The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  37. Harris, Op. cit., pages 54 and 379. Timmins, Op. cit., page 14.

  38. Timmins, Op. cit., page 15.

  39. Ibid., page 20.

  40. Ibid. See also: Harris, Op. cit., page 385.

  41. Timmins, Op. cit., page 21, though according to Harris, Op. cit., page 390, he did not begin to think about insurance until the end of 1941.

  42. Fritz Grunder, ‘Beveridge meets Bismark,’ York papers, volume 1, page 69, quoted in Timmins, Op. cit., page 25.

  43. Ibid., pages 23–24.

  44. Cmnd. 6404, Social Insurance and Allied Services: Report by Sir William Beveridge, London: HMSO, 1942, pages 6–7, quoted in Timmins, Op. cit., pages 23–24.

  45. And, indeed, many officials were cautious. Harris, Op. cit., page 422.

  46. Timmins, Op. cit., page 29.

  47. Derek Fraser, Op. cit., page 180, quoted in Timmins, Op. cit., page 33.

  48. Ibid., page 37.

  49. In his memoirs, Beveridge refers to an American commentator who said: ‘Sir William, possibly next to Mr Churchill, is the most popular figure in Britain today.’ Beveridge, Op. cit., page 319

  50. Allan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, Op. cit., page 858.

  51. Crick, George Orwell, Op. cit., page 316.

  52. Malcolm Bradbury, Introduction to George Orwell, Animal Farm, Penguin Books, 1989, page vi.

  53. Crick, Op. cit., pages 316–318, adds that paper shortage may not have been the only reason for delay.

  54. Galbraith, A History of Economics, Op. cit., page 248.

  55. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 128.

  56. Moggridge, Op. cit., page 629.

  57. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 124.

  58. Moggridge, Op. cit., page 631.

  59. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 127.

  60. Ibid., page 131.

  61. The New Republic, ‘Charter for America,’ 19 April 1943, quoted in Lekachman, Op. cit., pages ‘33–135. See also Galbraith, Op. cit., page 249.

  62. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 150.

  63. Ibid., page 152.

  64. Moggridge, Op. cit., page 724. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 158.

  65. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 152.

  66. White had prepared his own proposal on an International Bank. Moggridge, Op. cit., page 724.

  67. Ibid., pages 802–803.

  68. Keynes himself was more worried about Britain’s overseas spending, which he felt did not match her reduced means. Ibid., page 825.

  69. Lekachman, Op. cit., page 138.

  70. Ibid., page 161.

  71. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (two vols), New York: Harper & Row, 1944.

  72. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, page 378.

  73. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.

  74. Myrdal, Op. cit., page xlvii.

  75. Hannaford, Op. cit., page 379.

  76. See Myrdal, Op. cit., chapter 34, on leaders.

  77. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, page 794. Hannaford, Op. cit., page 395.

  78. Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, New York: Random House, 1964, page 316.

  CHAPTER 22: LIGHT IN AUGUST

  1. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Op. cit., page 319.

  2. Ibid., page 321.

  3. See R. W. Clark, The Birth of the Bomb, London: Phoenix House, 1961, page 116, for an erroneous claim that Frisch’s house was hit by a bomb and set ablaze.

  4. For more details about Peierls’ calculations, see Clark, The Birth of the Bomb, Op. cit., page 118; also Rhodes, Op. cit., page 323.

  5. Tizard’s committee, extraordinarily, was the only body in wartime Britain capable of assessing the military uses of scientific discoveries. Clark, Op. cit., page 55.

  6. Robert Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, London: Victor Gollancz in association with Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958, page 67.

  7. Rhodes, Op. cit., page 212.

  8. Fermi was known to other physicists as ‘the Pope.’ Jungk, Op. cit., page 57.

  9. Laura Fermi, Atoms in the Family, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954, page 123. Also quoted in Rhodes, Op. cit., page 249.

  10. C. P. Snow, The Physicists, Op. cit., pages 90–91.

  11. Otto Hahn, New Atoms, New York and Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1950, pages 53ff.

  12. Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 254–256.

