Is not your joy in it a very vulgar glee, not much unlike the snicker of any rogue at his success?’ This is hardly a cheerful outlook so that Frank, not being one of those favoured beings of whom James also speaks – those who seem to have been born with a bottle of champagne already to their credit, was occasionally subject to depression. Robust enough to feel that he could ignore Dr Johnson’s advice on the subject of attacks of melancholy, which was not to try to ‘think them down’ but instead ‘fly to business’, he was nevertheless very conscious how much of life is in fact business, how fully occupied any human being tends to be with what he liked to call ‘importunacies’. For so much of our time, he claimed, we are subject to the overwhelming potency of the present and the importunacy of its demands. These latter were like signposts imperiously directing us to ‘come here’, even if ‘here’ is something as apparently trivial as a game of poker or a ball game. The way we stand to importunacies is like a goalie to the ball so that it becomes a question whether someone who suspends his advocacy of the thesis that life is

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meaningless on the grounds that he has to pick up his children from school has not contradicted himself? How can the argument that, if he feels he has to pick up the children, he already knows the meaning of life, be met? Another way Frank had of characterizing the tangle in which we live is to recall all the unfolding stories in which we are engrossed, stretching as they do from those that are familial and vocational to those that concern the home team or the fate of the nation. Most of us live, that is, and for most of the time, according to what he liked to call the Scheherazade principle, looking forward to all the many narratives in which we are personally or vicariously involved. The trouble is that age brings with it a progressive attenuation of concern and closes down various avenues of potential experience as we lose our interest in the many anticipated denouements which once whetted our appetites for a knowledge of outcomes. The stories come to have a sameness about them, underneath their surface variegation. That may help to explain why there is a diminution of interest although, in Mauriac’s view, the cause is rather the dwindling likelihood of enjoying at first hand what we experience vicariously through imaginative discourse of one kind or another, from books and films as well as from enthusiastic accounts from friends of how they spent their holidays. In Frank’s view, however, what also makes our relation to the future different from the one we enjoyed in our youth is not only this closing down of options which Mauriac describes, nor that specific anticipations have been shown to be unrealistic and unwarranted, so that there is no reason to believe that future futures will be any more gratifying than those in the past, but also the disappearance of an open future where events and beings different in kind from those already encountered might be thought to reside. With age and physical deterioration there comes, in any case, a weakening of what Freud liked to call affect. Bertrand Russell appears to be talking of this when he claims that our whole life is built around a number of primary instincts and impulses and that when these

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begin to weaken, the search for an outside meaning which can compel an inner response must always be disappointed. We no longer care as we once did whether the home team wins, nor set our sights with the same enthusiasm on achieving this or that goal, or acquiring this or that object. Larkin was someone who believed that the happiest way to get through life was to want things and identified in himself a lessening of an acquisitiveness which had never, in any event, been very strong. ‘Once past 35’, he wrote, ‘it’s impossible not to feel that each year is taking you further from what is desired and pleasant and nearer to what is loathed and dreaded UNLESS . . . you have wound yourself thoroughly into life by conceiving and gratifying a chain of desires’. But then this was the man who wrote in one of his poems that life is ‘first boredom then fear’. Might not Larkin have fallen victim here, Frank mischievously enquired, to his native ebullience and would not a more accurate formulation therefore be ‘first boredom and fear, and then more boredom and more fear’? The danger of this way of talking is that it ignores genuine moments of pleasure in life so that those responsible for it are sometimes like the insomniacs who say they have not slept a wink all night but who turn out, on scientific inspection, to have dozed off quite a bit. Life has its peaks as well as troughs and, when Frank thought of the former, they tended to involve sport. His favourite example of exuberant and exhilarating physicality came from baseball and was the unassisted triple play, only 15 of which have been recorded in the major leagues. Although he explained this feat to me several times, I never quite grasped its intricacies; but there were plenty of similar examples I could offer him from football and cricket. There was always a question, however, of whether we were talking about participating in these feats, simply knowing that they had existed, or being able to watch them. In my youth I had been a long-suffering supporter of Manchester City Football Club which enjoyed very mixed fortunes until the miraculous appearance of a fairy godfather in the shape of an

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Arab sheik. On the last day of the 2010–1 season, City only had to beat a team lying very near the bottom of the league to win the title, and on their home ground. At the end of full time they were 2–1 down, but then managed to make it 3–2 in their favour during the four or five extra minutes the referee added on for various previous interruptions to the game. Television captured expressions on the faces of the fans who witnessed this reversal which were quite extraordinary. Anyone who asked these fans afterwards whether they thought life had a meaning would have received a very positive answer. A quite different endorsement of life’s value, through the recollection of peaks, can be found in Stendhal, who would identify various privileged moments in his past and regard them as proof that the chasse au bonheur, to which he was dedicated, was not a wild-goose chase. The prime example here was his arrival in Italy as a raw 17 year old and hearing for the first time Cimarosa’s opera The Secret Marriage. The major challenge in talking about the meaning of life lies in finding a discourse which remains fair to all life’s aspects. Being alone in the middle of the night and waking up in a sweat and a hell of a fright, as Eliot puts it, is not conducive to maturity of sentiment. We may be searching for ‘that solitude which suits abstruser musings’ yet at the same time we want those musings to bear on quotidian existence. Of what must one be mindful in order to produce a discourse which will retain its impression of adequacy under the most varied conditions, Frank asked himself, Of one’s own past and everyone else’s present perhaps, and of the ‘hands that are raising dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms’. An adequate utterance must take account of the demonic and squalid interludes which can punctuate our existence while insisting that, although whatever satisfactorily comprehensive formulation we arrive at will not in itself insulate us on those particular occasions on which ordinary life is disrupted and the skull grins at the banquet, these are not the staple of existence and could not be.

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As a way of testing his own thoughts on the meaning of life, as well as those of others, Frank was inclined to go to a surprising place. This was the so-called sincerity ritual which, in Practical Criticism, I. A. Richards suggested it was appropriate to invoke when trying to decide whether one’s responses to a particular poem were genuine. What one had to do, Richards wrote, was to consider the poem in a ‘frame of feelings whose sincerity is beyond our questioning’, one provided by contemplation of such issues as man’s loneliness (the isolation of the human condition), the inexplicable oddity of birth and death, the inconceivable immensity of the Universe, man’s place in the perspective of time, or the enormity of his ignorance. Frank was aware that this list had been ridiculed by many, including T. S. Eliot, and was inclined to make fun of it himself; but he nevertheless felt that the procedure Richards suggested could be helpful, even if the particulars which constituted the ‘frame’ differed from person to person. These should comprise whatever people felt brought them down to earth and would be inconsistent with affectation and pretentiousness so that, instead of the ultimate questions Richards was asking, they might include erotic fantasies so outrageous that a man hated to be reminded of them, or a vision of oneself in an advanced state of senile dementia and someone saying in exasperation: ‘Has he shat himself again?’ It worried him that the search for what he called discursive transactions with the conditions of our existence tended to be constrained by considerations of decorum. Let us therefore give, he would say, our thinker on ultimate things a boil on his bum which stabs him as he shifts in his chair and produces a vulgar expletive which his well brought up self feels reproachful about resorting to. It is that aspect of reality with which his characterization of the universe as a whole must be rendered congruous and not just the familiar staples of evil and tragedy. The problem is that his words must manifest an appropriate degree of disturbance in order to avoid the standard dismissive judgement of ‘During life’s fitful fever, he sleeps well’, while at the same

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time steering clear of the seductive counsel of that Japanese sage who says that the best thing to do on contemplating our lives is to drink sake and weep drunken tears. It would be unfair to demand that a discourse cater to the predicament of one whose child is deathly ill, but it must not be inconsistent with the reality of sick children. There must be just enough awareness of physical insecurity and moral squalor to suggest we are not taking refuge in the usual self-protective high-mindedness, but not so much that readers or listeners feel they are the victims of deliberate harrowing, or are being invited to collude with the speaker’s exhibitionism. In trying to think about the meaning of life, Frank could find no foolproof way of maintaining what Richards had called vigilance. He knew that the point of writing or thinking about the issue was not to provide definitive answers, but to characterize its intractability in a meaningful way, perhaps so that the listener could then say, like Wittgenstein’s circle-squarer when given proof that what he was attempting was impossible, ‘That’s what I really wanted.’ The dark abysses of life were a fact for Frank but so too was his hilarity at a Tex Avery cartoon. His sexual arousal by things it is unlawful to be sexually aroused by was genuine, but equally so were his heartfelt prayers for those who hunger and thirst. He was convinced that ‘pardon’s the word for all’ while fully retaining his impulse to knock down those who thwarted him. On other occasions, there are thoughts which seem like intrusions but the boast of this special way of thinking was to be commensurate with all forms of life. The sincerity ritual was an attempt to do systematically and deliberately what is usually only done incidentally, but it is the responsibility of each individual to find his or her own touchstones of authenticity. For Frank, the one well-known remark which he felt may have inhibited more portentous fakery than any other device at our disposal was not so much a momento mori but what he called the momento fundamentis of Montaigne, his reminder that the king on the world’s highest throne is still only ever sitting on his arse.

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14

Pessimism and Suicide

One of the thinkers Frank was trying to embarrass with his examples of great moments in sport was the Swiss philosopher, Amiel, whose published journal became a popular vade mecum of pessimism in the late nineteenth century. ‘A little blindness is necessary if life is to be carried on’, one reads there and also, rather more definitively, ‘life is an evil and annihilation a good . . . creation is a mistake; being is not as good as non-being and death is better than life’. This is a tradition of thinking with roots in what Matthew Arnold, a great admirer of Amiel, would have called both the Hellenic and Hebraic origins of Western culture. In Ecclesiastes, for example, there is: ‘All is vanity and a striving after wind. I praise the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive; better than them both do I esteem him which hath not yet been’; while Sophocles is famously assumed to have felt that not to be born is the best thing for man, and the next best thing is to die as soon as possible. Of various later manifestations of this tradition, Frank was fond of quoting Schopenhauer’s ‘Life is an unprofitable episode disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. The world and man is something that it were better had never been’; or Strindberg’s more moderate and differently focused ‘Life is like the tuning of an orchestra that never begins to play.’ But perhaps his favourite pessimistic pronouncement comes from Swift who claimed that ‘if we examine what is generally understood by happiness . . . we shall find that it is the perpetual possession of being well-deceived . . . a fool

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among knaves’. Contemplating all these eloquent nay-sayers sometimes led him to recall the advertisement from an undertaker which Freud reported having seen when he first went to America: ‘Why go on living when you can be buried for $10?’ A question that interested him was how best to explain the gloom and misery of individuals not usually in a position to take the lofty overview of these famous figures. There was here again the familiar conflict between the organicists – ‘a single drop of blood too much or too little in the brain’ says Nietzsche, ‘may render our lives unspeakably miserable and difficult and we may suffer more from this single drop than Prometheus from his vulture’; and those who would attribute both the misery and difficulty to traumatic events in childhood. It seemed to Frank, however, that it was too easy to dismiss the idea that there was sometimes a reasonable match between an individual’s circumstances and the degree of his or her misery, a position he referred to as situationism. Discriminations in this area are difficult to establish as Freud appears to acknowledge when he says that ‘It is painful for a medical man who spends the day struggling to gain an understanding of the neuroses, not to know whether he himself is suffering from a reasonable or a hypocondriacal depression.’ A reasonable depression would presumably be one which seemed justified by the sufferer’s circumstances: ‘The initial task when seeing a depressed patient’, writes one authority on depression, ‘is to determine whether the patient’s condition is a normal reaction to the life situation, which will respond to the household remedies of human kindness, understanding and a helping hand, or a depressive illness requiring skilled medical attention’. In general, however, Frank felt that psychoanalysts and psychiatrists were inclined to discount circumstances and point out, for example, how often depressives are under the illusion that a rearrangement of objective conditions will cure their illness or note that, as one doctor puts it, ‘the discontented and neurotic are after all found as frequently among the wealthy as among the poor.’

