What are you reading? John Irving’s fictional landscape

Presented to the Club on June 13, 2011 by David T. Noyes



"What are you reading?" Such was the signature greeting of my mentor, Dr. Guy W. Leadbetter, Chief of Urology at the University of Vermont Medical School. Of course, despite the rigorous health sciences program of Medical School, and a residency training program consuming 80 or more hours a week caring for patients, he was not referring to academics. He wanted to know what I was reading for fun. What imaginary story of intrigue was capturing my interest? Or, perhaps, whose biography was garnering my attention. He didn’t care that the book might not be great or famous or even popular — only that he felt it was critically important to be stimulating one’s mind with something other than medicine. He himself was a great fan of Louis L’Amour — the American author who described his novels as “Frontier Stories.” I believe Dr. Leadbetter claimed to have read all 105 of L’Amour’s books.



This was the same man who, following any conference presentation, challenged each individual in the audience with the requirement to have a question at the ready. His caveat: “If you don’t have a question, then you weren’t paying attention.” (Kind of reminds you a bit of the Monday Evening Club, doesn’t it?)



When I entered medical school, I was certain I wanted to be a pediatrician. At that time, the third year curriculum required two months of OB/GYN, two months of psychiatry, two months of pediatrics, three months of medicine and three months of surgery. After serving on the Pediatric hospital ward for the first of the two required months, I was even surer that this was the career path I would take. However, the second month in a local pediatrician’s office, proved to be my undoing — one screaming child after another. Talk about cluster headaches at the end of the day! I simply couldn’t manage it.



It was during my surgery rotation, that I first encountered Dr. Leadbetter. At that time, he was in his early 50s. He had written five lead articles for the New England Journal of Medicine. He had conceived, and invented two different pediatric urologic operations — one for severe incontinence, the other for ureteral reflux. Tireless in his pursuit of achieving the best possible outcomes for his patients, he expected 110 percent effort from his staff, but only because he lead by example. A giant in the field, he would go on to become the president of the American Urologic Association.



Yet there was a certain air of the absent minded professor about him. In those days smoking was allowed in the hospital (although not in the patient rooms). He would usually be smoking his pipe when he arrived for compulsory Saturday morning teaching rounds. The residents would gather outside each patient’s room and discuss why the patient was in the hospital, providing up to the minute details of his or her current condition. The entire entourage would then go into the room to visit with the patient and learn small, but important nuances from the master. One day Dr Leadbetter simply stuffed his pipe in his back pocket just before entering one the rooms. He must have thought it was out, but ten minutes or so later, it was obvious that his pants were smoking! He was on fire!



Also, in contrast to the usual image of a surgical department chief, he always was sincere and gentle in his conversation.



I chose to spend a one week elective with Dr. Leadbetter, and I became hooked. I wanted to become a urologist and complete a training program under his watchful guidance. Perhaps, we all have had such figures appear in our lives at crucial turning points. One of my most treasured possessions is a photograph from the final year of my training, of Dr. Leadbetter and me at an operating room table working together on a patient. I keep it on my office bookshelf.



We have all heard it said that a given critic “couldn’t put a book down.” I’m not that person. In fact, it’s fair to say that I have never read a book I couldn’t put down. If I’m reading in the evening after a long day, I’m quite likely to fall asleep even during a very exciting plot twist. On vacation, relaxed, reading mid afternoon in a comfortable chair, I’m very likely to find myself napping mid chapter. Furthermore, I find I don’t have the patience to read, even the most intriguing novel, for more than an hour or two at a time. I have to walk, stretch or do something physical before I can sit back down again with the book. And I gave myself permission many years ago to put a book down permanently if it wasn’t entertaining. I don’t feel the compulsion to slog through a book just because someone else has proclaimed it to be good. Most recently I found this to be true with both Thomas Pynchon’s recent works: the 773-page Mason and Dixon, and the 1083-page Against the Day. Both highly acclaimed, both with a scattered multitude of characters and little to no common thread tying scenes together. Umberto Eco’s 1983 novel The Name of the Rose was the last book I forced myself to finish.



Perhaps at some point in your life, a specific novel has held you spellbound. You feel a special affinity for the author’s point of view. Or you develop an intimate appreciation for the characters. John Irving’s 1989 novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was such a book for me. As a product of the anti-war, antiestablishment 60’s, and as a man with a Congregationalist faith, I found special resonance with Irving’s observations. In the Forward to the novel, Irving credits Frederick Buechner, his former teacher at Exeter, for his help with the manuscript and the Preface includes the following Buechner quote: “Not the least of my problems is that I can hardly even imagine what kind of an experience a genuine, self-authenticating religious experience would be. Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.”



Prominently noted throughout the novel is the incompetence of the national leaders of the day--especially Johnson’s expansion of the Vietnam War, to the ultimate sacrifice of 58,000 young men. JFK’s trysts with Marilyn Monroe (and Jackie’s apparent willingness to be deceived), receive the reader’s attention. Irving satirizes such American phenomena as teenagers with their rock music and marijuana; and mocks the onset of sycophantic television evangelists selling Jesus like junk food. (I’m reminded of one of my favorite bumper stickers of the era — TELEVANGELISTS DO MORE THAN LAY PEOPLE).



Irving gives us Owen Meany, a young man from a modest and unpretentious background. Owen always does and says the right thing. He is aided by prophetic powers and a single-mindedness that makes him capable of achievements far beyond expectation. He can’t explain his actions, except to note that he is confident that his experiences will be needed some day. Throughout Owen’s life, he is continually practicing for what turns out to be the courageous event that ultimately culminates in his heroic death.

Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes once said that “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.” And so, exactly 20 years after the publication of this Irving novel, we have the saga of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landing his US Airways plane in the Hudson River in January of 2009, saving all 155 passengers. Like Owen Meany, his whole life seems to have been in training for this event — he graduated for the US Air Force Academy, where he was one of only a handful of cadets to participate in the glider program and by the time he was a senior he was instructing the younger cadets in the technique. At graduation, he received the Outstanding Cadet Airmanship Award as the top flier at the Academy. Sullenberger served as a fighter pilot for the Air Force, piloting the McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II from 1975 to 1980. He advanced to become a flight leader and a training officer. While in the Air Force, he was a member of the official aircraft accident investigation board. Since 2007 he had run his own safety consulting business, Safety Reliability Methods Inc., which provided "emergency management, safety strategies and performance monitoring to the aviation industry.” He had also been involved in a number of accident investigations conducted by the USAF and the National Transportation and Safety Board. He served the Air Line Pilots Safety Association as safety chairman, accident investigator, and national technical committee member. Instrumental in developing and implementing the Crew Resource Management manual that is used by US Airways, he has taught the course to hundreds of other airline members. And so, indeed, Mr. Sullenberger’s heroic actions and his lifelong preparation for just such a calamity, provide a prime example of Life imitating Art.



When interviewed in 1989, at the time of publication of this novel, Irving reflected: “Like most teenagers, for 19 years I sat in church and hated every minute of it. But the accumulated time takes a toll or leaves you with images that cast a doubt on one’s former atheism.” It was the element of precognition in the Gospels that appealed to his artistic imagination. “One event that always got me was that Jesus told his disciples that they were going to betray him.” Owen Meany issues a series of prophecies — including one of his own death — that become reality. “What degree of religious belief I can manage owes as much to personal experience as it does to all those years of training within the church. When I am moved to see beyond my usual doubt, when I am moved to something that approaches real faith, it seems to me, I am basing those instincts for belief on personal experience as much as I am on any formal religious training.”



Irving’s eleventh novel, Until I Found You, gives us a protagonist, Jack Burns, whose mother is a famous tattoo artist. She drags him as a child around through various tattoo capitals in Europe while searching for his father, a church organist, who is addicted to being tattooed. And so Irving writes: “In this way, in increments both measurable and not, our childhood is stolen from us — not always in one momentous event but often in a series of small robberies, which add up to the same loss.” Eventually, Jack goes on to become a famous movie star playing mostly female roles. But his psychiatrist bluntly asks: “Is it because of your mother’s lies to you, or your missing father, that you are an unanchored ship — in danger of drifting wherever the wind or the currents, or the next sexual encounter take you?”



Many have surmised that this novel is Irving’s attempt to resolve the themes of his life and work. His biological father, John Wallace Blunt, divorced Irving’s mother, Frances, before he was born. Blunt disappeared from his son’s life and went on to become a hero during WWII. Frances remarried, this time to Colin Irving, a Slavic languages and literature major at Harvard and a Russian history instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy. John Wallace Blunt, Jr. thus became John Irving. “I have never lost a single night’s sleep wondering or imagining who my biological father is,” Irving says: “I passed up several opportunities I could have had to confront him. I wasn’t interested.” He said of searching for one’s biological roots: “It’s not going to do any good. Unless you’re looking for something to attach your victimhood to, which is a common ailment of the contemporary time.”