  13. Jungk, Op. cit., pages 67–77.

  14. Helge Kragh, Quantum Generations, Op. cit., page 260.

  15. Ronald Clark, The Greatest Power on Earth: The Story of Nuclear Fission, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980, page 45. See also: Jungk, Op. cit., page 77. Rhodes, Op. cit., page 258.

  16. Rhodes, Op. cit., page 261.

  17. Szilard suggested secrecy but didn’t find many supporters. Kragh, Op. cit., page 263.

  18. Clark, The Birth of the Bomb, Op. cit., page 80.

  19. See Jungk, Op. cit., pages 82ff for Szilard’s other initiatives.

  20. Ibid., page 91 also says that the possibility of a chain reaction had not occurred to Einstein.

  21. Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 291–292 and 296.

  22. See Clark, The Birth of the Bomb, Op. cit., page 183, which says that Canada was also considered as an entirely British alternative. See also: Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 329–330.

  23. Kragh, Op. cit., page 265; and Rhodes, Op. cit., page 379.

  24. Rhodes, Op. cit., page 385.

  25. Mark Walker, German National Socialism and the Quest for Nuclear Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pages 222ff, argues that the significance of this meeting has been exaggerated on both sides. The meeting became the subject of a successful play, Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn, first performed by the National Theatre in London in 1998, and on Broadway in New York in 2000.

  26. Kragh, Op. cit., page 266; Rhodes, Op. cit., page 389.

  27. Leslie Groves, ‘The atomic general answers his critics’, Saturday Evening Post, 19 May, 1948, page 15; see also Jungk, Op. cit., page 122.

  28. Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 450–451.

  29. Clark, The Greatest Power on Earth, Op. cit., page 161.

  30. Rhodes, Op. cit., page 437.

  31. Jane Wilson (editor), ‘All in Our Time’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1975, quoted in Rhodes, Op. cit., page 440.

  32. See Kragh, Op. cit., page 267, for its internal organisation.

  33. Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 492 and 496–500.

  34. Kragh, Op. cit., page 270.

  35. Stefan Rozental (editor), Niels Bohr, Op. cit., page 192.

  36. Margaret Gowing, Britain and Atomic Energy, 1939–1945, London: Macmillan, 1964, pages 354–356. See also: Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 482 and 529.

  37. See Clark, The Birth of the Bomb, Op. cit., page 141, for the way the British watched the Germans.

  38. On the German preference for heavy water, see Mark Walker, Op. cit., page 27.

  39. David Irving, The Virus House, London: William Kimber, 1967, page 191. The involvement of German physicists with the bomb became a cause célèbre after the war, following the claims by some that they had steered clear of such developments on moral grounds. Several contradictory accounts were published which culminated, in 1996, in Jeremy Bernstein (editor), Hitler’s Nuclear Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall, New York: American Institute of Physics Press. These were declassified transcripts of recordings made at the English country manor, Farm Hall, which housed the captured German scientists in the wake of World War II. The Germans were secretly tape-recorded. The recordings show that by war’s end the German nuclear effort employed hundreds of scientists in nine task-oriented research groups, and with Heisenberg in overall charge. The project was on track, in 1943, towards a working reactor but these plans were disrupted, partly by the interdiction of supplies of heavy water, and partly by Allied bombing, which caused the research
institute to be moved south, out of Berlin.

  40. Herbert York, The Advisers, London: W. H. Freeman, 1976, page 30. Rhodes, Op. cit., page 458.

  41. Kragh, Op. cit., page 271. Rhodes, Op. cit., pages 501–502.

  42. This is Rhodes, page 618, but Jungk says Truman was not informed until 25 April: Jungk, Op. cit., page 178.

  43. Jungk, Op. cit., page 195.

  44. See also Emilio Segrè’s account, reported in Kragh, Op. cit., page 269.

  45. Jungle, Op. cit., chapters XI, XII, and XIV.

  46. The names of the plane were the first names of the mother of the pilot, Paul Tibbets: Jungk, Op. cit., page 219.

  47. Paul Tibbets, ‘How to Drop an Atomic Bomb,’ Saturday Evening Post, 8 June 1946, page 136.

  48. Caffrey, Ruth Benedict, Op. cit., page 321.

  49. Modell, Ruth Benedict, Op. cit., page 285.

  50. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946, paperback edition: Houghton Mifflin, 1989.