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In Frank’s view these remarks hardly settled the issue and he liked a story he had heard of Oswald Bumke, who was one of the psychiatrists the Wolf Man consulted before he came to Freud. His diagnosis of manic-depressive insanity was based on the fact that his patient was sometimes elated and sometimes deeply depressed. He did not know, or did not trouble to find out, that the Wolf Man was attracted to a nurse in the sanatorium where he was being treated and that whenever she responded he was in good spirits and whenever she did not, he was cast down. To those anti-situationist organicists who were inclined to attribute the depression of middle-aged man to biochemical changes worthy of being characterized as the male menopause, he would reply with the German expression Torshusspanik, the panic of closing doors. Although this is currently used of women who want to get married but wonder whether the opportunities for doing so may be passing them by, it seemed to him to describe accurately a period in life when a man feels he is running out of options and loses that sense of all things being possible. Environment, family, career, income – all tend to become fixed. In these cases, a certain degree of depression would seem reasonable. But he redressed the balance somewhat in favour of psychology by finding in Dr Johnson an unfamiliar passage which expressed memorably this feeling of doors closing, yet at the same time added nuances associated with the unreasonable expectations many of us entertain of life: We do not indeed so often disappoint others as ourselves. We not only think more highly than others of our own abilities, but allow ourselves to form hopes which we never communicate, and please our thoughts with employments which none will ever allot to us, and with elevations to which we are never expected to rise; and when our days and years have passed away in common business or common amusements, and we find at last that we have suffered our purposes to sleep till the time of action is past, we are reproached only by our own reflections; neither our friends or enemies wonder

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that we live and die like the rest of mankind; that we live without notice, and die without memorial; they know not what task we had proposed, and therefore cannot discern whether it is finished.

The arguments against situationism can take either a strong or weak form, that is to say they can either dismiss the individual’s circumstances as largely irrelevant or complain that, distressing though they might be, they are not commensurate with the intensity with which the misery or world-weariness is being experienced. ‘Why seems it so particular with thee?’ asks Hamlet’s mother after it has been pointed out to him that losing a father is in the normal course of nature. Yet where bereavement was involved it was clearly, in Frank’s view, impossible to establish a tariff. For how many months is a surviving partner allowed to grieve before his or her condition should be categorized as pathological? A writer in The Guardian in the 1970s had suggested that ‘a pathological grief reaction is diagnosed if symptoms last more than a year.’ The time limit appears arbitrary as do many of the criteria used to distinguish ordinary unhappiness from pathological misery. Was it really a sign of illness, of clinical depression in Dora Carrington, for example, that she committed suicide after the death of Lytton Strachey, adapting for her own use the epitaph Sir Henry Wotton wrote for Sir Albert Morton’s wife: ‘He first deceased, she for a little tried / To live without him, liked it not and died?’ There were surely no rules for these matters. To illustrate one of two extremes, not so much of grief as anxiety about the world, he liked to refer to the character in one of Grimm’s fairy stories called clever Elsa. Sent to fetch some beer in the cellar by her parents, who are entertaining her future husband, Elsa notices an axe hung up above the beer barrel and collapses into tears because she thinks, if I marry and have a child I’ll one day send him to this cellar for beer and that axe will slip off the wall and kill him. This seemed to Frank a good example of unreasonably gloomy thinking about the

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future which he liked to contrast with the unjustified optimism of the man in the New Yorker cartoon who is shown falling from the Empire State Building and remarking as he passes the twenty-fifth floor, ‘Well, I’m alright so far.’ Between these two undoubtedly pathological cases, how was it possible to establish any general rules as to what was or was not healthy? People’s situations differ so markedly. In a novel by Rose Macaulay he had found the account of an unhappy widow who is contemplating recourse to a psychoanalyst and imagines how her first session might go. Why do you think you are so unhappy, he would ask her, and she would explain that at 63 she felt old and discarded, thrown away on the dust-heap like a broken egg-shell and drifting like sea-weed tossed to and fro by the waves. The psychoanalyst would listen to her, passive and intelligent, and would then say that none of the reasons she gave for her unhappiness were the correct ones, that he would root out those which were really true, and after that they would trouble her no more. Clearly Frank was sceptical, as no doubt Rose Macaulay was also, that the reasons some people have for feeling miserable, which are perfectly understandable and related to their situation, can be wished away in this fashion. Rose Macaulay’s widow had quite specific reasons for feeling unhappy whereas the gloom of those I began this section by quoting purports to be not individual but general, the result of a calm, philosophical survey of the available evidence. Frank remembered that at one point Bertrand Russell had come to the conclusion that, if the world did have a creator, He would be under a moral obligation to destroy it. Yet if life were not worth living, why was the rate of suicide so relatively low? If Sophocles really did feel that the best thing is to die as soon as possible it is ironic that he himself was apparently over 90 when he passed away. Frank thought this counter-argument ignored how unnatural an action suicide is for most people (we are terrorized not bribed into the continuation of existence, as Hume has it), and

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he liked to quote Dorothy Parker’s thoughts on putting a premature end to one’s life: ‘Razors pain you / Rivers are damp. Acids stain you / and drugs cause cramp. / Guns aren’t lawful / Ropes tend to give / Gas smells awful / You might as well live’. But this did not make him any the less angry and indignant about the absurd laws against assisted suicide in England and there was no trace of his Catholic boyhood in the way he inveighed against them. He had come across a minor writer called Charlotte Perkins Gilman who in August 1935 had committed suicide by taking an overdose of chloroform, preferring chloroform over cancer, as she put it. ‘When all usefulness is over’, Gilman wrote, ‘when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent end, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.’ To want an easy death seemed to him no more than commonsense and he enjoyed the joke about the man who says that he would like to die like his father did, in his sleep (not screaming like his father’s passengers). Suicide notes had a particular interest for him. There was, for example, the American poet Vachel Lindsay who in December 1931 wrote, ‘I must end it. There’s no hope left. I’ll be at peace. Noone had anything to do with this. My decision totally’; or the actor George Sanders who, in what one imagines as his celebrated silky public school tones, addressed himself to ‘Dear World’ and said he was leaving it because he was bored. ‘I feel I have lived long enough’, the note went on, ‘I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool – good luck.’ In a work on Hunter S. Thompson Frank had found the following, written 4 days before he shot himself: Football Season is over. No more games. No more bombs. No more walking. No more fun. No more swimming. 67. 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No fun for anybody. 67, You are getting greedy. Act your old age. Relax. This won’t hurt.

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Was this pathological, he wondered. To contrast with its tone he would adduce the suicide note of a certain Ralph Barton who had killed himself in May 1931 at the age of 43, after having been adversely affected by the Stock Market crash. ‘Any sane doctor’, Barton wrote, knows that the reasons for suicide are invariably psychopathological and the true suicide manufactures his own difficulties . . . No one thing is responsible and no one person – except myself. If the gossips insist on something more definite and thrilling as the reason, let them choose my impending appointment at the dentist or the fact that I happen to be painfully short of cash at the moment.

It did not of course escape Frank’s notice that this was an argument against the situationism which he felt was too often neglected; and he could tell against himself and his own position, an anecdote which concerned the statistics of mental breakdown among members of American bomber crews in the Second World War. He had read of these in books on the American Air Force and felt he could explain the fact that the incidence of breakdown was much higher among navigators and gunners in the bomber crews than among pilots. After all, he reasoned, cold and lonely at the back of the plane, the gunner especially was much more exposed and his situation therefore more stressful. That would explain why he was more vulnerable to mental disease. I was proud of this situationist reasoning, he would say, until I discovered that the Air Force submitted its recruits to psychological testing before employing them and that the tests were far more rigorous in the case of pilots than of other ranks. Gilman’s view of suicide was also Frank’s although he was aware that there were complications which went beyond the difficulties which Parker mentions. Apart from pain, that is, there was also the problem of an individual’s moral and social responsibilities, that network of obligations in which he or she was likely to be enmeshed.

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He was familiar with various experiments in social psychology which attempted to establish whether people thought life was worth living or, if they had a choice, whether they would want to live the same life again. But he felt they were flawed without the kind of thought experiment he himself had devised. Imagine, he would say, that there was an extinction button which produced death both instantaneously and painlessly; but then provide a safeguard against impulsive reactions by requiring it to be pressed a stated number of times in a 24-hour interval before it will take effect. Imagine also that the apprehensions as to the aftermath of one’s death in terms of inconvenience or pain to others are to be catered for by the provision of a doppelganger who will allow one’s suicide to pass unnoticed. Only then, he would insist, would you really know how many of us feel life is not worth the candle. Whether or not he himself thought so would be difficult to say. Certainly he felt that if one looked lucidly at the world it was tempting to agree with Mark Twain’s Satan in his Mysterious Stranger and say that sanity and happiness were an impossible combination. He used to suggest, in a manner which was only semi-jocular, that there were three things that made life worth living. The first of these was eating chocolate. Chocolate was a food of which he was inordinately fond but I suppose he meant it to represent all the physical satisfactions, including sex. Of sexual pleasure in general he liked to recall Sophocles’s remark in old age about being relieved to have that demon off his back while at the same time he enjoyed a story told of Clemanceau who, seeing a pretty young girl pass by when he was 80, was heard to mutter how much he wished he was still 70. The second incentive for carrying on living he characterized as watching the children open their presents at Christmas (with no children of his own, he had two nephews in the States and a stepson). This was representative of the altruistic urge, which was very strong in Frank. With very few material needs himself, he would describe how he

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would day-dream of winning a lottery and compose in his head the innumerable letters to friends and relatives which would accompany giving it all away. The third incentive, that he would produce as one does a punch-line in a joke, was ‘hearing oneself praised’. But the trouble here was not only the relative rarity of the occurrence but where the praise came from. He was as hard on his own work as on that of others, coming back time and time again to certain formulations to make sure that they were both absolutely precise and felicitous. Often in the process he would remind us (teachers of literature both) of how William James had complained to his brother Henry of the difference between writing fiction and philosophy, and why one was so much more arduous than the other. Frank was nevertheless one of the few people I have known who could read his own past writing with genuine pleasure. Sometime, in the middle of a discussion, he would reach for one of his own books and read out a paragraph to illustrate a point, saying afterwards, if not quite ‘what genius I had then’, but how he did not see any way in which he could have expressed that specific point better. For 5 per cent of the time he was a narcissist, but for the other 95 per cent, no one had a more lucid understanding of where he stood in the world.

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15

Death

One of the experiments in social psychology which had left Frank dubious, and which had involved taking a sample group of people and asking them whether, if they had the choice, they would opt to live their lives all over again, appears to have been carried out by a man called Knight Dunlap. The surprising result was that a majority choose what was effectively non-existence. The Lucretian argument against any fear or apprehension of this state is well known: nonexistence did not bother us before we were born so why should the thought of it after we are dead be at all troubling? Setting aside the objection that our non-existence before we were born could be said to have had a recognizable termination, or that it is a state which is strictly non imaginable (whenever we try to imagine it, we find ourselves still present as a spectator), he was sympathetic to this line of reasoning and found powerful statements of it in Hume, as well as in a non-philosopher like Hazlitt: There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern – why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we will cease to be? I have no wish to be alive a hundred years ago . . . why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence . . . To die is only to be as we were before we were born.

This was all very well but he was aware that for some people, of very impressive achievements, the prospect of non-existence was terrifying.