In a passage from The World According to Garp, Irving writes: “If Garp could have been granted one vast naïve wish, it would have been that he could make the world safe. For children and for grownups. The world struck Garp as unnecessarily perilous for both.” But, Irving claims, he simply uses the theme of an absent parent for the same reason that Charles Dickens did; because orphans make for good stories.



The family lived with Irving’s grandmother in Exeter, N.H. until John was almost seven years old. From this experience, his grandmother, who had three daughters and no sons, often told him how proud she was of “her boy.” She had graduated from Wellesley with an English Literature major, but apparently she did not enjoy Irving’s work. She read his first novel and stopped after that (which Irving has said is probably a good thing). She told him that she disapproved of the language and the subject matter. Furthermore, from reviews that she had read about the other books, it looked to her as though things did not improve with maturity. She made no effort to read the subsequent four novels that followed the first and died in l982 almost reaching her 100th birthday.



Irving says he would not have qualified for admission to Exeter via the normal admissions process. He was a weak student due to dyslexia, although no one knew that at the time. He gained entrance as a faculty child. Because he failed both Latin and math his senior year, he was required to remain at the Academy for an unprecedented fifth year, graduating in 1961. When he was asked to recall his Exeter experience, he said: “I’m eternally grateful to the Academy for its rigorousness. I’m a hard worker, and I had to be at Exeter — needing five years to complete the four-year program. What Exeter can’t necessarily prepare a student for, are the kinds of experiences the characters in my novels generally face: sorrow, loss, grief, or dysfunction. No school does.”



Exeter was where Irving came to love wrestling. He was team captain in his senior year and actively competed until he was 34. “My life in wrestling was one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline. I believe that my life as a writer consists of one-eighth talent and seven-eighths discipline too.” In the movie, The World According to Garp, Irving plays the referee because: “it was a non speaking part,” and the original actor proved to be inept because he had no wrestling experience. Irving was voted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992.



From Exeter, he went on to the University of Pittsburgh, predominantly so he could pursue his wrestling ambitions and compete with the top athletes. However, when it became apparent to him that he would be, at best, a backup for an All American at any of his possible weight classes, he opted to transfer to the University of New Hampshire. Here he received a graduation prize in recognition of a “high degree of creativity in an academic program.” He married his first wife and became a father while he was still an undergraduate. Following graduation from UNH he entered the University of Iowa’s writing workshop, where he was mentored by Kurt Vonnegut from 1965 until 1967. (you may recall that we heard Bob Anderson quote Vonnegut in his paper earlier this year) He could only find time to write two hours a day, waking at 5 a.m. for the two prized hours of peace and quiet before his son, Colin, awoke. Irving supported his family with jobs in the university library restacking books, teaching one undergraduate writing course, selling cowhorns, bells, stadium cushions and pennants at the home football games, and waiting tables in “a nauseating restaurant out on the Coralville strip.” He never imagined that he would be able to make a living from his writing, but Vonnegut had told him: “You may be surprised. I think capitalism is going to treat you okay.”



After Iowa, he moved back east and taught at Windham College in Putney, Vermont (no longer in existence), and then at Mt. Holyoke College. Subsequently he went back to Iowa as a teacher from 1972 to 1975 where his students included: T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ron Hansen, Douglas Unger, Kent Haruf (rhymes with sheriff) and Susan Taylor Chehak.



Until Irving’s fourth novel — The World According to Garp — vaulted him into celebrity in 1978,  he usually had a full time job teaching creative writing or coaching wrestling. His meager income was supplemented with awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship during the preceding 11 years.



Irving divorced his first wife after 18 years of marriage in 1982. Five years later he married his literary agent — a Toronto native, 12 years his younger. Irving says of the experience: “There are only two ways you can feel, I suppose, when you have a second marriage and start a second family. You either feel you are lucky to have had that chance or you feel you’re a damn fool to have made the same mistake again.” Irving’s habits are a bit different now, as he writes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., then works out in a gym that is part of his house where he has a wrestling floor mat. Afterward he usually prepares dinner, as he is the family’s sole chef.



Although he won an Academy Award in 2000 for the best adapted screenplay taken from his 1985 book The Cider House Rules, Irving says that he thinks “books are better.”



In 1984 came A son of the Circus, set in India and Toronto, and Mr. Irving’s only attempt at a mystery novel. Readers are treated to his usual vast array of characters. These include a well dressed, dignified Indian orthopedic surgeon researching the gene responsible for achondroplastic dwarfism, identical twins separated at birth (one an Indian film star, the other an American Jesuit), a child prostitute who may be HIV positive, a beggar boy whose foot has been crushed by an elephant, transvestites and transsexuals., and a drug filled dildo carried by an American hippie. It is here that I came across one of the simplest but most frightening lines of Irving’s fiction. The protagonist is alone in the bedroom of a prostitute. He hears the killer coming down the hall and he furtively seeks a place to hide, choosing a closet with only a curtain for a door. As the killer enters the room, Irving writes: “the only sound you can hear is the sound of someone trying not to make a sound.” Who amongst us, in childhood games of Kick the Can or Flashlight Tag, has not been in the same plight — trying desperately not to make a sound!



However, despite the bizarre and violent plot twists, Mr. Irving again explores some serious issues — especially the theme of perpetual exile. (The book is dedicated to Salman Rushdie.) The Indian orthopedist finds that he is not comfortable in his adopted home of Toronto where he is subject to racial abuse. Nor is he comfortable in his native India where he finds the country’s misery and chaos oppressive.



Irving also portrays the Indian circus as a social welfare institution where many performers are children who are sold by their parents as a way to see that they are cared for. His circus descriptions are reminiscent of the circus scenes of the highly acclaimed Canadian author, Robertson Davies, in his series of novels, The Deptford Trilogy. Irving has said that he does not believe in the mantra of many writing teachers — that an author must write about what he or she knows. This novel would seem to prove the point, as Mr. Irving has never been to India.



Irving says: “I’m not the guy to ask about American literature. I feel out of place in it, and have always been more at home in the British novel.” He admires 19th century authors such as: Dickens, Hardy, Trollope, Turgenev, Flaubert and Tolstoy. “I am a conscious imitator of those forms of the novel: narrative, large, full of plot and fate, and of characters who strive to be more than ordinary.” American influences make up a small portion of his list of favorites. He cites Melville, but especially Hawthorne and says: “I am not a Faulkner-Hemmingway-Fitzgerald person. Perhaps, in part, because I was forced to read that stuff in school when I was too young to appreciate it, and hated it. Vonnegut and Heller mean much more to me than Twain.”



Irving begins his memoir Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, with a disclaimer: that all memoirs are false. “A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have. Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven’t had the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary, strict toiling with the language; for me this means writing and rewriting the sentences until they sound as spontaneous as good conversation.”



Irving says of his writing: “My instinct is to reach you emotionally, which includes wanting to make you laugh, but also wanting to move you, to make you cry, to hurt you. I’m not an intellectual, I’m a storyteller. And, as such, I’m a craftsman. I care very much about building characters to a point where you care deeply about them, and when you lose them, it’s like losing someone you knew.”



Irving, like Dickens, uses the backdrop of the societal ills of our time in which to display his novels. He creates distinctly unique and memorable characters. His themes have to do with how his characters handle loss or the effort to control some part of life that is, ultimately, random and uncontrollable. Perhaps his popularity arises because we see parts of ourselves mirrored in his fiction? We certainly are part of his landscape.



So Gentlemen, what are you reading?



Material for this essay was obtained from the New York Times Book Reviews, Phillips Exeter Academy Alumni Bulletins, Mr. Irving’s memoirs, and, of course, his wonderful novels.

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No longer a god: How Hirohito’s image was refurbished after World War II

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Presented to the Club by Martin C. Langeveld on May 16, 2011



From December 7, 1941, until August 1945, the personification of America’s enemy in the Pacific War was Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Public officials, military leaders and the press rarely missed an opportunity to tie Hirohito’s name to the struggle against Japan. For example, General Douglas MacArthur, speaking in March 1942 to the Australian parliament, promised the lawmakers “there can be no compromise . . . We shall die . . . in the fight to drive Emperor Hirohito’s invasion armies back out of the southwest Pacific.” War correspondents were fond of language like, “Hirohito’s invasion hordes were reported striking peak fury down the Malaya peninsula today.”