  51. Ibid., pages x–xi.

  52. Ibid., passim circa page 104.

  53. Ibid., see the table on page 116 comparing On, Ko and Giri.

  54. Ibid., pages 253ff.

  55. Ibid., page 192.

  56. Caffrey, Op. cit., page 325.

  57. Modell, Op. cit., page 284.

  58. Benedict, Op. cit., page 305.

  CHAPTER 23: PARIS IN THE YEAR ZERO

  1. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, London: Heinemann, 1987, page 250. Herman, Op. cit., page 343.

  2. Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History, Op. cit., page 343.

  3. J.-P. Sartre, Self-Portrait at 70, in Life Situations, Essays Written and Spoken, translated by P. Auster and L. Davis, New York: Pantheon 1977, pages 47— 48; quoted in Herman, Op. cit., page 342.

  4. Ibid., page 334.

  5. Ronald Hayman, Writing Against: A Biography of Sartre, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986, page 64. Herman, Op. cit., page 334; Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 57.

  6. Herman, Op. cit., page 335.

  7. Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 95.

  8. Herman, Op. cit., page 333.

  9. Ibid., page 338.

  10. Heidegger’s notion that the world revealed itself to ‘maladjusted instruments’ fitted with Sartre’s own developing ideas of ‘l’homme revolté’. Hayman, Op. cit., pages 132–133.

  11. Herman, Op. cit., page 339.

  12. Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation: 1944–1949, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994, page 199.

  13. Ibid., pages 81 and 200.

  14. Ibid., pages 156 and 164.

  15. Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 248. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., pages 159–161.

  16. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 155.

  17. Herman, Op. cit., page 343; Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 258.

  18. Herman, Op. cit., page 344.

  19. Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., pages 444ff.

  20. Herman, Op. cit., page 346.

  21. Maurice Merlau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, pages xvi—xvii.

  22. Herman, Op cit., page 346.

  23. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon, London: Jonathan Cape, 1940, translator Daphne Harley; see also: David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind, London: Heinemann, 1998, pages 288–290, for the fights with Sartre.

  24. Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., pages 347–348.

  25. Ibid., page 348.

  26. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 158.

  27. Stanley Karnow, Paris in the Fifties, New York: Random House/Times Books, 1997, page 240.

  28. Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 265.

  29. Karnow, Op. cit., page 240. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 202.

  30. Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 266. Karnov, Op. cit., page 242.

  31. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 382.

  32. Karnow, Op. cit., page 251. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 207.

  33. See Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., page 307 for a discussion of the disagreements over America.

  34. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 405.

  35. Ibid., page 408.

  36. Some idea of the emotions this episode can still raise may be seen from the fact that Annie Cohen-Solal’s 1987 biography of Sartre, 590 pages, makes no reference to the matter, or to Kravchenko, or to other individuals who took part.

  37. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 409.

  38. Ibid., pages 411–412.

  39. Ibid. See Cohen-Solal, Op. cit., pages 332–333 for an account of their falling out.

  40. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 416.

  41. ‘Nikolas Bourbaki’ was the pseudonym of a group of mainly French mathematicians (Jean Dien-donné, Henri Carton et al.), whose aim was to recast all of mathematics into a consistent whole. The first volume of Elements of Mathematics appeared in 1939 and ran for more than twenty volumes. For Oliver Messaien, see: Arnold Whittall, Music Since the First World War, London: J. M. Dent, 1977; Oxford University Press paperback, 1995, pages 216–219 and 226–231; see also sleeve notes, pages 3–4, by Fabian Watkinson to: ‘Messaien, Turangalîla-Symphonie’, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Decca, 1992.

  42. See Olivier Todd, Albert Camus: Une Vie, Paris: Gallimard, 1996, pages 296ff, for the writing of The Myth of Sisyphus and Camus’ philosophy of the absurd. For the Paris art market after World War II, see: Raymonde Moulin, The French Art Market: A Sociological View, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987; an abridged translation by Arthur Goldhammer of Le Marché de la peinture en France, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967.

  43. See: Albert Camus, Carnets 1942–1951, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966, circa page 53 for his notebook-thoughts on Tarrou and the symbolic effects of the plague.