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Dr Johnson, for example, when told by Anna Seward that the dread of annihilation was absurd, was driven by strong feelings to employ some highly dubious logic in order to refute her; and in Philip Larkin’s Aubade there is an eloquent protest against ‘no sight, no sound, / No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, / Nothing to love or link with, / The anaesthetic from which none come round’. It was Larkin also who told Kingsley Amis, ‘I am not so much afraid of dying. I am afraid of being dead.’ In Frank’s view, what Larkin said to Amis was a reversal of the usual order of priorities: it was dying that worried people much more than non-existence. ‘Life is pleasant; death is peaceful; it is the transition which is troublesome’, says Arnold, with a type of wit not usually associated with him; and in a poem called ‘Cottage Hospital’, John Betjeman asks, ‘And shall I groan in dying / as I twist the sweaty sheet, / Or gasp for breath uncrying / as I feel my senses drowned?’ When life has seemed to pass by like a well-served meal, Frank would sometimes say, we hope to slip out without paying the bill but know that is only very rarely possible. The locus classicus of fear of dying (although of death also) is of course Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illyich, and he liked to dwell in this powerful story on the reference to the Caius syllogism. ‘Caius is a man, men are mortal therefore Caius is mortal, had always seemed to Ivan correct as applied to Caius’, Tolstoy writes, ‘but certainly not as applied to himself. He had been little Vanya, with a mama and poppa with toys, with all the griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped yellow ball Vanya had been so fond of?’ Frank admired Tolstoy’s story, as who could not, but did not like the faint gleam of transcendence which is glimpsed at the end and therefore preferred a rival, much less well-known work by Chekhov, sometimes translated as ‘A Dismal Story’. The protagonist of this is a university professor of medicine who knows he is dying and finds all the elements which once made his life seem rich and rewarding – the

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fame his studies have brought him, the effect his lectures used to have on his students, his home life, a once attractive ward of whom he has been very fond – turning to dust about him. Whereas the emphasis in Ivan Illyich is on the pain of Ivan’s terminal illness and the hysterical fear approaching death brings, in the Chekhov story the tone is much flatter (the professor has a heart condition), and there is a dour, relentless exposition of how little all the aspects of his outwardly successful existence amount to. Disillusioned in both the private and public sphere, there is no hint of relief for the dying man as he takes a last, jaundiced look at his family and colleagues. At one point in ‘A Dismal Story’ Chekhov’s protagonist is placed in a dilemma with respect to the demoralizing thoughts which force themselves on him, ‘evil thoughts I never knew before have made their home in my soul.’ He struggles to know whether they are a consequence of a general decline in his physical and mental powers consequent on his illness or that, as another character in the story says, his eyes have at last been opened, and he now sees what he has refused to see before. This last notion that the vision clears with approaching death, and pronouncements uttered in anticipation of it therefore have a special authority, was one Frank thought worthy of Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Ideas. He would occasionally suggest that for some the thought of dying is inseparable from the satisfaction of at last having caught (at least momentarily) somebody’s undivided attention. In part illustration of this thought he would refer to The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion, an author who referred to death as a ‘great adventure’ and said that he would like to be able to control ‘the time, the place, the manner of [his] exit’. This he did by ending his book with the announcement of its author’s death (‘Barbellion died on December 31’), although in fact, a longtime sufferer from tuberculosis, he lived long enough to witness its reception. For Nietzsche, this would all be part of what he called death as ‘a comedy of vanity’. ‘The seriousness with which every dying

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person is treated has certainly been for many a poor despised devil the most exquisite pleasure of his entire life and a kind of indemnification and part payment for many deprivations’, he claimed. Whether or not Barbellion could reasonably be accused of vanity, the trouble with these remarks is that they date from the time when death was still a public event. Now it is so private, the old idea that deathbeds are a stage on which the dying perform has disappeared more completely than the belief that what is pronounced on them carries a guarantee of candour and self-knowledge. Frank did not want to dismiss entirely the thought that they could function as an extreme instance of Richards’s sincerity ritual, but he felt that to consider them in this light produced what could only ever be a rule of thumb. To those who appeared on television after some narrow escape or miraculous recovery and vowed they would never again be annoyed by trivia or pursue materialist objectives he wanted to shout ‘Yes, you will’; while he suspected that imminent death was just as likely to incite cracker barrel moralizing as preclude it. Lucretius felt that when people worried about what would happen to them after death they were suffering from the delusion of post-mortem sentience. Frank liked to refer to the aspect of this which interested him most as ‘cadaveric anxiety’. ‘Ay, but to die, and go we know not where, / To lie in cold obstruction and to rot, / This sensible warm motion to become / A kneaded clod’, says Claudio in Measure for Measure. That what he imagines is simultaneously both illogical and understandable was once made explicit by Tolstoy: I know I shall soon die and my mind is reconciled to it; but when I think that my body will be put into a coffin, that the lid of the coffin will be screwed down and I will be buried under the earth, I am horrified. I am well aware that my horror is unreasonable, that I shall not be feeling anything by then, but I cannot overcome this feeling.

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In one of Simone de Beauvoir’s novels, a character is about to commit suicide but then realizes she would leave behind a corpse for people to look at, handle and generally do what they like with, and this stops her from putting an end to her life. If only, she thinks, she could just vanish and be spared the horror of what she calls the ‘leftover body’. An unusual angle on the topic had been found by Frank in a very early sketch by Dickens which describes a visit to a morgue and the corpses there as objects which can be looked at but which labour under the severe disadvantage of not being able to ‘return the look’. It was characteristic of him, however, that, after multiplying these instances, he would point out that there were contexts where the attribution of sentience to the dead was in no way morbid, and he would break into one of the verses of ‘Danny Boy’, unsympathetic as an early childhood spent in thrall to brutal Christian Brothers had made him to many aspects of Irish culture. Hamlet is of course full of classic expressions of cadaveric anxiety but what also troubles him, when contemplating suicide, is the possibility of judgement in the after-life, one of those factors perhaps that explains why Hume should have said (through his Philo) that we are terrorized not bribed into carrying on living. In addition then to the dread of non-existence which some have felt; to the anticipation of the horrors of putrefaction; and also to the resentment at the disruption of our projects, either familial (‘children rawly left’) or professional (‘before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain’); what can also make death terrible is the fear of condemnation by a just, all-knowing God, the eventual detection of our undivulged crimes ‘unwhipped of justice’. This will chiefly apply to the religious but perhaps also to those who carry with them the residue of a religious upbringing. Frank used to talk of a widowed aunt who dreamt that her husband had appeared and reproached her for not having had enough masses said for him. When Catholics of my generation prayed for the souls in purgatory, he would say, they did so in the same spirit in which they might have

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appeared before a parole board pleading for a near relation’s early release. The rationale for the practice was that while people were in purgatory, suffering for their earthly sins, their periods of punishment could be reduced by acts of self-abnegation on the part of the living, in particular when they prayed in conditions of some discomfort. He later felt that one all too obvious objection to which such habits were open was that, unlike Buddhist prayer wheels, they involved wasting futilely on the dead energy and effort which might just as well have been devoted to the living. Yet as an adolescent he did not doubt that his aunt’s behaviour was rational. Friends who were philosophers of religion had, in a spirit of charity, assured him that had he really believed in a notion like purgatory when he was young, he would have asked himself a number of awkward questions – where is it? how is time measured there? how is the efficacy of different modes of petition determined? – but he did not think that was the case. A religious upbringing or environment is always likely to leave something behind. Frank enjoyed the story of Diaghilev who, in fear of his life during a rough Atlantic crossing, ordered one of his servants to pray for him because he felt it was an activity unbecoming for an unbeliever like himself. When I knew Frank he would describe the inclination to cross himself from time to time as a ‘non-cognitive residue’ of his ‘believing years’. He was not among those whose feelings about death are complicated by the thought of judgement in the after-life, although for some of those (hard though they might be to imagine) there is presumably no complication since what they look forward to is proceeding almost directly to eternal life, after having quickly passed through the judging process with flying colours. Although it pleased him to remember how Henry Vaughan had ‘felt through all this fleshy dress / Bright shoots of everlastingness’, he liked Wittgenstein’s thought that making life eternal in no way solved its problems and noted down a logical attack on the concept from Henry Maudsley which may well have interested him because of the

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way it anticipates the spirit in which the logical positivists would treat these questions. ‘Is not eternal life something of a contradiction’, Maudsley wrote, since we know life only as ending in death, and death as the condition of life, and cannot conceive life except in contrast with death? To call life eternal is to attribute to it, by means of an adjective, a quality which it is of the very essence of its nature that it has not.

Rather more crisply, it is Wallace Stevens who remarks on the insipidity of eternal bliss with ‘Does ripe fruit never fall?’ Since life is defined by death, death is always with us, as Donne famously observes with his ‘and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee’. Perhaps then the egotism of the husband who, in a joke Freud recorded, says to his wife ‘If one of us dies, I’ll go and live in Paris’, has some necessary evolutionary function. In the book which gave rise to that favourite film of Frank’s, Bye Bye Braverman, a member of the group which finally arrives at Braverman’s funeral reproaches himself for not being able to express grief: ‘Shithead’, he labelled himself, ‘horse’s ass, peculiar creature. You could cry when the planes shot King Kong off the Empire State Building. You could cry when Wallace Beery slapped Jackie Cooper and then punished his hand. You could cry when Lew Ayres reached for that butterfly’. But even so nothing came from his eyes.

The references here to three famous films from the 1930s evoke a vanished era (the slapping episode is perhaps from The Champ, one of several films Beery and Cooper made together, while that involving the butterfly is certainly from the first film version of All Quiet on the Western Front). They indicate yet another reason for the appeal of Bye Bye Braverman for Frank, apart from its images of the New York

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in which he grew up and its Jewish humour. The first thought of the character represented here on hearing of the death of Braverman, who had influential friends, is annoyance at the loss of a valuable contact. His second thought is shame at this first, although that might have been mitigated had he known that when Virginia Woolf first heard that Katherine Mansfield had died she recorded in her diary, ‘A shock of relief? A rival the less?’ Frank’s not entirely serious take on this process was to say that what he first felt after learning of the death of a distinguished philosopher was regret that he died before having had the chance to apologize for underestimating Frank’s own work. But responses like these were common enough for him to feel that Donne’s famous remark enjoyed too much prestige. A character in Chekhov, or perhaps Chekhov himself, addresses from the window a funeral cortège he sees passing with the words ‘There you are being carried to the cemetery and here I am going to have my breakfast.’ He thought this more wholesome and unaffected than the sentiment expressed by Donne. The bell does not toll for us, it tolls for the person being buried, he insisted, and when our turn comes, then it will toll for us. He said that if people saw his coffin being carried to the cemetery he would much prefer to know they entertained Chekhov’s sentiments than Donne’s. Not being overwhelmed by sorrow at the death of others, or not being one of those who, as Tolstoy says of himself in Childhood, Boyhood and Youth, feel self-hatred at failing to experience sorrow to the exclusion of everything else, is one thing. The apparent cool indifference which Emerson expressed in his diary after the death of his 5-year-old son is quite another. For him, something that he fancied could not be removed without great pain had simply fallen away and left no scar. In his view, ‘The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is the type of us all. The dearest events are summer rain, and we the coats that shed every drop.’ This was exaggerated

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indifference and Frank found what he felt were more representative and nuanced responses in Dr Johnson. When a woman finally died, after years of invalidism which had condemned both her and the husband who had had to look after her to poverty, Johnson assumed that this husband must often have thought how ‘lightly he should tread the path of life without his burden’, and added ‘Of this thought the admission was unavoidable, and the indulgence might be forgiven to frailty and distress.’ But following his own wife’s death, he claimed he now took less pleasure in anything that befell him because she could not participate: ‘On many occasions’, Johnson wrote, ‘I think what she would have said and done. When I saw the sea I wished for her to have seen it with me.’ The difficulty lay in drawing a line between a reasonable or at least extenuatable limiting of contemplation to the endurable, and that ‘snigger of any rogue at his success’. The issue is raised by F. R. Leavis in his commentary on Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage. This simple tale of a young woman whose husband is forced to leave her, and whose subsequent physical deterioration is mirrored in the gradual decay of her once clean and tidy home environment, is perhaps the best thing Wordsworth ever wrote. The story is told by the Wanderer who is described as someone who ‘could afford to suffer / With those whom he saw suffer’. This is not the case of the narrator, struggling to come to terms with the degree of arbitrary pain and death in the world. He has to be coaxed into believing of Margaret, the former occupant of the ruined cottage, that ‘she lies in the calm earth and peace is there.’ Could we ever express a similar sentiment at the site of Auschwitz, Frank asked; what ‘potent determining context’, to borrow the phrase Leavis uses to describe how we are led by Wordsworth to accept the comfort the Wanderer offers, would ever permit us to do so? Yet most of us are not faced with the challenge of death in the way Auschwitz presents it and are led to think, not of belief-shattering

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injustice or sadism, but loss on a more private, domestic scale. Perhaps the major problem there is that, while time may relieve the pain of bereavement, it at the same time exacerbates the sufferings of the survivors by intensifying feelings of guilt at the abandonment of the lost one, a dilemma which Frank found eloquently expressed in Emily Bronte’s ‘Cold in the earth’, or in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Hymn to Priapus’.