Often, Hirohito’s name was being uttered in the same breath as the other Axis leaders: “Mr. Hirohito, Mr. Hitler and Mr. Mussolini will be entirely eliminated from the picture—and that soon!” the mayor of Pittsburgh said in a speech. “Mr. Hitler and Mr. Hirohito, take notice!” the Christian Science Monitor started a story about military preparedness. “Hirohito’s invasion hordes were reported striking peak fury down the Malaya peninsula today,” the Associated Press reported.



“Blame Hitler, Hirohito and Benito! . . .Don’t blame your grocer!” was the headline on a 1942 newspaper advertisement from Heinz, explaining why tin rationing might squeeze supplies of some of the “57” varieties.



In 1944, this ad headline in the Spokane Spokesman Review offered an incentive to buying $18.75 worth of war bonds: “How’d you like to send your compliments to Hirohito on a bomb? Well, here’s your chance . . . There’s a parachute bomb that’s all yours, just waiting for your personal greetings to be added to start it on its way.”



But while that kind of rhetoric continued, by 1945 there were hints that Hirohito might not be in the same archfiend league as Hitler and Mussolini.



The government had begun to hint at a go-easy on Hirohito policy, and some columnists were beginning to warm up to it. Direct military attacks and even propaganda attacks on him were being avoided out of concern that doing so would elevate the conflict to a religious war and increase the fanaticism of the Japanese people, and because the word for unconditional surrender would ultimately have to come from the emperor’s lips.



“We confess we are not convinced what should be done with Hirohito,” editorialized the Rock Hill Herald of South Carolina in mid-1945. “We do not know how much responsibility for the war is on his shoulders. It is possible he may be the mere figurehead he is often described to us."



This doubt was by no means unanimous, however. The Japanese capitulation came on August 15, 1945, and American occupation began August 28. Just weeks later, on September 18, Georgia Senator Richard Russell called for immediate prosecution of the emperor for war crimes. Anti-Hirohito sentiment in the U.S. was intense. Polls taken in June 1945 showed three-quarters of Americans in favor of severe punishment for Hirohito as a war criminal, with nearly 50 percent favoring execution, while only 7 percent favored leaving him in office.



A barrage of editorials and columns calling for the arrest, imprisonment and ultimate execution of the emperor continued for several months after the Japanese surrender, even though President Truman and the occupation chief, General MacArthur, had by then made clear that he would stay.



The St. Louis Post-Dispatch thundered that retaining the emperor “would perpetuate…the fanatic delusion of imperial divinity and keep unbroken the thread of dynasty leading again inevitably to war.” Others focused on the fact that Hirohito had failed to use the actual word “surrender” in his broadcast to the Japanese nation. The New York Times noted that reliance on Hirohito “appears to be [strengthening] the Emperor’s autocracy.” And Roscoe Drummond, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, asked “By retaining the Emperor, are the Allies promoting anything more than a palace-approved façade of Japanese democracy, behind which the Japanese imperialists will be even freer to work than were the German militarists behind the weak Weimar Republic?”



But by early 1946, a remarkable change in sentiment had come about. In its issue of February 4, 1946, Life magazine published a photographic essay, “Sunday at Hirohito’s”, showing the emperor watering his plants and relaxing with his family. “He is a model family man,” Life wrote, “aged 44, neat and nervous, methodical, thrifty, decent, with a strong voice and handshake, and fond of his wife (a love choice), his children and his mother, who was opposed to the war. He admires Abraham Lincoln…he has read the works of Longfellow and Whittier.” In the final picture in the essay, Hirohito is shown reading The New York Times and Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for U.S. service personnel.



In May, the New York Times, in a story headlined “At Long Last, Hirohito Begins to Enjoy Life,” published a photo of the emperor and his son splashing in the surf. And U.S. opinion polls, which had shown practically no support for keeping Hirohito on the throne in mid-1945, showed in mid-1946 a 60 percent approval rating for MacArthur’s handling of the occupation, of which Hirohito’s retention was a central tenet. That support grew to 81 percent by 1949.



What changed? How did the emperor acquire these new clothes, and what transformed the attitude of US media and citizens? Indeed, why did the Allies decide to retain the emperor? And did Hirohito do anything that actually merited his lenient treatment?



To explore these questions, first it’s important to understand the Japanese perceptions at the time of the “emperor system”, or the Japanese national polity as it is often referred to.



Every country has a polity, as do many institutions such as churches. The word means a system of governance but typically it refers also to the basis of its legitimacy. In the U.S., our polity is based on the statement in the Constitution’s preamble that “We the People” are the source of all authority.



In the Japanese polity, as understood especially by Japan’s wartime military and civil leadership, all authority flowed from the emperor, and a Japanese government without an emperor was unthinkable. Contrast this with the European constitutional monarchies, where royal families are retained out of tradition and even genuine affection, but where few citizens would consider it unthinkable to switch to a non-monarchical form of statehood.



The Japanese word generally translated as “national polity” is Kokutai, but a great deal of meaning is packed into that word. The principles of Kokutai have origins deep in Japanese history, but in order to consolidate power around it, in 1937 the government ordered a committee of scholars to codify the Kokutai principles into a booklet (Kokutai no Hongi, or Fundamentals of our National Polity), millions of copies of which were distributed. Proceeding from essentially religious or metaphysical assumptions, rather than logic and reason, it became the basis for every aspect of domestic and foreign policy, as well as of Japanese civilization and culture. Kokutai implied not a constitutional monarchy, but an emperor-centered state in which the emperor was above the constitution. The “imperial way” was embedded in kokutai as a motivating theology that penetrated every aspect of Japanese life.



Lester Brooks, in his book called “Behind Japan’s Surrender”, described Hirohito’s status in this system as one of “supremely paradoxical fiction.”



Brooks wrote:

Because the Emperor was head of the ‘national family’ and all Japanese (except naturalized ones) were related by blood to him, unblinking, wholehearted belief was given to such slogans as Emperor and People are One. Through ages eternal, past and future, each Japanese had a place in the supreme scheme of things. And the Emperor was the pole star by which he could orient himself and to which he could direct his devotion. It was the combination of three things deriving from this that made the Japanese character distinctly Japanese: unswerving loyalty to the Emperor system, deep conviction of their mission on earth, and belief that their inherited, divinely given qualities were superior.

The Japanese constitution, “given” to his subjects by Hirohito’s grandfather, the Emperor Meiji, stated “The Emperor is Heaven-descended, divine and sacred; he is preeminent above His subjects. He must be reverenced and is inviolable.”



In other words, the Emperor was understood to be a living god. And yet, his status as supreme commander of the armed forces was a title without actual authority, and his supremacy over the civilian cabinet was similarly constrained through an elaborate set of rituals, guardians and procedural mechanisms. While the emperor’s signature was required on direct orders (called rescripts) from time to time, in actuality the emperor had no ability to control policy or actions. This had been the case, to a greater or lesser degree, for more than 1000 years until 1868, during which shoguns and samurai ruled Japan and often kept emperors in seclusion and poverty. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration eliminated the shogun and returned the country to a powerful emperor system, but with the Meiji Constitution of 1890, which remained in force through World War II, an elected parliament assumed primary authority and the emperor’s powers were limited by the requirement that any order he issued needed to be signed by a “Minister of State.” And as a practical matter, orders always originated from the government bureaucracy rather than with from the palace.



So the “supremely paradoxical fiction” of the emperor was that he was the head of state, but he was not; all authority flowed from him, but it did not. The Allies began to understand this as early as 1943, and incorporated it into their postwar planning even as they allowed the public and the media to continue another fiction, the demonization of Hirohito.



Historians have mixed views on whether Hirohito was an active participant in the pursuit of what in Japan was called the Greater East Asia War, including its antecedents the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and the war against the Republic of China launched in 1937. He did not object to either incursion, and his questions about the Chinese war dealt with how long it might take, and whether the Soviet Union might become involved. He authorized war against the United States, but said after the war that if he had not, there would have been a coup d’etat including complete with his assassination.



With his network of advisors and private intelligence channels, it’s likely that Hirohito, despite his isolation, always had a good sense of which way the wind was blowing; and by the summer of 1945, he had become convinced that Japan should end the war on any terms possible — although there is a current of historical opinion that says Hirohito actually delayed peace by waiting too long to break with his government’s militarists.



In any event, by midsummer the emperor’s views, those of his closest advisor, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal, Koichi Kido, and of the Prime Minister, Kantaro Suzuki, had begun to coincide around the view that the war needed to be brought to a close.



In early August, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the issuance of the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies, Kido and Suzuki engineered the convening of an Imperial Conference to consider next steps. This in itself was not unusual. Typically, the conference brought together a dozen top military and civilian leaders; the emperor would listen in silence to a discussion of the issues, and would assent to whatever decisions emerged. At this conference, held late on the night of August 9 in a bomb shelter deep beneath the Imperial Palace, that’s what most in attendance expected.