  44. Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des Choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1960, page 29, quoted in Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 206.

  45. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971, page 346.

  46. Ironically, Mettray, the prison Genet served in, was an agricultural colony and, according to Genet’s biographer, ‘the place looked at once deceptively pastoral (no walls surrounded it and the long lane leading to it was lined with tall trees) and ominously well organised …’ Edmund White, Genet, London: Chatto & Windus, 1993, page 68.

  47. Genet fought hard to ensure that black actors were always employed. See White, Op. cit., pages 502–503, for his tussle in Poland.

  48. Andrew K. Kennedy, Samuel Beckett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pages 4–5.

  49. James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett, London: Bloomsbury, 1996, page 54.

  50. Kennedy, Op. cit., page 8.

  51. Knowlson, Op. cit., page 175.

  52. Beevor and Cooper, Op. cit., page 173.

  53. Kennedy, Op. cit., pages 6, 7, 9 and 11.

  54. Knowlson, Op. cit., page 387.

  55. Kennedy, Op. cit., page 24.

  56. Ibid., page 42.

  57. Godot has always proved popular with prisoners – in Germany, the USA, and elsewhere. See: Knowlson, Op. cit., pages 409ff, for a discussion.

  58. See Kennedy, Op. cit., page 30, for a discussion.

  59. Ibid., pages 33–34 and 40–41.

  60. Claude Bonnefoy, Conversations with Eugène Ionescu, London: Faber & Faber, 1970, page 65.

  61. Ibid., page 82.

  62. See Eugène Ionescu, Present Past, Past Present: A Personal Memoir, London, Calder & Boyars, 1972, translator Helen R. Lane, page 139, for Ionescu’s thoughts on ‘the end of the individual.’

  63. Bonnefoy, Op. cit., pages 167–168.

  CHAPTER 24: DAUGHTERS AND LOVERS

  1. See the letter, written in early 1944, where he is competing with Camus for a young woman. Simone de Beauvoir (editor), Quiet Moments in a War: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1940–1963, London: Hamish Hamilton, translators Lee Fahnestock and Norman MacAfee, 1994. page 263. And, in Simone de Beauvoir, Adieu: A Farewell to Sartre, London: André Deuts
ch and Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1984, she made a dignified and moving tribute.

  2. Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, Simone de Beauvoir, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987, page 207.

  3. Ibid., page 235.

  4. Deidre Bair, Simone de Beauvoir, London: Jonathan Cape, 1990, pages 325, 379–80.

  5. Bair, Op. cit., page 379.

  6. Bair, Op. cit., page 380.

  7. See the discussions in Bair, Op. cit., page 383, chapter 40.

  8. See Francis and Gontier, Op. cit., page 251, for its reception in France; and page 253 for its being placed on the Index.

  9. Bair, Op. cit., page 387. And see: Toril Moi, Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pages 155ff for a psychoanalytic approach to The Second Sex.

  10. It was translated into sixteen languages: Francis and Gontier, Op. cit., page 254.

  11. Bair, Op. cit., pages 432–433.

  12. Ibid., page 438.

  13. Brendan Gill, ‘No More Eve’, New Yorker, volume XXIX, Number 2, February 28, 1953, pages 97–99, quoted in Bair, Op. cit., page 439.

  14. Bair, Op. cit., page 432.

  15. He saw himself as ‘a second Darwin’: James H. Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, New York: W. W. Norton, 1997, pages 25ff.

  16. John Heidenry, What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997, page 21.

  17. John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, page 285.

  18. Ibid., page 285.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., page 286.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Heidenry, Op. cit., page 21.

  23. Jones, Op. cit., pages 690–691; see also: D’Emilio and Freedman, Op. cit., page 286.

  24. Jones, Op. cit., page 695.

  25. Heidenry, Op. cit., page 21.

  26. D’Emilio and Freedman, Op. cit., page 288.

  27. Heidenry, Op. cit., page 23.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid., pages 24–25.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Ibid., page 26.

  32. D’Emilio and Freedman, Op. cit., pages 268 and 312. Heidenry, Op. cit., page 28.

  33. Heidenry, Op. cit., page 29.