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In many different ways, Frank approximated to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. His socks never matched, and if you looked down at his shoes you often found that they were without laces. Invariably the same ones he had been wearing for weeks, if not months, his sweat shirts were stained and tended to be put on back to front (shirts in the more conventional sense I hardly ever saw him wear, so that the sub-title of this book is even more metaphorical than it must already appear). Most noticeable of all was the way his trousers had a tendency to fall down. He claimed that this was a result of an unusual build and would recall with genuine embarrassment a moment when they had fallen round his ankles while he was speaking to a female student in one of the corridors at the University of Essex. Once he had retired, he thought he might solve the problem by wearing overalls, but he could never find a pair whose fastenings were not too complicated to manage easily. This became more important when he was reduced to having to urinate through a tube into a bag, the fixtures of which he regularly turned the wrong way so that he found himself soaked and having to take a bath. He bore these indignities with quite remarkable fortitude. In any task requiring manual dexterity, he was strikingly incompetent. When he was young he had been given a Mickey Mouse book with line drawings of the various Disney characters. The aim was to fill in the body parts of these with different colours and he could

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remember the frustration he experienced at his difficulty in keeping inside the lines, as well as the exultation he felt when he managed to colour one of Mickey’s shoes yellow, without too much overlap. A characteristic episode from his later life which he recorded involved letting slip part of a biscuit into a cup of coffee. As he was using a fountain pen to pin the biscuit against the side of the cup and slide it to the rim, he touched the wrong part of the pen and flavoured his coffee with ink. This was at a time, he wrote, when I was composing a particularly elegant paragraph at the prospect of death. These things can happen to everybody occasionally, but they happened to Frank all the time. He had a particularly poor record with microwave ovens. As his wife became increasingly disabled, it fell to him to prepare the food but he very often pressed the wrong buttons so that I can remember at least two microwaves that had to be replaced because, in cooking some dish to a cinder, they had simultaneously burnt themselves out. When he joined the army he was given a test of cognitive-perceptual abilities and the officer who administered it had the tactlessness to inform him that his mark was the lowest he had ever seen. He was not allowed to drive after having crashed two jeeps and never (as far as I know) drove again. That course from which on his return he was disappointed to learn that he had been hardly missed was in wireless technology. He was the sole member of the class who failed to build a radio at the end of it, and was only passed because he received 100 per cent in the written part of the final test. If war had then broken out again, he used to say, I would have substituted being a competent radio operator for aggressively waving my certificate at the enemy. He thought that the episode which shed most illumination on this aspect of his life was a spell in a simulated airplane cockpit. It was then he learnt how limited his capacity was for handling information and how quickly he panicked in the face of multiple demands. He felt on that occasion that he stood to his cognitive incapacities like an illiterate who has managed to conceal his condition and is always having to

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pretend to be without writing implements. A celebrity who interested him was Audie Murphy who, without being especially good looking or having much (if any) acting ability, was an important film star in the Hollywood of the 1950s. This was partly because he had become a national icon after the war as one of America’s most decorated war heroes. It intrigued him to learn, in reading about Murphy, that both his heroism and survival during the war were closely associated with all those skills Frank himself knew he did not have. He found the degree to which he lacked practical abilities humiliating and used often to insist that it made him abnormal. In confirmation of his idea that scientific terms can have both a distancing and comforting effect, he was pleased when he discovered that one technical term for his condition, for his incapacity to make deft or gracious movements, was dyspraxia. It was surprising to discover that such a forceful and charismatic personality felt himself inadequate in so many of those areas where most people are reasonably comfortable. This sense of inadequacy or abnormality may have been associated in him with a tendency to seek out backwaters, places which would make his anticipated failures less galling. What I got from Orwell’s essays, he once said, was a confidence in the joy to be found in anonymous existence and its sufficiency, and he would sometimes then add, thinking perhaps of his practical failings, I have no talents which I can blame myself for having neglected so I could have relaxed more often and with less self-reproach. The talents he did have he improved all the time, reading whenever he was not writing or trying to think a problem through. He would read as he walked up to work from his house in Canterbury, and he liked to find run-down coffee houses where he could take a book. At one moment in his notes, he either quotes some author or writes himself about ‘the euphoria of shabby neighbourhoods with junk shops whose disorder behind their grimy panes exhilarates because it incites to reveries of an old abandoned but never completely

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renounced ambition – the liberation of the self from the struggle to control its appearances’. It was in the shabby neighbourhoods that he liked to read while drinking coffee, even if one of the cafés whose closure he records regretting, and where there was what he describes as a comfortable cosy atmosphere, seems to have been in the bus station at Colchester. One of the reasons he spoke fondly of Berkeley, where he taught summer school on several occasions, was that there he could read for hours undisturbed in one of the many coffee shops. An advantage he had clearly retained from his working-class background was an ability to concentrate in noisy environments. Frank’s awareness of his mediocrity as an ‘information processor’ assuaged any regret he might have had at not having achieved a more formally distinguished and prominent position in his academic career. I had colleagues who were similarly disappointed, he would say, but whereas their disappointment was sharpened by the knowledge of what they could have made of their talents if the opportunity had presented itself, I was glad to avoid a larger stage on which to display my ineptitude. Administration was certainly not his forte. He recalled that when he first went to Essex as a professor, he had to attend a meeting of the Senate, or similar body. It was always his practice to take a book to these large meetings and read it through all the discussions of items that had no special relevance to the philosophy department. On this occasion there was a vote on some contentious issue which was very close, and perhaps a tie. I would like to point out, someone officiously told the chairman, that Professor Cioffi has voted on both sides on this issue. He explained to us later that it was his practice to lift his hand as he heard a vote being called for, and then not realized he must have lifted it twice in fairly quick succession. The fact that he was never invited to occupy one of the senior administrative posts at Essex may have some relevance to this episode and he therefore suggested that others, who like him were only interested in continuing with their academic work, might deliberately

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adopt this tactic which he had only stumbled on inadvertently, when they first arrive in a new university. Not that he felt he had been a wholly bad professor. He remembered with pride that his relations with the vice chancellor had been excellent – he claimed to be the only head of department the VC addressed by his first name – and that when he had to ask for more funds for Philosophy he always got them (I usually went in the office with the set sum I wanted in mind, he reflected, and when I came out with it all, could not help wishing that I had asked for more). A member of his department who was an excellent teacher but had not published was coming up for promotion, or to what used to be called the efficiency bar. Frank could remember making an impassioned plea to the promotions committee in which he described how difficult real philosophy could be, why taking it seriously was never likely to result in copious publication, but how central it was to education in the university. The committee was entranced and his member of staff secured his promotion or increment. The fact is that when he put his mind to it Frank could be mightily persuasive, and this was one of the reasons why he was such a compelling lecturer. I can remember, just before he left for Essex, eagerly waiting for him to appear in one of the lecture theatres in Kent that would have been packed to the rafters, had it had any. There was a perceptible moan of disappointment when the then head of the philosophy department came in to announce that there had been an alteration in the programme which meant that he would be giving the lecture instead of Cioffi. He next made the mistake of saying that anyone who wanted to leave was free to do so. Although this man was far from being a favourite among his colleagues, those of us who were also members of staff felt a professional duty to stay put; but the crowds of students had no such scruples and melted away like snow in warm sunshine. One of the appeals of Frank’s lectures was that they appeared to be extemporized (he always spoke from notes and not a script), although they had in fact usually been carefully thought through beforehand.

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The quite strong sense he had of failure in life was indirectly connected with his Anglophilia. I suggested previously that this was inspired by his reading of the Sherlock Holmes stories but also influential, he explained, were the country scenes in Random Harvest, Margaret Rutherford’s Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit and films about the Royal Air Force in the war. So persistent was his fondness for ‘old England’ that it was a long time before he could stop thinking of Colchester as an idyllic country town. As I have indicated, going to Oxford was no doubt highly significant in developing this fondness since there he made an impression on, and got to know, so many interesting people. He was an exile who wanted to become part of a world of what he sometimes described as ‘complementary others’, but by the time he had qualified to do so the world in question had altered beyond recognition. Of course, he knew that the England of the 1950s was full of unfairness and prejudice, but he felt it was not only full of that and, without having the slightest trace in him of social snobbery, felt depressed by what seem to be revealed about the country in the vulgarity and offensiveness of much television, and the worldliness and show-business preoccupations of the intellectual newspapers. I was a tail looking for a dog to be wagged by, he would say; I wanted to join a family which I did not know was in a process of disintegration. This variety of disappointment was only a minor component in his sense of failure. A much more important constituent of it could be put down to temperament. Partly responsible for his success as a lecturer was the self-confidence he exuded whenever he was addressing others, but in private he was full of doubts and anxiety. He would often describe how flat he felt after sending a lecture hall full of students away in an excited and exhilarated mood and comment sourly that this mood was hardly likely to last, intellectual admiration quickly giving way in them to casualness or indifference. Besides, who could tell how superficial the reasons had been for their excitement? What he suffered from in addition to this scepticism was a strong

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sense of the discrepancy between a perfectly modulated inner voice, with its ready fund of apposite illustration and striking images, and the intellectual stammerer he quite unjustifiably felt he often was in public, or in discussion. When I philosophize, he would say, I am like a slow-witted man counting on his fingers; but then he rather distrusted any colleague whose effort to think clearly was not accompanied by similar impressions. The self-confidence he exhibited in public was only a performance, a matter of nerve, and he would talk of how marvellous it would be to have a self-sufficiency so complete, and a self-delight so intense, that even the couples embracing on their park benches would stare enviously after you. His great worry was whether anything he had said had ever mattered, and he had found in Lewis Carroll a character who claims that is not good manners to talk to someone who is not there. How could he be sure that anything he had published had had any effect and, with his interest in late Wittgenstein, was he not like the speaker of a dying language the intelligibility of which would barely outlast his death? As for death itself, he would sometimes claim that, for him, Pascal’s reflections on the misery of man and Chekhov’s story about the dying professor, had said all he needed to know about the human condition – together (that is) with Boswell’s London journal. Having been very ill and faced death previously on two occasions, he was pleased to have identified in himself a certain equanimity. He used to think that this was a result of his having so successfully interiorized the Lucretian point of view, but came to feel that it was rather more because he was attached to life at fewer points than most other people, with many of those attachments having been severed by exile. He would nevertheless have liked to feel that he had made a difference and therefore could not help regretting the relatively small feedback his work had engendered, even though he was perfectly aware how mixed and unreliable a larger amount would have been. He liked the story of the man who has to travel through a wood and comes across a

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party of cats lowering into the ground a coffin with a crown on its lid. Scurrying nervously on to a friend’s house, the man describes what he has just seen whereupon the family cat, who has been stretched out lazily in front of the fire, suddenly leaps up and shouting out ‘Now I’m the king of the cats!’ disappears up the chimney. He knew that this is the exclamation Yeats had repeated when news of Meredith’s death reached him. For him, the story resonated with his forlorn hope that the originality of his thinking might one day be more widely recognized. Yet by most ordinary standards, Frank Cioffi’s academic career was of course successful. Highly influential in the dismantling of Freud’s theoretical framework, he was a widely respected figure in Wittgensteinian circles. His achievements in these two fields are easy to document and might well be celebrated in this or that Festschrift, were such things still published. Yet it seems to me that his distinction was also apparent in the kind of general thinking about life I have been trying to illustrate here. ‘My ideas will gain’, writes Santayana, ‘by being loosened from the academic and professional mortar in which they have set’. I hope this might be true of Frank’s ideas also and, if the conclusions to which some of them lead then turn out to be familiar, perhaps that will provide the occasion for Dr Johnson’s ‘it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.’ If they also could be said to lack conclusiveness, it is because he often dealt with questions for which conclusive answers are impossible to conceive. I said earlier that I once put together a dialogue in which all the discussions Frank and I had about biography were arranged into a rough order. Listening again to the tapes we made when I was doing that, I can only now be conscious of inadequacy. How is it possible to convey in cold print the energy and humour of his delivery, the surprising uses he was able to make of his vast stores of miscellaneous information, and his formidable resourcefulness under argumentative pressure?

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No academic I have ever met was as free of worldliness as Frank and, although he used to complain that he had been better at annoying people he wanted to annoy than pleasing people he wanted to please, there was also in him a fundamental generosity of spirit. He possessed that essential core of innocence or naivety which D. H. Lawrence claims is what qualifies people as proper human beings. The less intelligent James, as Frank sometimes called Henry (in order to annoy people like me), has a phrase somewhere about how the image of a friend is ‘strangely simplified and summarized’ by death: ‘The hand of death . . . has smoothed the folds, made it more typical and general. The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count’. One of the tasks of those left behind after the death of such a gifted individual as Frank is to retain as many as possible of those accidents and shades. But it is far from easy. His nephew (Frank L. Cioffi), who is a professor of English in New York and the author of several books, has been working on a biography which will give a far fuller and rounded picture of his uncle than I have provided here. That will provide fascinating details of what was an unusual and, in many ways, extraordinary early life. My own aim has been to provide an impression of what he was like to talk to given that, as I said in my first paragraph, interesting talk is such a rare commodity and Frank was able to provide more of it than anyone else I have ever known.