The discussion revolved around possible conditions for Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam terms, which called for Japan’s capitulation, occupation by the Allies, the reduction of her territory to the principal islands of Japan, complete disarmament, and the punishment of war criminals. Some in the Japanese leadership hoped to mitigate the impact of these terms by attaching conditions, which included the continuation of the imperial family, the disarmament of the armed forces by Japan herself, the trial of war criminals by Japan herself, and a limitation on the duration and extent of occupation.



Two hours into the imperial conference, there was no resolution in sight. Some of the leaders, including foreign minister Shigenori Togo, were realists, willing to limit the conditions to retention of the Emperor system, while others, hoping to protract the war, favored listing all of the conditions. Finally, in an unprecedented, but premeditated step, Suzuki addressed the deity seated at the head of the table: “Your Imperial decision is requested as to which proposal should be adopted, the foreign minister’s or the one with the four conditions.” Then, the emperor-god spoke to the shocked group.



“Then I will state my opinion,” he said.

I agree with the foreign minister. My reasons are as follows. After serious consideration of conditions facing Japan both at home and abroad, I have concluded that to continue this war can mean only destruction for the homeland and more bloodshed and cruelty in the world. I cannot bear to have my innocent people suffer further. Ending the war is the only way to restore world peace and relieve the nation for the terrible suffering it is undergoing.” He countered the military men’s suggestions for a final, decisive battle that might allow Japan to negotiate better terms by citing a number of specific promises and projections that the military had not lived up to.

He continued,

I feel great pain when I think of those who have served me so faithfully: the soldiers and sailor who have been killed or wounded in distant battles, destitute families who have lost all their possessions — and often their lives as well — in air raids on the homeland. Indeed, disarmament of my brave and loyal military is excruciating to me. It is equally unbearable that those who have rendered me devoted service should be considered war criminals. However, for the sake of the country it cannot be helped. To relieve the people and to maintain the nation we must bear the unbearable . . . All of you, I think, will worry about me in this situation. But it does not matter what will become of me. Determined, as I have stated, I have decided to bring the war to an end immediately. For this reason I agree with the foreign minister’s proposal.

He had spoken for nearly half an hour. It was the longest public speech in his life to that point. Having achieved his objective, Suzuki immediately adjourned the conference. Some of the military leaders, still hoping for a way around the imperial command, looked for ways to delay. It took five more days, and considerable palace intrigue, for the emperor’s decision to be ratified by the cabinet, for it to be transmitted to the Allies through neutral Swedish and Swiss diplomatic channels, for the allies to transmit a response, for the language of that response to be parsed and discussed, and finally for the emperor to record a message to his people for broadcast over state radio. In the meantime, a group of army colonels attempted to engineer a last-ditch coup, and actually succeeded in penetrating the imperial palace grounds with the aim of taking the emperor prisoner. They also invaded the radio headquarters, seeking to prevent the broadcast of the speech. But in the end the uprising was put down, and mid-day on August 15, for the first time ever, the people of Japan heard the voice of the sacred crane, the Showa Emperor, speaking to them directly.



It was not a message written for immediate understanding, but for the ages; and it was written in an arcane form of Classical Japanese used only at court, with many words and inflections not familiar to ordinary Japanese. Even the English translation sounds stilted:

After pondering deeply the general trends of the world and the actual conditions obtaining in our empire today, we have decided to effect a settlement of the present situation by resorting to an extraordinary measure. We have ordered our government to communicate with the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration.

He went on to explain his reasons:

The war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone . . . the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives . . . . The hardships and sufferings to which our nation is to be subjected hereafter will certainly be great . . . . However it is according to the dictate of the time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.

Mystified as his listeners may have been, the gist of the message was clear, the war was over. And it had been the quiet insistence of Hirohito, and his shrewd manipulation of the byzantine workings of the Japanese political system, that had at least hurried the end.



Of course, the story of Hirohito’s pivotal role would come out much later, and at the time of the surrender, the Allies were unaware of it. And certainly the American public and press knew nothing about it and continued to issue calls for a noose to be put around the emperor’s neck.



But American officials had come to the conclusion to accept the continuation of the imperial system, not because Hirohito helped end the war, but for strategic as well as practical reasons. First, U.S. occupation planners were convinced that keeping Hirohito was key to the success of the occupation. With Japanese cooperation, MacArthur projected, he could make do with 200,000 troops, as opposed to the 900,000 or more it might take otherwise. Indeed, even before occupying troops landed on the Japanese mainland, Hirohito had ordered demobilization to begin.



Secret U.S. planning for a postwar Japan began as early as 1943 and was in full swing during 1944. Early on, some zealous schemes had been put forward — for example the idea that Japan would not be allowed to surrender until it was virtually destroyed, and that that would be followed by a 25-year occupation. More rational thinking took hold, and although some of the early thinking was largely anti-emperor, a pro-emperor view gradually came to predominate: if having the emperor in place would help the development of the kind of government to which the Allies would be willing to hand over control, then the emperor should be kept on.



The reasoning went that an occupation could not happen without the involvement of Japanese officials and existing Japanese institutions; most Japanese officials viewed the Throne as the source of their own authority; and removing the institution of the emperor, or stripping him of all power, would lessen cooperation from the bureaucracy by making it feel it had lost its legitimacy.



The proponents also advanced a legal argument, based on the 1907 Hague Convention, which stipulated that an occupying power had no right to change the political institutions of an occupied country. Therefore, removing Hirohito would not alter the existence of the monarchy itself, and a successor would simply take his place.



Still, the final report of the occupation planning group made it clear that its recommendations were just that, and that the Supreme Allied Commander in Japan would have the final say. As it turned out, MacArthur, with President Truman’s support, accepted the council’s arguments. In effect, MacArthur’s policy of using the emperor to help implement demilitarization and other occupation aims coincided with the deeply-held concern kokutai beliefs of the Japanese bureaucracy.



In September, Hirohito met with MacArthur, and a widely-circulated photo of the general towering over the emperor, dressed in formal attire but hatless, was seen as signifying the monarch’s submission to MacArthur’s authority, as well as providing the first hints to the Japanese people that their emperor was a mortal being just like them. In fact, the Japanese government considered the photo so disturbing that at first they tried to ban its reproduction in the newspapers. MacArthur’s staff continued contacts with Hirohito and his advisors, and persuaded him to issue, on January 1, 1946, an Imperial rescript in which Hirohito declared his humanity. It was actually an adroit piece of communication: the English translation implied a renunciation of divinity, referring to “the mistaken belief that the emperor is divine”; while the Japanese-language version for domestic consumption had him descending only partway from heaven, stating, in esoteric language, that the emperor was not a “manifest deity”, and not touching the accepted belief that he was a direct descendant of the sun goddess. And, and in fact, language added by Hirohito to the Allied first drafts included a full quotation of the Meiji emperor’s Charter Oath of 1868, one of the founding documents of modern Japan. The Charter Oath included principles of deliberative assemblies, free enterprise, and abolition of class distinctions. Thus, the rescript served to place Hirohito back at the center of national polity, but this time with a democratic constitutional monarchy.



Of course by this time the spread in Life magazine was already in the works, and the passage of time had already begun to soften attitudes in the U.S., but the perceived renunciation of divinity was particularly well-received by some of the erstwhile anti-Hirohito editorialists and politicians in the U.S.



Also at the urging of MacArthur’s staff, the Imperial Household Ministry, which had for centuries supervised the imperial family’s affairs, began in early 1946 a series of steps to humanize and demystify the emperor. He began to travel around the country, visiting schools and factories and riding in public parades. He would tip his hat to the crowds, and on several occasions shook hands with American servicemen — both unthinkable gestures in the past. Not everyone was thrilled by this — the Soviets considered it to be monarchist propaganda, and even the Australian foreign minister expressed concern — but the travels continued. Later in the year, Hirohito addressed the Japanese Diet to urge the adoption of a new constitution that would strip him of most of his traditional powers, referring to him only as the “symbol of the state and of the unity of the people”.



U.S. newspapers that had been critical of Hirohito began to modify their stance. The Washington Post editorialized, “The notion that Japanese militarism could not be destroyed unless the Emperor, too, were destroyed, was evidently not based on any knowledge of his personal character.”



It helped, of course, that the occupation authority could keep a firm censorial grip on the kind of information and news reporting that came out of Japan, so that by and large it could be ensured that a flow of positive news about Hirohito and the imperial family would reach U.S. readers.



When Hirohito died in 1989, 159 countries sent representatives, including President George Bush and 54 other heads of state. The occasion brought out criticism, especially from veterans groups, and some countries like the Netherlands, in deference to the still-vivid memories of wartime treatment at the hands of Japanese armed forces, sent cabinet-level representatives rather than royalty or heads of state. Still, the ceremony was a final indication of the emperor’s rehabilitation, both domestically in Japan and internationally.