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Himself when young . . .

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Afterword Nicholas Bunnin

I The Oxford that Frank Cioffi entered at mid-century was the venue of remarkable transformations in the methods, doctrines and aims of analytic philosophy. Logic and philosophy of language, which emerged from the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein early in the century, continued in the role of ‘first philosophy’, having replaced epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mind to ground and shape philosophical practice as a whole. The conception of language and its analysis, however, was under pressure, partly through close technical criticism of texts and doctrines of the earlier period and partly through an ambition to transgress the limits of philosophy set by the initial programmes of analysis. This was the period of formation and flourishing of Oxford ordinary language philosophy, but this term should not be taken to imply homogeneous goals, or even mutual understanding, among the leading figures on the Oxford scene, such as Gilbert Ryle, Paul Grice, Peter Strawson, John Austin, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, Bernard Williams, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. Wittgenstein’s self-criticism of his earlier seminal views also greatly contributed to the buzz of ideas in Oxford’s philosophical air. Analytic philosophers of the earlier stage held that determining the correct logical form of propositions would allow their assessment for both meaning and truth. Some propositions have logical forms that guarantee that they have meaning and are true, but lack empirical

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content because they are true and meaningful however the world turns out to be. Some philosophical utterances are meaningless because they fail to have a correct logical form and thus fall outside the limits of describing how the world could be. Other philosophical utterances have grammatical forms that lead to unjustified metaphysical claims, but these claims can be dispelled by paraphrase, replacing their misleading grammatical forms with their correct logical forms according to which the utterances are clearly false. This analytic programme was anticipated by Gottfried Leibniz’s seventeenthcentury vision of an ideal language, the syntax of which would keep us from philosophical error, John Horne Tooke’s eighteenth-century method of grammatical paraphrase and a succession of earlier attempts to eliminate metaphysics from philosophy, but its main focus was to work out the philosophical implications of Frege’s new propositional and predicate logic. This conception of propositions as items that are true or false and are conveyed by assertoric sentences with correct logical forms seemed to be appropriate for pursuing Frege’s own attempt to provide a logical grounding for mathematics. Russell wedded the aim of grounding mathematics to an empiricist account of the possibility and scope of scientific knowledge. For this purpose as well, a conception of propositions as the bearers of meaning and truth seemed satisfactory. More generally, propositions, abstracted from the sayings and hearings of human discourse, were held to be the locus of both meaning and truth. If we turn to other areas of philosophy, Wittgenstein’s distinction in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus between what can be said and what can be shown seemed to exclude from philosophy much of what Wittgenstein recognized as being humanly important, such as ethics and religion, because what we attempt to say in these domains is unsayable. Paradoxically, according to Wittgenstein the apparent propositions of the Tractatus itself, including the claim that propositions and states of affairs share the same logical form, are also

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unsayable. A. J. Ayer emphasized this exclusion in Language, Truth, and Logic, a book important in Cioffi’s initial approach to academic philosophy, by linking the meaning of propositions with their verification and rejecting as nonsense any utterance that failed the test of verification. In Cioffi’s Oxford, this account of language began to be questioned from a variety of starting points. On the formal side, Kurt Gӧdel in Vienna had earlier shown that any consistent logical system capable of describing the arithmetic of natural numbers could generate true propositions that are not provable from the axioms of that system, thus freeing meaningful true propositions from the confines of an initial single system of logic. Rival logical systems had been developed in which propositions could be analysed as having different logical forms, thus challenging the claim that for any proposition philosophical analysis could determine the single correct logical form. Supplementary logics, such as those formalizing necessity and possibility, obligation and permission and knowledge and belief, and multi-valued and fuzzy logics offering one or more truth values between true and false, called out for assessment for philosophical implications. Philosophers struggled to deal with belief and other psychological states with objects or contents that did not fit into the scope of standard formalization. Other philosophers, including figures in Oxford, turned from constructing formal languages and tracing their philosophical implications to exploring the logic of natural languages and their complexity of usage as the method of finding and correcting philosophical error. They retained a notion of philosophical analysis without the tight discipline of logical form embedded in a single system of logic. In Cambridge Wittgenstein turned from abstract logical form to a naturalized and humanized ‘form of life’, including a vast array of different ‘language-games’, in an attempt to prevent mistaking one use of language for another in an overall strategy of

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returning unacceptable philosophical employment of words to their normal non-philosophical use. He urged looking not for the meaning of expressions but for their use. In a related development, Ryle saw the study of formal logic as useful ‘square-bashing’ drill to prepare for the discovery of ‘category mistakes’ to explain and dispel philosophical errors. Grice had developed his radical reconfiguration of meaning by focusing on the interlocking intentions and expectations of speakers and hearers to give priority to speaker’s meaning over the timeless meaning of what is said as a relation between propositions and the world. This extension of the philosophy of language to its human context led to Grice’s later distinction, already in the works, between saying and implying, which drew together the semantics of saying within the pragmatics of presupposition and implicature. Influenced by Grice, Strawson objected to the ascription of truth and falsity to meaningful propositions, arguing that propositions were the bearers of meaning while statements were the bearers of truth and falsity. In particular, he criticized Russell’s paradigmatic analysis of ‘The King of France is bald’, given that there is no King of France, as the falsehood, ‘There is one and only one thing that is a King of France and it is bald.’ If Russell were correct, the analysis of ‘The King of France is not bald’ would also yield a falsehood, thus violating the law of excluded middle. Strawson argued that the perfectly intelligible statement ‘The King of France is bald’ is neither true nor false because of the failure of reference, with the question of truth and falsity shifted to the statable but unstated presupposition that there is a King of France. Strawson not only challenged the classical configuration of meaning and truth, but also contributed to extending the scope of the philosophy of language to a common-sense human context of saying and understanding. Austin’s theory of performatives challenged the claim that the meaning of all assertoric sentences could be determined by their truth conditions by showing that many such sentences, for example ‘I hereby marry you’, are used for tasks other than stating truths. In his later lectures How to

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Do Things with Words Austin provided the foundations for a theory of speech acts, bringing together philosophy of language and philosophy of action, semantics and pragmatics, through a classificatory study of how humans use language. Other Oxford philosophers, Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire and Bernard Williams, were uncomfortable with the austere constraints of classical analytic philosophy and mistrustful of its roots in Enlightenment rationalism, scientism and optimism. Berlin responded by turning from philosophy to history of ideas and grew increasingly attentive to the exploration of human language, history, action and society by Counter-Enlightenment thinkers. Hampshire studied Spinoza as a platform for his own ethical and critical concerns with human thinking and agency. Williams rejected a preoccupation with the meta-ethical analysis of the logic of ethical propositions as a distraction from the complex ethical construal of real human life. Of fundamental importance in this regard was the revival of virtue ethics, with its focus on the perplexities of human agency, in the thought of Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe. The re-engagement in Oxford with normative ethics challenged the view of analytic philosophy as a meta-disciplinary grounding, correcting and limiting of the primary pursuit of fields such as mathematics, science, history, politics or morality from an external standpoint. Rather, the distinction between ‘x’ and ‘the philosophy of x’ became blurred, and at least some important philosophical issues were seen to emerge from within the practice of other disciplines. On this view, philosophers retained their distinctive and diverse sensibilities, but, like anthropologists, could get their hands dirty in the field. This change of perspective also licensed a view of applied philosophy, the application of philosophical thought to problems of life and the world, as a central aspect of philosophy rather than an accidental employment in other domains of separately formed philosophical conclusions.

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The developments in Oxford philosophy retained a naturalistic framework of philosophical analysis, but challenged the scientific naturalism of earlier analysis with the possibility of what might be called a humanistic naturalism. Instead of holding that all knowledge is, or could be reduced to, scientific knowledge of causally interacting entities in the natural world, a humanistic naturalism could perhaps extend beyond science and hold that scientific knowledge itself could be understood only in the context of thinking, conversing and acting as shared natural human activities and that comprehending these activities might require methods extending beyond the limits of scientific explanation. It was unclear, however, whether this humanistic understanding would be entirely autonomous or in some sense interpenetrate with scientific knowledge as currently conceived or as reconfigured in this new context. It was unclear what a revised conception of science would have to be in order to collaborate with or absorb this humanistic perspective, but human consciousness, intention and agency were on the agenda for inclusion in an expanded account of science. It was unclear whether this humanistic naturalism threatened Frege’s insistence that logic and mathematics should not be absorbed by psychology, an insistence at the heart of the initial programme of analysis and also of Husserl’s turn to phenomenology. If there were room for formalism in humanistic naturalism, it was unclear what formalism would be required and what status that formalism would have. These were questions for philosophy as a whole, but also for the philosophical examination of sciences focusing on human beings, such as sociology, anthropology and psychology. Of special interest for a study of Cioffi, who read Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology for his Oxford degree, is the exploration and defence of Freudian psychoanalysis that was in the air among Oxford philosophers, most directly expressed in the work of Brian Farrell, the Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy. Here was an important example of the erosion

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of the distinction between a field of study and the philosophy of that field. Some admirers anticipated that, properly understood, Freud’s captivating work could provide a scientific psychology to link the scientific orientation of early analytic philosophy and the emerging humanistic orientation of philosophical analysis in Oxford. I should again emphasize that this new orientation was not homogeneous and was understood differently by the individual philosophers following the trajectory of their own investigations. Earlier conceptions of philosophical analysis, especially in the works of Russell and Ayer, challenging these revised approaches were also in the field. All of these tendencies provided the complex and sophisticated culture of controversy that Cioffi entered as a student and emerged from as a philosopher.

II Cioffi entered Oxford with a social and educational background radically different from those of his Oxford contemporaries. He was born to neither privilege nor comfort, nor was he a socially modest high-achiever educated in a state grammar school. Rather, he was an eccentric autodidact who had dropped out of a terrible high school in New York before serving with the American army of occupation in Japan and the war graves registration service in France, examining the repellent shattered remains of soldiers killed in the war in hopes of identifying them. Cioffi was born in New York in 1928 to an Italian family with origins near Naples. Because his mother perished in childbirth and his father died soon afterwards, he was raised by his grandparents as a son, but even after learning his actual parentage Cioffi considered his uncle Lou to be his brother. The family was impoverished when his shop-owning grandfather refused

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to pay protection money. A mob-connected lawyer rewrote his grandfather’s will, fraudulently making himself its beneficiary. Soon afterwards, Cioffi’s grandfather was knocked down by a car, with the driver running over him again to ensure his death. Cioffi’s own real education began in the streets and clubs of wartime Manhattan, where he met intellectuals and writers such as James Baldwin, and in the New York Public Library, where he immersed himself in disordered and eclectic reading extending far beyond the scope and depth of any conventional syllabus. He absorbed classics of literature, history, art, criticism, politics, social thought, sociology, psychology, biography, philosophy and science, but also pursued American popular culture of the day: radio series, pulp fiction, baseball, cartoons, jazz, comic strips and movies. His intellectual and emotional hinterland contained both Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych and Charles Atlas’s injunctions to stop bullies kicking sand in your face; both relations between Dante and Beatrice and relations between Minnie and Mickey Mouse. For a while as an adolescent in New York, Cioffi was active in a Trotsky-inspired political splinter group, but he became dissatisfied with the claims to authority of their grandly simplifying scheme of political analysis and action. This dissatisfaction was independent of but aligned to his earlier rejection of what he saw as the narrow and punitive religious authority of his own Roman Catholic schooling. His scepticism of authority, sacred or secular, was akin to the visceral street-wise cry of ‘go tell it to the marines’ rather than the outcome of identifying a missed step in an otherwise compelling argument. His sense of language, both as an argumentative tool and as an object of study, included rhetoric and poetics as well as guardedly neutral description and explanation. Cioffi never aspired to become a dispassionate civil servant or a philosopher exhibiting the same characteristics of caution and detachment. Living and reflecting drew him to a complex terrain comprising questions of life and death, guilt and shame, love and

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hatred, integrity and betrayal, sensual freedom and excess, suffering and ease, exultation and despair, frustration and achievement, activity and ennui, optimism and pessimism, self-love and self-loathing, agitation and contemplation. In physical terms, Cioffi stood out as strikingly tall, notably thin and overtly dyspraxic. With dyspraxia came an associated neural disorder, leaving him painfully sensitive to most fabrics, a problem solved by wearing pyjamas under his ordinary clothes and leaving his shoes untied. This physical presentation and his intensity regarding the issues that interested him fed his reputation for eccentricity. In Paris after the war, he fell in again with James Baldwin and his circle. His intellectual gifts and argumentative power were recognized and appreciated, leading Lionel Blue, another member of the group, to suggest applying to Oxford. Cioffi was admitted to Ruskin College, a trade union institution associated with the University, in 1950 and then for degree study in 1951 by the newly formed St Catherine’s College, all financed by the G. I. Bill of Rights. The essay Cioffi submitted with his application explored and defended his own resignation to profound isolation and loneliness. Had Cioffi retained his initial Oxford enthusiasm for Ayer’s verificationist doctrines, he might have confined his studies within the framework of earlier analysis bounded by the considerations of logical form and the language of science, but at the cost of excluding from philosophy his own humanistic preoccupations. His philosophy would then have developed as a detached technical capacity, with any pursuit of his other concerns left outside the scope of this expertise. On the formal side, Cioffi discovered that he had neither the interest nor the ability to study Fregean logic and its philosophical implications. He was also disquieted by imperatives to reject as nonsensical the issues he cared about and their linguistic expression. Like others in the philosophical culture of the time, he sensed that many of the allegedly central problems of philosophy in the Oxford syllabus were grounded in dogmatic presuppositions and

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buried misunderstandings. There was excited anticipation about the forthcoming publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, but Cioffi’s first exposure to the work, through reading pages of his tutor Elizabeth Anscombe’s translation in her study while she worked, proved discouraging rather than liberating. Nevertheless, he was fortunate in his philosophy tutors: Friedrich Waismann and Elizabeth Anscombe, both closely associated with Wittgenstein, Anthony Quinton, gifted with philosophical independence, shrewd iconoclasm and encouraging bonhomie, and Iris Murdoch, subtle observer of character and friend of Wittgenstein’s pupil Yorick Smythies. He also benefited from discussion with a circle of student friends, including John Searle and Nigel Lawson, from active membership in Oxford philosophy societies, and from writing reviews and essays for the student newspaper Cherwell. He corresponded with Russell and Ayer. His exchanges with Karl Popper prefigured his mature criticism of Freud and psychoanalysis, while his more extensive correspondence with F. R. Leavis set out a path to his later philosophical explorations of literature and literary criticism. More than anything else, Cioffi gained self-confidence that his own preoccupations could find a place within the fluid transformations of Oxford philosophical analysis. With this self-confidence, he assumed the freedom to formulate his own philosophical questions and to determine his own philosophical methods. As his career proceeded, he was increasingly influenced by the later works of Wittgenstein, but he did not engage in what emerged as the mainline battles of Wittgensteinian exposition, interpretation and defence. His Wittgenstein struggled with what the Tractatus consigned to the ‘not sayable, but showable’. His Wittgenstein supplanted clear and distinct concepts with family resemblances in the use of terms and prescribed an escape route from philosophical error by looking at a wide range of ordinary cases to replace theorizing about single mesmerizing examples. His Wittgenstein sought to provide a perspicuous

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articulation and sequence of such cases in order to render ways of making sense of things evident and compelling. His Wittgenstein explored the possibility that deep and legitimate human reflective attempts to deal with what troubles us could be pursued without recourse to any discoveries of fact or scientific theory. In this regard, Cioffi was greatly impressed by the aphorism of the eighteenth-century founder of experimental physics Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: ‘Delight at having understood a very abstract and obscure system leads most people to believe in the truth of what it demonstrates.’

III Cioffi’s Wittgensteinian commitment to looking at cases rather than relying on received theory surfaced in his undergraduate intervention in a discussion of how to characterize our perception of a straight stick that looked bent when half-immersed in water. In what seemed to be no more than tiresome pedantry, Cioffi brought a stick to a lecture in a transparent container of water and gained agreement that the stick was straight, but appeared to be bent. He then pulled the stick from the water to reveal that this stick was in fact bent. Cioffi’s mature strategy of assembling examples to lead us away from seemingly compelling theoretical dogmas that limit a domain and constrict our full and individually variable capacities to explore that domain found application in his first major publication ‘Intention and Interpretation in Literature’. There he sketched a programme for aesthetics of ‘putting into order our notions as to what can be said about works of art’. His immediate target was W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s theory of literature and literary criticism in their famous essay ‘The Intentional Fallacy’. The two critics rejected the use of biographical information about authors, including their intentions, in the interpretation of their literary works in favour of

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attending to ‘the work itself ’ as ‘a linguistic fact’ or an ‘integrated symbol’. They saw literary works as autonomous texts, the meaning and value of which could be determined by a scientific poetic analysis parallel to a scientific philosophical analysis of concepts or a scientific psychological analysis of behaviour. Their analysis, although focusing on poetic complexity rather than philosophical clarity, ran parallel to the early philosophical analysis of propositions by abstracting the use of language from the quirky framework of interlocking human intentions, expectations and responses. For Cioffi, their aim ‘has its source in the determination to tidy up the activity of reading and to reduce what it involves to a neatly homogenous set of considerations such as communicate a readily communicable rationale’. Although poetic analysis could often rely on standard meanings established through communicative practice, Cioffi used a startling array of cases to display many different ways in which puzzles and disagreements over critical interpretation might rightly call for biographical details about authorial experience and intentions for their resolution. Instead of replacing an inadequate theory of poetic meaning and correct critical judgement with a better theory, Cioffi held that the quest for theory itself was misguided, replacing it with an elastic and open-textured ordering of what we can say about works of art. In this and later papers, he rejected an ideal of single correct interpretations of literary works. Rather, he understood the practice of criticism to allow a diversity of critics to provide their own responses, each inviting agreement rather than commanding universal assent. On his account, critics should be understood as inviting one another and responsive readers to see and appreciate works in certain ways, but their suggestions were enabling rather than coercive, at best drawn from mature subjective reflection rather than being objective proofs or demonstrations. By following this path, Cioffi found his own way to territory staked out by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, but he saw these surroundings with fresh eyes.

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Cioffi approached other questions by exploring relations between objects that matter to us and our human responses to them. Why do we immerse ourselves in novels and films, including those neither intended nor understood to contain any factual truth whatsoever? Why are we attached to biographies and narrative histories we know to contain errors of fact or flaws of interpretation? Why are we drawn to multiple biographies of the same individual or multiple histories of the same periods or events? Why are the novels, biographies and histories that move us not necessarily those containing the maximum of factual truth, whatever that fantastic term might mean? Cioffi answered in terms of making sense of things by cultivating our capacities to bring perspicuous order to what we can say about them and about ourselves. These capacities can be confined to jejeune engagement with shallow and dreary objects, like the stunted sensibility of a reader wanting every book to follow the same plot. But for many of us as we mature, cultivating increasingly complex sensibility and capacious judgment is an ideal worth pursuing. He saw the point of Wittgenstein’s claim that the existence or nonexistence of an historical Jesus was irrelevant to the importance of the New Testament as an object of reflective judgement. Closer to our own time, Cioffi knew that our response to the Holocaust is anchored in the certainty that the events took place, but he denied that what we seek in coming to terms with what troubles us about the Holocaust is further factual knowledge. Rather, for each of us, dealing with these troubles is a task for reflective contemplation of a complex domain of crucially different cases, extending and putting into order our own complex sense of what it is to be human. Resistance to solving our perplexity with a demand for accumulating more facts also featured in Cioffi’s interest in how for different people one or another gesture could epitomize an age, and how for different people one or another incident could allow entry into a whole life. He used questions and examples to situate this mode of contemplative response, but did not

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propose a theory to pin down and explain its liberating importance. To ask for an algorithm, proof or demonstration of a single justified response would be to miss his point. Not all ways of ordering stand up to scrutiny, but the methodology for determining better and worse orderings is constituted internally by the progress of reflective critical practice rather than by sorts of measuring appropriate to other investigations. For Cioffi, the enabling rules of this practice allow individual responses, each of which invites general agreement rather than commanding universal assent. In addition to tensions among the responses of different individuals, we could all have reflective struggles within ourselves, putting what we can say about the world at times in an intensely pessimistic order and at times in an intensely optimistic order, at times in the order of tragedy and at times in the order of farce. Cioffi himself feared pessimistic nihilism that banished sense from the world, but mistrusted religion or its optimistic secular successors as offering no more than illegitimate infantile comfort. His treatment of these issues contrasts with that of the early Wittgenstein, who placed such questions in terms of the will of a non-psychological metaphysical subject as a limit of the world and the world itself as a whole, whatever its factual content. Cioffi placed the questions in terms of complex natural human individuals engaged in a practice of reflective response to a complex world. Form of life replaced logical form as the notion of form that we must comprehend to make sense of this task, with Frege’s boundary between logic and psychology for these purposes blurred or called into question.

IV It might seem that Cioffi was indifferent to science and the philosophy of science, but this was not the case. In the social sciences, he was puzzled

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by praise of the scientific achievement of Erving Goffman’s fascinating accounts of how we both reveal and conceal ourselves in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Stigma and of David Riesman’s distinction between ‘inner directed’ and ‘other directed’ personalities in The Lonely Crowd. In both cases, he found ordinary insights expressed in a technical classificatory vocabulary that lacked the theoretical underpinnings to provide explanatory or predictive bite. Taxonomical classifications, like the periodic table, can both provoke scientific investigation and express the results of scientific discovery, but many engaging taxonomies do not function in these ways. In particular, taxonomical terms organizing ordinary experience should not be mistaken for theoretical terms going below the surface of such experience. Nancy Mitford, even had she been dressed in a lab-coat when she drew the distinction between U (upper class) and Non-U (middle class) vocabulary, would not have been mistaken for a social scientist, and the same should be true for many other acute and effective social observers, including Goffman and Riesman. For Cioffi, their insights contribute in limited ways to putting into order what we can say about the world and our responses to the world, but like good jokes, their startling freshness can be lost with repetition, and their cogency dispelled in the face of additional examples falling outside their range of instantiation. These further examples are not counter-examples that can be used to refute a theory and deny its apparent instantiations. The instantiations stand, but the impression that they yield exhaustive underlying insight fades away. Turning from scientific ideals of simplicity and elegance to different ideals of depth and complexity, we can place achievements like those of Goffman and Riesman in their proper setting. The depth and complexity are humanistic rather than the scientific depth of underlying theory or the scientific complexity of complex causal systems. Only if we think that scientific explanation is the only game in town are we likely to think that humanistic depth and complexity must ultimately be reduced to scientific depth and complexity.

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Nevertheless, Cioffi did not exclude the possibility of scientific understanding entering our characterization of items for reflective ordering. There is some limited point in talking about adolescent emotions in terms of hormones kicking in, although there is no justification in reducing what concerns us about emotions to the physiological conditions that enable us to have them. Current confident talk of our preferences or activities being in our DNA reflects a scientistic prejudice rather than anything that we have learned from genomics. Cioffi suggested examining a wide variety of cases to determine where scientific insights plausibly alter what we can say about a domain in dealing with the problems that perplex us and where they do not. Instead of one grand impervious boundary, he gave examples of many specific locally determined crossing points and barriers. In any case, the human task of ordering what we can say precedes science, extends beyond science and answers to a method that is not scientific method. In a similar vein, Cioffi worried about Wittgenstein’s radical rejection of the importance of Frazer’s speculations in The Golden Bough that traced the descent of European fire festivals, in which human effigies are burnt, from ancient festivals, in which actual humans were burnt alive. Even if there were secure empirical grounds rather than speculation about these origins, Wittgenstein held that the historical information would not explain our response to the meaning of human sacrifice expressed in the modern rituals. This was a matter of an aesthetic unravelling of the web of our associations evoked by the thought of human sacrifice and its placement in our reflective grasp of the stable and enduring conditions of humanity. Cioffi accepted Wittgenstein’s orientation, but denied that it required a blanket exclusion of further information drawn from history or science in order to be pursued. The exclusion was a remnant of the radical Tractarian distinction between what can be said and what can be shown. The actual danger to Wittgenstein’s later insight was the

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wholesale collapse of a methodology suitable for the reflective project into the methodology of empirical or scientific investigation.