After his radio address in 1945, Hirohito never again made a broadcast address to the nation. It was not until March 15 of this year, in the wake of the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, that a Japanese emperor, Hirohito’s son Akihito, would again speak to the nation, this time on television. Akihito has continued the descent from heaven initiated by his father. His recent speech was delivered in standard Japanese, not the Classical Japanese of Hirohito’s speech, which is still spoken at court. He was the first emperor to marry a commoner; when he underwent prostate surgery in 2003, the public was informed — in the past the state of the emperor’s health had been kept secret. The cause of Hirohito’s death, pancreatic cancer, was not disclosed until after his death; it is unclear whether even Hirohito himself was told the diagnosis after he fell ill. Through Hirohito’s generation, royal offspring were largely raised by court-designated tutors, but Akihito and Empress Michiko actively raised their own children. The royal family and the Imperial Household Agency consciously look to European royalty for role models. To be sure, the imperial family still lives largely in isolation, and is perhaps surrounded by more ritual and stiffness than some of its European counterparts. Jokes about the royal family, commonplace in Great Britain, are out of bounds in Japan. But, although, like any royal institution, the Japanese monarchy is not without its controversial aspects and outright opponents, the Japanese people generally regard the royal family with affection and understand their emperor as a figurehead of the European kind, and no longer as a deity. In that sense, a generation later, the emperor’s change of clothes is complete.



U.S. government photo by Lt. Gaetano Faillance

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By the hair of my chin: Facial hair through the ages

Presented to the Club by William A. Selke on Monday evening, March 21, 2011



It was on "The hair of my chin," his beard, that the little pig vowed his defiance to the wolf. With men, as well as well as little pigs, beards have been traditional symbols of maleness, and, in some eras, have had important significance. Implying that a man would rather emasculate his chin than fail to live up to a promise is reflected in the oath, “By my beard” used by Shakespeare in “Two Gentlemen of Verona.” In all but the most primitive societies, when a beard was worn, it has been a conscious choice, but that choice has waxed and waned throughout history. It is the wearing of beards, and the razors for removing them, that we will consider this evening.



On display in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo are several oval gold disks, with small handles on one side, identified as razors of the period four millennia ago. If one doubted that these devices were effective, relics and pictures of Egyptian royalty of that period show the men shaven, though in some cases with a small circular beard, real or artificial – of gold – in the middle of their chins. Clean chins and jaws have been a possible choice for the elite for a very long time.



Meanwhile, across the Red Sea, Jews following the instructions in Leviticus, Chapter 19, verse 27 wore truly full beards. That verse states that “Ye shall not round the corners of your heads; neither shall thou mar the corners of thy beard.” (We might note that verse 18 of that same chapter includes the “Great Commandment “ –“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”) Over the course of history, we’ll see men adding or removing their beards for indefinite reasons, but in this case the authority is clear.





Moving forward to ancient Greece we note that Zeus was always bearded, as was Poseidon. but the young god, Apollo, was usually represented as a beardless youth, a kouros. Statues of mortals are less common, but the customs of the mortals can be inferred from contemporaneous statues of the gods. The similarity in appearance of gods and mortals is evident in the fact that a number of unwitting women bore children fathered by gods whom they had mistaken for their husbands. Hermes, always free-spirited, wore a beard when posing for his early statues, but was beardless from the fifth century BCE.



Greek fashions changed after Alexander the Great’s sweep of conquest in the 4th century BCE. He ordered that all his troops remove their beards, so as to deny the enemy handles by which soldiers could be grabbed and killed. While it was introduced for practical military reasons, shaving spread through the Macedonian Empire as fashion. When a beard was worn, it would be by a philosopher, as a professional badge. This predictably led to proverbs such as “The beard does not make the sage.” So, in the third century BCE, the majority of aristocratic Greeks shaved.



As the Roman forces took over the Greek Empire, the Hellenistic era begins with the conquerors learning to imitate the Greeks they had conquered. That most expert military leader, Scipio Africanus, who was granted that name for his conquering of Hannibal in 202 BCE, is represented in Rome clean-shaven in a splendid bronze bust. And that style was followed by all the early Caesars . Shaven Ceasars were the rule until 117 AD, when the brilliant and transformative leader, Hadrian, wore a beard to signify his respect for the cultural richness of the Greece of 500 years earlier. His successors followed his model for centuries.



Looking at the Middle East two thousand year ago, we ask did Jesus wear a beard? We never see representations of him without one, and we can be sure that no artist took it upon himself to make such an important decision himself. The teachings of Leviticus were, from the start followed carefully by members of some groups – the orthodox Jews throughout time – but not widely. Nowhere in the Gospels is there direct mention of Christ’s beard, nor, for that matter of its absence. The evidence of his beard comes from centuries of biblical scholarship. The Old Testament book of Isaiah, you will recall, foretells the coming of the Messiah. Chapter 5, verse 6 states “I gave my back to those who strike Me, and my cheeks to those who pluck out the beard.” This is indirect, but unassailable proof.



In his depiction of the Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci showed all of those gathered with beards except for two. One of these is conventionally identified as the Apostle John, known to be younger than his fellows, and therefore, frequently shown as beardless, as was Apollo, the young one in an earlier holy group. On less distinct grounds, the other beardless man is thought to be the Apostle Philip. One would hope it is with tongue in cheek that some feminists now question those identifications, all of them male. They propose that one of the beardless figures is Mary Magdalene and the other, perhaps Martha.



In the Islamic tradition, God commanded Abraham to keep his beard. Accordingly, Muhammad encouraged the growing of beards. In recent times, only a minority of schools of Islamic Law regard beard wearing as compulsory, but all regard it as at least commendable.



Whether the man is Greek or Roman or Jew, his beard starts to grow when, during puberty, pre-existing hair follicles are stimulated by dihydrotestosterone, a derivative of the male hormone, testosterone. A particular follicle will produce hair for a fixed period, designated the anagen. The length a hair can reach depends on the duration of the anagen; since the hair is dead, its growth is not influenced by whether it is cut or not. The anagen of follicles on the arm, for example, will be a few weeks to three months. On the scalp or chin, it is two to six years. When the anagen is over, during a period called the catagen, no further length is added, but a clublike end is put on the base of the hair. After a few months of rest, the follicle pushes out the old hair and another anagen commences.



There are significant differences in the beards of men of different races with in general Caucasians with bigger beards than East Asians. What might be called the earliest Asian immigrants in the US, the so-called native Americans,” are essentially beardless.



Looking for a group within the Caucasian race with a genetic difference in beard length, one might look at the Lombards, the Germanic group which conquered northern Italy in the 6th century and who controlled most of Italy near the end of the seventh. Their name, Lombard, is indeed a latinization of “Longo bardi,” — long beard. I was disappointed to find that the there is no evidence that the anagen period of the chins of Lombard men was ever unusually long. Instead, the name comes from what is probably a fanciful tradition. As the story is told, when the ancestors of the Lombards were a very small tribe in Northern Europe they found themselves opposed by superior force. As they lined up to battle their foe, they were badly outnumbered by the attacking tribe. The order went out for the women to pull their long hair up over their faces and to stand next to their husbands This fooled the invaders and brought instant victory. The term, Lombardy, whatever its true derivation, remains the name of the northern part of Italy, where the descendents of the Germanic invaders remain to this day.



Psychological warfare is not a recent innovation. When those early German tribes were threatening Rome, the defenders tried to demonize their opponents by attributing atrocities to them. They alleged that before a young German man was allowed to wear a beard, he must personally kill a Roman. Whether that was accurate or mere slander, it is an example of the current customs by which the wearing or the shaving of a beard is governed by tests of manhood. In some groups, one can shave only after killing a deer. In others, shaving follows finishing hockey playoffs. A feature of the 250th birthday celebration of Great Barrington is a contest for the longest, bushiest, and most creative beards. After the judging, participants will have “…those follicles (sic) removed for free…” at Sim’s Barber Shop. For some men, unhappy about the trends of our society, the appeal of any customs involving beards is that they are among the last refuges that can’t be invaded by women



In Renaissance Europe, church hierarchies kept switching between requiring priests to be shaven and forbidding them to wear beards. Martin Luther wore a beard, and so young Reformist priests wore beards as marks of their positions. Across the Channel, Henry VIII wore a beard, and his archbishop, Henry Cranmer, honored Henry by growing a notable beard. His subsequent defiance of the catholic Mary I led to his being burned at the stake as a heretic in 1556. With the resumption of the Reformation, it was the bearded Catholic priests who perished on the stake.