V For over half a century, Cioffi deployed the full range of the philosophical views that I have traced above to initiate and pursue his powerful criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis. In doing so, he examined the works of Freud and of later psychoanalysts, those whom he considered to be philosophical and non-philosophical apologists for Freud and those criticizing Freud for what he held to be the wrong, especially scientistic, reasons. He was initially attracted to Popper’s condemnation of psychoanalysis as a pseudo-science for failing to meet a formal test of falsifiability, but soon argued that psychoanalytic theory from its earliest days was both falsifiable and falsified. Nor was the problem one of merely holding on to the theory in the face of counter-instances. Although he did not explore Imre Lakatos’s judgement that all scientific theories were born and pursued in a sea of anomalies, he did see that some scientists were vindicated for holding on to falsified theories that nevertheless proved to increase our grasp of the workings of the world. If this was all right for other scientists, why was it not acceptable for Freud and his followers? In trying to sort out the grounds for his disquiet with psychoanalysis, Cioffi posed other questions. He recognized the brilliance of some of Freud’s poetic and rhetorical explorations of webs of associations that were independent of any commitment to psychoanalytic theory. If Freud was rightly lauded for these insights, why not accept his method of extending the discovery and interpretation of associations through psychoanalytic theory? Freud claimed therapeutic success in ridding neurotically disturbed patients of their symptoms and held that the framework of his discoveries was necessary to achieve this

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success. He also claimed the initial clues leading to the discoveries came from patients rather than from himself. However rough and ready early psychoanalysis might have been, does not the continuing therapeutic success achieved by Freud and later practitioners give adequate grounds for respecting their scientific achievement? Aristotle warned us to adjust the demands for rigour in various sciences to the level appropriate to each. For us to ask for the rigour of physics in dealing with human affairs is a violation of this sensible advice. Why should we apply inappropriate standards to psychoanalysis rather than accepting its scientific validity according to appropriate standards? Psychoanalytic theory, when applied to healthy people and to our culture as a whole, has fundamentally transformed and enriched our human self-understanding. Why should we withhold honour from Freud who made the discoveries that initiated this transformation? Cioffi’s resources for raising and dealing with these questions emerged from his own philosophical orientation. He saw that the tests to be met by psychoanalysis were not rightly characterized as Popperian formal tests of falsifiability or as abstract tests of willingness to relinquish actually falsified theories. Further, the importance he ascribed to human reflective ordering as a way of making sense of ourselves and the world allowed psychoanalysis to be judged by a method distinct from scientific method. For both of these reasons, he turned to examining the integrity of Freud and his followers by standards drawn from our complex prior engagement in reflection, communication and interaction. For Cioffi, it was a profound error to see Freud as a scientist working at an appropriate level of rigour for his subject matter or as a speculative pathfinder whose discoveries have led to such a science. By turning from formal scientific to humanistic grounds of assessment, he opened the possibility of pursuing philosophical questions about psychoanalysis through forensic examination of the actual claims by

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Freud and his followers about the origins of psychoanalysis and its history, method, theoretical contents and therapeutic effectiveness. He saw continuity rather than discontinuity between the philosophical assessment of psychoanalysis and a detailed grasp of the claims of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Among other aspects, Cioffi explored Freud’s account of his linked discoveries of the unconscious and the aetiology and cure of neurosis through a method of enabling patients to provide unprompted associations from their symptoms to repressed infantile sexual fantasies and Freud’s further claims for the positive therapeutic outcome of uncovering these associations. Cioffi argued that an unbiased investigation of Freud’s case histories, other publications and correspondence showed that Freud moved back and forth between claiming that he followed a neutral and empirical method that could have led to other results and claiming that the early sexual origin of the symptoms was an a priori assumption of the method. Cioffi provided evidence of Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic commitment to a sexual hypothesis and its transformation into a methodological assumption. He gave grounds for ascribing the associative links in many cases to Freud rather than to the patients, who at most complied with his account of them. Further, he held that the early cases cited by Freud as proof of the therapeutic success of uncovering these associations provided no such compelling pattern of success. Cioffi examined Freud’s earlier use of the same method to trace the origins of neurosis to the actual sexual interference with infants by siblings, nursemaids, parents and other adults and to establish the therapeutic benefit of retrieving these actual memories. Freud replaced this seduction theory by tracing the origin of neurosis to infantile sexual fantasies. For boys these were based on the sexual desire for their mothers and fears of castration by their fathers, and for girls these were based on penis envy. Freud also claimed the same therapeutic outcome for revealing memories of actual seduction as

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he later claimed for revealing these infantile fantasies. Cioffi asked why we should have any greater confidence in a method that led to the false results of the seduction theory when, without a change of method, we are led to the results of the theory of infantile sexual fantasy, especially if both results were accompanied by questionable claims of therapeutic benefit. He also asked why the range of actual seducers according to the seduction theory was restricted to fantasies of parental seduction in its successor. Just as Cioffi noted the disappearance of the alleged empirical confirmation of the seduction theory, he remarked on the disappearance in later psychoanalysis of the alleged empirical confirmation of penis envy as the grounds of female neurosis. Here again, he held that the whole attempt to provide empirical confirmation of psychoanalytic theory was unsafe. Even if the alleged empirical confirmation of psychoanalysis is set aside, Cioffi recognized plausible non-Freudian narratives linking crucial early episodes in a life to the later character of individuals, citing the intelligibility of Dickens’s fictional depiction of Miss Havisham’s eccentricities in Great Expectations and of their origin in having been abandoned at the altar, and the intelligibility of explaining the origin of Prosper Merimée’s haughty reserve by his remembered childhood humiliation for crying. In neither case is the early episode confined to the infantile period crucial for Freud, nor would the explanatory force of the episode require the backing of an empirical survey of the outcome of other cases of being jilted or of being chastised for crying. Freud’s accounts are open to doubt not because he followed a web of associations, but because his associations did not meet the standard of persuasive power exemplified by the associations in the cases of Miss Havisham and Merimée. The appearance of this power in Freud’s cases required the acceptance of an intervening theory, while the intervening theory could be justified only if the associations were acceptable independent of the theory. The theory itself was linked to a method with principles of interpretation that could lead elsewhere if

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not pre-loaded to produce Freudian associations. In a parallel domain, we can ask what we should make of utterances that we laugh at only if we accept a theory of why they are funny. Cioffi admired Freud’s verbal dexterity, rhetorical and poetic sensibility, his capacity to recognize the importance of metaphor, simile and other figurative tropes, but argued that Freud at his best gave instantiations of ordinary concepts rather than confirmations of invented theoretical terms. Like exemplifications, his real insights were immediately compelling and not refuted by cases falling outside their range. In responding to human complexity, Freud was neither alone nor unprecedented in responding to sexuality, unconscious motivation and self-deception, but his insights, according to Cioffi, were corrupted by insistence on a theory forcing too much of humanity into the confines of a single pattern. Rather than being assessed according to standards of rigour appropriate to a human science or assessed as contributing to an early inaugural stage of scientific discovery brought to maturity by later developments, Freud should be judged by humanistic standards fit for the reflective activity of perspicuously ordering what we can say about ourselves and our world. Here again, Cioffi accepted the possibility of scientific discoveries having importance for this reflective activity, but rejected giving up dealing with what troubles us as a separate legitimate aim of human judgement.

VI My brief account of Frank Cioffi as philosopher provides a map of some centrally recurrent features of his thought. I allude to the precise concrete argumentative verve of his writings, but do not attempt to replicate it. I have tried to place his criticism of the literary theory of Beardsley and Wimsatt, the social taxonomies of Goffman and Riesman, the potential

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for anti-scientific obscurantism of Wittgenstein and the psychoanalytic theory of Freud within a coherent approach to philosophy. I have also situated that approach within a wider turn in mid-century Oxford to exploring the nature and limits of philosophy as a humanistic discipline. I would argue that Cioffi belongs with Berlin, Hampshire and Williams as a major figure in this return to humanism. Philosophical assessments of Cioffi are likely to give priority to his long critical engagement with Freud and psychoanalysis, but a broader appreciation would focus on aspects of his thought that enabled him to shape and develop this criticism. Of crucial importance was his inclusion of poetics and rhetoric within the scope of the philosophically significant analysis of language. His approach to language offers legitimacy within analytic philosophy for the exploration of humanistic ideals of depth and complexity to supplement and rival scientific ideals of explanatory simplicity and elegance. It also provides room for his exploration, following Wittgenstein, of reflectively making sense of things as central to philosophy, a theme independently explored in the recent work on metaphysics by A. W. Moore. Ensuing questions of how we should understand reflection, how we might employ standards of persuasion in assessing claims to make sense of things, how we should determine the place of different scientific findings in helping or hindering our struggles with what troubles us as human beings and how we should restrain our propensity to theorize by looking at disparate cases are all ways in which Cioffi provides guidance for philosophy as a humanistic discipline. In pondering his own legacy, he was fond of quoting another of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms: ‘Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was – nobody any longer wanted to be that.’ Cioffi hoped that some might be drawn to the honest man that he was.

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Major Works of Frank Cioffi Readers are likely to gain most by turning first to two collections of Frank Cioffi’s essays Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience and Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, for which the contents are listed below. Borger, Robert and Cioffi, Frank, eds, Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). Cioffi, Frank, ed., Freud (London: Macmillan, 1973). — Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1998). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Why are we still arguing about Freud? Wittgenstein’s Freud Freud and the idea of a pseudoscience Wollhem on Freud The myth of Freud’s hostile reception Symptoms, wishes and actions Was Freud a liar? From Freud’s ‘scientific fairy tale’ to Masson’s politically correct one Psychoanalysis, pseudoscience and testability ‘Exegetical myth-making’ in Grünbaum’s indictment of Popper and exoneration of Freud 11. Explanation and biography: a conversation 12. Through a psychoanalytoscope: Bouveresse on Wittgenstein’s Freud 13. A final accounting — Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Introduction 1. Information, contemplation and social life 2. Aesthetic explanation and aesthetic perplexity 3. Wittgenstein and the fire festivals 4. When do empirical methods bypass the problems which trouble us? 5. Explanation, self-clarification and solace 6. Wittgenstein on making homeopathic magic clear

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7. Wittgenstein and obscurantism 8. Wittgenstein on Freud’s ‘abominable mess’ 9. Congenital transcendentalism and ‘the loneliness which is the truth about things’ 10. Explanation and self-clarification in Frazer 11. Explanation and self-clarification in Freud 12. Conclusion: Two cheers for the coroner’s report — The evasiveness of Freudian apologetic, in Ann Casement, ed., Who Owns Psychoanalysis? (London: Karnac, 2000). — The propadeutic delusion: What can ‘ethogenic science’ add to our prereflective understanding of ‘loss of dignity, humiliation, and expressive failure’? in History of the Human Sciences (2000), 13 (1), pp. 108–23. — Wittgenstein and the riddle of life, in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, ed., The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). — Wittgenstein on ‘the sort of explanation one longs for’, in Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, ed., Perspicuous Presentations: Essays on Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). — Making the Unconscious Conscious: Wittgenstein versus Freud, in Philosophia (2009), 37 (4), pp. 565–88. — Overviews: What are they of and what are they for? in William Day and Victor J. Krebs, eds, Seeing Things Anew: New Essays on Aspect-Seeing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). — Wittgenstein’s non-explanatory ‘craving’, ‘discomforts’ and ‘satisfactions’, in Volker Munz, ed., Essays on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). — Pseudoscience: The case of Freud’s sexual etiology of the neuroses, in Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, eds, The Philosophy of Pseudoscience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