In his 1949 book “Beards: Their social standing, religious involvements, decorative possibilities, and value in offense and defense through the ages,” Reginald Reynolds relates how in the 16th and 17th centuries there were constant fights within the church hierarchy as to whether the wearing of beards should be mandatory, or should be proscribed. The disputants were bitter in their partisanship, even though they could not have believed that either side had divine favor. The theologian Valerino Bolzai acknowledged that neutrality with his judgment that “God is not offended by hair,” In Italy some in the clerical community seems reluctant to let shaving be a personal or a parochial choice. In 1656, in Benevento, an Antibeard Party lost in its bid before the regional council for ecclesiastical enforcement of their position that priests must shave. In a show of good sense, that council held that the only theological limitation on facial hair was that mustaches must be sufficiently short as to avoid defiling the sacrament



Even though the switches in custom over the last millennium are dictates of fashion, not instructions from a deity. Following the local style could be an essential career move. Monarchs are accustomed to being flattered, and we know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus when bare-chinned, eight-year old Louis XIII ascended the French throne in 1610, beards disappeared from court. Philip 5th of Spain, crowned in 1683, couldn’t grow a beard. So members of his court also displayed bare cheeks and chins.



Getting closer to our time we note that mid-19th century figures such as Nathaniel Hawthorne just had big mustaches, but by the end of that century the leading literary figures wore beards. Melville and Henry James and James Russell Lowell all sported beards. J. Willard Gibbs of Yale – the first American Ph.D. in engineering, father of chemical thermodynamics, is always pictured with a beard. The leaders in other fields at that time are also pictured with beards, Charles Darwin, Richard Wagner, Auguste Rodin, to name a few.



While numerous generals and civilian leaders wore beards in the early 19th century, our presidency has generally had fewer beards than business and political leaders of their eras. The New York Times recently showed an unfamiliar picture of Lincoln, taken in June 1860. One sees that he has not yet joined what was a nationwide swing to beards. A photograph from later that year shows him starting the beard which in 1861 marked the man we remember. There was a short run of presidential non-shavers, but that ended, with Benjamin Harrison being our last bearded president. After the terms of William Howard Taft, no facial hair at all has been worn in the White House.



For thousands of years, the means existed for men to be shaven if they wished. The metals used for razors followed the general advances of technology, with bronze replacing gold and iron replacing bronze. After the eruption of Vesuvius an 79 AD, pieces of glassy obsidian provided a sharper edge than the metal of the day. Obsidian knives were employed for ceremonial sacrifice by the pre-Columbian Meso-Americans



Eventually, there developed the open-bladed steel straight razor with folding handle, and the strop for the final sharpening This was the true classic design, the standard of excellence for centuries. In the OED, there is a citation for “strop: strip of leather or wood covered with leather for sharpening razors” dated 1702.



Some men found the idea of straight razors near their throats worrisome. They might have shaved themselves were it not for the fear of accidental suicide. In recognition of these potential users in the late 1800s several so-called safety razors were brought to market. In every case, the guard, which protected the throat, prevented the sharpening of the blade in place, making shaving a rather involved process. In 1898, the American team of William Nickerson and King Gillette patented a safety razor with easily changeable disposable blade. Gillette was at that time a very successful salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company. From that experience he knew it was possible to make a lot of money by supplying a large number of well-made small and simple objects. (These caps sealed 90 percent of the beer bottles we saw earlier this season). Gillette’s razor was introduced to the market in 1902 and immediately took a leading share of this growing field. Gilllette is usually, but undeservedly, regarded as the inventor of the business model in which the razor is sold at a loss and the profit comes from the sale of the blades. In its introduction, his razor sold for a very high price, five 1902 dollars. Later, to maintain share in the emerging market, he copied his competitors, who already had adopted the strategy usually referred to as ”giving away the razor.” (Currently there may be no better example of this business model than the pricing of computer scanner-printers. The price of two pairs of short-lived refills – color and black – exceeds the price of the printer, itself.)



At some point in the history of shaving there appeared a vital accessory product, the little white styptic pencil, to stanch the flow of blood from the inevitable nick or gouge. While I mention these little cuts in connection with straight razors, only with the advent of plastic injector cartridges was nicking entirely eliminated. Those without a styptic pencil stuck a bit of tissue paper on the bleeding spots, hoping to remember to remove them before the public day began.



Gillette had a flair for marketing, and he expanded the market of shavers. His picture was part of the trademark and appeared on every folder of blades. In 1910, after Theodore Roosevelt had left the presidency of the United States, with great fanfare, Gillette offered him the presidency of the Gillette corporation at a salary of one million dollars. Of course Roosevelt declined, but at very little cost, each party received desired publicity.



Throughout the western world, the first decades of the twentieth century saw change from one in which all men had beards to one in which almost all shaved (or were shaved) daily. The introduction of the safety razor must have helped, but there were other forces in the same direction. In World War I, many of the British inductees, rural laborers, most of whom were bearded, were found to be infested with head lice. The vital step in fighting these parasites was denying them shelter, which meant ridding the soldier of hair, both from his head and from his face. From then on, he had to shave. Among American draftees, infestations were not as severe, but sanitation still favored clean shaving. To this end, the army bought a Gillette shaving set for each inductee, and, of course, made every inductee a consumer of Gillette’s blades. The advent of gas warfare in World War I brought forth an issue somewhat parallel to that faced by Alexander’s Macedonian troops. Beards could interfere with the sealing of gas masks. On this basis the armies of many countries still require that in some branches, if not all, soldiers be clean-shaven. Concern about the fitting of emergency oxygen masks led to the world-wide prohibition of beards on airline pilots.



In the 1920s, beards became a rarity. The only bearded man that I can remember seeing in the flesh, except for the department store Santa, was an uncle, who stereotypically was an alienist. That trend continued through World War II, so that beard wearing in the United States fell to its all-time low by the 1950s. Teaching at Columbia at that time, I don’t remember any of the academic giants of the Philosophy or the English Departments following the example of the bearded philosophers of ancient Athens. Elsewhere, there were small numbers of beard-wearers, following the customs of their groups. An example are Amish men. Young bachelors must be clean shaven, but upon marrying, the Amish man grows a beard which he wears for the rest of his life. The leaders of the Eastern Orthodox church retained their beards. Some Catholic monastic orders continued, and still continue to wear beards, and as do orthodox Jews. But all these small groups together represent a small fraction of American men.



In the late 1960s, the trend reversed, and we started to see more beards. These new beards were not on the Melvilles of the day, but on young men who spurned conventional fashion. But, as we come up to the present, beards spread more and more widely in our society, and lately appear more on members of the Establishment than of the counterculture. The neatly dressed young Mormons who ring our doorbells did not abandon shaving, but members of a wide range of the professions have done so. In the past few days I’ve seen pictures of the following: David Wessel, Economics editor of the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Josten, Chief lobbyist of the US Chamber of Commerce, Randy Moss, wide receiver, Dr. C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General, Benjamin Bernanke, Federal Reserve Chairman, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged terrorist .



Picking up on the story of razors, we find that although his company thrived, Gillette, himself, having been spectacularly extravagant, suffered ruinously in the great depression. When he died in 1932 he was almost bankrupt. From the very beginning, Gillette razors dominated the market around the world. But in 1960, their position was challenged by a competitor, Wilkinson Sword of Sheffield, England, who introduced a superior blade. It was of stainless steel. It was known that when a blade is used, it rendered the blade dull. The stainless alloy used by Wilkinson extended the life of the blade more than enough to justify its premium price. But after a brief dent in their market share, Gillette blades, now stainless, were again dominant.



The Gillette Company thrived, buying up competitors and other consumer-care businesses including Oral-B, Duracell, and Braun. The company was finally sold to Procter and Gamble for $57 billion in 2005 and the brand name Gillette is still strong.



The pairing of Gillette razors and Duracell dry cells matches the fact that the Wilkinson Sword Company, which sells its razors in the US under the Schick tradename, is now owned by Eveready Battery, the Energizer Company These groupings of product lines — razors and batteries — are evidence that in modern business, having common distribution channels is more important than, for example, having similar technological bases.



The American inventor Col. Jacob Schick introduced the first electric shaver in 1928, starting what is called in the trade “dry” shaving (the traditional use of razors being called “wet”). Dry shaving had a further lift when Remington Rand introduced an electric shaver in 1937. More recently, a third design, called a Rotary razor, was introduced by Philips Laboratories. Dry shaving changed where one shaved; it didn’t need to be to the bathroom. Then, with the introduction of rechargeable batteries, it was not even tied to the electric socket and so really set free. Driving in morning commuter traffic in Atlanta one sees almost equal numbers of men, telephoning, drinking caffeinated beverages, and shaving.