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Index Abbott, ‘Bud’ 91 Abu Hassan 12 Addison, Joseph 86 Aldrin, Buzz 65 All’s Well That Ends Well 17 Ames, Van Meter 55 Amiel 131 Amis, Kingsley 142 Anscombe, Elizabeth 7, 161, 165, 170 Argyle, Michael 4, 24 Aristotle 178 Arletty 94 Armstrong, Lance 32 Arnold, Matthew 131, 142 Atlas, Charles 168 Aubrey, John 12 Auden, W. H. 28, 85 Austen, Jane 37, 44, 86, 89 Austin, John 161, 164–5 Ayer, A. J. 121–2, 163, 167, 169 Bachelard, Gaston 7, 107 Bader, Douglas 18 Baker, Nicholson 86 Baldwin, James 22, 168, 169 Barbellion, W. N. P. 143, 144 Barnett, Isobel 35 Barrault, Jean-Louis 94 Barrett, Cyril 6 Barton, Ralph 137 Beardsley, Monroe 171, 181 Beerbohm, Max 39, 41, 85 Beery, Wallace 147 Beethoven, Ludwig von 19, 85 Bennett, Alan 13, 14, 18 Berenson, Bernard 35 Bergson, Henri 97 Berlin, Isaiah 36, 161, 165, 182 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 38

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Betjeman, John 142 Bierce, Ambrose 55 Blake, William 83 Blue, Lionel 169 Bonaparte, Joseph 52 Bonaparte, Napoleon 9, 52, 95, 96 Boswell, James 35, 64, 86, 157 Botticelli, Sandro 113 Brave New World 65 Brecht, Bertolt 124 Breuer, Josef 96 Brontë, Emily 150 Brown, Charlie 36 Browne, Sir Thomas 119 Browning, Robert 101, 102 Bryant, Jacob 107, 108, 111 Bullitt, W. C. 68 Bumke, Oswald 133 Bunnin, Nicholas 10 Bush, George W. 91–2 Bye Bye Braverman 23, 147 Byron, Lord 31, 63, 107–8, 111 Carné, Marcel 93 Carrington, Dora 134 Carroll, Lewis 157 Carteret, John 48 Cataline 86 Cézanne, Paul 49 Chaplin, Charlie 88 Chatterton, Thomas 31 Chekhov, Anton 37, 142–3, 148, 157 Cheyne, Dr. George 64 Christ entering Jerusalem (painting) 104 Churchill, Winston 52, 53 Cimarosa, Domenico 127 Cioffi, Frank L. 159 Cioffi, Lou 167

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186

Index

Clemenceau, Georges 138 Cobb, Richard 72, 79 Coleridge, S. T. 71 Collingwood, R. G. 72 Cook, Captain James 64 Cooper, Jackie 147 Costello, Lou 91 Cowley, Abraham 46 Crews, Frederick 8 Critique of the Power of Judgment 172 Croce, Benedetto 102 Crosby, Bing 76, 85 Dante 103, 168 Das Leben der Anderen (film) 85 Davis, Bette 12 Dawkins, Richard 72, 74, 75, 77, 104, 112 De Beauvoir, Simone 145 De la Mettrie, Julien Offray 61, 68 De Quincey, Thomas 73 De Staël, Madame 119 Death of Ivan Ilych 168 Diaghilev, Sergei 146 Dickens, Charles 47, 52, 64–5 his Scrooge and Marley 84, 89, 145, 180 Dilthey, Wilhelm 89 Dodds, E. R. 27 Donne, John 102, 147, 148 Dora (case history) 52 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 61, 66, 67 Doyle, A. Conan 69, 105 Dreyfus, Alfred 32 Dryden, John 102 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil 79 Du Camp, Maxime 48 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 58 Dunlap, Knight 141 Ecclesiastes 131 ‘Elephant Man’, the 67 Eliot, T. S. 102–3 , 114 , 115 , 116 , 127 , 128

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Elizabeth 1, Queen 12 Emerson, R. W. 148 Epicurus 37 Erasmus 61, 63 Falstaff 17, 94, 95, 98 Falstaffian 99 Farrell, Brian 166 Febvre, Lucien 57 Fitzgerald, Ella 76 Flaubert, Gustave 48, 55, 56, 143 Fliess, Wilhelm 95–6 Fontanelle, Bernard le Bovier de 61, 63, 74 Foot, Philippa 161, 165 Forster, E. M. 58 Frazer, J. G. 6, 10, 22, 105, 107, 176 Frege, Gottlob 161, 166 Freud, Sigmund 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 23, 25, 26, 51–2, 53, 56, 57, 58, 67, 68, 71, 77, 94, 95–6, 97, 99, 106, 107, 122, 125, 132, 133, 147, 158, 167, 170, 177–81 Freudian(s) 8, 11, 49, 52, 53, 96, 97 Freudianism 54 Freudianizing 53 Frost, Robert 35 Garbo, Greta 32 George III 48 Gibbon, Edward 117–19 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 136, 137 Gӧdel, Kurt 163 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 78 Goffman, Erving 11–18, 28, 31, 33, 58, 78, 89, 175, 181 Golden Bough, The 22, 105, 106, 176 Gosse, Edmund 85 Grant, Ulysses S. 32 Gray, Thomas 46, 47 Great Expectations 52, 180 Greene, Graham 67 Greenwood, Edward 3, 5, 10, 76 Grice, Paul 161, 164

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Index Grimm, The brothers 134 Gros, Louis 38 Grünbaum, Adolf 96 Gusdorf, George 25 Hamlet 113 the play 134, 145 Hampshire, Stuart 161, 165, 182 Harding, D. W. 49 Harré, Rom 31, 33, 34, 58, 78, 89 Harris, Frank 82–3 Hart, Moss 12 Hartley, David 71 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 57 Hazlitt, William 15–16, 46, 141 Heidegger, Martin 4, 32 Heller, Joseph 36 Helmholtz, Hermann von 78 Henry IV Part Two 94 Hillary, Richard 18 Hobbes, Thomas 94 Holmes, Sherlock 9, 24, 51, 69, 156 Homer 102–3, 107 Hopkins, G. M. 32, 113 Hopper, Edward 23 Horace 42 Horne Tooke, John 162 Housman, A. E. 31, 82–3 How to Do Things with Words 164–5 Hull, Clark 59 Hume, David 135, 141, 145 Husserl, Edmund 5, 115, 166 Huxley, Aldous 61, 62 Iliad, The 102, 108, 111 James, Alice 29 James, Henry 24, 25, 57, 117, 139, 159 James, William 5, 38, 43, 74, 114, 124, 139 Jesus 97, 173 Johnson, Dr Samuel 1, 6, 15, 46, 64, 66, 84, 85, 86, 124, 133, 142, 149, 158

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187

Jones, Seaborn 114 Jonson, Ben 58, 95 Joyce, James 22 Kafka, Franz 25 Kant, Immanuel 5, 172 Kaufman, George S. 12 Keats, John 63, 104 Kepler, Johannes 71 Khan-Du 32 Kierkegaard, Søren 29 King Lear 19, 44 Kinsey, Alfred 18, 67 La Bruyère, Jean de 45 Lakatos, Imre 177 Lamb, Charles 104 Language, Truth, and Logic 163 Larkin, Phillip 126, 142 Lawrence, D. H. 62–3, 75, 112, 150, 159 Lawrence, Freida 63 Lawson, Nigel 170 Leavis, F. R. 89, 114, 149, 170 Lee, Robert E. 32 Lefebvre, Georges 72, 79 Leibniz, Gottfried 162 Levi, Primo 124 Lichtenberg, G. C. 71, 171, 182 Lindsay, Vachel 136 Linnaeus, Carl 71 Lonely Crowd, The 175 Lowe, Arther 87 Luckács, György 73, 102–3, 107 Lucretius 37, 141 Lucretian 144, 157 Ludwig, Emil 52 Lumet, Sidney 23 Luther, Martin 52 Macaulay, Rose 135 Macaulay, Thomas B.48, 72, 74, 95, 96 Mahler, Gustav 26 Mailer, Norman 98 Maine de Biran 121

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188 Mann, Sir Robert 48 Mann, Thomas 52, 77 Mansfield, Katherine 63, 148 Margalit, Avishai 66 Markfield, Wallace 23 Marshall, George 118 Marx, Karl 78, 102 (Marxism) Mauriac, François 125 Measure for Measure 144 Medawar, Peter 7 Meredith, George 158 Mérimée, Prosper 25, 54, 180 Michelangelo 74 Mickey Mouse 3, 151, 168 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 66 Milgram, Stanley 78 Milton, John 86, 102 Mitford, Nancy 175 Montaigne, Michel de 129 Montesquieu 38 Morton, Sir Albert 134 Much Ado About Nothing 84 Müller-Lyer experiment 123 Murdoch, Iris 161, 165, 170 Murgier, Henri 48 Murphy, Audie 153 Murray, Gilbert 27 Nash, John 36 Necker, Jacques 119 Newton, Isaac 71, 104 Newton, John 114 Nietzsche, Friedrich 5, 62, 63, 73, 132, 143 Nixon, Richard 32 Ortega y Gasset, José 33 Orwell, George 47, 122, 153 Othello 16 Oxford, Earl of 12 Painter, George 84 Parker, Dorothy 136, 137 Pascal, Blaise 74, 121, 157

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Index Pears, David 74 Po-Chü-i 49 Pope, Alexander 62 Popper, Karl 170, 177 Powys, J. C. 119 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The 175 Prometheus 132 Proust, Marcel 4, 19, 45, 46–7, 56, 83, 84, 89, 111, 112, 113 Proust’s narrator 23, 26, 56, 84, 112, 113, 114 Quinton, Anthony 24, 170 Rabelais 57 Raphael 38 Renard, Jules 111 Rice, Condoleeza 91–2 Richards, I. A. 128–9, 144 Ricks, Christopher 14 Riesman, David 14, 175, 181 Right Stuff, The 65 Roland, Madame 38 Roubiliac, Louis-François 38 Roudinesco, Elisabeth 9 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 25 Rowse, A. L. 36 Ruskin, John 111 Russell, Bertrand 125, 135, 161, 167 Rutherford, Margaret 156 Rutherford, Mark 44, 45 Ryle, Gilbert 161, 164 Sachs, Harvey 101 Saint Nicolas 104 Sallust 86 Sanders, George 136 Santa Claus 104 Santayana, George 55, 72, 108, 158 Sartre, Jean-Paul 91 Savage, Richard 46 Scheherazade principle, the 125 Schiller, Friedrich 71

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Index Schopenhauer, Arthur 124, 131 Searle, John 170 Seward, Anna 142 Shakespeare, William 4, 12, 19, 32, 37, 54, 57, 58, 74, 84, 89, 95 Shapiro, James 57 Shelley, P. B. 62, 63, 64, 101 Shenstone, William 46, 47 Simmel, Georg 115 Skinner, B. F. 59 Smith, Adam 86 Smythies, Yorick 170 Sonnets, Shakespeare’s 57, 58, 84 Sophocles 34, 131, 135, 138 Sorrows of Young Werther 66 Southampton, Earl of 58 Spence, Kenneth 59 Spinoza, Baruch 71, 84 Stendhal 38, 54, 127 Stephen, Leslie 56 Stevens, Wallace 147 Stigma 175 Storr, Anthony 53 Strachey, Lytton 134 Strawson, Peter 161, 164 Strindberg, August 131 Swift, Jonathan 131 Swinburne, Algernon 85 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 102 Thompson, Hunter S. 136 Tickell, Thomas 86 Tolstoy, Leo 4, 19, 37, 89, 117, 142, 144, 148, 168 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 162, 170 Tracy, Dick 101, 116 Troilus and Cressida 32 Trotsky, Leon 168

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Turgenev, Ivan 37 Twain, Mark 138 Updike, John 84, 86 Waismann, Friedrick 7, 170 Walpole, Horace 48 Wayne, John 103 Wells, H. G. 71 West, Nathanael 124 West, Rebecca 68 Whewell, William 73 Wilde, Oscar 58, 82 Williams, Bernard 161, 165, 182 Wilson, Colin 31 Wilson, Edmund 55 Wilson, Woodrow 68 Wimsatt, W. K. 171, 181 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 14, 19, 22, 25, 28, 29, 31, 41, 46, 55, 74, 76, 77, 81, 92, 94, 105–6 on Frazer and Freud 107, 111, 112, 117, 118, 120, 122, 129, 146, 157, 161, 162, 170–1, 173 Wittgensteinian 54, 66, 77, 112, 158 Wittgensteinians 44, 97 Wolf Man, the 27, 133 Woolf, Virginia 148 Woolwich, Bishop of (John Robinson) 42 Wordsworth, Christopher 73 Wordsworth, William 54, 73, 104, 149 Wotton, Sir Henry 134 Yeats, W. B. 74, 158 Zola, Emile 56 Zoshchenko, Michail 26

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