Reliable statistics on how American men treat their cheeks are hard to find. Any survey involving the internet is prone to distortion by a disproportionate participation by prepubescent boys. With that caveat, consider a recent report:

• Wet shaving — 45 percent


• Dry shaving — 17 percent


• Not shaving — 38 percent

Another survey found that 75 percent of men shave daily. Of the nonshavers, 7 percent cite religious restrictions — presumably these include Orthodox Jews as well as Amish Christians. That survey found 64 percent wet shavers vs. 11 percent dry shaving. It should be noted that some of the newer electric razors are waterproof, leaving ambiguous whether the “wet” category includes electric shavers used with water.



If an anthropologist wanted to fix the date of construction of an American house of the 20th century, he could inspect the bathroom and note changes to accommodate differences in how we shaved. One clue would be the presence or absence of a slot in the back of the medicine cabinet for used razor blades. We used to poke our blades in there, only occasionally wondering about their ultimate fate. When it was no longer a simple blade that we discarded, but instead an injector, or an entire plastic-handled razor, the slot was too narrow to accommodate it, But, for that matter, those discards would not be pose the disposal problem as did a menacing bare blade. Next, the spread of electric razors spurred the installation of Ground-fault- detector electric plugs near the bathroom mirror



My recollections of my first professional haircuts, are of the wonderful barber chairs, and white-coated men wielding frightening straight razors bending over customers, whose faces were covered with thick foam, whipped up with a brush which had been in one of the elegant mugs from the shelves which covered the back wall of the shop. But that hedonistic luxury of being shaved by a barber has almost vanished from our lives. My barber in Lee shaves a few men each week. Generally, they are men physically unable to shave themselves, because of fractured limbs or severe palsy. Theirs is not the excellence achieved only with a straight razor; he uses a cheap plastic throw-away. In New York City one can still be shaved with the incomparable straight razor. The Metropolitan section of the Sunday Times of November 14 carried a feature entitled “A Straight Razor, a Warm Towel, a Fading Art.” It tells about The Hair Box, a storefront in Soho, which has housed a barber shop for over 100 years. There, old Italian men enjoy haircuts for $20, and shaves for $17. For a very different clientele the Style section a week later mentions that places like the “fancy pants” New York Shaving Company in NoLita, charge $25 to $40 for a straight razor hot shave.



For millennia, man had shaved with single blades. Very slight gains in closeness of shave can be demonstrated by two-blade assemblies at little additional cost. The second blade stretches the skin, pushing up the follicle as did the free hand of the user of a straight razor. But with the fraction of American men shaving having fallen so radically in the past 50 years, one might wonder why Gillette and Schick spend so much on developing flashier and flashier new razors, adding blade after blade for incremental, if detectable, improvement in actual performance? However, there is a rational explanation, viz. the evolution of the broadcasting of sports events on television. The audience for these broadcasts is well matched to shaving devices, and pictures of these products can be quite alluring. Verbal descriptions of a razor with – now — one more blade than the competitor’s couldn’t have stirred much interest in “play-by-play” but now men don’t give much thought to spending a dime or two more each day for fancier new razors. Were it not for playoffs and the World Series, we might never have had razors with more than two blades?



While it may not have been a widespread feeling, I believe that many of us would have worn beards in the past had we not faced a serious obstacle. That barrier was the awkward period between the stopping of shaving and the displaying of a recognizable beard. A recent development makes it possible to make that transition without at any point being out of style. In much earlier eras, aristocratic German youths sat for portraits wearing several days’ growth of beard – stubble. In the 60s, a stunt by some trend-setting American young men was to appear ostensibly unshaven, wearing one, or two, or three day’s growth of stubble. Third day growth, for example, is clearly perishable, but daily use of an electric clipper with suitable spacers permitted presenting the same – presumably transient — appearance day after day. American television viewers were introduced to stubble by a series called Miami Vice carried by NBC in the 1984 to 1989 seasons. Appropriately, the clipping equipment to maintain the stubble was called a Miami Device. (Recently, I saw one for sale in a local drugstore for $15). This practice was given impetus by publication of what was purported to be the results of a poll in the UK. It stated that women rated men with facial stubble as tough, mature, aggressive, dominant and masculine, and judged them as the best romantic partners either for a fling, or for a longtime relationship With endorsements like that, it is not surprising that the wearing of stubble spread around the globe like a porcine flu.



It is ironic to contrast the current glamorization of stubble with the attitude towards five-o’clock shadow in 1960. For the first televised debate, presidential candidate Richard Nixon spurned the use of makeup to cover his five-o’clock shadow. He lost badly and it is generally agreed that his appearance that night contributed significantly to that loss. And as for importance of the debate, we should note that in the general election Nixon received only 0.2 percent fewer votes than Kennedy.



Over the span of history, we’ve seen the fashion in beards swinging back and forth, even within the 140 years of our club. Were you to be required to make a prediction, would you expect such oscillations in style to continue through the next 140 years?



Phone by dawkeye, used under Creative Commons License.

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Food for thought: The Beard-Child-Claiborne-Waters culinary revolution

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 11, 2011



In the last 50 years there has been a revolution in this country. It has been non-violent, but certainly exciting, spirited, and dramatic. It has affected each of us in either major or minor ways, but no one has been immune.

I’m talking about the change in America’s food and eating habits.

Fast food is one branch of this upheaval. But the other direction – and one more interesting to me – has been the enormous increase in the variety of food we now take for granted. An orange in your Christmas stocking (perhaps along with a lump of coal if you had been involved in some misdeeds) was a treat – now we have grapefruit and oranges year round. Salsa and sushi were unknown. Now salsa has surpassed ketchup as America’s most popular condiment and sushi is even in Pittsfield, Lenox, and Great Barrington.

Butter used to be, well, just butter. Now it comes in a variety of butterfat contents. And one writer describes being at a salt tasting, of all things. “The waiter, like some particularly elegant cocaine dealer, gently spooned nine mini-mounds onto a little board, each salt a different hue and consistency from the next – one as fine and white as baking powder, another dark and chunkily crystalline.” This is a long way from the all-purpose Morton’s Salt we grew up with.

It is, in short, a great time to be an eater. And how often do we get to say something as unreservedly upbeat as that? We often complain that things aren’t as good as they used to be: movies, music, baseball, political talk – but food is one area of American life where things just continue to improve.

If we’re cooking at home, we have a greater breadth and higher quality of ingredients available to us. If we’re eating out, we have more options open to us.

How did we get to this point? We learned there is more to the restaurant world than Schrafft’s or Howard Johnson’s and food became part of our popular culture – with even its own TV channel.

The consensus seems to be that it began with James Beard who developed a successful catering company in New York called Hors d’Oeuvres, Inc., starting in 1939. His mother, who ran a boarding house in Portland, Oregon, was a superb cook and he learned from her. He came to New York wanting to be an actor in the theater, but had no success. He did, however, have a highly cultivated palate and was a great charmer of the people he often cooked dinner for and who were able to give him and his catering business significant publicity.

The success of his catering company led to a series of cooking book contracts. Along with the recipes – and probably more important – he defended throughout his books the pleasures of real cooking and fresh ingredients. He wrote a lot about outdoor grilling at home and that men could legitimately be involved in home cooking. His writing was appealing and his considerable girth made him non-threatening to the home-based, non-professional cook. 

To Beard, cooking and eating comprised a fulfilling cultural pastime, to be pursued as ardently as golf, opera, or any other activity that aroused one’s passions. His enthusiasm was contagious and he was read widely.

At the same time in New York the 1939 World’s Fair along with World War Two led to several notable French chefs arriving ultimately to open a remarkable group of top-tier classic French restaurants. Le Pavillion, the Colony, Le Cirque, La Caravelle, to name a few, based on 18^th Century French traditional recipes and techniques to some degree interpreted by Escoffier in Paris and London. Another was the Brussels where some 60 years ago a very indulgent bachelor uncle of mine and his long-legged very glamorous to me lady friend introduced me to smoked eel. To this day I still enjoy it when I can find it. I courted Ann while I was living in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone and we frequented a French bistro on Third Avenue in Manhattan where the order of the day was piles of sautéed frog’s legs and match-thin French fries along with a bottle of wine. Each of these restaurants generated others as employees trained at these left to open their own establishments.

Post-war America, partly because of GI’s coming back from Europe, considered classic French cooking to be the highest form of culinary art. Chuck Williams, the founder of the kitchenware store Williams-Sonoma, writes as he completed his Air Force service and built himself a house in the then undiscovered hinterland of Sonoma, California, that "The magic that France had at the time was felt by so many of us. It was roaming on the side streets of Paris and eating in the small mom-and-pop restaurants. It was the haunting music and songs sung by Edith Piaf that I heard everywhere. It was the wonderful pastry and chocolate shops in every block, the butcher shops, the crepe and waffle stands, the standup bars where you stopped for an espresso, a café au lait, or a cognac. I wanted to capture the magic of Paris in my shop and make it completely French."

Also enthusiastic about all things French was a young, 6-foot, 2-inch, Smith College graduate from Pasadena, California, named Julia McWilliams. She spent the war years working for the OSS (Office of Strategic Services — the predecessor of the CIA) in Washington and then in India on a tea plantation the OSS had commandeered as its base of operations from which to plot attacks on the Japanese. It was there that she met Paul Child a cartographer for the OSS.

Child was a good six inches shorter than she, but he loved to cook and dine out and was very knowledgeable about cooking. Eventually they were assigned to Kunming in China where Julia became interested in food and the various Chinese cuisines.

Back in the United States the couple was married in 1946 and soon left for Paris where Paul Child worked for the State Department implementing the Marshall Plan. During the decade they were in France, Julia set about learning all things French which eventually included enrollment at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school. Her teacher had apprenticed under Escoffier himself. At night she often cooked for dinner the dishes the class had made that day.

Meanwhile, back in New York, a young man, and the third member of our founding trio, named Craig Claiborne – also with a mother who ran a boarding house and cooked extraordinarily well – arrived fresh from a stint at a Swiss hotel school. By luck he got himself a short-lived job writing for Gourmet magazine which turned out to be mostly useful for the people he met and the connections he made. One of these led him to an interview at The New York Times which was looking for a food editor but had always had a woman in the position. It had apparently not occurred to the Times that a man could do the job.

He was eventually hired and began a twenty-year association with the paper that was destined to change America’s food culture. He started at a time when post-war Americans were ready to improve their kitchens and cooking. They were ready to go beyond food as “maintenance” and explore new ideas. GI’s brought back familiarity with ethnic cooking as well as French Cuisine. And Claiborne was ready to lead the way by treating food as more than just recipes. It was a journalistic responsibility to discover what was going on in America’s more creative kitchens. He wrote about home cooks as well as professionals. He introduced the idea of restaurant reviews that could make or break a place.

The food world reaction was one of awe. Here was a man writing about food and cooking with the same intellect and rigor that the Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote about Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett.

An interesting side note is that in 1961 when Claiborne wanted to do a cookbook using the Times name, the paper thought a cookbook would be so minor that Claiborne was given the rights to use the Times name with no obligation. The New York Times Cookbook became a best seller and sold more than three million copies.

Going back to Julia Child, who we left in Paris at the Cordon Bleu, her next adventure was to open a cooking school in Paris to educate Americans, who were wealthy wives brought abroad by their husbands’ jobs in business or government, about French cooking. Along with running the school with two French collaborators, the idea of a cookbook for Americans emerged.

This became Mastering the Art of French Cooking after a decade of recipe testing and adapting French measurements, methods, and ingredients to the American kitchen. 

The success of the book lies in both its multi-year meticulous preparation and Child’s charismatic publicizing of it. There is probably no other cookbook in American history that better combines breadth, thoroughness of explanation, culinary authenticity, distinctive authoritarian voice, and reliability. Whereas Escoffier’s book assumed the reader knew the fundamentals of French cookery, Julia assumed the cook knew nothing. The recipe for a basic omelet runs seven pages and has six illustrations.

Alfred Knopf published the book in 1961. By this time Julia and her husband had returned to the United States and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Shortly after the book was published Craig Claiborne gave it a rave review in the Times calling it the most comprehensive, laudable, and monumental work on French cooking and predicting it would endure as the definitive work for non-professionals. James Beard gave the book his blessing and he and Child became great friends. Julia often was a guest instructor at Beard’s school which was at his town house in Manhattan. Beard was often a guest at the Childs’ getaway home in Provence, spending entire days in the kitchen with Julia.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking went through five printings. Its publication coincided with Jacqueline Kennedy’s time in the White House and her hiring of a French chef by the name of Rene Verdon. The Times, now the lifestyle manual of culturally correct postwar upper middlebrows, played Verdon’s hiring on page one with a article by Claiborne that described Verdon’s first official assignment, a luncheon for the British prime minister Harold Macmillan, that included trout cooked in Chablis, fillet of roast beef au jus, and artichoke bottoms Beaucaire – filled with a fondue of tomatoes simmered in butter. French food was now fashionable – and to some extent competitive because now you could really astonish your dinner party guests.

Kitchenware suddenly attained the status of fetish objects in certain American circles. You just had to have a Le Creuset casserole dish and a crepe pan the size of a manhole cover. Williams-Sonoma was now “the source” and was located in the heart of San Francisco.

To add to the excitement, WGBH TV station in Boston started “The French Chef” cooking show starring, who else, Julia Child. For the better part of ten years she was a cooking instructor to America and quickly became the most popular attraction on WGBH. The show was picked up by public television stations throughout the country.

So while Craig Claiborne was dominating the print media with his New York Times columns reviewing restaurants and providing his readers with recipes for such dishes Spanish paella and other ethnic foods, Julia was the television personality keeping America’s cooks (and eaters) focused on whatever was this week’s recipe. She criss-crossed the country for book signings and cooking demonstrations.

But it rapidly became apparent, as attention to food increases, that the quality of American ingredients was sadly deficient.

We had only parsley, no chives, said one French chef. He also pointed out the experience of needing special mushrooms and having them arrive in cans from Germany instead of fresh. It turned out they were grown in Oregon and because there seemed to be no market in the states for them, they were shipped to Germany for canning and then sent back to the U.S. when ordered. By this time they barely resembled the original. So professional chefs were frustrated.

Home cooks were becoming totally dependent on the large supermarket chains that were springing up – particularly in the suburbs, aided by the increase in car ownership, the advances in refrigeration, and even the introduction of the shopping cart. The old butcher, baker, or greengrocer shops were becoming obsolete.

One food columnist wrote that she found her local Grand Union supermarket to be at once disturbingly alien while also marvelously convenient. The pre-butchered chicken parts in cellophane-sheathed white Styrofoam containers, she wrote, arranged in refrigerator cases and illuminated by florescent lights were something out of a science-fiction movie. The chicken pieces lying there were dead in their little coffins. Bread, it was noted, looked and tasted like facial tissue.

By the early seventies out on the West Coast, a group of culinary-minded young radicals had gotten mad as hell about the supermarket state, and they decided they were not going to take it any more.

Many of them had come together on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and had been the prime movers of the radical Free Speech Movement that demonstrated and for a while took over the Berkeley campus in the 1960’s. Gradually their counter-culture philosophy came to include a serious disagreement with the giant agricultural businesses and supermarkets that were determining the American diet. There came to be a feeling that just because you were a revolutionary didn’t mean your idea of a good meal should be Chef Boyardee ravioli reheated in a dog dish – as Alice Waters who went on to fame as the owner of the exemplary Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley put it.

She and others encouraged small providers (what we now see as “organic” growers) and co-operative grocery stores throughout the California Bay area. Farmers’ markets, brimming with fresh, local produce became regular fixtures. Interestingly, this winter on Sanibel Island off Fort Myers in the Gulf of Mexico, there was a weekly farmers’ market for the first time. Sanibel has always been deprived of fresh produce, which is silly considering all the agriculture nearby. But it was only this year that the Food Revolution arrived and incidentally included wonderful fresh greens that we don’t get here and marvelous fresh Gulf shrimp that were never frozen. It has been said that the fresh food movement was perhaps the Berkeley counter-cultural movement’s greatest and most lasting triumph. 

The emphasis on high quality ingredients spread rapidly throughout the country.

The Spartan, traditional health foods stores were supplemented by colorful, bountiful markets with organically grown produce and fresh baked goods. Whole Foods market became a national chain. The ranks of specialty coffee companies grew, such as Starbucks, which started in Washington. Coffee and activism were a good fit; most coffee beans came from Third World countries where poverty and human-rights violations were problems, and many specialty coffee drinkers were college students who were eager to be politically engaged. 

But it wasn’t just the politically conscious, back-to-mother earth foodies who discovered the power of upscale, high quality food, it was also the next generation Italian grocers and Jewish delicatessen men who saw a world beyond the small markets of their fathers. Balducci’s, Zabar’s, and DeLuca’s in New York are examples. They set out to re-educate the American palate. The stores became destinations for specialty foods. Guido’s here in the Berkshires is part of the same trend.

The food revolution is here and it is continuing. We can watch Price Chopper supermarket on Route 7 and Guido’s virtually next door expanding to go head to head to capture not only the shopper’s dollar but also his or her participation in this new world of food.

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